Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness and self-compassion regardless of financial, social, or physical challenges. The Sounds True foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, including at-risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries. If you’d like to learn more or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit soundstruefoundation.org.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Sandra Ingerman. Sandra Ingerman is an award-winning author of 12 books, including Soul Retrieval, Medicine for the Earth, Walking in Light, and The Book of Ceremony. She is a world-renowned teacher of shamanism and has been teaching for more than three decades. With Sounds True, Sandra Ingerman has created a new eight-week online training that begins on November 11. It’s called Healing with Spiritual Light: The Shamanic Power of Transfiguration to Heal Ourselves, Each Other, and the Earth. This is a timely conversation that talks about the power we each have to work with our thoughts, our daydreams, our words, and how we hold ourselves as beings of light—lights in the world to help literally be the change we want to see. Here’s my conversation with Sandra Ingerman:
Sandy, it’s great to have this conversation with you. I’ve loved our previous podcast conversations and I think of you as a dear friend, both to me and to Sounds True, so thank you. Thanks for being with us.
Sandra Ingerman: Thank you Tami, and you’re family to me. So this is exciting, and of course this is a topic that I’m so passionate about.
TS: Healing with Spiritual Light: The Shamanic Power of Transfiguration to Heal Ourselves, Each Other, and the Earth. I want to talk about transfiguration because I think a lot of people, when they think of, “Oh, here’s a spiritual practice that I do.” They think of their yoga practice, their meditation practice. Maybe they chant or even do a practice like lovingkindness, but transfiguration? What’s that? So let’s start there.
SI: Yes. Well, that’s what happened to me is I actually got to do that practice in a dream and I woke up and I said, “What’s that?” And so, it took me a tremendous amount of research. Basically what happened for me is I originally was studying marine biology and I was very interested in reversing river pollution. And so my shamanic practice and my visioning practices were all about how can we actually change what’s happening in the environment, not just through social activism, but by the spiritual practices that we perform? And I went to Egypt and when I came back from Egypt, I had a really powerful dream, and the Egyptian god Anubis showed up in the dream. And I always knew him as a gatekeeper. And he introduced himself to me and I’m very auditory, so I get my greatest messages through listening.
And Anubis said to me, “The missing piece of your environmental work is transfiguration.” And I never heard that word before. So I woke up in the morning and I said to my husband, “Did you ever hear of the word transfiguration?” And he said, “Yes, I think it means something like shape-shifting.” So I got up and I went to Webster’s dictionary—at the time we were still using, hard copy dictionaries—and I looked up transfiguration and there it was, shape-shifting. And then I was so confused because what does shape-shifting have to do with changing environmental pollution or transforming anything? I was aware of the wealth of shamanic stories that came from different cultures, about shamans being able to shape-shift into a raven or a wolf. But I couldn’t connect the dots. What did it mean about practices to help the planet?
And so I kind of kept searching, but wasn’t getting anywhere. And my next-door neighbor was actually a born-again Christian. And she always saw me as the evil witch that lives next door and she didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And then she developed liver cancer and she came over and knocked on my door and asked if I could help her. And so we started to work together and she used come over—we just lived right next door, and so she used to come over and lie on my office floor and I would lie down with her and we’d just share stories together. It turned out we just were in love with each other and it was just amazing that our religious beliefs kept us apart. And so we’re lying on my floor and I start telling her about the dream, about Anubis telling me about transfiguration being the key to my environmental work.
And she jumped up. She was so excited, and she started just quoting the Bible about Jesus transfiguring into a greater light than had ever been seen, and anybody who touched his robe would be instantly healed. And she just went on and on, every miraculous story about this great light of transfiguration. And then as the universe always has it, after Catherine and I met together and we talked about transfiguration, I couldn’t open a book and not see the words somewhere. And what I learned as I kept researching and I started looking at all different traditions—whether it was Buddhism or practices that came from the Hindu tradition, the Kabbalah, the Bible, Taoism, every place I looked—what you thought is that any kind of miraculous healing that took place by a guru, a mystic, a shaman, you always saw that person transforming into a greater light than had ever been seen before.
And that seemed to be a real key in creating miraculous healings. And even though the miraculous healings were talking about working with people, I was able to make that leap to, well, if it heals people, then we have an opportunity to also work with what’s going on in the planet. And so that led me to, well, how do I teach this? How do I explain it? What’s the information, the core of the information that’s been developing through my research?
And what I discovered is—and many of us know this [who are] listening, is that we’re more than a body and a mind. And when we go beyond our body and our mind, we drop into pure spirit, and that’s who we are. We’re spiritual beings that are clothed by these wonderful bodies, but our essence is actually spirit. And what’s the essence of the spirit of pure light, and light transforms. That’s the nature of light is that it transforms.
So I started teaching the most involved process, the most complicated process possible of how to find your inner light. And then as the years went by, I found that I could get people to that same place very easily just to imagine themselves going inside and experience a sun growing inside of them and allowing that sunshine to just flow throughout the universe, or to experience a star from the night sky within them and let that grow and shine just like a star in the night sky. A star doesn’t direct its light anywhere. It doesn’t effort to shine. We try so hard to be a light, but a star doesn’t effort. The sun doesn’t effort. And so I taught people how to experience their own inner starlight or their own inner sunlight as a reflection of their own inner spirit. And that’s transfiguration.
TS: Now, there’s a lot in what you’ve already said, and I want to take it slowly, Sandy. The first is that this Egyptian figure appeared to you in your dream, Anubis. Is this practice of transfiguration something that dates back specifically to Egypt?
SI: Well actually, transfiguration, from what I can tell in my research, was performed in all spiritual traditions. And when I first started studying shamanism, people didn’t have the opportunity to travel to shamanic cultures. But then when they started traveling to shamanic cultures, my students started coming back with these amazing stories of shamans in Siberia who used no particular healing method to heal their clients. They just became this great light and their clients healed. And I started collecting a wealth of stories from South America, of some of my friends going down to South America and working with these female shamans who said, “All you have to do is shine your light.”
So it’s a practice that comes out of the Egypt. It’s practiced in the Hindu traditions. It’s practiced in shamanism, Taoism. Buddhist masters are known to heal by being this great light. So from what I can tell, it’s really cross-cultural and it goes beyond religion. It just seems to be a core part of all those spiritual practices that I’ve been introduced to.
TS: Now you also mentioned it’s the nature of light, that it transforms. And I can kind of imagine that, meaning if you walk out into the sun you feel its warmth and radiance. But help me understand more what you mean when you say that, and what the mechanism is that creates healing when someone’s transfiguring?
SI: So let me give you an example of this. If you know somebody who has cancer or is dealing with an illness, we can really just focus on their illness and we can go, “Oh, you poor thing. I’m so sorry to hear what you’re going through.” And we start to focus on the symptoms and what’s happening to the person. But from a spiritual perspective, you can look beyond what’s happening on a physical level, and you can only identify with the fact that a person is spirit and that beyond their cancer is actually a spiritual essence of them that’s filled with light. And so when that light is recognized—and there’s a modern day mystic by the name of Jack Schwartz. And he said that you can never heal another person; the only thing that you can do is act as a AAA truck that goes into the desert when a car’s battery is dead, and you can help that client put their foot on the accelerator, but you can’t put your foot on the accelerator for them. That’s the job of the client.
So with transfiguration, what happens is instead of trying to heal the cancer, you recognize the spiritual perfection and the light that’s flowing out of that person. And in different traditions, there are so many case studies about people being healed just from that one practice of instead of trying to heal the symptoms, is recognize the divine perfection and the light.
And so what we did is so many of my students want proof, and a lot of people in the spiritual traditions don’t care about scientific proof. And so to make this more palatable to the public, because I was so passionate about getting this work out into the world, we started conducting experiments and we started by working with water. We would take what’s called deionized water—and this is just water where all the minerals are taken out of, so nothing will interact with the minerals in the water. It’s just really pure.
And we put ammonium hydroxide in the water; ammonium hydroxide is a very common pollutant in the environment, which is caused by ammonia. And any animal that would drink water with ammonium hydroxide and it would die immediately and no animal would ever drink it because the smell is unbelievable. And trust me, I traveled around the world doing these experiments and the smell in the room would be overwhelming. And what I would tell my groups was, do not focus on the water as being toxic, only focus on the water as being light. And I would go through a process where I’d have all the students in my workshop go to their deepest self and experience their starlight and their sunlight flowing through them, not sending anything to the water.
And this is a crucial part of transfiguration that I can explain more. It’s healing by being. And so my students would just become light. They would go beyond their body and allow their own spiritual light just to flow like a star and to perceive the water in its perfect light as absolutely healed instead of being toxic. And I ran these experiments all over the world and I always had a chemist or a physicist with me, and the water always changed from a pH that would be poison down towards neutral. And so different workshops—I mean, we didn’t always get the perfect neutral water, but we always got very close.
And then we just kept continuing the experiments and I bought a very special camera called GDV camera that would takes photos of the energy field of different substances. And so we were able to start working with other substances besides water. We worked with cookies and M&Ms and dirt from a driveway. And we just used our imagination. We brought in GMO food and tested before and after, and we really just got phenomenal results with all of these experiments.
But then what we started to notice was not only was the water coming back more to neutral and the substances that were in the middle of our altar were looking so much better in their energy field, but people who were sick in the workshop were getting better. One of my workshops I had a woman with such severe lupus [that] she needed a service dog, and she lied in the middle while we were doing one of our ceremonies and we just perceived her in her divine light. And she got up, and the next day she was mountain climbing. And weeks later, her doctor wrote a letter saying that she’s been cured. So I could use that case study in some of my writings.
TS: OK. Again, Sandy, I have a lot of questions. Taking it slowly, what is your understanding of the mechanism of how this happens? So you have 100 people in a circle, 50 people in a circle, they’re turning into starlight and someone’s cancer is healing, or the pH and water is coming down to neutral. What’s happening?
SI: Well, the mechanism that I can explain or the mechanism I understand is that our perception creates our reality. And so when we gather as a circle and community members steps forth and says, “I’m dealing with lung cancer and I’m asking for help.” And 100 people in the circles say, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear this news about your cancer. And yes, of course I’m going to try and help.” You have 100 people who have now agreed that this person has cancer. And that’s the perception and that creates the reality. We don’t invalidate somebody’s diagnosis. We don’t say “No your cancer is an illusion.” That’s just an insult because we’re here as bodies and we have to go through, part of our journey is getting ill, that’s part of how we evolve and how we grow.
But if 100 people look the on that cancer and only see that divine light, then from using what Jack Schwartz was sharing, what happens is that light starts to rise up and become stronger than the perception of the cancer. Does that make any sense?
TS: I can kind of follow you. I think the big question that I have that I think our listeners probably have is why does it work sometimes and it doesn’t work other times? Because it seems like there are plenty of cases when it doesn’t work.
SI: Yes. I think everything is timing. Everything, there’s a timing to everything. And I’ve had miraculous experiences with transfiguration in my own life when things were going wrong. And I’ve had years where it didn’t matter how many people were transfiguring on my behalf or how much I was dealing with, seeing, experiencing my own spiritual light. Nothing happened on a physical level. And that was part of my journey of healing. Because there’s a timing. We don’t want to do what would be known as a spiritual bypass. There’s lessons and there’s an initiation where we start to grow and we die to who we really are in this life. Sometimes by the hardships that we go through, whether it’s illness or catastrophe, part of our life has to die so that we can heal. And so for people who are still on an evolutionary process where illness is really a part of their journey, then the transfiguration process won’t work.
But if the timing is right for a person, it can work so quickly. It’s really quite amazing. And going back to Jack Schwartz, this might help people too. He was actually in the Dutch resistance and he was captured by the Nazis and he was tortured. And as he was being tortured, his wounds would completely heal, and to everybody’s amazement.
