The Heart of the Shaman Quotes

“We are no longer the director of the play; we become characters on the stage. And our dreams cease to be sacred. They become small and personal.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior

“It is not unusual to be drawn into a love relationship with a person we hurt in the distant past in an attempt to heal. The problem is that instead of healing an ancient wound, most often we end up reinjuring each other. That person who once burned you at the stake for your beliefs in a Christian or pagan god, and whom you confuse for your beloved, ends up lighting the kindling under you once again. And you’re left wondering why you are choking from the smoke of the relationship.
When you are sure that you have met your dream lover, your soul mate, and every cell in your body is quivering with excitement, run away as fast as you can. Unless, of course, you are ready to sign up for another lesson in the school of emotional storms.
We never got the best parents, only the right parents for us. We never got the best spouse, only the right spouse. The sooner we recognize this the faster we will be able to move on to more interesting engagements with the world. Learning to love the people you do not necessarily approve of or agree with is a challenge, but they are often our greatest teachers. They hold the mirror up to us so we can see hidden and neglected parts of ourselves in them.
As for your soul mate, accept that you will never find that person perfectly designed to your romantic specifications. They do not exist. But know that you can become the right partner. This will only happen once you stop looking for him or her.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior

“First, you must break the habit of searching for your “true” soul mate. This habit is so deeply ingrained that even after we are married we continue scanning the horizon in case the person we were really meant to be with should suddenly appear. And if they do appear, and you lock eyes and recognize each other, then you will risk everything, including your marriage and family, to join them in a journey into a nightmarish realm.
This person is often someone you tortured in a former lifetime and you are irresistibly attracted to in order to repair, heal, and mend from these misadventures. When you meet them again in this life, you feel as if you have known each other forever (you have), that you have been waiting for them your entire life (you have), and that you have finally found someone you can be happy with (how wrong!).
I am convinced that this is why monks and nuns take a vow of celibacy—they are choosing to stop learning and growing along the hazardous path of the kind of love that you fall into or out of. Meanwhile the rest of us continue searching for the mate who is our perfect fit, our twin flame who totally gets who we are, who knows us better than we know ourselves.
The Laika believe that we reincarnate to learn specific lessons and to be of service. We are irresistibly attracted to people we failed to learn a lesson with in the past.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior

“Love is only for the brave,” he said. “Frankly, I recommend you stay away from it. You are too soft to endure love for very long.”
I disagreed with him, explaining that I had been in love numerous times in my life, and knew the pain and the ecstasy of the feelings.
“That’s not love, that’s romance,” he said.
“Love is like a mill,” he explained, “Love grinds you down. It cracks you open and breaks you out of your shell, so you no longer recognize who you are. You become like a fine dust that can be blown away by the wind if you are not careful. Love then mixes you with a dash of spring water and pummels you, kneads you, and then places you on a hot stone by the fire to bake, so that you can become like the corn bread in the sacred feast of the Inti Raymi.”
“I’ve experienced that,” I mentioned to Don Manuel. I was thinking of my recent divorce, and how painful that had been. I had felt the heat of the fire and been singed by the flames.
“You know little about love,” he said. “You are like a kernel of corn that got too close to the fire and exploded, like a canchita” (popcorn).”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior

“When the sages of old sought to heal disease, they observed that the problem with becoming ill, other than it making for an unpleasant few weeks, was that you could die. Death was inevitable, or so it seemed. As they continued learning about the plants and remedies that healed disease, they also set about healing death.
They tried all the solutions available to them—the plants, the spells, the chants, the ceremonies—and found that none would keep death at bay. Then they discovered that death stalked everyone within time. Time was the problem. Time ran out and all good times, including ours, came to an end. So they set about solving the problem of time.
They discovered infinity.
They defeated death by breaking free from time. Then death became a friend, an ally, a companion that taught you to savor every moment, every breath. Even though the journey was infinite, this moment would never happen again.
Infinity is different from eternity, which is what religions promise us—suffering or ecstasy for all time. Eternity is an infinite number of moments, still trapped within the river of time. Infinity is before time, beyond time. The river of time, eternal as it is, runs through the valleys and meadows of infinity.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior

“Journeying to the future requires great skill, as there are thousands of alternate futures and there is only one dimension of time to journey along. When you travel along one of the many destiny lines available, you are not a tourist; you are also giving it energy, potentiating it, and helping select it. The act of finding a desirable future for one person in the interconnected web of countless possible destinies is an art form. The shaman can help a patient select a future healed state or they can upset the destiny of an entire village by altering the future of one of its members.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior

“You can also do this exercise in nature, drawing a circle on the ground and decorating your despacho with leaves and stones, and then erasing it at the end of your meditation. We want to give form to our prayers, to reengage that playful part of ourselves that creates through art, just like when we were children. The logical and reasoning faculties we spend so much time with will not respond to the giveaway in the same way. These faculties can write a check to a charity or a note to a friend in need. But to give form to a sacred dream you have to create something with your hands—a mandala, a poem, a meal.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior

“Your personal power is the product of your communion with the Ti. If the Ti is strong within you, and you are unencumbered by your past, you cannot be seduced by the daydream of a different future. Then the past opens up to you.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior

“A sacred dream launches you to a destiny beyond simply not dying, or of being reasonably happy as you strive to avoid discomfort. It encourages you to explore the mysteries of life and of love, to glimpse a reality beyond death and discover a timeless truth for yourself. It demands that you act boldly and courageously, and not collude with the consensual—that which everyone agrees on and no one questions—even though it is a popular story that traps us in daydreams that become nightmares.
How do you know when you have found a sacred dream?” Because it is much larger than you, and it feels impossible to accomplish all that you hope to achieve. A sacred dream launches you on a mission, as it did with Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi. I discovered that when you hold a sacred dream, the universe begins to actively conspire on your behalf to make the impossible doable. It offers you energy and skills that you never had available before. Discovering the sacred dream requires courage. You can no longer be a passive (and anxious) bystander watching others have a meaningful life. The sacred dream will not come knocking at your door: It requires that you leave the familiar and embark on a quest. It requires that you not compromise your integrity. It demands that you not allow yourself to be seduced by the “easy path.” It calls you to fight the lie that your daydream is adequate and will continue to keep you comfortable.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior

“Each one of us is given a fragment of the sacred dream to hold and express in our own way. When we forget that we carry an essential and necessary part of the sacred dream, our lives begin to spiral into disarray, our personal dreams become nightmares, and our lives descend into chaos.
Many people have replaced the sacred dream with a dream of fame and fortune, power, and Facebook likes...You find your sacred dream by transforming three common dreams many of us are convinced are true and cannot seem to wake up from. They are the dream of security, the dream of permanence, and the dream of love that is unconditional. When you transform these dreams—when you accept that life is ever changing, that your mortality is a given, and that no one can liberate you from a life of fear and insecurity except you—the chaos in your life turns to order, and beauty prevails.
When you find your sacred dream, the creative power of the universe, known by the shamans as the Primordial Light, becomes available to you to create beauty in the world, and to heal yourself and others. You become a luminous warrior.”
― Alberto Villoldo, The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior