Bridging Ancient Wisdom and Modern Leadership

I am Crystal Sanchez — Shaman, healer, and coach. I am the founder of Rising Spirits LLC, and I work under the name Crystal The Shaman. I carry Muwekma Ohlone and Coahuila indigenous ancestry, and I am a certified Master Practitioner of Energy Medicine trained through The Four Winds Society, founded by Alberto Villoldo, PhD. I spent nearly three decades in corporate technology leadership before answering a calling that had been waiting for me my entire life.

But before any of that — before the certifications, before the ceremonies, before the calling became clear — I was a woman in pain who was finally ready to stop pretending she wasn't.

In July 2020, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, my therapist referred me to the White Raven Healing Center in Anchorage, Alaska. The world had shut down — but something in me was finally ready to open.

At the time, I was in a relationship with an alcoholic I truly loved and living deep inside a childhood abandonment wound that had shaped everything — my relationships, my work, the way I moved through the world. I was overgiving. Overfunctioning. Exhausted. And somewhere beneath all of it, I knew there had to be another way.

What I found in Alaska was not what I expected. It was something older, something that lived in my bones before I had language for it. I was so committed to my own healing that I showed up in the middle of a global pandemic — because the pain of staying the same had finally outweighed the fear of change.

My sacred medicine journeys began in May 2022 and have continued to deepen ever since — each one peeling back another layer, each one confirming that this path was always mine.

 "I did not find shamanism. In many ways — given my Muwekma Ohlone and Coahuila indigenous ancestry — it found its way back to me." 

In April 2023, I was laid off from Microsoft. For most people, that would have been devastating. For me, it felt like answered prayer.

I had spent nearly thirty years in corporate technology — holding space for teams, translating strategy into execution, navigating the complexity of organizational politics, hiring and developing people, learning how to read a room and move within systems. I was good at it. But I had known for some time that I was being prepared for something else. The layoff was not an ending. It was a release — the universe shedding what no longer served, so that what was meant to come forward finally could.

Within months I enrolled in The Four Winds Society's 300-hour Energy Medicine training program. I completed it. I went back. I kept going deeper.

I bring everything. The thirty years of corporate experience that taught me how to hold people through complexity and uncertainty. The indigenous ancestry that connects me to this lineage at a level that goes beyond training. The personal healing that means I have sat in the places my clients sit — in the wound, in the confusion, in the exhausted middle of a life that looks fine from the outside but feels hollow from within.

I also bring rigorous training. The skills I practice — Illumination, Extraction, Soul Retrieval, the Bands of Power, the Munay-Ki rites — are not intuited. They are learned, practiced, supervised, and held within a sacred ethical framework rooted in the shamanic traditions of the Andes and the Amazon.

What I have come to understand is that the corporate skills and the shamanic skills are not as different as they might appear. Both require the ability to read what is not being said. Both require strategy and presence in equal measure. Both require knowing when to act and when to simply hold the space and wait.

"I did not leave the corporate world to escape it. I left it to bring everything I learned there into the service of something truer." 

• White Raven Healing Center, Anchorage, Alaska — July 2020
• Sacred medicine journey practice — ongoing since May 2022
• Master Practitioner of Energy Medicine — The Four Winds Society (300-hour core curriculum), January 2024
• Munay-Ki Mesa Carrier Practitioner — The Four Winds Society, October 2023
• Muwekma Ohlone and Coahuila indigenous ancestry
• Nearly 30 years of corporate technology leadership — Microsoft and beyond