Interview with a Shaman: Part 2

by | Oct 31, 2007 | Thoughts

ON THE ROAD WITH ANDY RODRIGUEZ

 

From the Editor: I first met Andy (Walks with Thunder) last fall when I interviewed him for the paper. It was a usual day for him, you know – clearing the weather, doing healing, and telling stories. For me it was the remarkable start of my friendship with him, his shaman grandfather’s spirit, and the presence of the thunder spirits in my life. Over this past year, I have heard many testimonials, thanks, and reports on healings & spiritual feats Andy and his students have done. Plus, my ears, stomach, elbow and emotional body all have great things to say about the effects of his energy transfer and more importantly, my whole life has been blessed. So Andy and I decided to meet again at his favorite stop in Bremerton – Dairy Queen – and catch up.

JT: Since we did the interview last summer, you have really come into your work! That’s wonderful!

WWT: Yes it is! I’m having so much fun. When we did the interview last fall, I had been doing classes in Dragon’s Lair in Belfair and just started teaching at Crystal Voyage in Tacoma. I wish I had said “Yes” to being in The Blue Star Gazette a year earlier, because since “Interview with a Shaman” was published, I’ve got a lot more places to share my work. I now teach classes at Vision Quest in Everett, Stonehouse Bookstore in Kirkland, Spirit Journey in Issaquah, Origin of Healing in Bothell, and Mystic Moon in Sedro-Woolley. I’ve also been a guest speaker at Bastyr College.

 

JT: You’ve been on the road a lot.

WWT: Oh yeah, not that I mind – I like it.

 

JT: You really love teaching don’t you?

WWT: I do. It’s great. I get to watch someone who comes in and doesn’t know if they have a gift or not, someone who doesn’t know what to do with some paranormal ability or event that has happened, from that point of uncertainty to a place of certainty. By this I mean where they now know they have a gift and they know how to use it. Not something that is hit or miss, but something that works every time. The classes make the difference between someone with a gift and someone who has been trained to use their talent. It’s wonderful to see people’s self confidence and abilities magnified.

 

JT: From my friendship with you and reading your email chain, a lot of healing stories – some miraculous – are happening in your classes; from you working directly on people in your classes and from your students now working on others. Just last week you told me an amazing story on the phone about your student healing her son. Let’s share that with the readers.

WWT: You mean Mary! Yes. Each of my students gets a thunderbird that I bless at the end of their 6-week training with me. The blessings are for negative energy protection, physical healing, to remove physical pain, and each has extra energy in it for them to use.

Mary has a son in Colorado who developed a heart condition. She called me and asked me to check on her son. I saw that he had a bacterial or viral infection and that his heart was hurting more on the left side. She flew out there to see him. When she got there, she did the energy body balancing and energy transfer on her son that she learned in class. Then she used her thunderbird as a potentiometer (like a pendulum to show if an energy center is in balance). It showed that everything was fine until she got to his heart. The thunderbird stopped moving all together! At that point as she was watching it, she noticed a golden aura around the thunderbird. As she watched, the golden aura detached itself from the thunderbird and moved down into his heart. She felt and told her son that he was healed, and he believed her. The next day he was sitting up in bed and the day after, they released him.

JT: Part of what exudes from you is empowering others but often in your classes you perform healing on people before class starts.

WWT: I do. Some of the people that come to my classes are in physical pain. It detracts from their learning. As I go around the room, I notice that they are in pain and I ask them if they want me to work on them. The new people are amazed at the feeling of the energy transfer and we gauge their pain. I continue working on it until it is zero. The returning students are used to this. But I noticed that the people that are healed really pay attention and they bring other people back to classes. The students share and talk about it on their break too. Like Nell.

 

JT: Who is Nell?

