The Healer Rite: Becoming a Medicine Person

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Wednesday, 24 January 2024

The Healer Rite: Becoming a Medicine Person

The first Munay-Ki transmission is the Healer Rite, or the Hampe Karpay, and it feels like a natural beginning to become a medicine person.

This rite connects us to an ancient and timeless lineage of healers who assist us in our personal transformation and awaken our healing power so that everyone we touch is blessed.

We access tremendous spiritual assistance from a lineage that has been holding a seat for us around a sacred healing fire since the beginning of time. These are healers from the past, present, and future who help us address our childhood wounds and those we inherited from our ancestors. They also help us to recognize and heal the collective traumas that keep us in stasis and turmoil. To be a healer for others, we must know from our own experience how to transform our wounds into sources of wisdom and compassion. The healer lineage accompanies us on our path to harmony and well-being. According to Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger, the Greek word therapeuein, which translates to “to heal,” originally meant “service to the gods.” For the ancients across many cultures, healing occurred in a sacred container. Edinger notes that “a group of pre-Christian, Jewish contemplatives . . . called themselves therapeuts ‘either because they profess an art of medicine more excellent than in general use in cities (for that only heals bodies, but the other heals souls which are under the mastery of terrible and almost incurable diseases, which pleasures the appetites, fears, and griefs, and covetousness, and follies, and injustice, and all the rest of the innumerable of other passions and vices, have inflicted upon them), or else because they have been instructed by nature and the sacred laws to serve the living God.’” The notion of healing by the therapeuts deeply resonates with the essence of the Munay-Ki in the sense that it recognizes the spiritual connection of a true healer who is not merely the sum of tools or information gathered lightly in a formal or informal setting. Instead, the authentic healer is aware of the spirit domain and learns the language of energy. Only in this way can a person recognize the works of the lineage coming through their intuition, voice, and hands and allow themselves to be surprised by a feeling or knowing that is beyond their own life experiences. At the same time, the healer perceives their intimate relationship with nature to the point of knowing that while in a human body, there is no separation—our bones are the minerals, our digestion is fire, and our breath is air. Therefore, besides working as one with the lineage, the Munay-Ki healer operates as one with nature.

In the Andes, for example, the hucha or heavy energies that can make someone sick are returned to the earth and are replaced with sami or nourishing, nectar-like energy that can heal. Keep reading about the different rites of the Munay-Ki and you will see how this awareness of interconnectedness becomes increasingly palpable and clear. Each rite offers a new perspective and abundant possibilities to keep reclaiming our undeniable belonging to Mother Nature.

Read more about the Munay-Ki in Marcela’s most recent book:
— The Sacred Andean Codes: 10 Shamanic Initiations to Heal Past Wounds, Awaken Your Conscious Evolution, and Reveal Your Destiny by Marcela Lobos

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Alberto Villoldo PhD is a medical anthropologist who has spent the last 30 years investigating the healing practices of the shamans of the Amazon and the Andes. He is the founder and director of the Four Winds Society, and author of Shaman, Healer, Sage, Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval, The Four Insights and Yoga, Power and Spirit. Alberto is founder of the world-renowned Four Winds Society and of the Light Body School. In his teachings and writings, he shares the experience of infinity and its ability to heal and transform us, to free us from the temporal chains that keep us fettered to illness, old age and disease.