00:00:01 Rosemary
I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes, and this is The Gifts of Trauma. Today, I’d like to welcome Ricardo Assis Rosa. It’s a delight to have you with us today, and I have so many questions for you. We’ve known each other for a little bit of time now, and I’m very grateful to have this opportunity to speak with you. The first thing that’s always fascinated me is that you’ve worked as an architect, you hold a PhD, and you’ve taught at Oxford Brookes University. Now you’re a somatic therapist using Buddhist methods, Shamanic practices, and the Compassionate Inquiry approach in your healing work. Can you share your story? What led you to change your professional focus from architecture and academia to healing?

00:00:50 Ricardo
Well, firstly, thank you very much for giving me this precious opportunity to speak and to be here on the podcast. I’m very excited to contribute to the gifts of trauma and all the discussion that is evolving from this podcast. So thank you for giving me that chance. I was always a seeker, you know, at heart, I was always seeking the meaning of life. Why are we here? What’s going on? Having a profound inquiry into my existence and spirituality and architecture came as a parallel to that, in the sense it was my studies that led me to architecture, my interest in architecture, and then later on into being an educator, a teacher, and being within the field of academia. But really, I was always seeking and practicing my own personal development and wanting to find who I am and to understand the nature of things as they are. And in 2005, I met with Buddhism. And so that was, I think, the real starting point. Although before that, I was interested in spirituality. When I met with this transmission of the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, it really sank into me, and something very special was there. And so I continued to practice Buddhism as I still do today. And that’s been a sort of a primary vehicle of my development. And the Buddhist philosophy, the Buddhist framework and the transmission of the Tibetan teachings, which in themselves are different to other forms of Buddhism, have provided me with a framework.

00:02:21 Rosemary
I’m curious, how did you encounter Buddhism? Is there a story there? Did something happen? How did you have this experience?

00:02:30 Ricardo
Yes, I think that seeking made me travel the land and wander until I could find something that was meaningful, that resonated. And I was traveling in different parts of the world, but it was here in Europe that on a motorbike tour across Europe, seeking some meaning and seeking some direction, that I came across this retreat center in southern Spain. And it inspired me immediately. The place was very beautiful. The people, the way in which they spoke about the teachings, the way in which they were westerners like me, practicing something that was of a different culture but had been translated and brought about in a way that I found appealing. I found attractive as the community of practitioners, the way in which they were traveling or practicing the meditations. And all that was immediately there was a hook and a ring. Something grabbed me. And so I continued to travel, and I still do travel, to seek more teachings, to seek more experiences within myself, to gain more understanding. That’s been a beautiful journey, which I. Which I’m really grateful to have met many teachers and have received practices that have supported me in my development.

00:03:44 Rosemary
Beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that. I almost had an image in my mind as you were describing coming across this retreat center in Spain. And I’m curious also, there’s much talk in the buddhist tracks that I’m aware of. It speaks of suffering. In fact, I came across a quote by Tich Nat Han and there’s just a snippet I pulled out. He said, we can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for. The reason I’m asking this is, it sounds like your journey was a journey of curiosity, not someone seeking an escape from suffering. I wonder if you could say a bit about that.

00:04:24 Ricardo
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. That’s right. I didn’t necessarily have a direct discomfort with my life or a problem that made me somehow be disconnected, and therefore I was seeking for a solution to a problem, if I may sort of frame it that way. I was seeking spirituality and seeking an understanding inside of myself about the cosmological view, the philosophical view of the world, something that would explain, I grew up in a catholic environment. And that didn’t really sort of call for me when I was sort of seeking. And I somehow resonated quite well with these Tibetan teachings. But it was only much later on where I then found shamanism, that the idea of healing came about with that sense of, there is an issue, right? There is maybe a trauma, or there is a situation in which the person is not really functioning to the way in which they want to, that then there are methods and there are healers. And so that only came later on. So the aspect of Buddhism wasn’t about healing. It was about transformation towards liberation and enlightenment.