And when he got out of the prison camp, he moved to the United States and he went on the whole talk show circuit. And what the hosts on the talk shows would do is they would take these long needles and they would dip them in virulent bacteria that would kill anybody and they would stick them in Jack Schwartz’s arm. And when they would take it out, there was no wound and he never got sick. And how he described it is when he was being tortured or when people were putting needles into him, he would go beyond personality and body. He would say, “There is no Jack Schwartz. There’s the only oneness, there’s only God. There’s only light. That’s all that there is.” And so nothing could hurt him. He was an amazing example of this particular practice.
TS: Now, Sandy, I’m going to be a little provocative here for a moment because I’m tuning in to our listeners and I think some people are tracking right with you, but I can also imagine someone who’s just thinking to themselves, “Oh my God, this miracle healing stuff sounds a little bit like BS to me. I just don’t buy it. X, Y, Z people in my life have died. They tried all different kinds of visits to spiritual healers. It didn’t work. I can’t go with you here.” What would you say to that person?
SI: Well, I actually have the same voice as some of the listeners. And so I think having that is really part of our conditioning. It’s really part of our conditioning that miracles don’t exist. There are no miracles in life and that’s something that’s spiritual traditions, those ancient spiritual traditions didn’t have to fight with is our minds getting in the way of what can happen when we really drop all of our judgments and our limitations and we allow ourselves to embrace what would happen if we just become beings of love, and emanate love, and we emanate light instead of actually trying to create a change.
And that’s something our culture—including myself, I didn’t grow up in a family that embraced being light as a way of healing. And so my mind is always going to come in and say, “No, this is just more woo-woo work and don’t we have enough woo-woo work out there now?” But this practice is thousands of years old and ancient people from all around the world, of every spiritual tradition, have talked about this is a healing power. So what about giving it a chance and seeing what happens, and what happens if we allow ourselves to step away from what society taught us and drop deeper into the spiritual practices that have been working for thousands of years?
TS: Now, you mentioned, Sandy, that you are interested in bringing an actual scientist on board and that they measured the pH levels in the water. And one of my curiosities is if this type of group transfiguration of a substance like water really works, why hasn’t science picked up on this? Why aren’t we seeing thousands of studies that demonstrate that these are measurable, repeatable results?
SI: Well, I’ll give you an example of this. There was an oil spill in a river in Montana. This is many years ago, we’re going back 15 years. And I was called in by a group of scientists to actually bring students to this river in Montana and start to perform transfiguration work and to see what would happen. And I was working, I got my students together, we were all excited. I was working on all the details, all the ordinary details of getting us there. And then I got a phone call saying that they’re asking us not to come because if the newspapers got wind that a spiritual group was coming up to Montana to be a light to help this river, they would lose all their funding and they would lose their reputation.
And this is just one example of over a hundred that I’ve experienced, but I have hundreds of students who have taught hundreds of people how to do this practice. And we’ve seen certain things like with some oil spills happening in local areas when we’ve gotten enough people to be able to work with the transfiguration process of only seeing coral as a being of light or the water as a being of light. Things started healing faster than scientists expected. And we have a lot of case studies of that.
TS: I think part of the reason I’m interested in having scientific research that shows the power of transfiguration is in my lifetime, in the last 20 years, I’ve seen what’s happened to meditation because meditators were put into FMRI machines and we could see what was happening in the brain. And a whole revolution happened in terms of mainstream culture and physicians prescribing mindfulness meditation. And people suddenly feel like, “Oh, this is actually good for you. This is evidence-based.” And I’m wondering, will we see that shamanic practice could actually be evidence-based in our lifetime and what you think about that?
SI: I would love to see it. Again, there’s really been a tremendous amount of resistance on a scientific level to really get an experiment. We have tried so hard. I even worked with the Institute of Noetic Sciences to see if we could come up with an experiment. But there’s just so much resistance from the scientific community around embracing spiritual practices. It’s just really sad.
