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!