This week's show is with Ramon Castellanos. Ramon is the author of the book "The Ancestral Now", as well as a teacher and facilitator of health-craft, healing alchemy, and ancestral reconnection.

Ramon grew up in a household devoted to shamanic traditions connected to the African Diaspora, where he was initiated, and taught how to work with magic from a very young age. As a teenager, he underwent a severe spiritual crisis, spontaneous Kundalini awakening, and later, multiple physical illnesses. He spent ten years living and working at a wolf sanctuary in the Zuni mountains of New Mexico, where his experience of the wilderness and wild animals helped shape his view of the human condition. His own healing led him to work closely with multiple spiritual teachers and he now holds instructor-ship capacity in a variety of systems of internal alchemy. He is an instructor of several energetic systems including, Primordial Alchemy, The Kundalini Awakening Process, and Eight Extraordinary Vessels qigong.

In this conversation, Ramon and I explored the ancient function and archetype of the shaman, what it means in a modern context, shamanic sickness, and individualism and collectivism.

We'd love to know what YOU think about this week's show. Let's carry on the conversation… please leave a comment below or share in our fb group.

What you'll learn from this episode:

• As Ramon and my experiences with shamanic sickness showed - they can vary from person to person but will tend to have similar themes of death or near-death, feelings of going crazy, and physical sickness of some kind - and as Ramon said, our culture has no understanding of any of this, which means we suffer the lack of context and meaning

• Whilst we lack true community in our culture, the role of the shaman only makes sense within a community so those of us called to that function are maybe also called to redream what the role of shaman and community means in this context

• As we devote to individuation - uniting with our own unique souls - we are able to understand our role in the whole

Resources and stuff that we spoke about:

• Ramon's book "The Ancestral Now"

• Ancestral Counseling

• Beyond Health Coaching

Thank you for listening!

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Thank you! Lian and Jonathan