about
rachel mann, founder and owner
In 2007, I left a long and successful career in Academia to do this work more actively in the outside world, on the “front lines”. While working as a full-time administrator and professor at the University of Virginia, I did research and teaching in the field of violence studies. Like many other anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and psychologists, I was attempting to develop a deeper understanding about how and why violence happens and how to avoid it.
This interest started at the age of 15 when I read Russian dissident writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich about the life of a man in the Soviet concentration camp under the Stalinist regime. Eventually, I got a BA in Russian Studies, then an MA in Soviet Studies and then a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures with an emphasis in the fields of anthropology and folklore. This intensive study of one of the most pernicious authoritarian governments and violence-ridden cultures of the modern world led me to wanting to understand patterns of conflict on a more pan-human basis.
In addition to my Academic studies, my thinking was eventually directly informed by my lifelong engagement with the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddhism and of indigenous spirituality, sometimes called shamanism. I also studied western psychology, in particular the insights of Carl Jung, and the study of trauma by anthropologists, historians, religious and literary scholars, and science.
As an educator, scholar and writer, I am deeply involved in teaching westerners about the power and validity of the shamans and shamanism of both indigenous peoples and in the emerging healing and spiritual movements adapted from them in the West. I show them that these wisdom traditions and healing practices can be put on the same footing as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and the Muslim faiths.
In my work to help all of us mend the collective wounds that have made violence and conflict to ubiquitous in our world, I also link the words and works of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other 20th and 21st century peacekeepers to the teachings of peace, healing and compassion found in shamanism and other indigenous wisdom traditions. We do not have to give up our own beliefs and religions to learn from the teachings of compassion and caring of shamanism. Through an understanding of how violence has made us all fearful and reactive, we can begin to unwind the patterns in our minds and bodies that lead to problems of racism, genocide, and armed conflict.
As someone who once suffered from PTSD and a chronic illness that could not be cured by western medicine, I also know from personal experience that these traditions and practices offer us something very unique in service of healing. Many of my private healing clients have attempted to cure their problems with anxiety, depression, panic attacks, interpersonal conflict, insomnia, and other symptoms of trauma through western medicine and psychology without complete success. While what I do does not in any way replace the best of western medicine, it can intersect in powerful and effective ways with it.
Shamanism also gives us a way to place our personal healing in the context of healing the world. It gives us hope that as we do the sorely needed work to heal ourselves, we can help others. This is extremely important to many of my clients, who fear that if they focus on their own healing, they are being selfish.
As a result of my understandings about global violence, trauma, healing, and peace, I wish to convey there is a new and simultaneously ancient body of knowledge that can help us create a new age of peace and healing. I want to shift the perception that is out there that the “New Age” is somehow on the fringe and filled with flakey and crazy ideas more akin to the occult, superstition, and greed.
This work for me includes the non-human species in our troubled world. I am an animal lover who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with my Great Pyrenees puppy, Tea and Sympathy, “Sym” for short, and my little rescue Pug named Wee. Because of my love of the furry ones in our world (and the feathered, scaled, shelled, and smooth) and my concern for the ways they are also victims of human abandonment, neglect, violence, and abuse, I seek to support those who are brave and hardy enough to work with animals in need, as well. By doing this work in service of the well being of all of us on Mother Earth, I honor the lessons and love given to me by many teachers and mentors, from human to non-human throughout my life. May we all find peace.