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August Thalhamer and I first met more than ten years ago while on an expedition to the shamans in Tuva, Siberia. It was an experience that had a lasting effect on both of us. In this book, August is telling us about his deep connection with the shaman, Saryglar Borbak Ool. On our long journeys across the steppe and in the twilight of the Siberian nights, we began a dialogue about our different approaches in our search for shamanism. We were both looking for a shamanism that can be effectively applied to our Western civilization, alongside medicine, psychotherapy and other spiritual healing methods. Since then, we have continued a loose exchange of our thoughts. I love shamanic practitioners who not only apply ancient healing rituals to obtain wondrous results, but also continue their research into the background of this archaic healing knowledge. Ones who do this with understanding – respectful of the knowledge of our own culture, which has conditioned our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting since birth. August Thalhamer is such a healer, thinker, investigator, philosopher, and teacher.

August Thalhamer is a trained priest and psychotherapist who has been following his own spiritual path for many years. He weaves his rich professional and personal experience and extensive knowledge into a carpet that constitutes the basics of psycho-spiritual healing. The author names his book The Shaman’s Way of Healing. A shaman’s way is not a path in the usual sense. A shaman’s training does not follow a prescribed syllabus. The healing work cannot be organized into a causal sequence of individual steps. The rituals cannot be simplified into an easy instruction manual.

Aside from that, August Thalhamer contemplates the shaman in the light of Western psychotherapy and Christian tradition. Psychotherapy, with its array of methodical approaches, scatters colorful lights onto the remaining vestiges of shamanism among the different indigenous peoples on several continents. Moreover, shamanism is empirical knowledge passed down by word of mouth. Most of what we know about it today comes second hand from ethnologists and anthropologists. The Christian tradition, as passed down from the apostles, church fathers, philosophers and Popes, is endlessly multifaceted.

Therefore, I see The Shaman’s Way of Healing rolling out in front of us like a carpet when we open up this book, wherever we are on our journey. It becomes a power place that has a healing and enlightening effect within us. Otherwise, I would say that August Thalhamer is paving a way forward: founded in the depths of ancient shamanic knowledge, spreading out in the basic pattern of Christianity, and embellished with multi-colored, mosaic inlays of the most diverse psychological and spiritual models. In fact, everything that Thalhamer has collected about shamanism along his way, from various indigenous traditions and antique philosophical insights to today‘s constructivists, from the schools of Freud and Jung to humanistic and transpersonal psychology, and from Christianity, from the Old Testament to modern Spirituality: All of this is already known. However, the author uses them to create patterns that intentionally merge with one another. In doing so, he creates new perspectives and insights into healing. This book presents a challenge. You can only follow your own way along these patterns. In retracing them, in contemplating them, in assimilating them, you are on your own … for they work in mysterious ways.

The second challenge is this book’s courageous commitment to the shaman. With The Shaman’s Way of Healing, August Thalhamer takes us on his own healing journey. This is the way of the wounded healer, as shamans often are called, because they gain their healing power through their own suffering and healing. Suffering is the passage through dying, death and resurrection. It is an initiation, a calling to a second life as a shaman and healer. Therefore, the author begins with how his chronic back pain of many years was magically healed. He dedicates a whole chapter to his life’s shamanic journey. With the help of many examples, we gain insight into his own work as a healer. He dares to profess himself as a shaman and emissary of an ancient knowledge. However, as a rational contemporary, he does this with hesitation because he can also sense our hesitation. After all, he is asking us to believe him when he says he received a calling by otherworldly entities to be an eternal ambassador of their forgotten knowledge.

However, this hesitation is not the reason August has gathered so many living companions and venerable ancestors around himself along his way. Here, we not only find all the great names from psychology, philosophy and many religious figures, we also meet contemporary companions such as Bert Hellinger, Stanislav Grof, Serge Kahili King, Willigis Jäger, Anselm Grün, Sylvester Walch, and Roger Walsh. August Thalhamer pays tribute to the works of others and connects it to an ever-widening network of people. This is the only way that increasing amounts of healing knowledge and work can crystallize – and soften up the rigid structure of the axis of evil that has been conjured into this world.

The third challenge of this book is Thalhamer’s passion for healing. For him, healing means deliverance from disease, suffering and pain. For healing, he applies the rituals of the ancient shamans. For healing, he cries, prays and implores magical entities along with the Christian God for their healing power. He understands them all as forces of a greater whole. Thereby, he achieves a style of conceptual transcendence. He finds himself again as a shaman who, in the end, only initiates healing with the power of the Universal One, regardless of what this force is called in the service of religions, philosophies or psychologies. Thalhamer breaks through the walls erected against the ancient healing powers of nature with the same terminology these disciplines used to erect them. As a result, the original life force can resume its work. This is the challenge and the gift of this book. May it reach many people.

Dr Carlo Zumstein

March 29th, 2007

Founder and Director of the

Foundation for Living Shamanism and Spirituality,

now: The Art of Bridging TAOB Foundation