The Heallist Podcast

Creating your own healing modality with Bob Vetter

• Yuli Ziv

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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

Join Bob's next Soul Medicine Journey cohort starting September 2025. Visit www.bobvetter.com for info.

Bob will also be serving as a guide at the upcoming Healers Retreat at Menla  May 16-18, 2025—an immersive experience for those seeking deeper embodiment of their healing path within community. Visit Menla.org to register.

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Check out Heallist.com for digital tools created just for holistic healers.

Yuli:

Welcome to the Healist Podcast, where we inspire and guide healers through business expansion. We give voice to incredibly abundant healers to share their stories. We dive into the quantum field to unlock the energies of conscious creation. We also develop digital tools to help you grow, which you can find on HealLesscom. I'm your host, Yuli, and I'm grateful you chose to join this space. Now let's go deep.

Yuli:

Hello, dear friends, Welcome to the HealLess podcast. So so thrilled about today's guest. It is Bob Vetter, a cultural anthropologist, healer and spiritual mentor with over 30 years of experience alongside indigenous elders and traditional healers. His mission is simple yet profound Healing is about remembering who you are and living in alignment with our deeper purpose. And, as the creator of soul medicine journey from calling to practice. He mentors the next generation of healers to walk the path with integrity, authenticity and heart.

Yuli:

And I'm really, really excited about the topic we're going to be uncovering today, and it's the topic of creating your own way of healing, your own unique modality, your way just to bring your gifts to the world. And we just chatted before we started recording and we got into this fascinating conversation and I said, Bob, stop, stop, let's save it for the podcast, because it was just so profound already. So I cannot wait to dive deeper into it. And my intention for this episode, as I'd like to set for each, is to inspire some of you to find your own unique gifts. Even if you have many different certificates or modalities that you explored, how can you blend them together in a way that is not just more beneficial for the seekers, the people that come to you but also allows you this really full and pure form of creation and sharing your gifts in the world. So, Bob, welcome to this fascinating conversation.

Bob:

Thank you, yuli, it's a pleasure to be here.

Yuli:

So where should we start? I think we should just dive right in. We started this conversation, like I said before, and I paused you because it was just so fascinating where you were sharing, because I do think it resonates with a lot of healers, right, I see so many people just on our platform, on the Heal Us platform, average practitioner has multiple modalities. Some of them have as many as 20 to their name, right? So at one point you blend those together in a way that you kind of the lines are blurred and then you're not even sure if you're doing like Reiki anymore or hypnosis, or what is it that? You kind of the lines are blurred and then you're not even sure if you're doing like Reiki anymore or hypnosis, or what is it that you're doing, and something else kind of emerges.

Bob:

So maybe I could share a quick story with you to tell you where that landed for me. So this was decades ago. I was sitting up in an all-night medicine ceremony and what I brought to it that night in addition to, of course, focusing my prayers on who was there was my own personal question what do I do with the decades of work that I've done, of work that I've done? You know, I've been around native North American healers and studied with them, studied curanderismo, the indigenous healing practices of Mesoamerica. You know a whole bunch of modalities as well that I studied Medical qigong, energy healing, sound healing I mean, you know long list as well as hypnotherapy, NLP. What do I do with this? So that was the kind of the critical moment in my life of saying what of all of this is me? That's what I brought to it, and I was in deep prayer all night. I was staring at the fire and I heard an answer.

Bob:

Now, the words that I heard were way less important than the feeling that went along with it. The words were specific to some of the modalities that I was told to use, but there was a permission in that moment to create something that was unique to me in my experience and in a flash of insight, I just had this moment where all of those things came together into one system. That would be my way of healing in the world, and that's what I try to bring to other people is how to have that moment of insight, how to pull it all together so that my system is mine alone and yours is yours alone. And if you and I studied with the same teachers for the same amount of time, but you brought in your experience and I brought in mine, If we were really really in touch with our soul in design, you would end up with a completely different healing system than I do, Because it's your soul mission, it's your soul walk, your soul journey that comes in with these techniques.

