Hybridized Shamanism is a developing model of traditional shamanism for the 21st century.
Algonquin Medicine Man, Pete Bernard has been on a personal journey of healing and reclamation of himself and now the creation of the person he is meant and wanting to be.
Rather than erasing the dark for the light, Pete practices and teaches acceptance of all of who we are so we can heal, learn and grow. His most recent focus is in the normalization of healing. Knowing that as a society today we have done an awesome job at normalizing trauma it is now time to make healing the new norm.
Learn more by listening to his recent interview with Rebecca Happy at Ottawa BuzzTV
TRANSCRIPT:
Good afternoon. It’s Rebecca Happy here again for the WOO Spiritual Summit and today we have our special guest speaker, Pete Bernard, also known as the Algonquin Medicine Man who operates out of the City of Ottawa and he’s going to tell us a little bit about himself and what we can expect to hear from him when he comes to the event.
I’m so happy to meet you here in this format and thanks for joining us. Thank you very much for having me, Rebecca. Yeah. So I’m sure there’s lots of people who know who you are, and equally there’s probably lots who don’t. I’m a big fan. So my, yeah, my name is Pete Bernard. I’m an Algonquin healer. And you might say I do hybridized shamanism.
So hybridized is Any form of like earth based healing that, you know, it blends certain aspects of things or it has grown from its root, it’s not limited to it. So with our understanding of healing, how, how it has progressed, how it changes, it’s basically that exploration of the human experience of how do we live?
Why do we live? And more importantly, how do we heal the things that happen to us or for us in our lives? When Did you do go, well, like I need to do this path.
I really felt that you had to embrace it. And make it fully your life purpose. I think around age nine, for sure, I knew that enough things had gone wrong, that it had changed me from who I initially was. It’s very difficult to identify with myself before then, and it’s not because I have no memory, but the memory I have is pretty traumatic.
So, I think in our lives, part of you, you’re trying to not lose anything else in your life. A lot of people live their life that way. It’s like, I just don’t want anything else bad to happen. I don’t want to lose anything more. But we never think about trying to gain. And I had already lost a lot of myself, I think, by that time.
So, this idea of healing was not something I wanted to do. It was just something I needed to do. Did you have people around you that helped you out how did you call yourself the Algonquin Medicine Man? I remember the first time I reached out on Facebook, kind of made a joke about it.
You’re eight years old and you go, okay, this was crappy. I need to do some healing. But who was there to sort of guide you? My grandfather lived next door and he would always tell me stories and I didn’t realize the stories were journeys And they were ideas about healing. They were concepts about how you could use your mind.
So almost like children’s stories in a way to meet you where you are. And then to acknowledge you, your experience. But then to get to a point of when do we resolve this? And how do you get a different version of yourself to evolve? What I’ve learned in healing, you know, personally, is that you can’t get back who you were, you can, or you can’t, you cannot reason is, is that you would have changed.
Anyway. I mean, you would have evolved in good ways. You would have grown in positive ways as well as trauma, but I was in love with this idea that I can get back who I was and spent a lot of time fruitlessly trying to do that. I never realized I should maybe be trying to change or evolve who I am to become more of how I want to be.
When did that come to you? Probably around 40 that you had mentioned. Okay. This idea, I was always one journey away. I was always one healing away from getting back this younger version of me before everything went wrong. And when I came to the realization that’s not going to happen.
It was me talking with another part of myself, and it’s like, that’s not going to happen. Like, even if nothing traumatic had happened, you would have evolved, you would have changed, you still would have dated, fell in love, gotten your heart broken other things would have happened. The idea is that this part of ourself before we get hurt is so very, very sacred.
That sometimes we don’t look at who you already are is also already sacred. So we’re in love with an idea of who we were as opposed to accepting who we are. So this notion of healing and being a healer, for me, that’s relatively new. You know where did that come to you during, during all of this process of learning from the stories that your grandpa?
