Greetings, friends.  Welcome to "Shamanism for a New Age", a new bi-monthly newsletter for MettaKnowledge for Peace friends and colleagues who are interested in the shamanic healing dimensions of the work that I do.  Recently, I was instructed by my spirit guides to "come out of the closet" more fully with this aspect of my life.  I have heard the call to be a healer in these ancient and simultaneously emerging spiritual and healing traditions for over two decades, but many fears and biases held me back.  As an academic and scholar, I have been worried about not being taken seriously. And because the explicit mission of MettaKnowledge for Peace has been to educate others in how to speak about differences in race, religion, spiritual life, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation and identities, I have not wanted to appear in those domains of my work as attempting to proselytize.  Further, due to my awareness of the past and ongoing oppression of indigenous peoples worldwide, I have been keenly aware of the ethical complexities of being a white woman of European ancestry taking on the spiritual practices of Native peoples.  Yet the call is clear: it is time to free my spirit in service of the whole.  Shamanism in all its forms and by all its names around the world, from how it is developing in the West to its preservation and ressurection among indigenous cultures is sorely needed by all of us.  We have entered a new age in which those systems of healing and curing that were once relegated to being of interest only to the stereotyped "out there" hippie, granola-eating, "woo-woo" fringes of society or that were deemed in Western systems of thought to be "primitive" and based on superstition are now moving into the mainstream.  Therefore, I invite you to join me on this next stage of my journey and to consider the truth of the evidence of the efficacy and value of shamanism.  In this newsletter, you will also find articles by outside contributors and information about shamanic research, publishing, trainings, and workshops around the Mid-Atlantic.  I also invite you to contribute your articles,  letters and testimonials. 
                                                                Yours warmly,
                                                                      Rachel Mann
                                                                       Founder and Owner
                                                                       MettaKnowledge for Peace, LL

In the Four Winds Society Healing the Light Body School, students are taught how to work with the energies in the light body, or what school founder, Alberto Villoldo, calls the Luminous Energy Field (LEF).  The LEF is  also referred to as the aura in other traditions.  It is an egg-shaped bubble of energy that surrounds and interprentrates the physical body.  When looked at from the top of the head, one would see a cylinder in the shape of a donut.  Running from the top of the aura to the bottom is a column of light that is sourced with energy from the heavens above and the earth below.  Within this light body are all the energetic imprints of one's life experiences, both good and bad, as well as imprints from one's family of origin, past lives, and collective history, such as from one's nation or ethnic group, among others.  Within this energy field is also contained the collective memory of all of humanity, which Carl Jung aptly called the collective unconscious.  In healing work, we track these often invisible threads and energies that may be influencing your life in ways that are not in service of wholeness and remove, unbind, or unwind them. We bring back lost parts of self that have fled in the face of ancient and recent traumas and reinstall them in the ground of your being.  We then fill your light body with the energies of the earth, stars, sun, and moon, among others, to create new and more positive encoding.  The work is powerful and effective.  To schedule a healing session, call me at the number below.

Although I only started the formal study of the healing practices of shamanism a year ago, my entry into it started almost 15 years ago through the portal of personal suffering.  I eventually came to understand that if I had been birthed into an intact indigenous tradition, the elders of the tribe would have noticed early on my particular gift for touching the unseen through body, mind, emotion, and spirit.  I would then have been ushered with support into the world of parlaying these gifts of emotional sensitivity, visions and dreams in service of the whole.  Instead, I took birth into the rationalist and mechanistic world of 20th century North America in which we are taught to suppress and deny such experiences and qualities or we are labeled at best odd, at worst, mentally ill.   I was also birthed into a family which had a history of suffering from extraordinary sensitivities, but who had stuffed them out of fear and a need to conform.  My mother had literally become mentally ill because of this legacy.  For my part, as I struggled with these gifts that often felt like curses, I pieced together a new story and chose the path of healing for myself, for her and for my ancestors.  To that end, I always say that the spirits gave me just enough suffering to initiate me in the absence of initiation rituals in our society, but not enough to break me.  I write about this initiation into the world of what is called shamanism by some in my forthcoming book, Shamanism in a New Age: Story and Healing  To read an introduction to the book, click here.