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This week’s topic: How Ritual and Shamanism Can Benefit our Daily Lives with Alberto Villoldo
Namaste loves and welcome back to our Monday interview show I am so excited for our very special guest here today. Dr. Alberto Villoldo is an amazing author He’s the founder of the four winds. He’s a medical anthropologist I met Dr, Alberto in person a few weeks ago at the Hay House conference and it was Magical. I just wanted to squeeze out every bit of wisdom that I had in person with this amazing teacher. I’m so excited to share some of his amazing wisdom with you here today. He also has a new vegan cookbook out, which we will talk about today. 1q
Dr. Alberto Villoldo Best Selling Book
Grow a New Body Cookbook: Upgrade Your Brain and Heal Your Gut with 90+ Plant-Based Recipes
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Connection
02:06 Exploring the Four Chambered Soul
06:33 The Power of Ceremony and Sacred Rituals
10:39 Healing Ancestral Wounds and Traumas
13:13 Holistic Approach to Infertility
21:43 Restoring Connection with Nature and the Invisible World
26:20 Incorporating Ceremony and Connection with Nature in Daily Life
29:21 Reconnecting with Nature and Spirit
30:08 The Impact of Diet on Health and Spirituality
32:34 Practices for Healing and Spiritual Growth
36:02 Becoming Your Own Chief Scientist
49:19 Embracing the Healing Path and Serving the Greater Good
About Dr. Alberto Villoldo
With over 5 million fans spread across her social media platforms, New York Times best-selling author Joanne Molinaro, a.k.a The Korean Vegan, has appeared on The Food Network, CBS Saturday Morning, ABC’s Live with Kelly and Ryan, The Today Show, PBS, and The Rich Roll Podcast. She’s been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, and CNN; and her debut cookbook was selected as one of “The Best Cookbooks of 2021” by The New York Times and The New Yorker among others.
Molinaro is a Korean American woman, born in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents were both born in what is now known as North Korea. Molinaro started her blog, The Korean Vegan, in 2016, after adopting a plant-based diet. In July 2020, she started her TikTok (@thekoreanvegan), mostly as a coping mechanism for the isolation caused by the global pandemic. She began posting content related to politics and life as a lawyer during quarantine. However, after a single post of her making Korean braised potatoes for dinner (while her husband taught a piano lesson in the background) went viral, Molinaro shifted her attention to producing 60 second recipe videos, while telling stories about her family—immigrants from what is now known as North Korea.
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Transcript:
Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
Kimberly Snyder (00:00.771)
Namaste loves and welcome back to our Monday interview show I am so excited for our very special guest here today Alberto Vildo who is an amazing author He’s the founder of the four winds. He’s a medical anthropologist I met Alberto in person a few weeks ago at the Hay House conference and it was Magical. I just wanted to squeeze out every bit of wisdom that I had in person with this amazing human, this amazing teacher. And I’m so excited to share some of his amazing wisdom with you here today. We will link in the show notes to some of Alberto’s books because he has written many amazing books. He also has a new vegan cookbook out, which we will talk about today. Alberto, thank you so much for being here with us today. We are very excited.
Alberto (00:51.278)
Kimberly, it’s a pleasure to be with you and great to meet you too at the Hay House Conference.
Kimberly Snyder (00:56.643)
We had this incredible experience. We were walking to dinner, Alberto, and I told you this, we were speaking and it was like, everything dropped away and we were talking and there was just this amazing presence. There’s this amazing energy. I’m sure a lot of people tell you this and it was just, felt really potent.
Alberto (01:16.014)
It was. It was a powerful encounter. You know, these sacred encounters that happen when you are serving a common mission of bringing a little bit more beauty and joy to the earth. We get these gifts from the great mother, from Mother Earth, to encounter souls that are walking a parallel path. And it was such a treat to meet you like that.
Kimberly Snyder (01:40.099)
And Alberto, I love how you’re talking about so many different topics around wellness and energy. And now you’re talking about food and you talk about destiny. And I was just preparing my notes and I said, wow, there’s so many different things that I want to ask Alberto in your vast experience. So first of all, wow, I love that you’ve written books about so many different topics. But the first thing, and I saw this…
very new to, for me it was new hearing about this idea of the four chambered soul. And that really spoke to me right away, Alberto, because you and I talked about shadow work. We talked about these wounds that we have, which can be in this lifetime or previous lifetimes and how that keeps us from fulfilling our destiny. Can we get into that first a little bit?
Alberto (02:25.806)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, wonderful mythologist, really, he used to say that if you don’t learn it, you end up marrying it. And so that you keep bumping into your shadow, you keep bumping into the unhealed parts of yourself and projecting it out into the world and trying to fix it through the world when we really had to fix it inside.
Kimberly Snyder (02:39.203)
Mmm.
Alberto (02:53.07)
Now I spent, you know, I started my work in a brain research lab at San Francisco State and then went to the Amazon for many years to work with the shamans and became what I call a neuro shaman, which is what I believe we all are because we’re looking for the magical and the sacred, but not as an escapist route, but to really do the core work of deep healing. And that has to do with coming back into your destiny.
Kimberly Snyder (03:08.227)
Hmm.
Alberto (03:22.83)
so that you’re not in the grip of fate because fate is fatal you know and when you’re not engaging your life calling then you’re at the mercy of your genetics which are not good in general or your family drama and when you can break out of that
Kimberly Snyder (03:39.203)
Mm.
Alberto (03:41.774)
into your calling and into your destiny, amazing healing happens. And then you can craft your own journey. You’re not a victim of the genes that run in your family or the dementia or heart disease. You write your own story.
Kimberly Snyder (03:50.563)
Hmm.
Kimberly Snyder (03:56.419)
Alberto, there’s our ancestors, right? In this lifetime, we can trace that lineage. And then as you’ve talked about in your work, there’s previous lifetimes, right? That are pulling from different lineages. So we are this combination, this unique combination as we come in with all these different influences. So do you believe here now we can heal this ancestral line and we can go even further back?
Alberto (04:23.918)
Absolutely. So you’re talking about karma. You know, the, and we, we, we reincarnate, we come back lifetime after lifetime and the shamans of old in every culture recognize that. But even in this life, we’ve had a number of lifetimes, maybe sometimes a number of relationships or marriages or, so we want to be sure we don’t drag that old karma along with us from this life.
Kimberly Snyder (04:42.275)
Yes.
Alberto (04:51.63)
so that we can shed those stories the way the serpent sheds her skin. But to do that, you know, what I learned in the brain laboratory is that we have a very ancient brain that needs ceremony, ritual, in order to change. That you cannot change your mind unless you change your brain.
Kimberly Snyder (05:09.923)
Mmm.
Alberto (05:14.03)
And you cannot change this old brain that lives in fear and in scarcity and in judgment and in projection of the shadow. You cannot change it unless you do ceremony, sacred ceremony, which is why you have it in every culture. But ceremony doesn’t have to be complicated ritual. It’s just a sacred moment. And one of the most ancient ones,
Kimberly Snyder (05:36.387)
Mmm.
Alberto (05:39.758)
Maybe I can share that with you now, it’s a fire ceremony because we sat around the fire for a million years before, until a hundred years ago, the world was lit only by fire. We sat around the fire, we told stories, we made love, we helped the dying and the babies be born. And today we’re trying to change, but we don’t know how to change that ancient brain because we have lost the sacred ceremony. We need to create them.
Kimberly Snyder (05:43.395)
Yes.
Alberto (06:10.126)
And the fire ceremony is one of the most powerful, the most ancient one. And let me share that with you right now. I’ve got a little stick in my hand and I’m going to blow into the stick. The shamans call it a death arrow. I’m going to blow it into it, whatever I’m bumping into, whatever obstacles I’m running into in my life.
Or maybe it’s a diagnosis. A diagnosis is kind of a modern curse. Because then you become a statistic. So you want to, you’re not a diagnosis.
Kimberly Snyder (06:38.499)
Mmmmm
Alberto (06:47.854)
or whatever self judgment you have and then I’m going to put it to the fire. I’ve got a candle here that we cannot see. I’m going to put it to the fire.
Alberto (07:02.318)
And I’m going to release the energy that I have bound around that story or that diagnosis or that self judgment. And then place it safely in water. And this gives that ancient brain permission to change. And if you don’t create some kind of sacred ceremony, then we’re going to be stuck. We’re going to be bumping into the blocks. We’re going to be waking up into what
Kimberly Snyder (07:07.011)
Hmm.
Kimberly Snyder (07:24.035)
Mm.
Alberto (07:32.11)
we’re not able to deal with. So I want to invite all of us that are watching or listening to really craft your own ceremony with your beloved, with yourself, with the fire, with the elements, with water, with… And use this one if you like. It’s very powerful and it works.
Kimberly Snyder (07:53.027)
Wow, Alberto, thank you for making that so accessible. Because sometimes when we hear ceremony, we think, I have to go to the Amazon. I have to carve out three weeks of my year. I spent thousands of dollars and it’s really hard to do. And I’m a busy mom and all the obstacles start to come in. But what you taught us just there, bringing that element, it’s transformational right here, right now.
Alberto (08:16.558)
Right here, right now. Many people go to the Amazon, spend three weeks, spend thousands of dollars and have ayahuasca and have dinner with God. And by Tuesday, they forgot everything that they talked about and they bring nothing back. So yeah, create your own ceremony. So, and it can be simply, you know, when we clink glasses with someone and have a toast, that’s a little sacred moment that you’re creating. But to heal.
Kimberly Snyder (08:18.851)
Ugh.
Alberto (08:45.358)
And to heal trauma, we need to give the brain permission to heal, to let it know that it’s safe. And because if it’s not safe, we’re not going to heal. In fact, there’s a story that the Hopi have, the Hopi nation in North America, they say that before we’re born, we have a twin, that we have an astral twin that looks out of the birth canal.
Kimberly Snyder (08:53.347)
Mm.
Kimberly Snyder (09:09.763)
Mmm.
Alberto (09:12.878)
to see if it’s safe to be born. If the family is safe, if the space is safe, and if it’s safe, it says, come on, let’s go. And both of them are born together. They’re the masculine and feminine sides of ourselves. And if it’s not safe, part of us holds back. And we’re born with what we call soul loss.
with trauma, with traumatic birth. Trauma is really the loss of the healed part of your soul and the part that remains behind is the wounded part. That’s why shamans have a strategy healing technique called soul retrieval, where you can recover that healed part, but you’ve got to let it know that it’s going to be safe, that you’re going to receive its gifts, that you’re
Kimberly Snyder (09:55.843)
Mmm.
Alberto (10:07.438)
You’re not just going to put it on your to -do list. You know, your soul part might say, why should I come back? I mean, look at your life. You don’t have time for anything fun and you want to have more fun? So you have to coax this soul part that left and people that suffer trauma in wartime.
or a woman that’s been sexually abused or will frequently report observing the scene as if from the corner of the room, as if from above. And that’s in psychology, they call that disassociation. And in the shamans that I had the opportunity to work with in the Amazon said, no, that’s the soul fragmenting. And we need to become whole again, make the soul whole again so we can step back into our destiny.
Kimberly Snyder (10:39.619)
Mmm.
Kimberly Snyder (10:51.299)
Mmm.
Alberto (10:58.286)
Because when your soul is fragmented, then you’re in the grip of fate. Then your future has been preordained by your genetics or by your family of origin or by your skin color or your gender or whereas when you become whole, when you retrieve, recover, that’s the soul part.
that has fled and today many of us are suffering from it because we were born into families that were not safe.
Kimberly Snyder (11:28.771)
Yes. It’s not safe, not awake, not honoring the wholeness.
Alberto (11:34.222)
Totally. And this happens at the moment of conception. I’ll tell you, my moment of conception, which is not only where your genetics come together, you get 23 from mom, 23 from dad. And that’s why I love the name of this company, 23 and Me, you know, for your genetic analysis. 23 for me is the moment of your conception. That’s when the dye is cast.
energetically for the rest of your life. The moment of my conception, my mother did not have much experience and my dad had had a little bit too much whiskey. So in this moment of terror and whiskey, bam, my genetic destiny was selected. So we have to make sure that we…
that we practice epigenetics greater than genetics so that we’re not a victim not only of the information in the genes but of the emotional charge that got infused into that DNA the moment that we were conceived.
Kimberly Snyder (12:41.237)
Mm, mm.
Alberto, can I ask you a question? This is such a fascinating topic. I want to take some in your ancient wisdom and all this vast knowledge for a very modern issue, which is present. It’s present in our community. We get a lot of questions around this, and it has to do with infertility because we’re in an age right now, Alberto, where there are so many women and couples struggling to get pregnant for the first time. Doctors are saying, you know, there’s
toxins in the water or the food supply. There’s all these unexplained reasons why people aren’t able to get pregnant. People are getting more desperate to get pregnant. They’re trying assisted reproductive technologies. There’s all the stats, like you said, when you were lighting the candle. If you’re over 34 or over 35, it’s going to be really hard for you. And yet, I think about my grandmother who had babies and the Philippines, still she was 48 and this ability to carry life and reproduce as part of nature.
What would you say or what would you teach or recommend anyone in our community that knows someone or is personally struggling with infertility?
Alberto (13:50.414)
That’s such a big, big topic right now. Let me give you a little bit of the science behind it. So the, in the last 20 years, men have lost 50 % of their sperm count.
Kimberly Snyder (13:52.803)
Yeah.
Kimberly Snyder (14:05.187)
Yeah.
Alberto (14:06.478)
And their motility, the ability of the sperm to swim powerfully is reduced tremendously. They say by 2060, you know, in 35 years, that two out of three men will be infertile, unable to reproduce. So, and you know, and this is, this is the science and it’s because the sperm is very vulnerable to toxins, to heavy metals, to toxins in the water.
Kimberly Snyder (14:20.067)
my gosh, two out of three?
Alberto (14:32.974)
But that’s the science side and science is materialistic. It’s missing the whole spiritual side. We have one of our students who had in vitro fertilization. Her best friend had 26 tries and the fetus was rejected. But she got it right at the first time because she called on that spirit to come.
she called on that little spirit that was right to be born through her to come. And the very first try of in -vitro was successful. Now, the second time she did the in -vitro, she had two spirits show up in her meditations and she communed with them and she had twins. So you’ve got to attend to the invisible world, not only to the genetics and not only to the technology and look at the environment that
Kimberly Snyder (15:18.435)
Wow.
Alberto (15:28.398)
this is happening. And I mean, you go to an in vitro fertilization clinic and it’s fluorescent lights. It’s like what happened with when I was conceived, you know, too much whiskey and sheer terror. That’s not a loving environment for a spirit to connect with, with biology. So this is so important that you prepare yourself.
Kimberly Snyder (15:39.107)
Yeah.
Kimberly Snyder (15:49.571)
Yes.
Alberto (15:55.374)
emotionally and spiritually and communicate, commune with that being that is wanting to be born through you.
Kimberly Snyder (16:02.115)
Mmm.
connect and feel them. And, you know, again, see this more holistically than, you know, people are like, I’m over 30 now. People are doing IVF in their 20s even, Alberto, you know, and just, yeah.
Alberto (16:17.39)
Yeah, totally. You know, when I was a boy, like many of us, we had our eyes open and we could see the energy world and I could see spirits. I could see dead people. My parents were terrified of it because I say, there’s Uncle Milton. He came back for his wife and the wife would die two days later. So they told me to shut up and never, ever say that again. But you can also see the…
the little spirits that are wanting to be born. And you can summon them. You can call that spirit that has a dharmic, not a karmic, but a beautiful positive relationship with you and connect with it energetically, spiritually, and invite it to come through you. We need to create ceremony around this whole mechanical, technical IVF procedure.
Kimberly Snyder (16:49.987)
Wow.
Alberto (17:14.702)
And but even if you’re not going the IVF route, if you’re doing the traditional form of conception of you got to create a sacred ceremony around your lovemaking. Because it’s not no longer about you and about him, but it’s about there’s three people involved here now. That little spirit that’s going to be coming through. And we have forgotten, of course, how important that is.
Kimberly Snyder (17:25.251)
Yes.
Kimberly Snyder (17:42.627)
Well, Alberto, with our child, with my husband, we actually had this Ayurvedic mantra that my Ayurvedic doctor gave us, and we would chant it together three times. And it was this ceremony, and we called that solen, and it felt really beautiful.
Alberto (18:00.59)
Absolutely. This is that element of the sacred that is missing today so much from our lives. You know, in my new book, I just finished a book called The Grow a New Body Cookbook, which is the sequel to my Grow a New Body book, which is how Amazonian peoples, how shamans, indigenous people know how to regenerate the body through a primarily plant -based diet and how they’re plants.
Kimberly Snyder (18:05.827)
Mm -hmm.
Kimberly Snyder (18:28.675)
Hmm.
Alberto (18:30.446)
that regulate your genetic expression. And I have a section in the book on the beverages that are the epigenetic regulators. But today we’re so seduced by, you know, we know that the green plants have the micro RNAs that will switch on the genes for health, but we forget that these plants have spirits also. Spirit in the plant, there’s the spirit in everything.
Kimberly Snyder (18:53.571)
Mmm.
Alberto (18:59.054)
And if you can work with not only the chemical structure of your broccoli sprouts, which are amazing, as you know from your own work, I mean, I follow, I love your work with the plants and the juicing and the… If you can connect with the spirit of the plant, you’re not just relying on the chemical.
Kimberly Snyder (19:19.715)
Yes.
Alberto (19:21.742)
And that’s what the healers of old used to do. They would awaken the spirit of the plant before they took it as a medicinal plant. And there you were getting not only the chemical, molecular, but the energetic.
Kimberly Snyder (19:38.531)
And Alberto, you talked about ceremony. Even in our family, we pause, we say grace, we pray, we say gratitude before we eat. And I feel like in our society today, there’s a lot of rush and there isn’t a lot of respect for the plants, is there? They’re just kind of shoveling it down or marketing reasons. There’s these formulas with like dozens and dozens of plants in them at once. And just like in minute amounts, it’s very commercial.
Alberto (20:03.822)
Yeah, yeah.
Alberto (20:08.366)
Yes, become totally commercial. You know, I used to bless my food before eating it. I don’t do that anymore. Today I ask my food to bless me before I eat it. Who am I to be blessing this incredible, you know, this incredible plant? It’s bringing me a blessing and I awaken, I try to awaken and receive that blessing and…
Kimberly Snyder (20:19.587)
Wow.
Alberto (20:33.806)
But if I could stay on the subject of plants like curcumin, turmeric, you know, amazing, it’s such an amazing herb. And we know that curcumin is the extract from the turmeric root. And we know that in India where they eat a lot of turmeric, people have only 15 % of the Alzheimer’s that we do in America. And…
Kimberly Snyder (20:55.203)
Mmm.
Alberto (20:58.574)
So we have targeted curcumin, but curcumin works best when you mix it with turmeric, because curcumin is the active molecule, whereas the turmeric is the synergistic spirit of the plant. So we have to bring spirit back into, not only into our IVF and into our conception and into our healing, but into our communion with the invisible world.
Kimberly Snyder (21:12.483)
Mmm.
Alberto (21:25.678)
where we have our umbilical cord that connects us to the invisible, to Mother Earth, is shriveled up. And she’s not able to nurture us energetically the way that she did when we were one with nature.
Kimberly Snyder (21:43.683)
Yes. And this can be restored in our daily practices, ceremonies, how we’re eating, bringing this in now.
Alberto (21:50.062)
Totally. Totally.
Alberto (21:55.022)
Yeah, totally, we need to restore that. I remember, I just came back from, we do an annual expedition to Peru that I lead to the sacred places in the Andes. And I met with one of the medicine women and they’re seers, they can see the energetic realm. And they were saying to me, Alberto, your energy is so good, because you’re looking so well, it’s like your glass is full.
But many of the people that come with you, their energy is, imagine the body is made out of glass, is all the way down to their feet. And I said, well, what does that mean? I said, well, these are the people that are going to get sick because if your energy body is full, if you’re full of that communion of that earth, of that chi, of that prana, you’re not going to get sick. Or if you get sick, you’ll be very resilient.
And, but for so many of us in the West, we think we get all of our energy from calories or from food, and we forget, you know, that we live in a universe that’s all energy, that we can drink from directly.
Kimberly Snyder (23:08.099)
So Alberto, I loved your practice with the candle. I love that you have this, what’s the name of your new vegan cookbook as well?
Alberto (23:14.926)
It’s a vegan cookbook and you know, I’m not vegan, but I am vegan one week a month and it’s called the Grow New Body Cookbook because you have to become vegan to allow the body to go into regeneration. You have to go plant -based at least one week a month so that because the body goes from first into detox, got to get rid of the toxins. If you can…
detox, then it’ll go into repair. And if you can sustain the vegan protocol for four or five days, then you’re going to regeneration because the plants have the instructions for helping us grow a new body. So one week, 10 days a month, all of us should go on a, particularly the land -based.
Kimberly Snyder (24:00.163)
Yes.
Alberto (24:09.454)
animal foods, including the eggs, the dairy, the meat, at least one week a month to allow the body to regenerate so you can grow a new body that ages and heals and dies differently.
Kimberly Snyder (24:24.931)
Alberto, I’m so excited to check out your book and your plants. I personally have been plant -based fully for about 15 years. I look at some of these pictures in college when I was partying. You know, we say the liver regenerates. I just look at my skin back then and it really is true that this energy, when we’re pulling from source and we’re not just on this material level and buying into these limited beliefs, this is how old I’m going to look when I’m 30. This is how I’m going to feel when I’m 40, 50, 60.
We go into this limitless capacity that is, you know, some people don’t understand it, Alberto, as you know, and some people think, statistics, medicine says this and this, but there’s so much more to it, isn’t there?
Alberto (25:01.102)
Yeah.
Alberto (25:06.958)
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, medicine statistics, that’s called the fat part of the bell curve. It’s a big bell curve. And the fat part is where the way everybody gets old and dies sick. You live long, but you live sick long. And we want to become an outlier out here where we can make our health span equal to our lifespan.
And to do that, we’re going to find that in the plants, in the plant -based diet, because they contain the instruction. We evolve with the plants, not with the animals. Very seldom would we eat animal foods. But that’s another topic.
Kimberly Snyder (25:37.219)
Mm.
Kimberly Snyder (25:51.395)
Yes. Well, so Alberto, taking it back to everyone listening to this who says, well, this sounds great and I want to connect with nature and I love ceremony. I’m really busy. Right. So yes, they’re shifting food. We’re eating on an everyday basis. But how can someone incorporate some of your practices and your beautiful philosophy saying, you know, like me, I’m a mom with two young kids. I got to do school runs. I’m working. I’m in modern life. How do how do I actually live this on a
daily basis instead of just doing a retreat or once in a while having a weekend.
Alberto (26:24.67)
Yeah. Well, once in a while, a weekend is good. And the or you can come to the Amazon with me for two weeks. But. But, you know, having having having kids is not a new phenomenon. This has been happening for a very long time and working the field and fitting. But the nature that you need to connect with is the invisible world. See, and what I learned from the shamans.
Kimberly Snyder (26:33.475)
That would be a dream.
Kimberly Snyder (26:41.283)
Yes, you work it in.
Alberto (26:54.286)
And I was trained as a neuroscientist, but what I learned from the shamans was that everything is natural. It’s a natural world. There’s no supernatural world. There’s only the natural world that has a visible component and it has an invisible component. It’s what we call the quantum field in physics, except it’s living, it’s alive. How you connect to nature, the most important part is with the invisible part of nature. That’s all around us.
all the time. And you know going for a walk in the woods is fantastic but if you go for a walk in the woods checking your phone or thinking about your to -do list you’re not connecting to nature. So the return to the garden, I call it the return to the garden, the return to Eden where we could speak with the rivers and with the trees and with God and the rivers and the trees and God would talk back to us.
Kimberly Snyder (27:37.251)
Right?
Kimberly Snyder (27:54.083)
Mmm.
Alberto (27:54.286)
That’s, you can do that from your living room. And, but you need some green, you need some green life and both in your diet as well as in your environment. And there’s a, there’s a tale, a legend of when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru and they met with the Inca, with the ruler who was a divine ruler. He was a shaman. And they gave the, the conquistador brought a priest.
Kimberly Snyder (27:58.019)
Mmm.
Alberto (28:23.246)
And they gave the Inca the Bible. And they said, this is the word of God. And they had never seen a book before because in the Americas, there was no writing. But the priest said, this is the word of God. So the Inca put it to his ear and listened and listened and didn’t hear anything and threw the book down. And he said, what kind of God is this that does not speak? And.
Kimberly Snyder (28:49.923)
Mmm.
Alberto (28:52.366)
He asked the priest, when did your God last speak to you? The priest said, 1500 years ago. And the priest said to the Inca, when did your God last speak to you? And the shaman said, this morning at breakfast. So they still have an active dialogue with nature, with the rivers, with the trees, with spirit, with God. See, God hasn’t stopped speaking to us. We’ve stopped listening.
Kimberly Snyder (29:08.418)
Wow.
Kimberly Snyder (29:21.315)
Mm.
Alberto (29:22.222)
And this is what that reconnection with nature is about.
Kimberly Snyder (29:25.699)
Well, and having that expanded view, that expanded connection, that spirit is in everything instead of up there in the sky, this perception or this being coming down to us rather than it’s going through everything.
Alberto (29:40.302)
Well, that’s in our prayers. Our father who are not here, who are somewhere else. This is why we have so many daddy issues in the West today. It’s even embedded in our form of prayer. But it goes back to our diet. Because we had a dietary shift that occurred 10 ,000 years ago where we discovered agriculture.
And at the same time that we discovered agriculture, we started no longer eating from the more than 50 ,000 wild plants available to us, we began eating only three of them, which are rice, corn, and wheat, and none of them are green. So when we made that dietary shift, we began to eat bread instead of eating greens and vegetables.
Kimberly Snyder (30:25.795)
Yes.
Alberto (30:35.182)
and we discovered religion, we discovered agriculture and warfare. We began to fight because the land became valuable suddenly. You were planting your fields, it became valuable and the farmer became the warrior. So this is a tragic event that occurred and that…
At that time, 10 ,000 years ago, human lifespan was reduced by half, by 50%. Human lifespans went from 65 years to about 32, 33. In Rome, the average Roman lived to be 35 years old, if you were lucky. And that’s when we made that dietary shift to eating grains and to eating processed grains that would turn into sugar the minute you ate them.
Kimberly Snyder (31:01.187)
Mm.
Alberto (31:24.078)
And you even find that embedded, of course, even in our prayers. And give us today our daily bread. A prayer didn’t go, give us today our daily greens and fats and proteins.
So this, we’ve got to get back to natural and not only to nature, to natural. And it’s very affordable. You can do it. You can even plant some of, you know, I plant some of my own vegetables right outside in my little backyard area. Even in a, you can grow your own sprouts in your kitchen in an apartment in the 37th floor.
And you go back to natural, you go back to nature, and you go back to spirit, you make your way back to spirit. And then we become abundant, whether that means fertile and having a child or whether it means having plenty, having been nourished and nurtured, not only by the calories you eat and by the macronutrients, but by spirit, by…
Kimberly Snyder (32:14.179)
Mm.
Alberto (32:30.894)
by the love of the mother, of the great mother.
Kimberly Snyder (32:34.499)
Hmm. Well, Britta, you mentioned fragmentation before, and I think a lot of people don’t see how we’re eating as connected to this abundance, wholeness, this connection to spirit. And yet we know as you speak about the shamans and also the yogis, Yogananda and all these great yoga gurus have always talked about how important what we’re eating is.
in terms of our meditation, our spiritual growth, our consciousness levels. So we know that what we’re taking into our body is having an energetic effect on our awareness and our aliveness. But it’s so missing today, isn’t it, Alberto? It’s just…
Alberto (33:12.43)
It’s totally missing. And one of the problems, of course, is we’ve been taking antibiotics since we were young. You know, if you go to the forest, I remember being in the Amazon and I asked our guide, where are the animals? The animals are where the food is. In Africa, this generally means around the water holes. So the animals go to where there’s food. And it’s the same with us. We have an ecosystem where the animals, the
Kimberly Snyder (33:17.411)
Yeah.
Alberto (33:41.134)
the good bugs in our gut flora, they go to where the food is. They go to our GI tract, which is where they get fed. We eat, we think we eat to feed us, but we eat to feed them, our intestinal flora, our probiotic colony, so that they can manufacture all of the vitamins and nutrients that we need. You know, there are 10 levels of gut bacteria.
and they are responsible for turning broccoli into you or into me. It’s a big job. They eat first and then they manufacture all of the nutrients that we need. And today we have our colony is so damaged that it doesn’t matter how much we eat. It’s all passing through us. It’s not even we’re not being nourished, not only energetically, we’re not being nourished even physically.
Kimberly Snyder (34:30.883)
Hmm.
Kimberly Snyder (34:38.403)
Mmm.
Alberto (34:38.638)
So it’s a critical time and that’s of course the cause of so many of this biases and of many of the of the physical ailments, particularly the autoimmune conditions where your immune system thinks that you are a parasite, that you are the enemy and it begins to attack you. Whoa.
Kimberly Snyder (34:51.587)
Yes.
Alberto (35:04.142)
You know, you don’t find that in any indigenous cultures that I have ever spent time with. In Africa or in Asia or in the Amazon, there are no autoimmune issues.
Kimberly Snyder (35:08.675)
Hmm.
Kimberly Snyder (35:18.083)
Wow. And they don’t have all the fancy biohacking and they’re not taking millions of supplements and living this, you know, this life with all these different devices. They’re living a very simple life connected to nature. It’s just this, it’s like this wow, this moment, this awe that it’s like their moment to moment living is a very different experience.
Alberto (35:23.886)
Yeah.
Alberto (35:39.662)
Yeah, you know, in my book, in the Grown -Ur -Body Cookbook, I write that you need to turn your kitchen into your laboratory. And you need to become your own chief scientist. Because we can’t trust the science out there anyway. You know, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Kimberly Snyder (35:55.971)
Mm.
Alberto (36:02.382)
and the Lancet, which is the British Medical Association, they wrote a joint paper editorial saying that they know that 50 % of the medical research papers they publish are bogus. They’re bad. They just don’t know which 50%. So even our medical science is broken. We cannot tell what’s true and what’s misinformation anymore.
Kimberly Snyder (36:15.331)
Ugh.
my.
Alberto (36:27.118)
And so you need to become your own chief scientist, do your own research, turn your kitchen into your laboratory, and take part in what I call the experiment of N is equal to one. Because in science, when you do an experiment in medicine, you want N, the number of people in your study, to be a lot so that you can say that it’s relevant to many people. But today we do the experiment of N is equal to one, and my experiment is called Alberto.
Kimberly Snyder (36:56.963)
I love it.
Alberto (36:57.742)
and yours is called Kimberly. And if you don’t do the experiment to create health, guess what? If you don’t take part in the experiment, you get to be in the control group. And the control group is that big fat part of the bell curve of how people live and get sick and get old and die in America.
So today we have to do that. We have to take charge of our health and of our destinies. And we have so much support available to us, but we got to do our own research and be careful who you trust and what you trust. We have become overly biohacked. We’ve become actually, I want to start the unhacking movement because we’ve been hacked. We’ve been hacked.
Kimberly Snyder (37:47.811)
I love that.
Alberto (37:49.23)
By our digital devices, we’ve been hacked by even the supplement companies that tell us we need to be taking all of these different supplements. We’ve been hacked. We need to unhack ourselves.
Kimberly Snyder (38:02.179)
I love that Alberto and I totally relate to that. And I also will say that for me as I grew in my wellness journey, which for me, the pathway in was nutrition and eating good food and getting my microbiome back into balance. And it really did parallel the spiritual path for me. And at different stages, I just started having more awareness. I could see myself more, I could see my patterns. And so it was almost like I was upgrading my body and then I was able to introspect.
more and reflect. So how would you like, what are some practices or some ways that you would encourage or teach some of our listeners that are starting to see things or like you and I talk a lot about shadow work and we want to get rid of patterns, right? So then we start to upgrade the structure and then we’re able to maybe have more strength and resilience to shift.
Alberto (38:45.422)
Yeah.
Alberto (38:54.99)
Yeah, first I think we have to practice slow food, you know, slow eating. Chew, eat your food, enjoy it. You know, I don’t need, I eat one meal a day now because it has all the nutrients I need, but I try to get a lot of my food through my breath.
Kimberly Snyder (39:14.147)
Mmm.
Alberto (39:16.878)
So every breath you take, you’re not just getting oxygen that’s going into your mitochondria and helping you produce energy, you’re taking in chi and life force. So if you breathe in consciously, you’re actually feeding every cell in your body. And there are people in India that are breatharians. I’m not quite there yet. I eat a really hearty good meal. And so that’s the beginning. And then,
Kimberly Snyder (39:36.515)
Yes.
Alberto (39:44.718)
eat consciously, be aware that you’re not taking food into your mouth, you’re not taking a protein into your mouth, you’re taking a piece of salmon, of a living being, of a spirit of a salmon that you may be taking into you, or of a plant that grew into wild, you know, like I eat, I love blueberries, but I only buy the wild blueberries.
because they had to really struggle for their lives. They’re not as sweet, but they’re full of life force. So today we have been breeding plants for taste, for sugar, for sweetness, and not for nutrient. So you’ve got to go back to the wild side, to rewild your diet, to rewild your spirit. We become far too domesticated. We become domesticated animals.
It’s terrible. And how do you rewild yourself? And because we have a wild nature that doesn’t like to be domesticated. And how do you rewild your spirit? Set your spirit free. Soar. Dare to dream outrageously and courageously. And pick a mission for your life.
Kimberly Snyder (40:37.667)
Mm.
Alberto (41:07.086)
that you can serve. We’re all looking for purpose and meaning, but we cannot find meaning until we find a mission that we can become aligned with. And then at that point, you find that the universe will begin to conspire on your behalf, your energy level.
Kimberly Snyder (41:14.403)
Mmm.
Kimberly Snyder (41:28.387)
And get really clear. Yes, get really clear about that mission.
Alberto (41:33.934)
Totally. Like I really get your mission. You’re helping people get well, get healthy, be conscious about what they eat, what they think, what they feel, how they heal. Each one of us can take that mission on. But then we go, well, who am I to take that on? I’m nothing. I’m a victim. Then you remain in the victim mode. When as if you take a mission on,
maybe to bring a little more beauty to the world. Then you become a hero. You go on the hero’s journey and not on the victim’s journey. And then you don’t have a whole list of reasons why you can’t do what you want. You know, you can get what you want or you can get the reasons why you can’t. So then it doesn’t matter that you have two kids and you’ve got to drive them to school and you’ve got to do your work and you’ve got to…
Kimberly Snyder (42:16.931)
Mm -hmm.
Alberto (42:30.062)
Those don’t become obstacles. They become the elements that temper your soul so that you can, you don’t have excuses for not living the kind of life you want to be living. You may have reasons why it’s harder, but not excuses.
Kimberly Snyder (42:51.107)
Mm hmm. Well, I really like Alberto, how you were, you start, we started off doing that really simple fire practice, because I think it’s easy to trudge through life in a similar pattern. I’m going to the school run, I’m going to the grocery store, but that felt like me to like a break, like, wow, something different is really happening here. And I’m letting this and I’m putting intention in it. And I go to this, we’re part of the time in Hawaii, Alberto, and there’s this amazing Hindu monastery near our home.