00:05:33 Rosemary
That makes sense. And it’s interesting, as I listen to you, what I’m hearing is supported by what I’m imagining as you share a motorcycle trip around Europe is a very physical thing, and yet your conversation is very intellectual, very heady. I know that these days you describe yourself as a somatic therapist, and we’re talking philosophy, we’re talking Buddhism, we’re talking shamanism. And I’m curious, from what little I know about shamanism, there are a lot of concepts, but there are experiences as well. And I wonder, you’ve also trained in somatic therapy and compassionate inquiry. It seems like you’ve found a very unique way to merge bodily experiences with cognitive insights, with shamanism and the buddhist practices. What spoke to you about compassionate inquiry that attracted you to yet another modality?

00:06:36 Ricardo
Let me go back a step then, because when I travel in 2017 to the Amazon and I find myself in this environment, in a very small village in the house of a family in the Amazon, that experience of meeting with ayahuasca was very profound and very spiritual and very opening to me. It really transformed me in that way. It brought about an experience, a somatic experience and spiritual experience. And it was something that was very transcendental of my understanding of myself and my forms of practice of Buddhism for the many years before that. That’s a big shift, if I have to make reference to that shift, that there was something very profound in those methods and the teachings from the plant world and on the Amazon that showed a reality and understanding of consciousness and of myself and that process, which therefore, that was quite a transition moment for me. And it’s then that I actually go through a process of my suffering where I have to go through a divorce, a separation, and a loss of my own identity, a loss of who I thought I was, and the construct of my Persona break down after that sort of phase, more or less after meeting with the plant. And it’s there that I get a deeper understanding and a way in which shamanism starts to make sense to me, because I am therefore now going through a process where I need help. And it was a help that I couldn’t find in my buddhist practice, my buddhist meditation. I couldn’t find it in any philosophical sort of explanation about the way things are from that perspective. But it was something much more somatic that actually really helped me. And at that time, I took a course, a one year course on the four elements. So we would spend a long weekend in the woods, and one weekend would just work on an element of water and then an element of fire and earth and air and so on. So those were very down to the basic, the fundamental sort of nature practices, where we did things like burial, where you spend 17, 18 hours buried in the ground to actually let go and let parts of yourself die through being confronted. And you have to be challenged by your fears or doing a vision quest, spending time out in nature with no water and food, and just really being in that space or sweat lodges. So there are various practices that are shamanic, as we might just refer to them. Shamanism is a very generalistic term, but there are practices that are found across the world which have this somatic engagement that there is something physical going on. And actually, it’s not very intellectual in that sense, per se, that it’s not how clever you are in articulating a set of ideas to explain something, but actually it’s confronting you, really, to be deeply with yourself and to allow that which is needing to be seen, which is wounded, which is struggling somehow to manifest, to come to relationship with. And so those were by far the most significant kind of steps in my journey to enable me to come into more. More into contact with humility of my process on a more to the earth, to the moment experience.

00:09:58 Rosemary
Thank you for painting that picture. And what I’m hearing, it’s. You found a way to heal your soul through releasing momentarily the hold that the mind has on all of us. It’s almost as if what you’re describing is a bodily, spiritual experience that does not engage the mind, because the mind, Buddha has much to say about the mind. And that makes a whole lot of sense when you consider what you’ve just described, these experiences in the woods, working through all the elements. It makes sense when you describe your experience in the Amazon. And I know that personally from the time I’ve spent living in Costa Rica, now, just being in nature, it makes a real difference compared to living in the modern world. So was that part of your path to healing was connecting to body and spirit and not being so dominated cognitively?