Yuli:

Now that's incredible. So it seems like for you it was going through your own quest right for this answer. How do you see other people finding this answer? Because I think it's something a lot of people kind of like struggle with and yes, they will go into deep meditation and they will try to come up and they still. The clarity doesn't always come as easy as just an answer you receive. I wish everything in life was as easy.

Bob:

It's just decades that lead up, led up to that simple moment. You know I was a cultural anthropologist my whole life. I did my graduate work at the University of Oklahoma and did my field work among traditional healers. You know, I wanted to look at that intersection of where healing and spirituality meet in cultures all over the planet. So that was my original mission in an academic sense, but it would be years and years before I got to actually engage it in the work, the boots on the ground, the what do you do with this? We consider the healing modality that the person has already learned and all of the techniques, the things that that person has done, their spiritual orientation, which is incredibly important in all of this, and then create a safe container for the work. In other words, I consider healing to be and this is maybe a controversial point, but I consider healing to be a performance and as a performance it has a beginning, a middle and an end. And I may end up doing something completely different in a one-on-one healing session with you compared with someone else, but I have a standard way of beginning it, ending it and sequencing our way through the different parts of that healing ceremony that we do together. So it's like a template in my mind that is operating in the background so that I always have something to fall back on, and I'm going to share one more little tiny story with you that, I think, illustrates this point. The template, if you want to call it that, that I use comes out of Corrinderismo, the traditional healing art of Mesoamerica, and I was sitting in a cafe in Manhattan with a dear friend of mine. She went through.

Bob:

My first apprenticeship in Correnderismo was with Alina Avila, who wrote a book called Woman who Glows in the Dark, which I strongly recommend to you and all of the listeners, and this friend of mine. She had been through the year-long apprenticeship with Elena Avila, with me, and you know we had been around a number of other teachers together and I said something about healing being a performance and she completely disagreed with me. I mean, she's kind of like my little obnoxious sister that I never had, who loves to fight with me and argue with me. So I was trying to come up with an analogy that would make sense in terms of understanding how all of this works. And we were sitting at this outdoor cafe in Manhattan and I was trying to think how can I explain this? What is the metaphor that I can use? And I looked down at the table and it hit me in that moment and I said you know, when I first came to these healing arts, what I thought was healing was the knife, the fork, the napkin and the cup and the glass.

Bob:

Now that I've been through this as long as I have, I think that it is the table that holds all of those items up. And what I mean by that is by having a sense of your own spirituality, an orientation that comes out of your understanding of your soul's mission being here and why being a healer is the most important job there is on the entire planet. It's having that as an orientation. The table becomes the container for the various items and the items can be pulled from various systems as that moment calls for systems as that moment calls for. So it's an intuitive grasp in the moment of what that client needs and having enough tools that either come out of one system or a variety of systems to have the intuition to know with clarity which one to pull out. Because you know there's another saying if the only tool that you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Yuli:

Yes, I love that. And do you feel like clients need some level of performance to be able to transform?

Bob:

I do, I do, and you know. Let me go to another story. If you don't mind, I'm going to illustrate. I love your stories. I think it makes the point very well. So over the course of the years that I lived in Oklahoma I was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma An old man named Oliver Pataponi was the last medicine man of his tribe but he adopted me into his family.

Bob:

He made me his grandson and one day we were talking about the healers that he remembered when he was a little boy. Now let me give you an idea of how far back we're talking. We don't know exactly when he was born, because they didn't really keep records like that, but he was probably born around 1898. Wow, like that, but he was probably born around 1898. Wow. So I met him in 1980 when I started graduate school, and he was talking about when he was a little boy. So we're talking about the very, very early 1900s and he was telling me about these medicine men who were old men at that time. Medicine men who were old men at that time. So now you know we're back, probably early 1800s. These guys were born and they were from a completely different era with completely different sensibilities than we have today. Now, in the literature that I was reading about the ethnographic texts that talked about healers among the Comanches, they talked about these medicine men who would have. It was almost like a contest, you know, to see whose powers were greater than somebody else's. At least that was the way that some of these anthropologists couched it. But that wasn't the impression that I got from my grandpa chief, and it certainly is not the impression that I have now when I look back on it.