But as people are waking up, finally, to what is actually happening with climate change and that we’ve lost billions of birds and our water’s becoming too polluted to drink and our foods too polluted to eat, I do believe that people will open up their hearts to embrace spiritual practices because they want to survive. And this is actually a way to adapt to the changes. If one mystic could drink poison and transmute it, that means that we all have the ability to do that inside of ourselves. But we have to start to embrace a different belief system, and I think that people are getting to that place of desperation because science doesn’t have all of the answers.
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TS: Now, specifically you mentioned climate change and the environmental challenges that we face right now in our world. I’m imagining once again, that person who says, “The challenges are so great, the level of carbon dioxide in the environment. This is a time when transfiguration, it’s not powerful enough for the level of challenge that we face—maybe at another time, but we’ve crossed a certain point.” What do you think about that?
SI: Well, there’s more to the work that I’m teaching than transfiguration because there’s other work that we have to do at the same time. And from a spiritual perspective, a lot of what we’re experiencing in the outer world is truly a reflection of our own inner garbage that we’re not dealing with. And so I do agree that just using the practice of experiencing light is not enough to really work with what’s happening on the planet right now. And in the Healing with Spiritual Light work that I teach, I teach that there’s two parts of the process. One part of the process is we have to learn how to be different people. We have to learn how to work with the thoughts that we emit, that we’re transmitting into the collective, the words that we use and how were they creating the experience that we’re all going through personally and collectively?
And what’s the daydream of this collective? What are people thinking about and daydreaming about all day long? And if you ask people to stop and look at the daydream of this collective, what all people are talking about is how terrible everything is and that we’ve gone too far and we can’t turn it around. And so this is what we’re creating. In the Healing with Spiritual Light work, I don’t just teach transfiguration. I teach people how to be authentic human beings who are willing to do spiritual practices all day long not just like in the morning as doing yoga or a meditation practice, but when they’re driving their cars, when they’re standing on a long line and getting frustrated, how do we start to focus our thoughts, our daydreams, and our words on the planet that we really want to live on?
And we can do transfiguration practices every single day, but if we don’t change, if we don’t become more evolved humans, I also believe that we’ve gone too far to see transfiguration work at this point. And so it takes a commitment to really wanting to evolve to a particular level where our words and our thoughts and daydreams actually align with the reality that we’re trying to create.
TS: Now, tell me more about this transforming our daydream. I think a lot of people think, “Oh my daydreams, I just let them kind of come, whatever they are. So I have daydreams about terrible things. Whether they come, they go, I’m spacing out. I’m driving the car. Now I need to become conscious of transforming my daydream?”
SI: Yes. [Laughs] And it is work, and nobody—and the interesting thing about the Healing with Spiritual Light work is we are humans and we live in a society where we want everything very quickly and we don’t always want to put a lot at work into what we’re doing. But we also don’t realize—and in shamanism, it’s a little bit becoming a cliché at this point, but shamans around the world keep talking about that life is just a dream. Life is just a dream and we’re dreaming our reality all the time through our daydreams. And there are different esoteric traditions that are outside of shamanism that talk about how to actually form a new reality by working with your daydreams.
So instead of talking or thinking about how bad the world is, going inside yourself and imagining the beauty of the flowers and clean water and clean air, and focusing on that instead of all the terrible things that are happening. And from a shamanic understanding, what happens is that dream becomes birthed through us. It doesn’t come to us; we’re waiting for some authority figure or for some outside magic to change what’s happening in our life and what’s happening to the planet. But from a shamanic point of view, what’s happening, any change that we’re going to see is actually birthed through us by learning how to work with our words, by learning how to work with our thoughts, which all become our daydreams. And when we start to bring honor and respect into the elements and when we start to greet life as kin, as our family, and we honor all of life, then that’s what’s reflected back to us. In shamanism that’s called the principle of reciprocity. If you honor, you’re going to be honored back.
TS: Now, it’s one thing to take utter responsibility for the words that I say out loud, but thoughts and daydreams, those are things that are happening privately and in the quiet confines between my two ears. And sometimes things just kind of, they come in. “That’s a weird thought. That’s a weird, terrible thought. That’s a weird, terrible set of cartoon imagery that’s now inside my head.” What do you suggest when that happens often during the day? “Those are strange thoughts, Jesus, negative, terrible.”