00:10:59 Ricardo
It’s a little bit of all of it, to a certain degree, it is multilayered. And I think we need to address the different layers in parallel or at different times. If I might give you an example of a retreat which I just held a few weeks ago in Scotland. So it was across four days in that process. There was a ceremony with the plant. So there was an ayahuasca ceremony around that ceremony. There were the four days that enabled the unpacking, the opening up, and the processing of something that is more profound. So we have to return the conversation in a minute to the need of ceremony, the need of ritual, the need of something which is cathartic, something which is beyond the ordinary experience, because that’s very important also to acknowledge in what it is to be human and the human traditions and how we’ve evolved as humans. And so there’s something that occurs in the possibility of being able to open up and be enriched by wisdom, enriched beyond your usual capacity of the holding of your ego, something that can support the transcendence of the ego, the breaking up. And even if that just shut for a short period, for a glimpse, that we can get that in various Ways. In this case, the modality was with ayahuasca. And so that enables that process to happen. And there’s a richness and there’s lots more to be able to describe about that, but we’ll just hold that for the moment there. And then the following day we went to climb up a mountain. So it took 7 hours to go and to come back on a very steep, powerful, strong mountain in Scotland and highland. And that process of physically engaging, climbing and climbing and sweating, and what you’re processing in your head, the information that you have from an intellectual perspective, from. From ahead, and is now connecting to something which is more somatic, something which is more in the body. And all that process enables an understanding, enables an exhausting engagement, is supportive with all that information that is being carried through. Now. We also know, through the process of compassionate inquiry, that we’re tapping into the body, that we are trying to bring awareness, bring light to stories that are registered and kept within our body, within our human story, that need to be seen. And we use the gateway of the body to enable that to come to our awareness. And so, again, that is a somatic connecting, and we want to be able to do that. And shamanism has been doing this. Shamanism – it’s hard to say when it started, but 40,000 years ago records there’s something already for a very long time that has been occurring in human history, human development, that’s got to do with going down to fundamentals related to nature practices. And so when we are able to come together as a community, to be around the fire, to beat the drum, to sing, to dance, to go into sacred space and ceremony, to be able to meet with those challenges, meet with the difficulties that you’re having with yourself or with your community, or with aspects of the world environment around – this is a fundamental form of engagement. And there’s a fundamental form of understanding our positioning with community and nature. And so this is really important to tap into this. When we are wanting to understand the notion of evolution, of transcendence, of healing, whatever we might be calling it.

00:15:03 Rosemary
I could hear the passion in your voice, I could see it on your face as you were recalling the recent retreat, the climb up the mountain, everything that you shared with us, what was happening in your body when you were sharing and possibly partly reliving that experience. What happens in your body when you just go back to that space?

00:15:24 Ricardo
It brings about wisdom, it brings about information, it brings about openness. I think openness, perhaps, is what I think is what gives that aspect of release, of tension. When we feel that something is tense, we want to be open and free. And so we recognize, even in the practice of compassion inquiry, what is there when there is something that feels tense or there is something constricted or something that is not feeling quite right, and that is exactly where we want to be able to focus attention, because then we wanted to, you know, something to change the feeling of freedom and openness, you know, is that feeling that we know, ah, things are being released. Things are changing.

00:16:04 Rosemary
I see your smile. Yeah. So it’s got to be very satisfying to be introducing people to that experience.

00:16:13 Ricardo
Yes.

00:16:13 Rosemary
Compassionate inquiry is not a spiritual practice, and you work at the soul level, and yet it is a useful practice. And you did paint a picture of how all of these different approaches, modalities, practices weave together to support your client’s healing. So I wonder, could you map maybe the somatic process to the compassionate inquiry approach and maybe just pick those two and demonstrate how you combine these approaches so powerfully for your clients?