Bob:

Now I'll tell you what I make of it. The performative aspect is what changes something in the mind of the viewer, because when you watch something happen that is maybe incongruous, beyond the scope of what my normal life is like, it makes me embrace a different understanding, that maybe I am not trapped by all of the things that I thought I was trapped by, and the condition that a person enters into when they come to see a healer is maybe, instead of understanding something that is going on with them in their personal life or in their health challenges, whatever the reason is mental, spiritual, emotional, psychological, whatever it is that they come to a session for what starts as something that is a temporary condition. As soon as I take on this belief, this understanding. This is part of my identity. This is now who I am.

Bob:

Now it's fixed, now it's not subject to change. But when I see something apparently miraculous happen, I see something that is outside the realm of my normal experience. It expands my understanding that maybe, just maybe, whatever it is that I came here for out of desperation can move. That's something that seemed to be a permanent part of my condition. Maybe there's a glimmer of hope that something can change.

Yuli:

I love that so much. I can totally see it and I'm with you. It's like you are making them an observer and but taking them also out of the ordinary world. Right, you're putting them in another world and now they're observer, and suddenly the rules are changing, the reality is shifting. So just the act of that I'm not sure if you're.

Bob:

Are you familiar with the word liminality? Yes, so it's. Yeah, you enter liminality in that moment where everything gets reversed. Everything is different in that moment.

Yuli:

I love that so much. Well, as you were speaking, I was trying to imagine the fire ceremony that you're going to be leading us in our Menla Healers Retreat in just a couple of weeks, and it's yeah. I love shamanic ceremonies and I think they're just so powerful, and this ability of taking people out of the ordinary worlds into other dimensions is just so incredible in this tradition and I can't wait to experience it myself. I was just mesmerized just listening to you. But how do you teach people those some of those skills?

Bob:

Yeah, so that's a good question. So in the program that I teach that you mentioned, I'm in the middle of one cohort right now. There are four separate modules that have to do with this experience, and in the first one, the first section, we look at personal transformation, how the healer is healed, and that goes for anybody, you know. I like to say that the job, 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. So the first section is we look at that personal transformation, personal healing and growth.

Bob:

In the second section we go into specific techniques that I consider to be the core, the core items that I use, and it's really a handful of things, 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, you know. So another analogy that I came up with one of the things that I lead is Temazcal, which is the traditional Mesoamerican version of the sweat lodge and when I was learning Temazcal, this was many years after I'd been leading North American sweat lodges. But in the Temazcal there's much more flexibility in terms of what you do, and what it made me think of was 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 that I think you can think of this process of soul medicine that 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.

Bob:

In the next section of the course we look at, we explore how your personal experience fits into this and then, in the final and fourth 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 in the first section of the course 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, as we say?

Yuli:

That sounds like an incredible system and I can see it working together so beautifully. And you know, I'm also one of those people who I actually love the blending of teachings because, as someone on a healing journey, I rarely use just one tool, right, I use different modalities. I love seeing different practitioners. Each of them uncovers different parts of me, my journey for me. But also I met on this journey a lot of people who are actually extremely protective of certain modalities and they're very. They have a big like apprehension when people either mix modalities or stray away from the proper way of doing something or the tradition right.

Yuli:

There's a lot of like people that just think tradition keeping as their their calling right, and they become so protective that it's almost like. On one hand, I can see why, right, I do think it's important to protect a lot of beautiful, different ancient traditions that are around, but I'm also witnessing this new kind of like emergence of all of those different modern modalities that are just again they're coming out of a blend right, and how beneficial those are. So I'm curious about and I know your point of view that we're pretty much alike in this vision. But how do you justify to people that have that resistance of straying away, that have that resistance of straying away.

