From Blocked Energy to Enlightened Leaders: Lessons from a Shamanic Retreat

A few weeks ago, I came back from a two-week retreat in Sweden called Shamanic Body Dearmoring.

On the surface, it was about:

• Energy
• The body
• Healing

Underneath, it turned out to be about:

• Sexual energy as life force
• Information as medicine
• What attraction might really be
• And why enlightened leaders might be crucial for where humanity goes next

It was the kind of experience that’s hard to put into words and very easy to dismiss if you only look through a conventional Western lens.

Yet, if you’re willing to see the body as energy plus information instead of just atoms and organs, the pieces start to fit together.

The body as energy, not just matter

The lineage behind the retreat, the Sweet Medicine Sundance tradition, is over 3,000 years old.

Its elders, from hundreds of tribes across the Americas, braided their knowledge together into what they call the twisted hairs: a unified set of teachings on how to live, heal, love, and relate.

At the core is a simple idea:

The body is flowing energy.
Over time, we accumulate blockages.
Healing is about restoring natural flow.

Shamanic body dearmoring is the process of:

• Finding where energy is stuck
• Releasing those blocks
• Letting life force move again

In modern terms, you could think of it as:

• Physiology + nervous system + subtle energy
• All viewed as one integrated system

Sexual energy and life force: not two different things

One of the big insights for me was this:

Sexual energy is not a separate category.
It is life force, expressed in a particular way.

Different traditions have different words:

• Prana
• Chi
• Kundalini

Underneath, they’re pointing to the same phenomenon.

This retreat made explicit what many only hint at:

• Orgasmic states are not just private pleasures.
• They are gateways:
  • To altered states of consciousness
  • To deeper connection with the “void”, the field, the One
  • To intensified manifestation and healing

Orgasm, as described here, is:

The charging and discharging of energy.

And that charging/discharging can be:

• Sexual
• Breath-induced
• Or generated through other embodied practices.

The gateway we were never told about

If orgasmic states are genuine doorways to:

• Higher awareness
• Stronger manifestation
• Deep healing

…then a lot of cultural messaging starts to look suspicious.

Most of us were taught:

• Sex is private, sometimes shameful.
• Masturbation is wrong or childish.
• Sexual energy is something to be controlled, not cultivated.

At no point did anyone say:

“By the way, this energy is one of your most direct gateways to the field that underlies everything.”

I’m not accusing religions or institutions of conspiracy for its own sake. But it is hard to ignore the pattern:

• A major key to power, presence, and connection is:
  • Not named as a key
  • Often actively discouraged

From a leadership standpoint, that’s relevant:

• We are taught to optimise our mental and productive capacities.
• We are rarely taught to work skilfully with our energetic and sexual capacities.
• And yet those are the very capacities that:
  • Boost intuition
  • Accelerate healing
  • Amplify the power of intention

Concrete shifts: intensity, intuition, and self-healing

What actually changes when you work with this?

For me, a few things are already clear:

1. More intense energetic states

   • Orgasms and other energy surges feel:
     • Stronger
     • Fuller
     • Less controlled by the mind

2. Heightened intuition

   • I’ve watched my intuition develop over the years.
   • Post-retreat, it feels:
     • Clearer
     • Easier to access
     • More trustworthy

3. Greater self-healing capacity

   • The underlying model:
     • Free-flowing energy = health
     • Blocked energy = illness
   • Dearmoring appears to:
     • Remove blockages
     • Give the body’s own healing intelligence more room to work

4. Stronger intentional power

   • When you hold a clear intent in a heightened energetic state:
     • It’s like attaching that intent to a rocket rather than a bicycle.
   • Tantric rituals use this deliberately:
     • Group clarifies an intention
     • Uses energy practices to reach peak states
     • Sends the intention into the field

I’m not claiming superhuman abilities.
I am saying:

The changes are coherent with the model, and they feel very real.

Attraction as an emergency call

Parallel to the retreat, something unfolded in my personal life:

• A strong attraction to a woman
• Brief, intense closeness
• Followed by her sudden withdrawal and silence

On one level, this could simply be:

• “It didn’t work out. Be disappointed. Move on.”

On another, given the framework I’m describing, it invites deeper questions:

What is attraction actually signalling?

Is it:

• Pure chemistry?
• “Genuine love” or “soulmates”?
• Or could it sometimes be:
  • A healing call from one soul to another?
  • Two people being drawn together because their systems have work to do?

A shaman I worked with once said:

“Part of your path is to be a healer.
You will often feel attracted where there is a need for healing.”

I don’t treat that as final truth. But when I review past attractions, a pattern is visible:

• Many involved people (including me) with deep healing work to do.

From this perspective, attraction can be:

• A signal
• An invitation
• Sometimes, an emergency call.

This frames relationships less as “success/failure” and more as:

“What healing process might be being asked for here?”