SI: Well, I have a long list of tools and I have people journey on ways to transform their thoughts. But this is the most powerful one for me. So if our listeners can embrace the principle of oneness, that there is no separation and that we’re all connected. And this of course for some people is a very evolved spiritual understanding, and for some people it’s, “Yes, I understand. We’re all connected.” And so if we’re all connected and this is understood in shamanism really well, there isn’t a shamanic culture that doesn’t teach this. So if I send a negative thought to a political leader, “I hate this political leader,” from a shamanic point of view, you’ve not only said, “I hate this political leader” and sent that energy of hate to that person, you’ve also sent it to yourself. You’ve sent it to every living being that you love.
And so one of the tools I use—again, this is one tool of many—is I have people impose the image of something that they really love on a person or an event or on a situation that really triggers them. So if I’m really angry at a political leader and my favorite being on the planet happens to be elephants, and if I impose the face of an elephant on that political leader, would I want to spend that kind of hate to of being I loved that much? And what that does is it at least helps me take a step back, because the key of the work is when we get triggered, how do we stop long enough to do a spiritual practice, to take a step back before we shoot the trigger? And what we do in our culture is we shoot the trigger too fast, and so we’re sending just too much negativity to people and out into the collective that’s actually bouncing back to each and every one of us and our loved ones.
TS: OK, Sandy, I’m going to get a little more personal if that’s OK. And there’s a reason. I’m thinking of the person who’s listening, who perhaps has been suffering with some kind of difficult illness, who’s hearing this conversation about healing with spiritual light and is thinking to themselves, “I want to believe it’s possible that if my friends gather around me, if I myself transfigure, if I spend time just bathed in that light field, that healing will occur. But I’m too afraid of being disappointed. What if it doesn’t work? And I’m too afraid of feeling like there’s something just wrong with me personally that healing’s not happening.” And I know you yourself, you’ve been dealing over the last several years with some pretty serious health challenges, and I wonder if you can share some about that and talk to that person who themselves might be suffering right now.
SI:Yes. It’s a real heartbreak when life comes in and takes you down. And we start to turn everywhere for help. And there’s always that fear of disappointment, and that’s human, to experience that fear of disappointment. And for myself, I went through such a place of darkness because I felt, “How could God or the Goddess or the helping spirits do this to me? I mean, look at how many people I’ve helped. I don’t deserve this.” And in life there’s nothing about what we deserve or what’s fair. We get certain experiences that are trying to help us grow.
And before we started this podcast, I talked about a metaphor that I was given just very recently about my own process with illness. My favorite food is ice cream, so this might make sense to those of you who like ice cream. I was told that I was being put into an ice cream maker to create a new flavor. And so what illness does, and what it has done for me, is it breaks down our shell. We all have a shell around us that keeps us from the depths of our authenticity. And in order to heal from an illness, you actually have to die to what is false in your life in order to heal. And so there is a process, and we don’t know how long that process is, of, what do I need to let go of in my life? What are the changes I need to make? What are the boundaries I have to set? What’s that of balance? Do I need to work less and spend more time in nature? Or what are the thoughts and the daydreams that I keep running throughout the day? I’m never going to heal. Nobody can ever help me.” What am I calling in that’s actually making my current reality even stronger?
And so it’s a process of initiation, which is a part of life, and it’s a very, very uncomfortable part of life. And the whole entire planet is going through it right now. The whole collective is going through this initiation where we’re being churned into different people, into a different flavor of ice cream or into a different flavor of food that creates more harmony. And so it really is accepting—and this is the difficult part, the surrender and letting go of the outcomes. How do you let go of the outcomes when you’re not feeling well? How do you just accept that you’re on a ride and that we’re all riding the river of life and that the river of life is trying to take us to someplace beautiful? It’s not trying to hurt us, but just like the beauty of the canyon that we’re riding through, some element came in that had it chip away at the rock, at the granite to create the beauty that we see all over the earth.