00:16:50 Ricardo
I use a framework of a transmission of teachings that I got from Acairo, the andean teachings, and that’s called the medicine wheel. There are medicine wheel teachings from other parts of the world as well. But this is the particular one I used, which works with five archetypes. And so I take my clients on a journey through these different archetypes, whereas the first one is to start to look at anything that needs to be seen, to illuminate traumas, to illuminate tension and characteristic and aspects of our personality, of our energy field that is suppressed or hidden, what’s in the shadow, effectively, we want to bring to surface. And compassion inquiry is a beautiful alliance with this process, because in one to one relationship with the client, I can work with the compassionate inquiry to enable the client to start to see where there’s tension and open up and bring about what is there in the body, bring about what is there to be seen in the story. That phase of working, the archetype of the serpent supports that as well. So it’s about a quality of the archetype that is also helping to bring to the surface that which is there to enable those things to be shifted and lifted. Then we move into a phase of the jaguar. And the jaguar in the west is about coming into your power. And in order to come into power, you need to understand where you’re being disempowered, how you’re disempowering yourself. Which brings about the beliefs, it brings about that which is stopping oneself from finding one’s power, from one’s strength. And how can we cut through this? And compassionate inquiry is doing exactly the same questions, also the beliefs, questions also those concepts, the way in which we hold ourselves in relation to the world. And also in this case, the jaguar is helping bring those things up into the surface. In the north, we have the hummingbird. And at this stage, the hummingbird is wanting to show the gifts, wanting to show the richness. Who are you? What are your qualities? What are your gifts that you can contribute to the world? What is your purpose? It’s supporting you to see, to have a vision above your purpose and to lift yourself up. And with this comes the soul retrieval. Comes the characteristics of your soul that have been fragmented or you haven’t been held energetically by your full capacity because of the traumas and because of the beliefs and because of the circumstances. And now it’s about bringing us back. So you being empowered with your sense of who you are, connecting more directly with your soul. So in the hummingbird, that bringing that energy back. Also in compassion inquiry, we practiced that right to come to be in charge and to be empowered again with the parts that are missing or not there or that are coming together. And then we go into the east, to the eagle and condor. This is now putting in practice your journey. How are you being able to carry out your practice? You’re putting into place your direction, your mission, and what is it that you need to do, and how can you do it, and how can those characteristics kind of start to fall in place? And so this journey is a kind of a key framework which I take my clients over. And this can take months to years, depending on the process in which each person is on, how much they can let go of, how much they want to do these changes, how much they’re engaging with this. And in That, I use different modalities. So compassion inquiry is a modality. Working with a plant medicine is another modality. Doing vision quests or climbing up the mountain or burials or sweat lodges or etc. All these other modalities are there to support the person in this unfolding, to give the conditions for the person’s experience to be held.

00:20:35 Rosemary
It sounds like such a magical variety to choose from. And I’m just going to go back to the medicine wheel for a moment, because all of those points had one. I’m not sure. Is it an archetype? Would the hummingbird be an archetype, except the last one had both the condor and the eagle. And is there some significance to that last point you shared with us that it has two, as opposed to the one archetype that the other directions had?

00:21:03 Ricardo
Yes. It varies from person to person, which of either the eagle or the condor will be working with that person, and that could also be through phases. For me, it was a phase of working with a condor and then became a phase of working with the eagle, and they had different characteristics and they supported my development in different ways, and they still do guide me in different ways for different things.

00:21:23 Rosemary
It seems that you have a very intuitive knowledge of what is needed, when, by whom, and I’m just wondering if you can speak about this whole perspective a little bit.

00:21:34 Ricardo
One characteristic which I’d like to say is just about duality and non duality and the ego identity. What we’re trying to is to gain the opportunity to experience non duality in relation to our duality. So without going too deep into that, we have our experience in this world with our ego, with our presence, of how we define our identity, our concepts, our beliefs, our stories, and we make this all to be the reality that we live and exist in. But what we need to understand is that is not our totality, that’s not who we are. That is an illusion. That is a big journey for everyone to be able to come to understand this. And we would have to have another sort of conversation, really, to elaborate on that. But what it means is that it’s important for individuals to be able to grasp from an experiential point of view, not an intellectual one, that there is non duality, that there is the full space of radiance, of experience, of mind, and that the ego is not part of that. So when the person is able to have that experience, then there’s a stronger opportunity for that disconnect from the sense of, I am all these stories, I am all these issues or traumas, or I am all this identity that I’m fixed in and I can’t change to something like, oh, actually, there is area here for choice, for maneuverability, for action to take place in your consciousness. So it’s really important that the mechanics of this is the crux of the core of the spiritual experience lies in that ability in the now to be consciously aware of what is happening and have choice in how to go about the moment and what is there for one to be experiencing. So in many ways, these physical experiences, these exhaustive experiences that might be the vision quest or climbing up the mountains, or for other people, maybe even running an ironman, doing something to those extremes is an opportunity to be really on the edge of where the ego is surrendering. There’s a power there that something happens after a certain amount of time, a certain amount of physical exertion. And that physical exertion doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to climb up a mountain. That’s an example we use, but it can also be sitting and not eating and drinking by a tree. In a vision quest, it takes us to a space and to a place in our consciousness that will allow us to see things differently, will allow us to reflect and understand outside of our usual comfort when we go into an ayahuasca ceremony or any other sacred plant, that’s going to take us on a journey that is beyond our ordinary capability to experience ourselves. And the question is, what can we learn from that? What can we bring back from that experience that showed us something else about ourselves, about the world, about the reality that we can then use to continue on our souls journey?