WWT: An 83 year-old lady who came with her two daughters. I asked her if she had a pain in her leg. She said yes, her ankle was hurt in a fall when her 34 year old daughter was just born. The ankle was swollen to larger than a softball and had chronic pain ever since. As I started teaching I worked on her ankle. I remember she had a little ankle bracelet that was so tight against the skin. After 1 minute she was pain free and you could stick one finger under the bracelet, after 4 minutes you could put 2 fingers under it. After 15 minutes, I could put 4 fingers under it and she told me later that it kept getting smaller all the way home.

 

JT: So I bet she really paid attention.

WWT: She loves my classes. I gave her a thunderbird that evening. She was just so happy. The look of joy on this beautifully aged face made me feel really good. My students really prize these thunderbirds and show them off to each other when they get them.

 

JT: And these people of course bring back more students for you. Didn’t one of the stores ask you to just come and work as a healer?

WWT: Yes, that would be Vision Quest in Everett. Want to know why they asked me? Judy, who owns Vision Quest, and I were talking about me teaching classes there. I asked her if she had pain and she replied that she did, her right foot. I worked with her foot for about 3 minutes: I gave it an energy transfer, an energy balance, and pulled the pain out of it. She was pain-free for the first time since 1992. After we set up for my classes, I left and 4 days later, I got an email from Judy that one of my students (Tony) had come in and removed the pain in her right foot, pain that she could now feel. She said experiencing that one of my students could also do this level of healing got her very excited, so she called and we set up a Day of Healing with me and three of my students.

 

 

JT: When are you doing healing at Vision Quest?

WWT. I am there each Thursday afternoon from noon to 5pm. That is something new, I’ve never done that before.

 

JT: But really you are all about teaching. You told me that you like to do the healing to get people to come to your classes.

WWT: I do! I just do it and then I tell them that they can learn how to do it for themselves.

 

JT: That’s the point of your teaching!

WWT: With a side effect of the class being the personal empowerment and transformation of people’s lives. When you have confidence, it touches every part of your life and all of your relationships. A lot of people tell me that I have this wonderful gift that they could never have. I say, but you already do have it. Do you remember when you were a little kid and you fell and hurt your knee and you grabbed it with your hands and the pain went away or was lessened so you could run home to mom? That is the basis of the energy transfer – you did it instinctively. I don’t want them to put me on a pedestal. These are things that I can do because I practice doing them. Almost everyone knows how to run, but there are better runners. I’m better at this because I practice. There’s nothing that I can do that you can’t do.

 

JT: Wow. That’s significant because you have your grandfather’s shaman spirit reincarnated in you.

WWT: Yes, but I’m pretty sure that we all have these spirits, skills and gifts in us. We can all become a natural at it. We all have an energy body whether we acknowledge it or not.

 

JT: Let’s talk about your classes. If someone wanted to start training with you, what is the best class to start with?

WWT: I would say the best starting place would be the Energy Body 1 class. The Energy Body class teaches you how to work with the body’s bioelectrical fields. We learn to use the thunderbirds, or pendulums, as a meter to show whether an energy center is out of balanced or not. We learn how to do an energy transfer, and we work on each other. With the thunderbird, you can see the results as well as feel it. We learn how to bless an object so it can be used for healing. So folks feel and heal the energy body, which heals the physical body right after it and gives them a tool to work with. It’s the best class for a skeptic to take, especially a skeptic with pain.

 

JT: What’s next?

WWT: Energy Body 2. In Energy Body 2 we take everything up to a new level. We work on what I call soft tissue re-sculpting on muscular-skeletal and cartilage problems. I had a new student come who was referred by her husband who is a chiropractor. She has bone on bone on her right knee and was going to have a knee replacement which she was too young for. Her husband and Mary sent her to me and I relieved her pain. Now she has decided to not get the operation. She has begun my classes too.

 

JT: What else in Energy Body 2?

WWT: We learn how to work on someone remotely & we have a “guinea pig” come in, and the class gets to diagnose what is wrong with them and that person works to fix it. At the end, when everyone has finished, the test person shares if they were right or wrong and what it felt like to be worked on by them.

