This is a very short book; 183 pages with larger print, and 12 chapters. I gave you the basic overview of what the book is "about". Alberto Villoldo is a PhD psychologist who has taught on the college level and has also spent time studying with indigenous healers around the world. He brings a narrow and specific structure to methods for clearing your past and creating your future.
When I say "narrow and specific" I don't mean that in a negative light. He outlines "journeying" to various spiritual levels to explore and correct what impedes your full development. He is conveying or utilizing a method used by a specific cultural healing group.
He outlines, according to this healing tradition, a lower world and an upper world. He describes 4 chambers with tasks for the lower world and some tasks for the upper world in a systematic progression one can follow on their own through "journeying" (or meditation, or prayer).
Lower World
Chamber of Wounds: In this level, you will explore the wounds you have received in this or other lives and the ways they impede or influence you. He outlines a process for clearing and releasing wounds and negative patterns that don't serve your higher good. These are not "everyday slights" but deep, impactful wounds that are the major forces in your life, your past lives or the lives of your ancestors that you tend to play out over and over again...different scenario with the same theme. The wound, of which there is typically just one major wound is the one that is identified as crucial to your own healing.
Chamber of Soul Contracts: On this level, you explore the contracts you made or the agreements or statements you made and renegotiate any that are not helpful such as "I will never trust anyone again".
Chamber of Grace: On this level you have the opportunity to retrieve a lost soul splinter (or in lay terms, when a part of you seemed to have died or separated from you). This process sometimes requires negotiation and reinstalling the retrieved piece into the area from which it was lost (or into your heart center).
Chamber of Treasures: Journey to this level in meditation to ask for and find your "tool". Use it, maybe even locate a manifest representation of it in the physical world to carry with you, to discover its symbolism, message and utility for your life moving forward.
Upper World
Destiny or Calling: Mapping your time line on three major themes (throughout your life or other lifetimes or in your family lineage):
1. Love: List the major beings you've loved
2. Power: List your emotional challenges
3. Money: List the jobs or careers you've had or tried or wanted
4. Health: List personal or family health histories/themes
Look for patterns
What are my limiting beliefs: list them. Such self statements like:
"I can't afford..."
"I don't have time..."
"I'm not enough"
"I should/should not..."
Five Planes of the Upper World (Spirit or "Heaven" levels where learning occurs)
What is your Calling or Sacred Soul Contract?
Retrieve your Destiny
Clearing the Momentum Tunnel
Drain the energy from each past lifetime focusing on the three major themes of
1. A lifetime when you were harmed or suffered most.
2. A lifetime when you used your gifts poorly but had the greatest knowledge and power.
3. A lifetime when you used your gifts well and had the greatest wisdom.
Heal your former selves/lives and discover your original nature.
Grow a new body
"As we heal, the world will heal."
"As we change, the world will change."
This is just an overview and it may or may not make any sense to you out of the context of the book. There are techniques and meditations to guide you through your process and it is recommended that you stay with one at a time, in order, until it feels completed.
I found many useful pearls of wisdom in this book. When I was going energy healing on a more regular basis, I stumbled into soul retrieval work with clients as it arose. Alberto is very quick to point out that it should only be done by a trained professional healer (of which he is paid to provide said training). While I understand his warning against those who profess to have such skill and do not, I do not believe that unskilled practitioners will harm you in this process. I think you'll just lose your money and not get what you were after. I have more faith in our higher self or soul's ability to discern and protect us. I believe that intention is paramount. The times I have conducted soul retrieval work it came up spontaneously in session and I followed my intuition and the client and I co-created a process that worked for them.
I tend to call "bologna" on "methods" that give you the steps that must be followed to the letter, and in order and in a specific way lest you mess it up. Each culture, each healing modality has it's own sets of guidelines. They are just that. Guidelines. They are not hard fast rules and you don't have to be scared that you might mess it up. Trust in yourself and in the higher healing potential of others.
You might also avoid a book like this if you adhere to a strict religious doctrine or dogma. That's too bad because it is easily adaptable, with an open mind to still be a useful tool that you adapt to your own spiritual framework. "Journeying" can be "meditation" or it can be "prayer". The "gatekeeper" can be God, or Buddha, or anyone that fits your vision. At it's base, the process seems sound and is very similar to what I've experienced working with clients. I was never taught it. It just came. It doesn't follow the steps in this book but the similarities are astounding. The world of spirit knows and has your best interest at heart, no matter what you call it or how you structure it.
I had a love-hate relationship with the book. It was like seeing two things superimposed on the other: A bla bla bla of dogma and ego, but an underlying truth that transcends all of it. There IS some useful stuff in here. I'll be passing the book on, while keeping the outline and notes I've written above to do some practice work on myself, and try with others if and when the opportunity arises.
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