Merging chakras and information medicine

In this tradition, people are seen as:

Energy vortices – fields of spinning energy (chakras), not just physical bodies.

When two people merge chakras:

• 1st chakra with 1st, 2nd with 2nd, etc.
• Their energy fields interlock and synchronise.
• They become, for a time, one shared field.

From a healing perspective:

• If one person’s field is relatively “clean” (fewer blockages),
• And the other’s field is more disrupted,
• Merging allows:
  • The clean field to serve as a blueprint.
  • The disrupted field to copy and adjust.

That’s what I mean by information medicine:

• Nothing physical is transferred.
• What moves is the information:
  • “This is how healthy energy flows.”
• The patient’s system:
  • Uses that pattern as a reference.
  • Gradually reorganises around it.
  • Symptoms shift as a side-effect of the new pattern.

This isn’t that different from how we use:

• Training data in machine learning
• Reference models in engineering
• Best practices in organisations

We forget that our bodies and energy fields might work the same way.

The spiritual womb transfer: balancing masculine and feminine

One specific experience brought this home.

I received a spiritual womb transfer:

• A shamanic woman with a physically and energetically healthy womb
• Transferred the blueprint of that to me as a spiritual womb.
• Not because I had none, but because my connection to it was blocked or under-used.

What it felt like:

• An intense wave of emotion:
  • Love for the healer
  • Deep gratitude
  • Tears and laughter together
• A physical sensation:
  • Belly expanding
  • More space, more presence in the lower body
• Afterwards:
  • Greater access to qualities we might call “feminine”:
    • Receiving
    • Caring
    • Holding

Interpreting it through the balance lens:

• Every man has inner feminine aspects (and vice versa).
• My masculine side was more activated; feminine less so.
• The transfer helped rebalance that:
  • More symmetry between action and receptivity.
  • Better conditions for energy to flow cleanly.

From a leadership perspective, that balance is not a luxury.
It’s central to how we:

• Decide
• Relate
• Hold power

From corners to the centre of the room

A simple metaphor sums up the importance of balance:

Imagine your life and leadership as a room.

• When you’re out of balance:

  • You’re stuck in a corner.
  • Movement limited.
  • Reaction often driven by fear and reactivity.

• When you’re in balance:

  • You stand closer to the centre.
  • You have room in every direction.
  • You can move, respond, and act with freedom.

It doesn’t matter if the axis is:

• Masculine / feminine
• Child / adult
• Spiritual / material

Whenever one side completely dominates, you get pushed into a corner.
Balance brings you back toward the centre.

A martial artist knows this instinctively:
You don’t want to be boxed into a corner in a fight.

The same applies to leadership.

The gold horse and enlightened leaders

One of the most powerful metaphors from the Sweet Medicine Sundance tradition is a horse race that symbolises possible futures for humanity.

Different horses, different outcomes:

• A red horse:
  • Planet Earth “fights back”
  • Disasters, climate chaos, turbulence
• Other horses:
  • Different configurations of conflict, stagnation, or partial progress
• A gold horse:
  • Humanity reaches its highest potential
  • We remember who we are and how deeply we belong to each other

The elders said:

For the gold horse to win, the world must be gifted with enlightened leaders and free-thinking minds.

When I read that, I was stunned.

Because that line describes, almost word for word, what my work has been gravitating toward:

• Leadership enlightenment
• Helping executives and influencers move beyond:
  • Purely materialist models
  • Old power dynamics
  • Narrow stories of self and success

The retreat therefore isn’t just about:

• Better sex
• Personal healing
• Interesting experiences

It’s part of preparing myself – and potentially others – to be the kind of leaders and free-thinkers that give the gold horse a chance.

What this means for you as a leader

You don’t need to adopt shamanic practices to take something important from this.

A few questions may be enough:

1. Where is your energy blocked?

   • Physically?
   • Emotionally?
   • In your work?
   • In your relationships?

2. What if attraction is sometimes a healing signal?

   • Are there relationships in your life that might be less about “success/failure” and more about mutual work to do?

3. What patterns are you unconsciously copying or transmitting?

   • As a leader, you are always radiating a blueprint:
     • Of how power flows
     • Of how safety feels
     • Of how truth is handled
   • People around you “copy-paste” that pattern far more than your words.

4. Where are you out of balance?

   • Too much doing, too little receiving?
   • Too much adult, not enough childlike play?
   • Too much head, not enough body?

5. Which horse are you feeding?

   • Are you reinforcing fear, control, and separation?
   • Or are you actively developing into a leader who could reasonably be called “enlightened” in the practical sense:
     • Self-aware
     • Energetically clean enough
     • Free-thinking

We don’t control the whole race.
But we do control:

• The stories we live by
• The energy we embody
• The patterns we pass on

And that might be more than enough to help the gold horse run a little faster.

(This article was inspired by a Conscious Conversation with a dear friend & professional colleague on 15th May 2024.)