00:24:31 Rosemary
I’ve heard you speak previously, and you’ve described shamanic, somatic practices as ethereal gateways. And you’ve touched on some of those already. You’ve spoken of vision quests. You talked about the climb up the mountain, the very tough mountain. You’ve talked about sweat lodges. I’m just wondering if you can say a little bit more about the role of ethereal gateways

00:24:53 Ricardo
I think that perhaps we can understand this as the experience of the non duality, the experience of the space that we don’t ordinarily experience. That is a space of wisdom, a space of consciousness, that there’s a space of other possibilities. And so what are those glimpses into those wisdoms, that information, those other worlds? What is there that can inform us? Within Buddhism and shamanism and many forms of practice, there are different cosmologies and different places and different ways of gaining information. And then that’s what we want to tap into. We want to be able to tap into, let’s say, non-human wisdom. I’ll leave it there because, again, that is in itself a whole conversation.

00:25:41 Rosemary
It is, and I’m wondering if you can make this a little more graspable for our listeners by sharing. Now you’re leading the retreats but as you were experiencing them, can you give our listeners a sense of what you went through to perhaps illustrate the work you do now and to try and make what you’ve just described so beautifully a little bit more tangible?

00:26:08 Ricardo
The experience is much more vivid in a plant medicine experience. So I appreciate that not everybody has experienced plant medicine, so I’ll try and explain beyond this. But when one enters into the space of the plant, one is entering into a field. It’s a field of wisdom, it’s a field of information. It’s a field of consciousness that is particular to the plant realm. So that is an aspect of accessing wisdom and experiencing oneself in a different consciousness, in a different consciousness, in a different mindscape.

00:26:45 Rosemary
Because it’s non human.

00:26:47 Ricardo
It’s non human. It’s of the plant right of nature. Now, that is a relatively easy doorway, because one can experience other forms of practice, sometimes much more difficult to grasp. If we look at Tibetan Buddhism, which I’m familiar with, but if you look at other Hinduism and other forms of practice that are pointing to a state of understanding beyond the human capacity, right, which is illumination or enlightenment or transcendence, etcetera, this is pointing to a state of being of mind that is of a greater capacity or a different capacity to ours. When we look at Tibetan Buddhism, for example, we notice that there are certain, let’s call them deities or aspects. You see these images, these very rich images. We notice that in forms of shamanism that there are offerings that are made to local spirits or to local gods. There’s much more going on around us than we can perceive from our egoic ‘I am the most important thing in this world’ perspective, and I’m the only thing, and I’m the top of the pyramid. We know that this has led us to very bad circumstances around the world with our fellow humans and nature and the environment and so on.

Once we comprehend that there’s more to reality than just what we are perceiving through our bodies, we are able also to tap into something that can contribute to that understanding, give us more wisdom. Obviously, there’s also things that are not necessarily so positive. So we need to be able to make alliances and have relationships with those that have a compassionate action. If we can tap into compassionate action, if we can tap into the wisdom forms and wisdom aspect, then we are able to bring about an understanding within ourselves and bring about a transformation within ourselves that can perhaps, hopefully make us better humans, make us more open to be able to support that which needs to be supported here. If that’s the mission of the person, or if that’s the journey in which someone is going to come about to be a practitioner of that sort.

Or we speak about someone who wants to go on a healing journey. And that healing journey is understanding who they are and where are the tension points, or where are the constraints, or where are the blocks that are stopping them from developing towards their soul’s journey. And I say it that way, how can they come to meet with the path that will lead them to a space of freedom, a space that is outside of the suffering? And this notion, again, of suffering, you asked me from the beginning, it’s an important characteristic, but again, that goes a lot into the teachings of Buddhism.