 

JT: Other classes?

WWT: Power Animals, Spirit Guides, Dark Spirits, Altered Vision. Intro to the Stone Nation is a fun class because there are a lot of people who are in love with stones. Many people will buy a book and read about properties but what we do in the class is write our own book. We start with the colors and what we know they do for us. We assign all these emotions to the color. Not everyone will have the same personal symbology and that is great because it is your personal symbology that you want to find out about. I teach them how to bless an object. We bless the rose quartz so they can see it turn white. Lisa, one of my students, reported that even her rose quartz earrings turned white and stayed that way and all the stones in her house turned a lighter color.

 

JT: What causes that?

WWT: Lisa wasn’t specific about her blessing. She just said, “Stones, I ask that…” but she didn’t say, “Stones in my hand, I ask that…” so all the stones around her got the blessing and changed colors. I put a disclaimer out in class that I’m not responsible for your stones changing colors. Some of the stores won’t let me handle the rose quartz because it turns white after I do, sometimes with my finger prints!

 

JT: Andy, thank you for sharing so freely of yourself and your gifts. I feel blessed to have you as a friend and to witness your success in teaching and the lovely happy community forming around you. I’m looking forward to taking your classes. Readers, go check out his website www.walkswiththunder.com & watch for the upcoming issue of The Blue Star Gazette! Walks with Thunder has offered to share his prosperity blessing with all of you!

Interview with a Shaman: Part 1

by | Oct 31, 2007 | Thoughts

The Spirit of a Thunder Spirit

By Jai Tiger Deardorff, Editor

The Blue Star Gazette

www.thebluestargazette.net

One of the great blessings that I have in my work is meeting so many different kinds of people expressing a diversity of work that in its great common heart has one purpose. Sometimes as I travel to meet people, I am not sure what to expect. On my way to meet Walks with Thunder, I had to smile at the images my mind offered for what a Shaman of Indian and Hispanic descent would look like. My imagination settled on a casual pale skin guy in jeans, a T-shirt with Native American design, a long gray braid, headband, a lot of Indian necklaces and bracelets, perhaps a hand-sewn leather bag with beads, feathers, and totems dangling off of it and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his T-shirt.

So when Walks with Thunder asked me So, do I look like a Shaman to you? I laughed and said Yes because he did…but not at like I pictured. The only visual cue you might find of Walks with Thunder’s heritage is the simple turquoise thunderbird he wears on a silver chain around his neck and, that he looks Indian. I answered Yes to this gentle unpretentious teacher, because he felt like a Shaman to me.

We were sitting side by side going over materials on his laptop when something happened. He had turned to me and with a playful expression on his face, asked me a question about desserts. My mind was confused and as I looked at him I saw a transformation in his face and felt a tremendous energy coming through, a very loving nurturing grandparent energy. Suddenly I felt very warm and to my embarrassment, tears started falling from my eyes. I told him that I was having an emotional reaction to him and went to sit across the table

Walks with Thunder apologized and asked if I would like to receive a balancing and an energy transfer. A few moments later I was back ‘together’ until the energy transfer when he put his hands on either side of my face, there was an intense heat and I felt again this loving nurturing grandfather and tears streamed down my face. In the middle of the Poulsbohemian Coffeehouse, Walks with Thunder handled this well. He explained that he is Shaman Born; his Grandfather was a Shaman for the Caddo tribe, as was his father before him. He told me that feeling this loving grandfather spirit coming through is just a spiritual experience that generates an emotional response from the soul. It is like receiving or remembering the revelation that the Creator loves you and puts people here to help you. When you meet these people it can be a very emotional experience. Its okay. It means you have heart and its full.

As my new helper took his seat across the table, I was finally able to get out my first question.

JT: When were you first aware of your unique abilities, that you were a Shaman?

