Suggested Reading

Ron Wheelock Interviewed by Victoria Alexander

A shaman is a person who, in tribal cultures, communicates with the spirit world. As intermediaries, shamans ask spirits to intercede in the lives of humans, healing them of illnesses, or granting favors. Since traditional cultures believe that spirits play important roles in people’s lives, the shaman must learn how to cooperate with the spirits for the benefit of his or her community.

Ron Wheelock is widely known in Peru as “The Gringo Shaman of the Amazon”.
Ron Wheelock, 53, was born in Independence, Kansas. In 1996 he went to Peru looking for a spiritual teacher. Ron first drank ayahuasca in Tamshiyacu with famed shaman Don Agustin Rivas Vasquez. While with Don Agustin, he made arrangements to return to begin the intensive training to become a shamanic healer himself using the South American plant medicine, ayahuasca.

Read more: The Gringo Shaman of the Amazon

By Peter Gorman
 
This article is a long hand version of a talk I gave at the 2nd Shamanism Conference in Iquitos in July, 2006. I wanted to discuss several important, but often overlooked aspects of shamanic healing, particularly as it relates to ayahuasca healing, but also as it relates, at least in one instance, to San Pedro healing. There is also an important aspect of healing given by Bertha Grove, a Southern Ute elder from Durango, Colorado, which will help those involved in healing to deal with the disease-factor with which they are working.

   With that in mind, this is more a primer on several little discussed aspects of Shamanism, as practiced primarily in northwest Amazonia today, but which might hold substance for plant medicine or shamanism elsewhere as well.

Read more: A Primer on Shamanism in Northwest Amazonia in 2006

BY Peter Gorman

Julio Jerena sat on his porch, leaning against the front wall of his home, a stilted ut on the Rio Auchyako in Peru’s Amazonia. Around us night had fallen. The heat of the day had subsided but the air was still thick with the incessant buzz of insects and the dank smells of the jungle. The moon, half-full and hung askew, began to rise above the trees across the little river.

Read more: AYAHUASCA: Vine of the Little Death

by Alan Shoemaker

Shamanic healing has been here for thousands of years and will remain. During the "Age of Reason", we were led away from believing in things we could not see and hear; that we could not place in our hands and feel its weight. This contrived reality found its way to the Americas a little over 500 years ago and through force of arms, unknown viruses and the Spanish Inquisition, it ravaged cultures and humiliated the medicine men, taking away their Gods and forcing them into submission. There remained, however, a few daring souls who continued to practice their magic, hidden away from the death threats of the conquistadors.

Read more: Grace and Madness