00:29:27 Rosemary
Yeah. Thank you. Now, I’m curious, in what ways has compassionate inquiry influenced how you hold space for people having novel experiences, if I can call them that, with non-human wisdom.

00:29:43 Ricardo
So the opportunity to meet with people in a therapeutic attunement, enables them to find a place of openness, of trust, enables them to bring to awareness themselves where their difficulties are. Where are the tension points, if we want to call them trauma, if they are in the spectrum of what is there that needs to be brought to the surface or brought in the way, I would say brought to the altar. So the compassion inquiry is a beautiful way of engaging, of meeting with the person sessions before they will come to a shamanic experience. And so it’s the interface of meeting the person. It’s the interface of being able to open and be in a trusted space. I can support them for them to bring forth what is there. And a lot of the work happens just in that. Compassion inquiry is so powerful in itself that a lot of things are resolved there. And some clients don’t even go for the necessarily for the shamanic experience, because so much is coming up already for them in that relationship. But they are in the process that I work with. There is an opportunity to go very deep and really go and pick up things that are much deeper down, that cognitively. And then somatically, we struggle to go that far deep down, or that we were able to meet with something of the person that they had been meeting with for many years already, and they haven’t been able to shift it. Certain things just don’t shift. Certain things are deeper. Some things just have many more layers behind it. And that’s why something that is ceremonial, something that is ritualistic, something that is of the sacred, something which asks for a surrender, asks for the person to arrive there in the compassion inquiry process, helps me and the client arrive at the altar with something in our hands, or the client has it in their hand.

This is the thing that they want to see, want to understand. There’s a clarity in the intention that they are able to put there. So compassion inquiry is incredibly powerful, incredibly useful, because by the time they arrive there, they’re not just arriving at the Ayahuasca ceremony, and they’re like, let’s see what happens. I have a vague intention. No, we are surgically preparing this, and then it’s there, and then through the ayahuasca experience, sometimes even during and very much straight after and the days after and the weeks after, there’s a continuity. And sometimes this doesn’t take a format of a therapeutic session. Sometimes it doesn’t look like compassion inquiry, and sometimes it does. So it’s weaving in where necessary. What is the best sort of situation to help the person understand, integrate, or first become aware, open, allow for some surrendering, allow for some change, and then bringing about the recomposition and integration.

00:32:39 Rosemary
I think that you’ve just used a very keyword, continuity, because as I’ve been sitting listening to you, I’ve also been thinking, so many people are seekers like you, and they may discover breath work, and they may get to a certain level with the breath work. They may discover ice baths, cold exposure, heat exposure, get to a certain level with that, and what you’re talking about is a different space. And I love the continuity because the thought that someone can perhaps start working with you, unpacking their trauma with compassionate inquiry, and then they decide something else needs to be included. And you’ve got this whole spectrum that you, as you said, it’s like a weaving, and you can pull this thread, or you can pull that thread, and because you’ve got this history with them, there’s a safety, there’s an understanding and a trust, and it’s almost as if you are the Soul Sherpa guiding them. Is there a mountain that they need to scale? Is there a plant they need to meet, whatever it might be? Do they need to work through the medicine wheel? And maybe when they’re halfway through the medicine wheel, they need the mountain. But I loved the way you framed it up with you facilitating their journey. They’ve got that continuity. They don’t have to start all over again with a new person. You share that you’ve been with them while they unpacked and repacked and shifted from this place to this place. You’ve been with them on their motorcycle journey of Europe. You’ve been with them when they discovered Buddhism and having that knowledge yourself, you are able to guide them, to support them through their journeys, support them in the integration of what they gain through their journeys and just be with them. And I think that’s something very rare because a lot of us find ourselves voyaging and seeking on our own. And it can be a very zigzag journey. We can end up doing a lot of backtracking and covering what we thought was new ground, and we find it’s the same old ground. It’s an amazing form of service that you offer.

00:35:03 Ricardo
Thank you very much for saying that because it was very beautiful the way you say it. And I love the analogy of a Soul Sherpa. I think that’s absolutely fantastic. I would like to use it if I have an opportunity. And it is like that. So it requires a commitment from the client. I don’t entertain spiritual tourism.

