Serratore's page notes that some services have been canceled, but others continue. The White Flame site also has disclaimers which include claims about her training.
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White Flame Institute is not responsible for, and expressly disclaims all liability for, damages of any kind arising out of use, reference to, or reliance on any information contained within the site. While the information contained within the site is periodically updated, no guarantee is given that the information provided in this Web site is correct, complete, and up-to-date....
I understand that Bonnie Serratore is a Licensed Spiritual Health Coach qualified to teach me how to use energy healing to help me reduce stress and enhance my quality of life. I also understand she is a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, certified through Colorado Coaching and Hypnotherapy Training Institute, and is qualified to teach me how I may improve my health and well-being.
I understand that I am responsible for my own health, healing and well-being. I also understand I have the ability to heal myself. I further understand energy healing is not a substitute for adequate medical care...
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WFI has other alleged healers listed, altmed types. Little or no training for most of them. The last is the exception, and deserves the most investigation.
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Amy Priest
CS Practioner
Amy practices transformative healing. Her intuitive senses enable clearings of energies...She has refined skills...A lifelong devotion to Inquiry has enabled Amy to blend and share her understandings and guide others to greater awareness.
[being curious seems to be her only training]
Beth Reuter
CS Practioner
Over the past 25 years, Beth has helped thousands of people with her deeply transformative blend of clairvoyant reading, shamanic work and hands-on or long distance energetic healing....Sessions are $200 and hour.
Michaela McGivern
CS Practioner
Michaela McGivern has been involved with Energy Medicine and Shamanism for more than 15 year...Over her 22 years as a rehabilitation therapist...As an alchemical healer...
[alchemical? Does she turn you into gold?]
Shari Philpott-Marsh
CS Practioner
Shari’s passion is supporting people through emotional crisis and major life transition...
[no training mentioned at all]
Susan Feathers
CS Practioner
Susan accelerates deep healing, via the Shamanic Arts, as a Spiritual Guide, Emotional Coach, and Creative Teacher. For 15+ years she...has worked with women in crisis, at-risk youth, adolescents and adults with developmental disabilities, ESL children...
[English as a second language is treated like an illness?]
Troy Marsh
CS Practioner
A powerful vision awoke Troy and and initiated him on a “heart path” of a healer. Dreams led him to the Kalahari desert in South Africa where he was introduced by mentor Dr. Bradford Keeney to the ecstatic big love and”shaking medicine” of the Bushmen shamans and their old ways of entering the spirited mysteries. Apprentice training and refinement practices followed with Kunlun, Nei Gung and teacher Max Christensen of taoist tradition. A prayer for urgent guidance during a crisis directed Troy to Bonnie Serratore. Dramatic life changes followed with Bonnie’s contemporary healing methods and training. Troy is a professional therapist since 1991 and is in private practice....
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The only one who lists any real alleged training is the most disturbing, a white American claiming training in Bushmen tradition. And that's not his only claim.
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http://www.catalystmagazine.net/blogs/item/2395-the-spiritual-path-shamanismhttp://www.new-shaman.com/Classes incorporate Contemporary Shamanism, High Egyptian Alchemy, Kalahari Shaking Medicine, Seiki Jutsu, The Work of Byron Katie, Sound Healing, Vajrayana Buddhism, BönShamanism, and more.
New Shaman training consists of three levels:
•Level One -Initiate •Level Two - Apprentice •Level Three - Shaman
Each level includes three months of training (one weekend per month for three months).
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Become a shaman and supposed expert in eight different traditions in only nine weekends...
For only $2250!
Including making your own gold.... No, I realize they won't actually make gold. That would require actual proof. They have some alleged healing they slapped the label alchemical on to sound impressive and sooper spirchul.
He used to claim to teach just Bushmen healing, but that seems have failed. Domain expired.
http://www.shakingmedicine.com/LinkedIn shows him trained in physical therapy at Northern AZ Univ.
His wife is the one claiming to teach alchemy. A yoga teacher and trained by Serratore, but no specific mention if that's where the alchemy training came from.
http://radianceyoga.org/aboutMarsh is a Mormon. He and Keeney both claim they are carrying on the Bushmen tradition and it will die out without them.
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http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_9844240Bountiful therapist communes with African Bushmen
By Jessica Ravitz
The Salt Lake Tribune
Published July 12, 2008 1:14 am
NORTH SALT LAKE - At first glance he's a typical, clean-cut, churchgoing white guy living in the 'burbs. But Troy Marsh, of Bountiful, is shaking things up, literally.
