Healing Cancer with Curanderismo
ALAN SHOEMAKER will be leading the Peruvian highlands portion of Peter Gorman’s Adventure Into The Heart Of The Amazon and Highlands, January 3-24 and June 6-27, 2009. Both Peter Gorman, who will be guiding the Amazon portion of the trip, and Alan Shoemaker have become legendary in guiding expedition participants into authentic connections with select shamanic curandero and ayahuascaro maestros.
Space has become available for the full January adventure or for the jungle or highlands portions only. Full information is at www.greatmystery.org/events/peru.html.
During the highland portion, Alan Shoemaker will be making available San Pedro medicinal cactus ceremonies for those wishing to partake of this healing and opening experience
You will find Alan’s biographical information below, following a short excerpted piece written by him regarding success in curing cancer through the use of shamanic plants in Peruvian ceremonial settings.
Machu Picchu — photo by Alan Shoemaker
Excerpted from
Grace and Madness, of Magic, Myths and Miracles
by Alan Shoemaker
In 1994, after a year and a half in South America, studying curanderismo with various maestros, I returned to the United States for a month, stopping in San Francisco to book a return passage with my travel agent. She asked me what shamanism and ayahuasca were all about, and I explained as best as I could. She then asked me if it could help her friend who had been diagnosed with an incurable cancer and given only three months to live.
"Absolutely", I told her. "Cancers are one of the diseases that respond best to shamanic healing and ayahuasca. Unfortunately, many people wait until the last gasp to try, making healing all the more difficult." I explained how curanderismo worked, which is a rather unusual subject to speak of in a manner acceptable to those who have no knowledge of it. I have been apprenticed four years, I have participated in approximately 200 healing rituals involving either ayahusaca or San Pedro. People come to my maestros for a variety of reasons and they're coming every day, not simply on the evening of a ritual. However, it is the ceremony with the spirit of the Sacred Power Plant and the curandero that is the most powerful. There is a synergistic magic here. As with the ayahuasca vine itself requiring the presence of another plant, chacruna, to produce the medicine, so too does the spirit of the medicine require the curandero to effect the cure.
I gave the travel agent my address and returned to the jungle. For the next year I apprenticed with my maestros in Ecuador and Peru and returned to the US once again, stopping to see my agent in San Francisco.
"Alan! I have a letter for you," she told me.
"A letter for me? Who would write me a letter and send it to you?"
"Remember the woman I told you about, my friend with the incurable cancer? I have her letter here. It isn't to you directly, but it's about you and what you told me the last time you were here."
She pulled the letter out of her desk drawer and read it to me. The woman had traveled to Iquitos, Peru, looking for me at the address I had given my travel agent. She couldn't find me, as I was in Ecuador at the time. She found a guide who took her to a healer where she participated in an ayahuasca ritual, going into a coma-like state for 36 hours. Upon awakening, she felt extraordinary. Back in the US, her doctors performed a battery of tests, finding no signs of cancer. They called it spontaneous remission. She called it a miracle. We call it curanderismo
Alan and family
Alan Shoemaker was born in the mountains of Southeastern Kentucky and graduated from the University of Kentucky with a pre-law major, focusing on psychology, criminology and theatre arts. He was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant as Artist-In-Residence and placed in Buchannon County, Virginia for one year. Here he also taught 35mm photography, black and white darkroom techniques and acting. Alan moved to Seattle, Washington and worked as a child psychologist for several years while becoming involved in mountaineering and rock climbing, inventing a new powder for keeping your hands dry and not leaving marks on the cliffs.
He represented several hi-tec mountaineering and backpacking companies in the Pacific-NW and became a distributor in the United States of a line of rock climbing shoes known as Vertical Footwear which he also helped design in Italy. He was the co-founder and co-artistic director of Sanctuary Theatre Group in Seattle, a professional theatre company. Fifteen years ago, he had a spiritual calling to come to the Amazon to study shamanism and listened to that, leaving the USA by land via Mexico and Central America, finally being led to his first teacher, Dr. Valentin Hampjes outside of Quito, Ecuador. The Putamayo river and a 15 meter dugout canoe for 2,500 kilometers brought Alan to Iquitos where he began his next apprenticeships with various maestro cuarnderos.
He has lectured on curanderismo all over the United States and Europe and has been published in Shamans Drum, Journal for Peace and Humanities, Magical Blend, etc. as well as having been a featured presenter in Conferences. Alan founded Soga Del Alma (Vine of the Soul) seven years ago and recently finished building their second chapel on the Rio Itaya just outside Iquitos, Peru.
Adventure into the Heart of the Amazon and Highlands
www.greatmystery.org/events/peru.html
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