00:35:25 Rosemary
Serious travelers only.

00:35:27 Ricardo
Yes, serious travelers only. You really have to be committed. It’s about a process over time. And there is an accountability because it’s relatively easy to be shopping, window shopping, spirituality with a bit of breath work, and I’m doing sort of ice baths, and I’m doing some Alaska thing, and tomorrow I’m going to do this thing on mushrooms and I’m going to be doing this x, Y and z and this yoga. And it seems like one is doing things and I don’t, you know, want to disrespect people’s processes, but the spiritual path is a challenging and difficult one. And so it requires commitment. It requires a relationship of really surrendering to what are your biggest resistances, which is yourself. And you have to engage, or it is best to engage with somebody that’s going to be there, as you described, throughout the whole process or throughout a significant part of your journey that can guide you, can help you and bring you along when you are a little bit lost or a little bit struggling, or you need some support in some sort of capacity, that there is that person there. And the work I do is all one to one. So it’s that intimacy that comes about, that we know each other quite deeply. I know the person in a way that probably only I know that person. There is an intimacy of knowing each other in ways that they probably don’t experience that with anybody else. And that is so valuable. It’s so wonderful to have that brother, that guide there that can really go along with you. And I think that it’s precious to find those situations, circumstances, and I hope people are able to find their guides and brothers and sisters, because there are many around. But the message here is actually, if you do want to transform and change, you have to commit, and that commitment will also ask you to surrender and change and let go of and enable new things to come about. And that’s challenging.

00:37:20 Rosemary
Yes. And I love that you offer to support people through that whole journey, because there’s nothing more dysregulating than finding you need to change your supporter halfway through the journey, because the mutual respect, the trust, the safety that you offer in continuity is, I imagine, invaluable. Because I’m an artist, I see mental pictures when I listen to people speak, and it was almost as if you are recreating a very indigenous experience for modern people, acting as the guide, the brother who will be with them on this very committed journey. When you think of certain rituals in indigenous communities, there’s a lot of support, and that often is erratic or definitely not available with significant continuity in our world today. So in a way, when you commit to working with a client, and a client commits to working with you, you’re taking them on a series of experiences in a similar way to how indigenous tribe members perhaps relied on the medicine men and wisdom, the elders, to guide them. And I know you referred to yourself and to them as a brother, and that people would look on you as a brother, but it seems that you’re representing many different roles within that brotherly perspective. And it’s an experience modern people don’t often get to have. We often keep people in little boxes. This is a teacher, this is a coach, this is a friend, this is a relative. But I love how you’ve put that together so that they can come to you with their most intimate and sensitive experiences, unpack them, and count on your support through new experiences that they would never undertake without your support.

00:39:29 Ricardo
Yes, and thank you for saying it that way, because it is the role of the shaman in the community that does this, that has this role. And the role of the shaman is a bit weird. In our current society, it’s not common. The shaman is sort of an odd character in that sort of contemporary profiling of jobs. It’s not easy to take upon that activity. And there are even discussions whether one is appropriate to even say that, oh, one is a shaman, or how does one come about even to say that? So there’s lots of controversy in terms of the maturity, experience, and rites of passage that one needs to be able to become a shamanous. And obviously, I’m also on my journey, so I’m somewhere on my development and I’m always developing, and it’s a fundamental principle that it’s no such thing as I’ve graduated, and now I am. I work within shamanic practices, and I carry functions that are those of a shaman. But I’m always in my own process of development and going through more rites of passage and more learning. And so that’s also an important characteristic, because that one is integral. And more importantly, also, I would say, in the role of someone dealing within spirituality, dealing with people’s consciousness, dealing with the very sensitive aspects of one’s being, that there is a clarity, a purity, and an integrity. And so I aspire all the time to be integral and clean. And that my activity is of a noble, compassionate in its nature and in my heart. And in order to do that, I also need to work on myself. Because, of course, I’m human, and I have my own karma, and I have my own things that need to all constantly be working. But it’s always meeting myself where I am in my best integrity. It’s wonderful. And I call myself a brother because I don’t want to have a superior role. Because I want to meet people eye to eye. And I want us to be able to be there that acts as a mirror. And that mirror then is able to reveal something that attunement. And we speak about this attunement very much in compassionate inquiry. That attunement, which is a mirror, like nature, it’s there that something comes about in the chemistry, right in the alchemy. And the energetic making of that meeting of these minds. That’s what’s really important. Because if I were to go and sit on a throne and say, oh, I’m really important. I’m a special person, whatever, that would just create that distance. Even the role of a teacher makes that distance already. Even if I say, I’m a therapist, it makes a different relationship. So, what is the attunement needed? How is that expression? What do I need to manifest as, energetically, to be able to help the other person refine themselves? See, and that’s the magic.