WWT: My first metaphysical memory was when I was one and a half years old. I was laying in bed looking out the window and I saw balls of colored lights in the trees and I wanted to go play with the fairies. I was in the process of crawling out the window to join them when my sister pulled me back in and told me I could not go. I had seen things all my life but I had no context to understand them. Raised by my Hispanic mother, I was not aware that I was Native. When I was 27 I called my mother and told her that I was going to check myself into a mental institution because I was seeing so many things I felt I was going insane. She then told me the family secret – that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Shaman and that this was perhaps why I was experiencing these things. I never met my grandfather but spirits like to return to same families.

JT: This is who I met then today, your Shaman Within, your grandfather. He has a very palpable presence. When you learned this, how did you feel about all of it?

WWT: I wanted it to stop. It was an intrusion on my ‘normal’ everyday technological life. It was 1989 and I was working for the Dept. of Commerce as a data processing manager with 50 people working under me. I was so uncomfortable when I would see spirits that I would tell the visage that I was uncomfortable and that I wanted it to stop. When I saw my first dark spirit, it really unnerved me. Then second time it made me angry, and then the third time I threatened it so it went away. I felt these experiences were an intrusion into my world or my perception of life as it should be. That changed the day of the explosion.

JT: The day of the explosion?

WWT: Yes, it was the day I first saw my guardian spirit. A little thunder spirit came out of the wall by the electrical outlet. I got a very strong feeling of uneasiness and told it I’m uncomfortable seeing you, leave me alone I’m going to get a donut. While I was getting a donut trying to calm down, there was an electrical malfunction which hit the $120,000 computer and literally destroyed it. Had I been working at the computer, I would have been electrocuted.

JT: So the next time you saw the thunder spirit…?

WWT: I was a little happier to see it! I understood that its message was Its going to be ok, I’m here. I realized that before the explosion, the little thunder-lightning bolt I had seen flying out of the wall socket showed up to warn me that something bad was about to happen.

JT: How do you feel about the thunder spirit now?

WWT: A very sweet smile fills his face as he throws his head back to the sky. Well, when I talk to the Thunder Nation, they do things for me. They love me, I’m one of their favorites!

JT: This was how you were able to help with hurricane Rita? (Walks with Thunder and I had talked two days before the hurricane was due to hit and he had been working on it. He told me that it would decrease from a Category 5 hurricane to a level one storm.)

WWT: Yes, my guardian spirit is a Thunder Spirit. Ed told me this is relatively rare, they usually don’t associate with humans. Ed told me that my thunder spirits other form is a Thunderbird with a 3 mile wingspan!

JT: Who is Ed?

WWT: Ed Whiting is a Shaman I went to see in Pine Ridge South Dakota. It was at a turning point in my life. When I first got there, he made me very uncomfortable. His guide is Emerald Man and while we were talking, it kept turning his face sparkly and green. Ed explained why I was seeing this so I told Emerald Man it made me uncomfortable and to stop and he did. Ed explained to me that the little thunder spirit was my guardian. It was 1998 when I was at Ed’s and I had left my old world.

JT: What happened at Ed’s?

WWT: I went through 10 days of ‘subtle’ testing! This began when he had me sleep in the basement and all the spirits that he sees kept coming and waking me up during the night. This really annoyed me because I was tired and I wanted to sleep. Some of the spirits were not so friendly but I felt safe because I was at Ed’s and I commanded the spirits to stop waking me up and they did. The next morning Ed told me to not assume I was safe and to say this phrase: Let me pass, I do not worship you.

JT: What did you say?

WWT: I said And that is going to get me out of deep dark trouble? I didn’t believe him until I used it on the lawn mower.

JT: On the lawn mower?

WWT: Yes, it was my day of testing where I was not allowed to come in out of the 120 degree heat until all the lawn was mowed and I had learned the lesson I was suppose to learn. After hours of mowing in the heat, I tried to go back inside but I was told to stay outside until I had learned the lesson I was suppose to learn. I was the only one outside. I told myself I already know how to mow the lawn.