Was, was, was speaking to you and, trying to like get back and then realizing no, it’s about being the best you are kind of thing. But where did that concept of healing enter as a healer to be the healer? I think the idea was when I was growing up, there was a lot of trauma in my own life. And there was a lot of looking at where I was growing up and the world.
And I just saw a lot of people who were hurt, maybe not exactly like me, but who were hurt. And I just saw a lot of things that were not working or people who didn’t have access to anything and I didn’t understand the light so much that people talk about definitely understood the dark. Okay, I understood what happens when you get angry.
When you get afraid and when you act from those two emotions, I understand what your life is going to become without exception. And I understand that when you’re trying to protect yourself, you’re not going to grow. And I know where that leads. So I think there’s this idea of me having made so many mistakes healing was really me gently trying to touch someone metaphorically on the shoulder saying, Look, I’ve been down there.
You do not want to go down there. You do not want to live from fear. You do not want to live from anger. You don’t want to live from regret. That’s, it’s not a way. You’re not going to be able to protect yourself in a way and that you think you can and then expect to be able to love somebody. Because you’re always going to be guarded loving you’re going to be guarded receiving you’re going to be gun shy of the universe itself so I think maybe it’s more of a reverse engineering of Understanding the wound more in a lot of ways and when you understand something enough you kind of demystify the wound So the magic comes in healing which is a natural ability that we all have
do you think your strength in knowing so much about the darkness or and not the light. Is that sort of what makes you distinctive in the this sort of community of healers in the city? Because I’ve I’ve gone to a number of your evenings of the soul event where it’s like with 150 people kind of thing.
And you often talk about embracing it and just watching it if you’re going to be 100 percent yourself, you need to have both that light and dark . I think that’s a differential because we don’t like that part, correct? And even in just sort of mainstream set of psychotherapy.
You have to do that. And I don’t know, they don’t speak about it in the same way that you, you speak about it. I’m asking you, do you see that sort of as differentiating yourself from the community that’s around us? Absolutely. Yeah. You know, in the, what I hear from people is like, they want higher vibrations.
Yes. They want ascension. Yes, they love. They want light. And what I think is really important shamanism is the environment that we are in mirrors, our consciousness, you’re going to spend half of your day in light and half of your day in dark. So when it gets dark outside, we don’t say it’s evil time. It’s just nighttime, and everything that’s already there is still there, you just can’t see it.
Different animals come out, but there’s nothing bad, but it’s a judgment. Because you can’t see, it’s bringing up all of these primal fears in you. And when you really translate over to your life, there’s things you choose to not look at, places you choose to not go, and those things have power over you. So they are your imaginary fence.
It just says, here’s the box that you’re in, don’t step outside of it. Right. So that fence is made out of fear and anger and a lot of other limitations and the idea that your life could be any different than what it is kind of scary . So I tell people is that Creator wouldn’t have made dark, would not have made nighttime if it was bad, and it’s a metaphor for your unconscious mind.
Like so much, like 93 percent of your mind is non conscious. So people think that they’re super conscious beings, assuming you’re using your whole brain, you’re using 7 percent of your consciousness. So, that 93 is a really big number you can’t get away from. Right. So I, I tend to not tell people, I don’t tell people the light fluffy things.
But I also don’t scare them, I normalize healing. And it’s like, you know, something can be hurt that doesn’t make it bad. Something can scare you, but it doesn’t make it necessarily scary. Things can be, the thing that hurt you can equally be afraid. And the thing that hurt you may have gotten hurt itself.
So, I, I try to normalize that, and it kind of takes a lot of the overemphasis on its abilities away from it. So when I look at the things that have hurt me, even the people, the people weren’t bad, the people who hurt me were hurt. So I can’t judge them for being hurt. And we always say, you know, well, you know, a person should know better, well, according to whom?
Yeah. Yeah. If you’re had a family that didn’t like to talk about things and like to sweep everything under the rug and wanted to just maintain a status quo, those conversations don’t take place. So I think if you make the assumption that people don’t know what you know, it’s easier to really be present for people and yourself.
