Eliot Cowan is the author of Plant Spirit Medicine, and a fully initiated Tsaurirrikame (shaman) in the Huichol Indian tradition. He began the study and practice of herbalism in the 1960’s and completed a Master of Acupuncture degree with J.R. Worsley in England in the 1970’s. Eliot subsequently apprenticed with Don Guadalupe Gonzalez Rios, a Huichol Indian Shaman. On the occasion of Don Guadalupe’s retirement in 2000, he ritually recognized Eliot as a guide to shamanic apprentices in the Huichol tradition. This was an unprecedented honor for a person of our culture.

Eliot is the founder of the the Blue Deer Center and is a member of the Council of Elders for the Temple of Sacred Fire Healing. As a provider at the Blue Deer Center, Eliot Cowan offers Plant Spirit Medicine practitioner training courses, continuing education for PSM practitioners, healing camps based on traditional Huichol shamanic healing, and animal totem courses.

Luisa was born into a family lineage of healers. Her father was a physician and psychiatrist. Her maternal grandmother was Concepción Palacios, the first female physician in Central America; her great-grandmother Báltazara was a curandera in El Sauce, Nicaragua.

In early childhood, Luisa began experiencing inner visions, clairvoyant dreams and auditory guidance. The lack of  spiritual mentors at that that time meant she lived with the emotional pain and confusion that comes from navigating blindly between consensual reality and a vivid non-ordinary inner reality.

At 14, Luisa had a breakdown of her rational and perceptual processes. She was told by an inner voice that she was “shedding a skin” and that the process would last for one year. The experience subsided one year later. This period of isolation and destabilization led to a deeper opening of Luisa’s psychic and intuitive abilities.

This period of inner deconstruction facilitated a disintegration and subsequent reorganization of ego structures, allowing Luisa natural access to non-ordinary states of consciousness. Such a core death-rebirth experience is a common feature of initiation into a shamanic life.

Education & Training

Luisa has a B.A. in humanities from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was an assistant producer for the Source Theater Company and editorial assistant to editor Richard Peabody of Gargoyle Magazine in Washington, DC. Through Peabody, she encountered the writings of Paul Bowles (“The Sheltering Sky”), and felt a kinship with Bowles’ exploration of chaos and magic in the unconscious territories of the psyche.

Feeling alienated from American culture and values, Luisa left the U.S. to find Paul Bowles in Morocco. She met and spent time with him; it was a pivotal experience for her.

From Morocco she went on to Ibiza, Spain where she met master-healer Ioanna Salajan*. Ioanna saw in Luisa the natural qualities of a healer and mystic. She recognized her as the student for whom she had been waiting to transmit the teachings of her lineage. She invited Luisa to engage in a one-on-one apprenticeship over the course of the next four-and-a-half years.

After her apprenticeship with Ioanna, Luisa returned to the United States in the early 1990s.

Her healing practice began to blossom by word-of-mouth and Luisa specialized in working shamanically with terminally ill clients. She learned to midwife the death & dying journey for clients and their families. Her work in this area was influenced by the conscious dying teachings of Ram Dass and Stephen Levine.

Luisa studied the trance posture work of Felicitas Goodman with psychologist Johanna Maybury (Cuyamungue Institute). With author and medical astrologer Marcia Starck she learned the foundations of earth-based spiritual ceremony. Her association with Joan Halifax Roshi (Upaya Foundation) deepened Luisa’s understanding of Zazen sitting meditation and Buddhism. She also became an apprentice in the Sweet Medicine Sundance lineage and was initiated in the teachings of meditation master and mystic Osho.

Luisa has a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology from Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a licensed psychotherapist in the state of New Mexico.

Luisa is a referring therapist for The Meadows treatment center in Wickenburg, AZ. She has been trained by (and participates in ongoing case-consultation) with Pia Mellody (author of “Facing Codependence” and “Facing Love Addiction”) in family-of-origin emotional trauma resolution therapy.

Luisa’s mission is to assist others in transforming their self-defeating patterns into joyful, passionate authenticity. The ultimate aim is to live a life of integrity, passion, spontaneity and joy. Luisa says: “My relationship with my inner world and the wilderness inside my own being generates an empathic and  respectful relationship with the natural world outside of me. My responsibility as a human being is to be a vessel for beauty and balance and to give that back to the world and to this planet, which give me so much.”

For Luisa, the shamanic path is one that she lives and breathes. It is her life’s work.

Luisa provides shamanic and psychotherapeutic consultation for individuals of all ages, facilitates dynamic workshops, seasonal ceremonies, and ongoing shamanic journey circles. She works in person, by Skype and over the phone with clients in New Mexico, across the U.S. and all over the world. She currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Marlise Wabun Wind, M.S., is the author of ten non-fiction books, with over two million copies in print worldwide in many languages. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in international communications from George Washington University. She is a lifelong student of cross-cultural healing, complementary and holistic medicine, and wellness. One of her books is about integrative healing, and several others are about cross-cultural healing techniques, comparative philosophies, religions and spirituality.

Ms. Wind was searching for an alternative to the surgical treatments for an arthritic ankle when she was referred to Dr. Shiple, and it was through him that she learned about RIT and underwent successful treatment. Her enthusiasm over the results of her experience led her to collaborate with Dr. Shiple on Regenerative Healing For Life.

Because of her own knowledge of the physical limitations of other illnesses, and pain, Ms. Wind has become an advocate for RIT and related non-invasive treatments. She has lectured widely on topics related to integrative healing, complementary and holistic medicine, and wellness.

She is currently working on several other projects, including a novel and a spiritual adventure memoir, as well as four other non-fiction titles concerning ceremony and celebrations, relationships, parenting healthy children, and “mother sense.”

I created Cedar Mountain Drums following a Vision Quest after making drums as a hobby for two years.  I had previously been a Gestalt Therapist, stockbroker, fund raising consultant and play therapist. I have published many articles on drumming as an alternative to drugs and alcohol to achieve high states, and have led drumming circles for corporations such as Nike, The Design Management Institute, prisons, churches and rehabilitation houses. I lead weekly drumming circles here at our home. I also leads circles for men, personal growth groups, and travels doing shows and drum making workshops across the world.

I live, love and make beauty at FLOWERSONG - an exquisite orchard garden retreat sanctuary in north central Washington – in a quiet and sweet fruit-growing, ranching valley. FLOWERSONG is dedicated to the expression of love and light which supports the flowering of our two-legged family and All Our Relations.

Please note that I am making available for download some wonderful teachings and music. I’d love to support your life with them, and be supported in turn!

It’s wonderful to be clear, awake and open-hearted at this amazing time on sweet Mother Earth, as the love and light comes in assist her movement into a new and golden time – Lady Gaia at her most beautiful! We passed into this new Age at the end of last year, and are now being showered with the high energies that will help us begin to move ourselves joyfully into a harmonious and abundant way of life. Since this Golden Age is prophecied to be 1000 years long, we are just tiny newborns in it.

One of the Mayan groups speaks of the people of the new time as “people made of honey”, and I love that image. It means we will be SWEET, deeply connected with flowers and creating wonderful, nurturing, healing things for all around us! It’s a practice for me to ask myself, “How can I be made of honey today? What kind of being and doing will help the flowering of life on Earth today?”

My home is named FLOWERSONG, which comes from the teachings shared by the wisdom teachers of the Americas who studied the Dawn Star’s ways in the central American temples and then came back north, spreading loving wisdom about the flowering of the Earth and All Our Relations. We will built the new world on these ways.