I looked over and there was a patch of lawn that hadn’t been mowed and it was in shade. I told myself, I’m going to go mow over there. If there’s something for me to learn, I’m going to learn it in the shade. I started mowing, cutting in a square. When the mower got to a certain spot it died and I began to feel very hot and like something was pressing on my chest. Being stuck in my technological mind, I checked the mower thoroughly and I could not find any mechanical reason for it to not run. Finally, I got the mower running but when I reached that spot again, the mower died. And the feeling of heat and the terrible pressure on my chest returned. I was annoyed at the mower, there was no ‘reason’ for it to stop! I got it started again and worked my way around the square to the same spot where the mower died again and the crushing symptoms returned. I was just unwilling to accept that a metaphysical force had stopped a physical engine. This time it was very very hard to breathe and the pressure on my chest was stronger. I said to myself OK I’m being messed with and I can fix it. I said in a very sarcastic way, Let me pass, I do not worship you. Suddenly I could breathe, it wasn’t so hot, I pulled on the cord and the mower started and I finished. When I went inside my friend asked me, Did you learn the lesson? I said Yes you’d be surprised what a cagey old man can do to you.

JT: How did it end with Ed?

WWT: Ed told me at the end of the ten days You came here because you wanted all these ‘bad things’ to stop and I have bad news for you. The spirit world is calling you because you have a gift and you are not using it, you are not sharing it and so they intrude on your normal everyday technological life to show you that there is more, that there is something else you are meant to do. So your choice is, you can either embrace your gift and use it or ignore it and continue to be a victim of your gift.

JT: So what happened after this?

WWT: So I asked the grandfather spirits to teach me gently. I get taught in my sleep. There have been a couple of lessons that have been really hard to learn. I’ve learned that I have to be careful about my will, and my intent, and how I feel about things. Ed explained to me that how I have been taught and the things I know how to do, the powers I have, are the result of my grandfather’s spirit reborn through me with his knowledge and power.

JT: You have a true shaman within!

WWT. I was able to see Grandfather spirits at age two and bilocated at fourteen. I didn’t know those things were special. I thought every one could do it, and you know I was right. I have been on the Red Road a long time before I even knew there was a Red Road. I live the life of a Wacasa Wakan, I don’t drink alcohol, don’t smoke (sometimes at a ceremony), don’t drink coffee, and use no recreational pharmaceuticals. Its a spiritual choice. I didn’t learn the way of the Shaman from another Shaman. I prefer to be called a Shaman instead of a Medicine Man because the term Medicine Man was a misnomer by the white settlers. What the shaman was doing was healing with power and the settler interpreted the word power for medicine.

Everything I do is with will and intent. I think it should be so and there it is. Knowing what I know and seeing what I see, I have absolute faith that there is a creator and there is a plan. By embracing my gift and sharing it with people, I follow what I am meant to do. This information comes from a pure state and it is things that everyone knows how to do, it is within you to do it. It is as easy as daydreaming and everybody knows how to do that! Within you is your soul that makes you unique, that gives you the sweetness of who you are. You draw on your faith and the power of your soul. What I do is very powerful yet very simple and things everyone can do once they learn to believe in themselves.

We said goodbye at my car and I felt like I had found a new friend. As I turned away, I heard him call back to me softly, I like your name. I looked back excitedly, it was his Grandfather’s spirit again… Thank you, I replied thinking of my first name when

the Shaman within Walks with Thunder sweetly called back to me, Tiger! smiled and walked away, his energy leaving me feeling giddy.

Walks with Thunder has many many stories, from a cancer healing miracle at Medicine Bear’s sweat lodge ceremony to finding a lost briefcase with $30,000 in jewels and being gifted two boxes of Girl scout cookies in return. But rather than reading more, best would be for you to join him at one of his fall classes listed in the events section! I’ll see you there! If you’d like to connect with Walks with Thunder, please feel free to call him at 253-350-5755 or email him at[email protected]