The physical therapist is en route - he departed July 11 - to southern Africa, where he'll partake in the transcendental rhythms, songs and all-night dances around fires with the Kalahari Bushmen, who didn't mix with outsiders until the 1950s. (Think of the 1980 film "The Gods Must Be Crazy.")
Marsh and 10 others, including Jade Chun of Salt Lake City, are part of a first-time experiential journey organized by Bradford Keeney, an internationally recognized therapist, scholar and shaman who's worked with the Bushmen for 15 years. Keeney, 57, is considered a master or owner of n/om (the "/" indicates a click in their Ju/'hoan language), the power to shake and help others shake in meaningful ways. Guided by elders in a remote Namibian village, the visitors' bodies will tremble in ecstatic movement as they feel the raw spirituality and healing powers of ancient shaking medicine, which Keeney points to as the world's oldest religious and therapeutic practice, one that's been expressed in the same form for at least 30,000, maybe 60,000, years.
"We've turned off the switch that must be turned on," said Keeney, who added in a recent phone interview that genetics have proven we are all descendants of Bushmen. "Through heightened feeling, they call it 'waking up,' we come together to sing, to wake our hearts up. In that state we become open to experiences and to the divine."
It's a bit like what might be seen at a Pentecostal revival - Bushmen shamans do lay hands on people to heal them - or in the heyday of Grateful Dead shows. But Keeney, the son and grandson of country Baptist preachers, said what takes hold in the Kalahari is a deeper, more mature and richer-in-variety arousal.
"The Bushmen would say there's an alphabet of expression, and many cultures only know a few letters," he said.
For Marsh, who will turn 44 (and celebrate what he calls "a spiritual rebirth") in the Kalahari, the two-week trip has been a long time coming.
The lifelong Utahn and proud, active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints served in the mid-1980s as a Mormon missionary in Johannesburg, South Africa. Though he made it back for a vacation in 1986, he said the Africa bug never stopped biting him.
"It's said, 'You don't get into Africa. Africa gets into you,' " the father of three explained earlier this week. "I prayed for a time when I'd go back."
The Utahn learned of Keeney, who lives in Monroe, La., after he reached what he called a "spiritual plateau" about eight or nine years ago. He was searching for something more, a heightened connection to his faith, when Marsh said he learned to open up his heart in newer and fuller ways.
"I started to shake," he said, holding out his trembling hands at a restaurant table. "I started to have deeper prayers and meditation."
In 2006, someone handed Marsh a copy of Keeney's book, "Bushman Shaman: Awakening the Spirit Through Ecstatic Dance." Soon after putting it down, he jumped in his car to drive to Sedona, where he first heard Keeney speak. Later, he attended a Keeney workshop. He said, "I felt like I met a brother."
Marsh and Keeney both said there's no conflict in relishing what the Bushmen offer and staying true to one's own faith. The Bushmen, in their most ecstatic state, have "visionary experiences," seeing, for example, ropes that float up to the sky allowing them to dance with their ancestors, Keeney said. This value of family and ancestors, for a Latter-day Saint who's always treasured genealogical work, is easy for Marsh to embrace. And the words of any sort of bible or religious text only mean something when they're read with an awakened heart, Keeney added.
" 'God doesn't live in paper,' " he said, recalling what the Bushmen told Christian missionaries when they began approaching them. "If you want to experience God, your heart must be open."
Lined up in pews, with books held open, too many people only know institutionalized or textualized spirituality, Keeney said. And while broader society has recognized the value of meditation, it hasn't yet accepted and even shuns as madness the idea of heightened, unfettered arousal, "the last great taboo," he said.
"We trade in the raw, wild experiences," what sociologists say marked the beginning of every religion, "for normalized beliefs and understandings," he said. "At the beginning, they dance for the Lord, and then they end up just talking about the Lord."
For the Kalahari Bushmen, who've lived in a culture without a written language and have no institutions, holding onto and passing on spirituality in its purest form happened naturally, Keene explained. That history, however, is threatened today.
"In Botswana, they discovered diamonds and took [the Kalahari Bushmen] off their land. In Namibia, they've found heavy metals, so it's just a matter of time," he said. "At the same time, people come with good intentions and set up schools, but it disrupts the old ways."
What exists in the Kalahari now won't last, which is why Keeney decided it was time to bring others into the experience.
"The elders aren't going to be around forever," he said. "Let's just take a group and visit them and see what comes of it."