Bob:

Well, so far I've only given you one side of my experience. Now let me go into the other side of it, because I'm involved in traditional collective Native American ceremonies from a number of tribes. You know I was adopted into a number of different families and a number of different tribes and there are annual ceremonies that I go to, where I help out or I have a variety of different ways of being a part of. I don't bring any of that into the work that I do and the reason that I don't is because it doesn't fit with that tradition. So I would not violate the trust that was placed in me. I will occasionally tell stories about it. I will draw strength from it. I will even consider the way that my one-on-one work goes to be based on a way of being, a way that I see in ceremony that people bring to the interaction, the compassion, the one-on-one ability to listen with concentrated awareness. Now, all of those things are completely separate than taking something from there that they don't want taken. So I'm very clear about cultural boundaries that I don't violate because they do not give permission. Now my experience in Correnderismo is completely different, because all of my teachers encouraged me to take it and bring it out into the world. So that's why I'm very careful about what I do and do not move from one side to another. And you know, we also live during a time that people are very concerned and maybe rightly so about cultural appropriation.

Bob:

So what constitutes cultural appropriation? Now, if I share something with you openly and I tell you, yuli, I want you to go out and I want you to use this in the world, I want you to help to eliminate the suffering in the world. So take this with you, with my blessing, and go do the work. That's very different than if a person shows up. They spend a very little bit of time somewhere. They pull something from one context and take it out and go away with it and never acknowledge, never give back to the community. You know all those are all things that make it cultural appropriation.

Bob:

So you know 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 anything in what that, 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. Does that answer?

Yuli:

Yeah, Listen, it's such a. It's such a, you know, delicate line to walk and I've seen it from so many different sides. And you know, while I respect and absolutely agree that the traditions are precious and they need to be kept, but I've also met people, like often, other people, who were told we want these traditions to come to the West. Right, 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.

Yuli:

And I think, like when you do that, when you open a door, there's always a danger of delusion, right, of some of those things. And then I've also seen people that are so like on the other side, right in the Western world, that would say I would never attend, like, a fire ceremony led by a white woman. It's just not right, right, and no matter how much time she spent with the elders and what certification she would have. So I think we're seeing now, this beautiful time, that a lot of those things are coming into our life and there are still not many rules or regulations, right, how?

Bob:

to operate.

Yuli:

Right, it's a wild west literally. But, and someone like yourself who has done it for years and you definitely have a strong ethical values, right, it makes sense that you will respect. But I think a lot of people maybe some of the newer generation that comes to those traditions I don't think they intentionally want to be disrespectful. I think they're just acting because there's no rules and regulations, right, they take something beautiful, it works for them, it changed their life. I try to believe that most people have good intentions, right, that's always my assumption until you're proving me wrong. So I do think they come with good intentions to spread those teachings. But how do we help them do it in a way that is not compromising?

Bob:

And that's where mentoring comes in. You know, whether it's you, me or somebody else, a lot of times it's the job of a mentor. You know, 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 mean, 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.

Yuli:

Absolutely Such a good point. So let's kind of circle back a little bit. So we talked about this blending of techniques and traditions. Then we talked about the kind of the more of a boundaries right around preserving some of them. So how does one kind of come up with their own technique that is not compromising all the different modalities and traditions that they are drawing from?

Bob:

well, are you asking me in general or do you want to know how I specifically do it? I work with let's do specifically.

Yuli:

Yeah, okay, sure so in.