And they have a simile of this big urn outside and they teach this practice where you write on a piece of paper, something that you want to release and their practice, you light it and you watch it burn, right? To say like, this is taking away. And every time I do it, I do feel lighter, right? So these rituals that you’re teaching Alberto for me, it’s like, whoa, like momentary wake up calls. Is there one with water too?
Alberto (43:32.59)
Peace, guys. Yeah.
Alberto (43:47.086)
Yep.
Kimberly Snyder (43:49.123)
I mean, I see you reaching for the fire. I love all the fire. Is there one? You mentioned water. When we’re walking with elements that we could do on an everyday basis.
Alberto (43:53.582)
Do you?
Let me go back to the fire first. And of course you light and then you can, if you have a big enough stick, you can clear that chakra with the fire, the heart chakra, the heart center.
Kimberly Snyder (43:58.563)
Yes.
Kimberly Snyder (44:09.091)
Do you say something into the fire first or you’re just…
Alberto (44:12.11)
Yeah, you place whatever you want to release and let go and then you clear the heart center, release it to the water and then you pass your hands through the fire, through the flames and you bring that energy that’s been set free, you bring it into your heart center. And from your heart it goes to whatever part of your energy body it needs to go to. So you’re taking back…
the energy that’s been set free. Let go of the story, let go of the trauma, let go of the block and take that pure energy back into you.
Kimberly Snyder (44:41.635)
Mmm.
Alberto (44:50.574)
So you want a water ritual? Okay. The water ritual.
Kimberly Snyder (44:54.115)
I want to water ritual. but you’re talking about the heart. I just, you know, my next two books are about the heart of children’s book and an adult book. And I’ve been working with the heart energy so much. I think there’s so much there. Like you said, it flows and we can connect to this. Right here.
Alberto (45:09.454)
Totally. The heart is the drummer. It’s a great drummer of the body, you know. It sets the whole rhythm to the entire energy system. It’s the heart rhythm. And that’s why the quieting of the heart through the breath resets your system and your rhythm. But yeah, you can do… I’ll share with you a water practice. So…
Kimberly Snyder (45:15.651)
Yes.
Yes.
Alberto (45:38.382)
I’m just working on a course right now on dreaming, on the art of dreaming, on dream yoga. It’s kind of a dream yoga. And it’s waking up inside the dream, becoming lucid inside your dreams.
So the way that you do that is you take a small glass of water with maybe an inch of water in it and you hold it and you before you go to before you fall asleep in bed you hold the glass you say I’m going to drink half of this glass now just a small amount so you don’t have to get up during the night and then when I wake up in the morning I’m going to drink the other half and all my dreams will come back to me.
Kimberly Snyder (46:19.075)
Wow.
Alberto (46:20.782)
And then first thing you do in the morning is you reach for your glass and you drink the other half and then go back, you know, curl up with the pillow again for a few minutes and your dreams will come back to you. After three or four days, you’ll begin to come back after a week, after two weeks, you’ll remember four or five dreams that you had in the night. And then after you’ve begun to remember them, the next step is the same practice when I…
Kimberly Snyder (46:34.723)
Wow.
Alberto (46:49.998)
Wake up, I’m gonna take the other half a glass and then you drink half and then you look for the glass in your dream. And you drink the other half of the glass inside a dream. So you wake up inside the dream, you become lucid.
Kimberly Snyder (47:10.435)
Wow. And you do believe Alberto that it’s really, there’s much value in remembering our dreams and going into them because some people say, they’re just random things that pass through.
Alberto (47:22.99)
Yeah, I know. This is what psychology did. Psychology eviscerated us. They denied the dream time. They said, it’s only symbols of your individuation or what’s going on in your life and your processing. Neurologists say this is how you store memories. Shamans say this is how we participate in the invisible realm. There’s the personal dream and the transpersonal. But the third part of the practice of the glass of water,
Kimberly Snyder (47:31.779)
Yeah.
Alberto (47:53.262)
is that you, well the second part is you find it in your dream and you drink it and you wake up in the dream and you realize you’re dreaming and you can guide it anywhere you want. But the third part is that whenever you’re having a lunch with someone or you’re going out to lunch in particularly and you reach for your glass of water, as you drink it, you want to wake up in this dream.
Kimberly Snyder (48:18.339)
Mmm.
Alberto (48:19.374)
and become lucid. And understand that this is also a dream, that what you call reality is a result of your projections of your shadow, of your unhealed parts and of the parts you don’t recognize as you. And that you can become lucid inside this dream that we call reality and navigate through it elegantly to, as long as you are using that power,
to create beauty and healing for the world, for others, and not only for yourself. You cannot use that power only for personal gain, but for the greater good. The Bodhisattva path, the Buddhists call it. But this is waking up in the dream to dream a new world into being that’s a little bit more beautiful and a little bit more healed and a little bit more sane than the world that we seem to be waking up into every day today.
Kimberly Snyder (49:19.523)
Alberto, that’s amazing. When you start waking up and expanding out right into this more oneness field and you’re for the greater good, instead of projecting your unhealed shadows out, this is where we start to see perhaps more synchronicities or more miracles happening. Cause we’re not in that personal, you know, the original wound or coming from that victimhood, that limited perspective kind of.
dissolved more of this little me.
Alberto (49:51.438)
Precisely. Your life becomes a combination of synchronicity and serendipity. Coincidences don’t become occasional, they happen all the time now. And then you enter into the non -causal, the non -linear, the magical world, the synchronistic world, which is the true nature of reality that we wake up into once we understand.
Kimberly Snyder (50:02.499)
Yes.
Alberto (50:20.014)
water and we go through our healing process. So that I don’t have to project, I don’t have to go, wow, Kimberly is so cool, she’s so wise, she’s so smart and she has raising kids and has the best selling art. Great. Well, that is all true and that’s also, we own that projection so that each one of us can find that greatness that we project onto the other, we find it within us. And
We don’t have to project our potential or even our unhealed parts into another. We can own it, claim it, learn the lessons and step into it, into our own greatness and path of beauty.