So like you have one child or you have more than one child? I have two children. Like that experience as being a father to like a pure light and, and your ability to
Do your journey. Do you think that they helped crack the barriers that you put yourself in and helped you get, they broke every barrier that I ever had. And the reason is, you know, even before them, I didn’t have to worry about anybody else. I could kind of be very self aware, self centered, whatever you want to call it.
But at that moment that you have to become loving and present for somebody, yeah. Other than yourself is a really big deal. And when you do that, if you choose to do that, you learn so much because in the nicest way, you know, I don’t parent my children the way I was parented. It doesn’t make my parents bad.
It just means that my values are different. So when I had children, I realized it wasn’t for my convenience. You’re not going to do what I do or say what I say. You’re going to be your own person. You’re a little person and my job is to help you with that. So you’re trying to bring out the best in a person.
And what are their talents? What are their skills? What are they curious about? And can you give them that immersion, that time, that energy? Can you read cues? And so when you make somebody, in a lot of ways, maybe even more important than you or a greater focus than you, you learn your issues are not that big a deal.
My issues can wait because I’m barbecuing right now. Right, right, right. Taking care of the family here. You know, that’s just the nature of, I think, who we are. And if you have that, that love will definitely open you up and refocus you on something.
Thank you. So on April 22nd, you’re going to be at the, I think you’re showing up at the end of the day. You’re going to do what are you doing on April 22nd at the spiritual summit? Yeah, we’re going to be talking about normalizing healing and the reason why we’re doing that is that we’ve normalized so much of trauma.
Yeah. We say, well, that’s just the way I am. That’s just the way it is. Well, you know, I avoid all of that. And you don’t realize that the normalization of trauma has screwed you because you don’t coexist with your trauma and then live your dream. Right. I’ve never seen a picture of somebody with their fear beside them on top of Mount Everest.
You know, they, they, those two things don’t go well together. So if we begin to normalize healing in the spiritual community, there’s always this belief that we have to know a lot and that we have to be spiritual masters before we can do anything. And everybody’s an average person in a beautiful way to me, including myself.
And it’s the curiosity of what would happen if I stopped trying to force or run away from my issues. I’m not trying to hunt my issues down and kill them and I’m also not trying to give them my life But is there a space in between? Where I can learn from them and let them go. And sometimes people will call that self inquiry, or self understanding.
But there’s an energetic component to it, because we are energy. And there’s a conscious component, because we can decide what to do with it. But when you can normalize a practice and make it relatively simple, people will use it. Right. If it’s a 90 minute commitment every day, people will probably not do it.
No. So if you can get it to point and to really figure out what it is, and I do this with a lot of my clients and it’s a game changer and like I never would have thought something as simple as what we just did would have such a large impact. And the reason is healing. We like to think it’s in the mind, but it isn’t your mind is your body and it’s a mind body connection.
It’s a brain heart connection. So the coherence between those two, like literally making a connection between your brain and your heart. It changes so much of how you do energy healing, how you do everything. So it’s not like you need to know everything. I mean, you do know everything just in a different way, but it’s the quality of your questions too, that really dictate a lot of the direction of your life and the quality of your life.
If I was the questions that you have for yourself, you mean? Yeah, I think if you wake up every morning, Rebecca, begin your day by saying, what’s the next amazing thing the universe would like to do for me.
It acknowledges the universe has already done amazing things for you. It acknowledges gratitude. It acknowledges that your relationship with the universe is a certain way. If you wake up and it’s like, Oh God, it’s only Monday. Why can’t it be Saturday or Friday night? You know? So there’s this idea of a celebration with that question.
Universe wants to do something amazing for me and I’m going to receive it. Cool. So just the nature of your questions and your self inquiry really do happen. Thank you. You’re very welcome. So Pete’s going to be speaking on April 22nd at the WOO Spiritual Summit. Be sure to show up. You can find out more about his work in the community here at the 8th FIRE thank you very much. Miigwetch. Miigwetch.