Bob:

In the case of work, the people I work with, let's do specifically yeah, okay, sure. So in the case of the people who work with me, I am their mentor and we have not only the class sessions, but when they sign up with me, we have a series of one-on-one sessions as well as well, and they have a chance to practice the things that they learn, and I only use techniques in it that I know are okay to share. So there's no need for worry in that sense, and the people that I've gotten to know have had their own experiences with and figure out a way. Well, let me just give you an example. Okay, let's say that we're doing a soul retrieval. Okay, so 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. So 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 do during a soul retrieval. But then there are other things that we can bring in. So, for example, you know I'll use contemporary sound healing practices to bring in during it.

Bob:

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 that we have a 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 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.

Bob:

I mean, if you're learning it from me, I'm teaching it to you in a way that I can tell you with certainty is with integrity, because I was given permission to do the things that I'm teaching you. But if you want to add something to it, you want to do it in your own way, and you've been, 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?

Yuli:

Yeah, no, that is so beautiful and thank you for taking us on this journey kind of behind the scenes of the healer's mind.

Yuli:

I always I love, I learned so much and I'm naturally curious about the way that healers work and why do they choose to use different techniques or how do they do that.

Yuli:

So I think that's extremely helpful for healers and not just healers, right, people that work just to understand where those things are coming from. Because I think one of the challenges of the entire holistic healing space and I think especially some of the more less kind of defined ways of healing, like energy healing or shamanism right, it's so undefined and undescribed and it's pure energy work, right, that is really hard for people sometimes to understand it and trust it, right. So I think and this is part of the mission of this podcast like, the more we talk about those things, the more we kind of lift the veil and actually prove there is a science behind and there's a system in place, right, there's traditions that go back thousands of years, and then there's the healer who is the master of the jazz orchestra, right. So I love that. I think a lot of people are learning a lot right now. So thank you for that.

Bob:

Yeah. So to just kind of sum that up, kind of wrap it up, I like to think that 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.

Yuli:

I love this. Well, you are just a wealth of knowledge and inspiration, and I feel like we could talk for hours, and I have so many more questions. You might have to come for part two, but I wanted to ask if there was anything else that you want to share with our listeners as a part of the conversation.

Bob:

Yeah, my parting message is that healing is not something that we do only because of our symptoms, and rather I would say it is an unfolding process of the evolution of the soul, and symptoms are what bring us to it in the first place, which is why 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.

Yuli:

Well, this episode was very healing for me. Already I love to talk to people like you who just raise the vibration just by being in the room or on my Zoom screen, and I really want to thank you for that and anyone who's interested in your beautiful course and to find their own unique modality. We'll put it in the show notes, but do you want to share a little bit more quickly about the course and the next cohort that's coming?

Bob:

up? Yeah, sure. So the next cohort is coming up in September 2025. And there are all kinds of freebies that you can find on my website, wwwbobvettercom. So, b-o-b-v-e-t-t-e-rcom, there's a quiz that you can take Should I be a healer? There is a free healing community that people can sign on to. There's all kinds of podcasts and blogs and videos and all kinds of things. So, even if you don't buy something, just go, because there's all kinds of fun stuff there.

Yuli:

Amazing. I love this so much, bob, and I cannot wait for your fire ceremony in just a couple of weeks, and hopefully more healers will join us there and have a chance to work with you in person. So thank you. Can I give a quick plug to that event? Yes, yes.

Bob:

So what is the name of the event? Healers Retreat, healers Retreat. So let me say why I signed on. Because, as you know, yuli, you sent me an invitation which I never even saw. You sent me an invitation which I never even saw, and then I found out about this and I wanted to come because I love the inspiration of being around other people who do what they do, and this whole idea that we can be in one place at one time that is dedicated to us sharing shoulder to shoulder. So I look forward to sharing a little bit of what I know during that nighttime healing ceremony and getting to know what other people in the community who I've never met before. I want to know what they do as well.

Yuli:

Amazing. I love this Community is our medicine. That's what I like to say. And this is the right community to belong, with all people that want to grow, want to help, want to make the world a better place, and thank you for being part of it and thank you for joining us today.

Bob:

Thank you so much, yuli, and thanks everybody for listening.

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