And it’s happening to each and every one of us on a particular level, and so the human part of us is so afraid of disappointment and that we’re never going to heal and that life is not fair. And I got stuck there for many years. And then all of a sudden, you start to notice that the chpping away is actually allowing a beautiful part of yourself to start to come through, something more authentic that matches your own destiny, what you came here to do.
And so that’s what’s been happening for me. I’m a completely different person than I was five years ago when I developed this disorder. Completely different person. But it took me a while before I was able to perceive the beauty that was starting to bloom inside of me that I had to allow that chipping away process at my personality to happen in order for me to be able to actually experience my own beauty and my own light and my own authentic self.
TS: At any point, Sandy, did you question maybe the practice of transfiguration? You know, maybe it doesn’t really work, I’m not sure.
SI: I never questioned the practice of transfiguration because I’ve been working with the practice since 2000 and I’ve seen, witnessed thousands of miracles with that particular practice. And so I never questioned the practice itself, but I had to come to an understanding that there was other work that had to happen before transfiguration would be a helpful practice for me.
And that doesn’t mean that everybody’s in the same boat. I just happened to be on a long initiation process and learning about acceptance and that there will be a right timing, but that I have to let go of that outcome and I have to accept the part of the journey that I’m on right now because it’s actually changing me into the person I was meant to be.
And the human side of me doesn’t like it. It’s not fun. It’s nothing that I want for myself. But as I watch what’s happening, the transformation that’s happening, and my capacity to emanate love into challenging situations and my capacity to emanate light into the horrors that we’re experiencing right now is growing greater by the day. People would always say to me, you’re going to see that there was a benefit at some time, and that is not a healing thing to say to a person who’s in the midst of such a deep initiation. The best thing that we can do, and what I always ask for, is for people to not try to take so much action or to create a change within me, but just to bear witness and in the bearing witness, there’s the healing that comes from that.
TS: Thank you so much for sharing so transparently about all of that Sandy. It’s one of the things I really love about you is just how vulnerable and what a truth teller you are. Thank you.
SI: You’re welcome. I mean, my journey—and I have a lot more to say about it at some point. I mean, it’s just really been unbelievably powerful, but I didn’t understand it until now. And so I feel like I can help people better who are going through these really deep initiations right now. And that’s part of what we can do as we do start to trust our own inner life and our own light that lives inside.
And when we do trust life itself—and that’s a journey in itself, to get to that trust, then that river of life is going to bring us to smoother waves and to a beautiful place, but many of us have to go through the turbulence. That’s part of life is to go through the turbulence, and sometimes the turbulence for people is a little bit longer than they would like, but there are always smoother waters ahead.
TS: Now, Sandy, towards the end of this new eight-week online course that you’ve created with Sounds True on healing with spiritual light, you have participants journey forward in time in order to meet with their descendants. And I’d love if you could just share a little bit about that practice and why you think it’s so powerful and how it relates to healing with spiritual light.
SI: Well, I had a very particular intention about bringing this journey into this particular workshop. And in shamanism, one of the beauties of shamanic work is when we take a shamanic journey, we’re outside of time, and so we can journey past and we can talk to ancestors, and we can journey into the future. And if you look at the practice of transfiguration, it’s all about working with light. And I’m just teaching a particular practice that my spirits gave me, but working with light for healing, I mean, look at the power of just working with infrared light right now and the power that they’re finding in how it can take toxins out of her body and create healing. And we know that sound healing is very important and that it has an amazing amount of potential.
And so in my workshops, I have people journey way into the future. I mean, when all of the craziness and all the turbulence that we’re in is over. So we’re going maybe thousands of years into the future or hundreds of years into the future. And I ask people to meet up with either a descendant or a group of descendants—then it doesn’t have to be our own personal descendants. Many of us don’t have children, but they’re going to be descendants on the planet. And I ask people to journey to descendants in the future to learn how they use light, the practice of light, and the practice of healing sounds for healing themselves.
