Healer Q&A: Creating your own healing modality with Bob Vetter
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
Bob Vetter, a cultural anthropologist, healer, and spiritual mentor with over 30 years of experience, shares his journey of creating a unique healing modality that blends indigenous wisdom with personal authenticity. Through powerful stories and practical insights, he illustrates how healers can honor traditions while developing their distinctive approach.
• Explains the difference between respectful integration and cultural appropriation and teaches healers to identify their core wound as key to discovering their medicine
• Structures healing sessions with a clear beginning, middle, and end while allowing intuitive flexibility
• Identifies three levels of healing: universal principles, cultural contexts, and individual expressions
Traditional Knowledge vs. Modern Blending
Bob Vetter: The process of healing is never finished, that we are always moving from a place of fragmentation to a place of wholeness. That's the reason for our being on this “earth walk” in the first place. So there's no such thing as being done. We're always working on that, regardless of where we begin and what our entry point is.
First, we look at that personal transformation, personal healing and growth. Second, we go into specific techniques that I consider to be the core items that I use, but it's enough to give you a beginning, middle and an end, and it's enough of a container to be able to drop things in.
Another analogy that I came up with is a bento box in a Japanese restaurant and you've got four separate sections that are the four rounds of the ceremony and you drop whatever items into each of those boxes that you need in that moment. And that's the way you can think of this process of soul medicine: I'm able to provide you with the bento box that you can then draw from your own experiences and your own background and other healing modalities. So we explore how to create that safe container, how to do a beginning, a middle and an end and then a core of maybe five different techniques that you may or may not use, but you drop them in as the situation calls for. We explore how your personal experience fits into this and then, in the final session, we look at how to put everything together and create this unique healing system that is yours and yours alone. And the clue is finding what is my core wound? What is it that is unique, that brought me to wanting to be healed in the first place, and how do I plug that back into who it is that I'm destined to work with, so that the medicine lies next to the wound.
Avoiding Cultural Appropriation
Bob Vetter: So the things that I do to make sure that I'm not doing cultural appropriation is – I make sure that I have permission. I make sure that I maintain contact with the people who have shared with me. I name my teachers. I can tell you where every single technique that I use came from. So I'm very careful to avoid what I believe is the danger of cultural appropriation. But there are people in the world who think that that's not enough, who think that we should stay in our own lane and we should never step into that other lane, because I wasn't born into it. So I have my own beliefs about this and I think each one of us has to come to it with an understanding of how we can be honoring and respectful of other people and other traditions.
It's such a delicate line to walk and I've seen it from so many different sides. And while I respect and absolutely agree that the traditions are precious and they need to be kept, I've also met people, who told me, “We want these traditions to come to the West. It's time to. This is the only thing that's going to save this planet, if some of those traditions are finally being introduced.” That's where mentoring comes in. Whether it's you, me or somebody else, a lot of times it's the job of a mentor. I had mentors along the way – native elders, who, when I came to a crisis in my life, when I had a question, I would go to them. I'm not saying that I necessarily do everything that they recommended, but I went to them in moments of uncertainty and I think it is helpful to have a mentor or a number of mentors.
Universal, Cultural, and Individual Healing
Bob Vetter: Let's say that we're doing a soul retrieval. The idea behind soul retrieval is something called "susto", that a person experiences soul loss, that when we experience a "susto" which I'm not going to define it as trauma, but let's just say that it is at least partially analogous to trauma that a splinter of the soul gets left behind at the time and the place of the incident, and that is a temporary fix. You could say so in the same sense that, let's say, you get in a car accident, you don't feel the pain right away because your body went into shock. In the same way, at the moment of a trauma, a little piece leaves to save the integrity of the rest of your sense of self. Now that works short term, but in the long term there is an energy loss associated with that. In soul retrieval, we're trying to find and bring back the pieces of the soul that left, and there are specific techniques that we do during a soul retrieval. But then there are other things that we can bring in.
There are techniques that I've learned in other systems of healing that I may drop in during one of these soul retrievals, even though it's not exactly the way that I was taught soul retrieval, so here's my favorite analogy: it's like a jazz composition. There is the basic structure to the song and then there is the place for improvisation. So when I want to drop something in, I ask the question, would I be able to say to the person who I learned this from that I'm using this in this context? Would they be okay with me doing what I'm doing? That's the way that I would pose the question. I'm teaching it in a way that I can tell with certainty, with integrity, because I was given permission to do the things that I'm teaching. But if you want to add something to it, you want to do it in your own way, and maybe you've traveled around the entire planet. Well, I would ask you that question – could you tell me who taught it to you? Could you tell me that you have their permission? Can you tell me that you have a continued relationship with them, so that you have that connection to the tradition and it's not merely a weekend thing?
To sum that up, there are three levels of understanding this healing process. So there is an aspect of healing that is universal, meaning that there are principles that we find all over the planet that everybody shares in common, including modern holistic practices. So that would be the universal level of healing. There's also a cultural level of healing, and by that I mean that, for example, you know, we can look at even illnesses as being culture specific, that the way that people heal in a particular culture is unique to them because of the holistic nature of the culture itself. And then there's the individual level, and it's the individual level where I am different. I am unique from everybody else both in terms of how my healing unfolds for me and in terms of how I put together my own system and my own way of being in the world as a healer.
Bob’s Message to the Audience
Bob Vetter: Healing is not something that we do only because of our symptoms, and rather it is an unfolding process of the evolution of the soul, and symptoms are what bring us to it in the first place. It's so important to infuse meaning into the inevitable suffering that each one of us will go through at some point or we have in the past, and healing is the way we make meaning out of this life's journey, that at times is difficult and sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's sad, sometimes it's joyful. Healing is this process of us moving from fragmentation to wholeness, and so it can become our whole reason for being.
