LJ Navera is a Filipino master craftsman, sound alchemist and artist in Lipa City, Batangas.[1] He can play more than a hundred instruments and made most of them himself: didgeridoos, handpans, Native American flutes, African djembes and shamanic drums.[1] In 2023 he built the first handpan made in the Philippines.[2] He was never trained in music. Everything he composes and everything he plays is intuitive.[1] He is also a recognised painter and sculptor, a professional tattoo artist and an art therapy facilitator.[4] He combines them when he works with others. He was a pioneer resident sound healer and art therapy facilitator at The Farm at San Benito.[1] He has been in recovery from depression for more than twenty-five years and works as an addiction professional and a life coach,[4] and he was the resident sound healer at the 2022 National Mental Health Summit, run by Mind You with the Philippine Department of Health.[4]
Carlos performs as Cardan Balam, a musician and ceremonialist who fuses pre-Hispanic instruments, prayer and live electronic production. His touring project is Cardan Balam Ancestral Music.[1][2] Born in Atlixco, Puebla, he leads cacao ceremonies, temazcal and Hikuri ceremonies from his own ceremonial space in Playa del Carmen, on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán.[1] His path crossed with Mayan culture and with Wixárika (Huichol) shamans when he was young, and he represents Wixárika, Mexica and Maya shamans today.[1] He founded Colectivo Cultura Ancestral, and with his family works to preserve Mayan lands and heritage in the Yucatán.[1] He has released music since 2021, most of it on the Balam Music Label, and in July 2024 he led the Tribal Village at Dreamersland Festival in Poland.[5][6] In November 2023 he was one of three credited artists on Sukum Balam, a five-track electronica album on the Balam Music label.[3] His Instagram, @cardan_balam_musica, has about 25,000 followers.[2]
Guilherme Barcellos Carlos de Souza, also known as Gui Tantan, is a therapist in Florianópolis, Brazil, who trains others to facilitate shamanic family constellations.[1][2] He holds a Master of Arts in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica in California, and is certified in family and organizational constellation through Hellinger Sciencia, the school of Bert Hellinger, who created the method.[2][3] He teaches constellation work to psychotherapists in Brazil, South Africa and Mexico.[2][3] With his partner Iana Barcellos he runs Caminhantes do Amor, a Florianópolis practice offering systemic shamanism, psychotherapy and training.[4][5] His work joins constellation to ritual from African and American shamanic lines, among them Kambô, temazcal, vision quest and Bhula, the Zulu divination he learned in KwaZulu-Natal.[6][13] He also runs constellations with horses.[12] He holds a postgraduate qualification in medicinal cannabis, taught in part by the Brazilian neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro, and has practised some of his therapeutic methods since 1996.[3]
Frances Carrington flew into India in 1995 on a two year contract, a trained fashion designer who had worked out by the end of the training that the fashion world was not for her.[5] She stayed eighteen years. Australian Volunteers Abroad sent her to Dharamsala, somewhere she had never planned to go and knew nothing about, and within the first week she was sitting in an average sized room with the Dalai Lama. "He walked into the room and he was the room."[5] She went in expecting nothing and came out with the thought she has followed ever since: he looks human, he acts human, so if he can do it, surely I can.[5] She has been in full time craniosacral practice since 2011, these days out of Chiang Mai.[1][5] Hugh Milne certified her in Visionary Craniosacral Work and she has assisted him in teaching for years.[1][2] She carries the biodynamic lineage as well, a BA in osteopathy out of Madrid, and Chi Nei Tsang, which works straight on the internal organs.[1] The other half of her is shamanic. She trained in core shamanism with Michael Harner's Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and she has sat more than thirty Vipassana courses, ten and twenty days at a time, which most humans will not do once.[5]
Isao Kato is a Japanese shamanic practitioner who works with the drum and rattle, and a member of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies' faculty for Asia and Oceania.[1][3] He has completed the Foundation's three-year programme and its shamanic healing training, and his specialisations are psychopomp work, guiding the dead onward, and house clearing.[2] He offers soul retrieval, extraction, guardian spirit retrieval, psychopomp work and space clearing, in person or remotely.[1] Based out of Chiang Mai, Thailand, he has practised shamanic healing and divination for more than a decade.[2][4] He came to this from a corporate career in engineering and technical writing.[1][5] He says the physical world is the dream, and dying is waking up.[4]
Jamie Wrate is a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy practitioner and an IFS-informed, trauma-informed coach, working between the United Kingdom and Chiang Mai, Thailand.[1] He is listed in the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute's therapist directory, and he holds a law degree, a BA (Hons) and a postgraduate teaching qualification.[2] His approach puts the body first. Sensorimotor work slows and settles the nervous system, and inside that settled state he does parts work using Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems model.[1] Behind it sits a long apprenticeship: seven years with the Brazilian shaman and psychotherapist Alba Maria Nunes, including two and a half years living in shamanic community and a five-year initiation into facilitation, and training in Somatic Plant Medicine Integration under Atira Tan.[1] He has been doing men's work since 2009 and shamanic healing work since 2011.[3] He offers private sessions, men's circles and plant medicine integration circles,[1][3] and holds integration retreats in northern Thailand, the next two in Doi Saket and Pai in January 2027.[4]
Nicolas Schindler is a French clinical hypnotherapist and regression therapist who practises as WiZinYou from Chiang Mai, Thailand.[1] He works with clinical hypnotherapy, regression therapy, and family and karmic constellations.[4] He came to the work after two decades in corporate business-to-business and business-to-government roles, including as Business Development Director for government security solutions at SICPA Asia Development.[1][2] Burnout ended that career in 2017.[1] He has lived in Southeast Asia since 2011.[1] What followed was a thorough retraining. He took clinical hypnotherapy through all five levels of the EKAA Foundation's programme, starting in 2018, and trained in Transpersonal Regression Therapy, family constellations, NLP to Master Practitioner level, core shamanism with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies Asia, and Usui Reiki.[1][3] His method draws on Dr John Kappas's Theory of Mind, which holds that the subconscious makes up ninety per cent of the mind, and goes to where a present-day problem was first set.[1]
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