00:42:25 Rosemary
Beautiful. And going right back to the beginning of our conversation, what is making perfect sense now is your profession as an architect. You use the word framework, is, what does an architect do? They design the framework. They flesh it out. They know what all the functionalities need to be. They know the best place to put them. And if I can expand this metaphor, say Buddhism is a functionality. You need electricity. You need Buddhism. You need plumbing. You need shamanic practices. And then with your teaching experience, you learned how to communicate and with your seeking experience. That’s what infuses – because it started and it continues – this framework with the soul, with the ability to attune, the ability to be the mirror. And while you are working with a client, notice what’s happening in you so that you can work on yourself. If your time with the client is sometimes that mirror goes two ways, and if we’re triggered by something, the client says, okay, I need to work on that. So I love how you’ve brought everything together in the work you do now and how it keeps evolving as you keep growing. I think you bring such richness to your clients, and I thank you for that.

00:43:43 Ricardo
Rosemary, thank you so much for saying that. And I think your summary was beautiful, very eloquent, and it was a beautiful way of bringing also a close to this conversation.

00:43:51 Rosemary
Thank you very much. I will ask you if you would like to, from all that you’ve learned over the last years, is there something that you would like to leave as a last thought for our listeners today?

00:44:05 Ricardo
There’s quite a lot, isn’t it, to cover and to give, to do justice, when these are very difficult concepts also to grasp, for people to get their heads around. And some people here have not had a plant experience or ceremonial experience. But I think what I really wanted to get across was the fact that a healing journey, or that even the gifts of trauma can be explored in a multitude of ways, in a plethora of richness that is also beyond the Zoom call. And almost as a criticism, there’s a lot of therapy that takes place in a relationship which is on Zoom that is always going to be very limited. Yes, it can actually do a lot of things. And it’s amazing that we have this technology, and amazing we can have sessions, and people do heal, and so much does happen. But when it comes down to embodiment, when it comes down to the somatic integration, when it comes down to changing something at the physical level which is in alignment then with our state of mind, with our consciousness, with our energy, the energy of the land, something needs to move, movement is needed.

And I think that’s really important to grasp that. I think it’s important for people who are trying to heal and they are trying to overcome their depression or overcome their difficulties they’ve had in their past, or difficulties that are arising in the moment, that perhaps what we call shamanic practices, but they are just human activities, can be so healing. And it’s not necessarily about an intellectual conversation. It’s maybe digging a hole. It’s maybe building a fire. It’s maybe hugging another person. Physical, more embodied, more alive. Right?

We have an epidemic of screens. It’s just so fucking wrong. What’s going on with the screen… It’s kids in push chairs. They are babies and they are like, on the screens already. You see these teenagers, they can’t walk anywhere without a bloody screen. My God, what’s going on? Where are the somatic integrative practices of embodiment? Where are we teaching our children and our members of our community to do things that actually are really fundamentally important? And that’s the healing we need. We don’t need plant medicine at that level. We don’t need any of those things. We just need the fundamentals back to be in practice. Yeah, I think that’s if anything, I would like to get that message across.

Thank you. And I just wanted to thank, yeah, thank, to, thank you to all of you, this amazing work of producing this content and creating the podcast, these opportunities and also to all our guides and protectors and all the space that was created for us to have this conversation. Blessings to all of our creation and existence around us.