Alberto Villoldo

Alberto Villoldo, PhD, is a psychologist and medical anthropologist who has spent more than forty years apprenticing with the shamans of the Amazon and the Andes — and translating their ancient healing wisdom into a form the modern world can use. Born in Cuba in 1949, his family fled the revolution when he was a boy, and he grew up to become, by his mid-twenties, the youngest clinical professor at San Francisco State University, directing its Biological Self-Regulation Laboratory and studying how energy and the mind create psychosomatic health and disease. But the laboratory, he realised, was too small to answer his questions. So he traded it for the rainforest — travelling to Peru, where he was initiated into the healing lineage of the Laika, the Q'ero shamans of the high Andes, descendants of the Inka. In 1984 he founded the Four Winds Society, and through its Light Body School — widely regarded as the gold standard in shamanic energy medicine education — he has trained thousands of practitioners worldwide, marrying ancient wisdom with modern nutrition, biology, and neuroscience. His many bestselling books, including Shaman, Healer, Sage, The Four Insights, Courageous Dreaming, One Spirit Medicine, and Grow a New Body, map the shamanic arts of the luminous energy field: clearing the imprints of trauma, healing the "core wound" beneath illness, and what he calls dreaming the world into being. In One Spirit Medicine, he recounts the ordeal that tested everything he taught — a devastating diagnosis, picked up over decades in the jungle, that he navigated using the very practices he had spent his life studying. Now leading trainings, expeditions to Peru, and online programs worldwide, Villoldo offers a bridge unlike any other in contemporary spirituality: a rigorous scientist who became a shaman, teaching that we are not victims of our biology or biography, but dreamers with the power to author new stories of health, purpose, and destiny. For anyone drawn to shamanic healing but wanting a wise, credentialed guide across that threshold, he is among the most trusted names alive.