The Balanzu Way School has a full website of its own these days, go check it out.
The Balanzu Way School of Healing and Shamanic Arts offers year-long
programs and a three-year apprenticeship for folks interested in learning to
work with shamanic tools, either for their own healing, or to work
professionally with others.
The foundation of our school is our one-year Healing the Wounded Healer
program, where folks work with a shared cohort to transform themselves and
prepare to enter any healing field. After this first year, anyone interested to
pursue shamanic work must be called to it by the spirits of our tradition. If
accepted, in their second year with us, apprentices take the same skills and
tools they learned in their first year, and begin to practice them with each
other and clients at a monthly clinic under supervision. They learn to work
with the spirits of the Balanzu Way, as they also deepen and diversify into
their own, unique ancestral practices, and what is taught to them by their own
spirit guides. In their third year, apprentices are supported to open their own
practice, beginning under the umbrella of the Balanzu Way, and see clients on
their own while receiving weekly supervision.
We believe in the old method of relational apprenticeship work, while
managing it in a modern way similar to models of graduate school in healthcare
fields, which Western people are more familiar with. We strive to blend these
Western and indigenous ways into something that makes sense in a modern world,
while still being in integrity with the old.
As a community, we draw a variety of queer, trans, and BIPOC folks, as well
as folks of other backgrounds who are concerned with social justice and
thoughtful about the harms of cultural appropriation, and about engaging in
this work in an authentic and respectful way. The Tradition is grounded in our
founder’s Mexican/indigenous heritage and shamanic practice, and is guided by
the spirits they work with. These beings offer permission to everyone in our
tradition to learn from and work with them as a shared Way, while each person
in the Balanzu Way also learns to develop their own separate relationship with
their ancestral ways of healing/magic/shamanic practice as well.
In the Balanzu Way, we see ourselves as having one foot in each world, which
allows us to be united, but also richly different, and honoring of our cultural
backgrounds, instead of appropriating the ways of others. This is one of the
things that makes us very different from the many primarily white folks
teaching shamanic techniques strip-mined from cultures of color, which were
taught to them primarily by other white folks who don’t have authentic
relationships to those cultures. This is one of the biggest modern shadows of
shamanic work that contributes to a legacy of colonial harm, and it is
something that, in itself, needs to be healed.
So what exactly is the Balanzu Way? We are a shamanic energywork
tradition based on the balance between dualities, and the power of
transformation that rises in the space between. Most of us called to the
Balanzu Way bridge many different worlds and are creating our own unique path,
in relationship with others. Apprenticeship training in the Balanzu Way is a
challenging shamanic warrior path of intensive personal and spiritual growth.
Practitioners of the Way go through powerful initiatory ‘Gateways’ where they
must face and overcome their greatest fears with dedication, courage, and
sacrifice. Through this process, apprentices gain knowledge, power, clarity,
and compassion, while honing their intuitive gifts as spirit workers and
healers.
Practitioners of the Balanzu Way learn to cleanse and protect themselves and
their spaces energetically, to channel messages from guides and spirits, and to
vision into the past, future, and deeper into the empathic present for guidance
and counseling. They perform energy rebalancing, soul retrieval, past-life
work, cord-cutting, entity detachment, and other effective healing practices
that transform their own lives, and the lives of their clients. While all
apprentices of the Balanzu Way share distinctive hallmarks of the tradition,
each practitioner’s gifts are honored and unique. If you find yourself reading
and resonating with this, and want to work with the tradition or someone in it,
be assured you haven’t arrived here by accident. Welcome to the Way!
If you’re interested to find out more about shamanic apprenticeship or our
Healing the Wounded Healer program, please email your interest to Jai at jai@jaimedina.com.