The Sun Valley Wellness Festival will welcome as a featured speaker psychologist and medical anthropologist Alberto Villoldo, an expert on shamanism and founder of the Four Winds Society in Park City, Utah.
While at San Francisco State University, Villoldo founded the Biological Self-Regulation Laboratory to study how the mind creates psychosomatic health and disease. Villoldo studied with shamans and healers in the Amazon and the Andes Mountains for more than 20 years. Four Winds offers programs on shamanic healing and shamanic expeditions.
Author of the books "Healing States," "The Four Winds," "Island in the Sun" and "Shaman, Healer, Sage," Villoldo will discuss the ideas explored in his book "Courageous Dreaming: How Shamans Dream the World into Being" at a daylong workshop on Monday, May 26.
The workshop will address the way in which people fall into despair, apathy, fear and anger, and how we have the ability to overcome these feelings.
"Healing is the business of the shaman. Curing has to do with illness," he says. "The shaman is the caretaker of the earth."
Ancient shamans understood that we can create our own experience in the world, but that "life is but a dream," as Shakespeare said. But, Villoldo says, we carry within us, encoded in our "luminous energy field," unhealed trauma that if not healed is "carried in the cocoon of our field and becomes a permanent fixture."
It's up to us to dream the life we want, rather than settling for the nightmare being dreamed by others, he says.
Villoldo will show how to wake up from the collective nightmare and begin to dream a life of courage and grace, a sacred dream that shamans throughout time have known and served.
Festival Schedule
Friday, May 23
· 1 to 4 p.m., workshops and presentations at Sun Valley Resort. Visit sunvalleywellness.org for times and locations.
· 7 p.m., keynote speaker Dan Millman, Limelight Room, Sun Valley Inn. Tickets: $100 VIP, $40 general.
Saturday, May 24
· 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., workshops and presentations.
· 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Exhibit and Hands-on Hall in Limelight Room, Sun Valley Inn.
· 8 to 10 p.m., Sally Baldwin, "Communion with the Archangels," nexStage Theatre. $50.
Sunday, May 25
· 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., workshops and presentations.
· 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Exhibit and Hands-on Hall.
· 8 to 9 p.m., Alberto Villoldo, "Courageous Dreaming," Continental Room, Sun Valley Inn. $150.
Monday, May 26
· 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., workshops and presentations.
· 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Exhibit and Hands-on Hall.
· Tickets are available at Chapter One in Ketchum or sunvalleywellness.org. Students receive a 15 percent discount with a valid student ID.
Alberto Villoldo explores the business of healing with Shaman Don Mauuel.
Courtesy photo Four Winds Sanctuary Project.
