The four secret words in shamanism

Pleasure and joy are an important part of the Shamanic Apprenticeship that I offer

Every solid shamanic training or initiation should walk you through the spiral of the four directions - in other words: the Medicine Wheel. Understanding and integrating the nature of this wheel is a cultural and habitual question, it makes little sense, for example, to try to walk an Atzek Medicine Wheel from 700 years ago in today’s Tokyo.

But, the Spiral itself is also not a toy or a play room in which you’re meant to rearrange everything according to your liking. It’s, in all of its perplexities, an occult and mystical tool for healing and manifestation, to be taken seriously and studied properly.

The way I train and initiate into this wheel is based on four words, which we hardly mention, but work around:

The first word is STORY.

Your life is not a problem to be solved. It is a story that wants to be inhabited. Everything that has happened to you — the pain, the wildness, the betrayals, the moments of inexplicable grace — is the material. Not the wound. The material. In this lineage, we learn to read our own stories with new eyes. To find the golden thread that was always there. To become the author again.

The second word is WONDER.

We do not yet know what is real. That is not a weakness — that is the beginning of everything. In this apprenticeship, we train ourselves to be genuinely and stubbornly open to what cannot be explained. We practice not-knowing. We step into mystery and discover that it holds us. Marvelling at the wonder is not naïve. It is brave. It is the bravest thing of all.

The third word is ROMANCE.

I mean this precisely. Not sentimentality — romance. Eros. The felt pull of life toward life. The sense that the mountain knows you. That the river is speaking. That your relationships — with your body, with your ancestors, with the sacred — can be lived with hunger, tenderness, and full presence. Love in this lineage is not a spiritual concept. It is, in the most romantic way imaginable, the actual medicine.

The fourth word is PEACE.

Not the peace of having solved yourself. Not the peace of finally being good enough. The peace of surrender — of following your heart, even when your mind thinks it's dangerous. Of trusting that your belonging here was never in question. This is the peace we are building: not the absence of fire, but the fire burning in the right direction.

What the year actually looks like

We swim in the waterfall behind the house.

We eat well — really well. Long meals, good wine, the kind of evening that doesn't end until it's ready to.

We play with Puma, my dog, who has no interest in your trauma arc and enormous interest in whether you're present right now.

We paint our nails. We drink champagne if we want to. We make completely inappropriate jokes. We sit in circles and tell each other the truth.

We do real ceremony — not theater, not performance, not a spiritual experience designed to impress you. Real ceremony, in the mountains, with lineage behind it and the land underneath us.

And yes — we do shadow work. We do it because we love life, not because we're afraid of it. We are not digging and digging and digging at old wounds until you forget why you came. We are integrating. We are making things whole. There is a difference, and you will feel that difference the moment you arrive.

No ayahuasca. No plant medicine theatre. No guru in white claiming to have the answers.

Just you. The mountains. The lineage. The work that actually sticks.

Is this for you?

You've been on this path for a while. You've done the retreats, the ceremonies, the courses. You've learned the language. And somewhere in you that unresolved question is still there:

Is this real? Is any of it real?

The Peacekeeper's Lineage is for those who want to experience something REAL. Who are done with borrowed wisdom and ready for direct experience. Who want to come home — to themselves, to their story, to their life — and never leave again.

The next cycle begins this year in Berzona Onsernone, Ticino.

Send me a message if you’re interested in this kind of nomorbullshit initiation!