And I’ve taught this journey all over the world—again, since 2000—and all the groups I work with see very similar things. That way in the future that there won’t be cities, that people will be living very close to the earth, like they always have until technology came in. Some people have gotten from descendants that it was rare to see any illness, but if they did these are the practices that they would do. They would come together as a community and work with light or sound in a particular way. And I ask my students to ask their descendants that they meet for one very simple practice that they can bring into their life that would help themselves or others based on what people in the future know.
So as an example, I’ll use myself as an example. I was working with a group of descendants for a really long time, and I told them—this was over 20 years ago, that I was having thyroid problems. And they said, “Well, you really need to start singing the note A.” And they said, “We know you can’t sing that note A.” Which is true. I can’t carry a tune. And they said, “Well, get a tuning fork with an A and put it on your thyroid.” And it worked. And so the point of going to descendants in the future is to see how they work with light and sound for healing, and what can we learn from them to bring back into this time to help us right now?
TS: Now, Sandy, I’ve talked to some people, people who know a lot about climate science, who are concerned that we won’t have descendants in the future, that we’re actually facing what people are calling the sixth extinction caused by humans and the amount of carbon dioxide we’re emitting into the atmosphere. Do you have people journey into the future and not find any descendants—we’re just not here?
SI: No, I have not, in thousands of students. I have never had a student who brought back that information. I personally, my own visioning is that there will be a lot of death, but that there will be people who do survive and that their survival will be based on bringing back the nature practices for themselves as have been practiced by shamanic cultures all around the world. Because the practice of shamanism is really a nature-based practice, and shamans learned—how people in shamanic cultures survived was by learning how to talk to the plants and to find out what their medicine was and how to make it, and to talk to the elements and to learn how to bring balance between humans and the environment. So in my own visioning, what I’ve seen is that there will be people who do survive, but it’s learning those nature-based practices again.
TS: Sandy, just to end—I mean, first of all, it’s been an incredible conversation. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, as ever. Can we connect our spiritual light together here as we end our conversation? Maybe you could take us through some type of very brief practice of connecting inward to the light and connecting with each other?
SI: Absolutely. So I’d like everybody to take a deep breath, because there’s been a lot of words and basically we want to put our ordinary minds aside because our ordinary mind can act like an anchor; when a ship is trying to go out to sea, our thoughts could be like an anchor that don’t let the boat take off.
So let’s just take a few deep breaths and really go into our heart and think about what we really love about life and what we love about the Earth and about nature, and how we would love to see a beautiful planet. And as you start to focus on the beauty of life, what’s beauty to you? Allow your consciousness to just keep thinking even deeper inside of yourself. Just let your consciousness think. Let yourself rest in spirit. And imagine a star from the sky all of a sudden falling inside of you, and that star starts to shine. It doesn’t effort. It’s so natural. Notice how the light just starts to flow so effortlessly and it’s so beautiful. It’s such a stunning, exquisite light. And allow that light to fill every cell of your body. Absorb it like a flower would absorb sunlight or the rain if it’s been in a drought. Absorb that light into every single cell of your body, allowing that light to bring healing into your body.
And then let’s all together, let that light flow within and throughout the earth, throughout the entire web of life, uplifting all of life right now. Be a light in the world. That is your destiny. And don’t disconnect from that light because that’s who we are. And so we want to learn as human beings how to live on this earth as humans, but allowing that light to continue to flow. So allow that flow to continue, but bring your consciousness back into the room that you’re in right now.
TS: Sandra Ingerman, thank you so much. Thank you so much for all of your good work and all the ways that you’ve taught and helped so many people. Thank you.
SI: Thank you, Tami. It’s always a pleasure and I love this to work. I just love it, and I’m so excited for anybody who would like to embrace this practice.
TS: Sandra Ingerman has created a new online course with Sounds True. It’s called Healing with Spiritual Light: The Shamanic Power of Transfiguration to Heal Ourselves, Each Other, and the Earth. The course begins on November 11 and you’re all invited to join us, come to soundstrue.com for more information.
Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at SoundsTrue.com/podcast. And if you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. And also if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.