Kimberly Snyder (51:04.067)
Mmm.
Kimberly Snyder (51:09.571)
Alberto, I find exactly what you’re saying when I don’t think about myself so much, right? Cause it’s easy to compare and be like, I’m here, this person’s so much bigger, like this or that, more degrees, whatever it is, how we see the world. When I just focus on sharing and wanting to help the whole, I feel like everything just works out better and I feel better. It’s like the mission gets bigger and then you kind of, I feel, I find healing in that because I’m not.
focused on those little shadows. The shadows don’t come up as much anyway, right? Because I’m more broad. Does that make sense?
Alberto (51:47.566)
Yeah, yeah, this is… You recognize your own healing path. And so you don’t have to continue fighting with your demons. You can start feeding them and befriending them and turning them into allies. But this is why we’re in Earth’s goal. This is Earth’s goal. This is why we’re in a body. You know, we’re here to learn, to serve, bring a little more beauty and to grow. To…
to really become fully human, maybe for the first time. And it’s happening during an incredible time in history in which we’re living in the middle of an extinction event. It’s the sixth great extinction event since the dawn of life on the planet.
The previous extinction event was 65 million years ago when a meteorite struck the earth and wiped out all the dinosaurs and all the big life forms. The extinction event we’re living in started 20 years ago. There are more species dying in the world today, becoming extinct, than in any other time in history. But when that happens, Mother Nature takes her foot off of the evolutionary brake and steps on the accelerator.
Kimberly Snyder (52:51.235)
Yeah.
Alberto (53:04.078)
And what happens is that in ordinary times, evolution is in between generations. Our children are smarter or better looking. And during extinction events, evolution follows the loss of quantum physics, not Newtonian physics, quantum leaps. Biologists call it quantum speciation, where we evolve within generations. You and I, all of us in this room,
We have the opportunity to become a new human that the indigenous prophecies around the world have been speaking about for centuries. We have the opportunity to become what I call hom*o luminous, not hom*o sapiens. Luminous beings, luminous humans, generous humans, hard -driven humans, and not greedy, territorial.
Kimberly Snyder (53:49.891)
Mmm.
Alberto (53:59.406)
heady thinking humans only that are becoming extinct. So take this opportunity for the quantum leap today. It’s happening today. We can be part of that experiment.
Kimberly Snyder (54:11.619)
I love it. Well, Alberto, exactly what you’re talking about, these quantum leaps and healing and healing trauma. Sometimes it feels so dense, like I’m trudging through years and years of talk therapy. I’m trying to work out this one issue. But for me, when I started going into the power of the heart and expanding out, there’s like these clearings were happening spontaneously. Right? It’s just, it’s nonlinear.
Alberto (54:35.214)
It’s amazing and do the fire ceremony. We need to give the brain permission to change. Otherwise it won’t change. It’ll give you the sense of, wow, I had this great breakthrough, but you’ll be back stuck. Do the fire ceremony. Do connect with your indigenous self. Awaken that inner shaman within you.
Kimberly Snyder (54:38.787)
Yes.
Kimberly Snyder (54:56.451)
I could speak to you forever Alberto, two more quick questions. With fire ceremony, a lot of people like to work with sage, right? These plants can burn through different energies if they’re used with intention.
Alberto (55:12.43)
Yeah, sage is wonderful for smudging, for cleansing, for clearing. For this, I like to use like a little hibachi stick that can burn a little bit longer. And if I’m careful, I’ll go over my heart center counterclockwise to draw out any sludge or any heavy energy in the heart. The heart is the master chakra. And then I’ll take the energy of the fire into me. So…
Kimberly Snyder (55:22.531)
Got it.
Kimberly Snyder (55:34.755)
Mm.
Alberto (55:40.718)
And it doesn’t have to be a fire ceremony. It’s just that we sat around the fire for a million years. So it’s almost in our DNA to be, to associate fire with. If you go for a romantic dinner, you know, you want to light a candle. So you, you just use this, this knowledge that we have of our time with our brotherhood, sisterhood with the fire.
Kimberly Snyder (55:57.187)
Yeah.
Kimberly Snyder (56:08.387)
Beautiful. I mean, there’s so much, you’ve covered so many things and in your books and in your teachings, you talk about spirit animals, you talk about connecting with different energies, plants, your new vegan cookbook, which we’ll link to directly in our show notes. I mean, there’s so much magic and beauty and everything and you’ve connected in such a deep way, Alberto. I truly love your teaching so much.
Alberto (56:31.566)
Thank you, Kimberly. You know what I do today is to, I have a school, like we train modern shamans and shamans that know the visible and the invisible world that can dance on top of that equal sign of Einstein’s famous formula, E equals MC squared. You know, the world of energy, the world of matter. And today we have the opportunity to really bring.
modern brain science together with ancient wisdom traditions and that’s what that’s my mission.
Kimberly Snyder (57:04.931)
Mm, so amazing. Alberto, tell us where we can find out more about your work and your amazing books.
Alberto (57:12.206)
Well, you can visit my website, the4winds .com, the4winds .com, and take a look at my new cookbook, my new cookbook, Roe New Body Cookbook. It has all the science and 100 wonderful vegan recipes. But most important, I want to invite you to take part in that experiment of N is equal to 1. Turn your kitchen into your laboratory. Become.
your own chief scientist, your own chief shaman.
Kimberly Snyder (57:45.123)
I love it. And that’s so accessible. We all have kitchens. We all need to eat. We all need to cook. So why not make it a magical, completely nourishing experience? Thank you so much, Alberto.
Alberto (57:53.226)
Totally.
Thank you, Kimberly. A pleasure to be with you. Blessings. Blessings all. See you around the fire.
Kimberly Snyder (58:03.235)
See you around the fire. Thank you again, Alberto. Thank you all for tuning in. We will link directly to Alberto’s amazing work, directly to his website, directly to his new book and our show notes, which will be at mysaloona .com. And we will be back here Thursday as always for our next Q &A show. So until then, take great care of yourself. Sending you so much love and blessings. Namaste.
