Welcome to Teaching Spirit.
Individuals can come to transform their lives through inner healing and natural medicine.
TeachingSprit offers the chance to rejuvenate, de-stress and empower.
TeachingSprit offers the chance to rejuvenate, de-stress and empower.
We offer certified year-long courses, retreats, and one-on-one sessions for all, whether you are a serious practitioner or simply curious.
About
Vasiliki Lagoudis
Medicine Woman
Vasiliki is the founder and visionary behind Teaching Spirit Retreat Centers. She is a multi-faceted individual who has transformed her entire being through profound teachings and life experiences. With her uncanny ability to use her natural-born gifts and innate wisdom to balance all aspects of life, she freely shares love, light, and service.
Her life mission is to empower people to love and accept themselves. The goal for her students is to live a life filled with enthusiasm and happiness.
Vasiliki has traveled the world to expand her studies in the healing arts.
After 30 years of working as a healer, she uses her wisdom to mentor healers from around the globe, supporting their healing abilities, disseminating their work, and helping them to fulfill their dreams.
After 30 years of working as a healer, she uses her wisdom to mentor healers from around the globe, supporting their healing abilities, disseminating their work, and helping them to fulfill their dreams.
All healing begins with connecting and healing your spirit. She is a medicine woman, who uses her knowledge and her warm, fun-loving personality, to connect her clients with nature, spirit, and body.
As a Qigong master, she trains people in self-healing and self-empowerment. From hands-on healing to international spiritual quests, this passionate woman will forever touch your heart and change your life.
With a burning passion for embodying her dreams and purpose, Vasiliki runs two spiritual retreat centers in Jefferson Valley and Catskill NY, and an Outdoor Sanctuary offering programs of Ancient Ways with traditional trends of today’s spiritual breath.
Featured Interview On:
What is a Modern Medicine Person ?
Along my journey to being a medicine woman, I took many different titles with a list that seemed to continually change as I grew. Reiki Master, transformational healing coach, happiness coach, Qigong practitioner, energy worker, and so on. One day after a ceremony with Red Medicine, I told him I didn't know what to call myself. First, he squinted his eyes, looked toward the sky, and then said, "You are Teaching Spirit''. I chuckled and said. "No that is the name of my company" he shook his head and said "No. the grandmothers are telling me they gave you the name Teaching Spirit". Still confused, I said,” well then, what do I call my work?.” he said "You are a medicine woman. You carry medicine within you. You are here to heal the spirit." At that moment it all came flooding in. The years of following my heart, working on a cancer patient in the morning, helping a woman going through a divorce in the afternoon, and then being at the birth of another client’s child late in the evening seemed to cover a lot more than my titles ever fit. Red medicine and I had a great chat that day. He explained that the spirit is what gets us through life and when it is weak or sick a medicine person is the one that heals and rebuilds their spirit so their mind, emotions, and body can get strong. He or she is the one that people go to council, including the leaders of the tribe. The elders were always called upon when there were great changes or decisions to be made in the tribe and the medicine person was always the one to make the final decision before presenting it to the tribe.
Today most people struggle in life always searching for someone to counsel them. A friend, a family member, a doctor, a psychiatrist, a life coach, and the list goes on. They may all give good advice, but they don’t get to the core of the struggle and many times give advice that would work for them, not the person asking. It is the spirit that gets weak, tired, confused, and lost. Answers and guidance are not enough to build your spirit to be strong and free. A medicine person is trained to work with the spirit. To communicate with the spirit of the individual and to clear and heal things from the core. To support, nudge and carry the spirit to the light. Using the tools of the indigenous people and their own innate gifts, a medicine person becomes a very important part of their client's life. All aspects of their life. Always there to reconnect them with spirit. To guide them to their highest potential. To open their heart when it is closed, to remind them of who they are, to assist in their healing when they are sick, and celebrate the turning points of their life.
There are so many walking this earth with a lost spirit. It is time for the medicine people of this generation to take their rightful place in the community. To bring spirit back into the community. To heal the world, we must first heal ourselves. To truly heal you must heal the spirit, not just the vessel that carries it. To heal the earth, our mother, we must remember we are part of her, we are a reflection of her.
The earth represents what we feel inside of ourselves. It represents what our spirit is feeling. Yes, to all the medicine people out there, I thank you. To those feeling the calling, you know who you are, step up and join us. Spirit is calling you.
Why do I call myself a Medicine Woman?
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Are you ready to be a Medicine Person?
Shamanic Journey to Your Soul Purpose
My Story
As a toddler, my Mom would dress me up, put pigtails in my hair and sit me on the lawn. I would stay there for hours watching the birds, the trees, the butterflies, the people, and how they all worked together. She still jokes about me being the lawn ornament. As I got older, we moved from a house to an apartment on the main street in a small but wealthy town. While all the other kids were playing, I chose to sit on the front stoop and watch people walk by, listening to their conversations, how they acted and dressed, and seeing what made them tick. I loved seeing how people interacted with one another and tried to understand how humans worked. I didn’t get why people couldn’t just be themselves. Impressing others seemed to be more important than happiness.
As a teenager, a teacher once told me, I would amount to nothing because I didn’t have a father. He told my mother to buy me new clothing. I would dive into the Salvation Army dumpster and pick out new clothes, it was for the poor, and heck, we were poor. I was told I couldn’t be a cheerleader because I couldn’t afford to buy a uniform. I was a poor kid from the wrong side of the track and they didn’t want their manicured team blemished. People were downright cruel, degrading, stuck on themselves, with no compassion. I went from the lawn ornament to the lawn trash. Even the local church treated me and my sisters terribly, I remember hearing someone say, “Oh the scroungy kids are here again!” and telling us that we were lucky that they let our kind in there. This was supposed to be a place of God.
So, I got off that stoop and became a rebel. I fought to be everything society didn’t accept. I was fighting for my inner freedom. It angered me to watch the world live life as a role, conforming to the wishes and desires of others, worrying only about themselves, and what others thought. As a young adult, I became a humanitarian, with a deep desire to help the world. I wanted to help the trees, the animals, my neighbors, and starving children in foreign countries. This became so overwhelming, I just gave up. Who did I think I was to change the world? Who was I kidding?
The dull ache in my stomach that I was not fulfilling my purpose never went away. As a people watcher, it lead me to wonder, why life is the way it is, why we act the way we do, why didn’t everyone else think the way I thought, why didn’t others care the way I cared, why couldn’t everyone just be themselves and care about one another? My journey within was stirring once again.
Trying to conform, I married my high school sweetheart, worked a perfect job, and had the perfect child, thank goodness I had a boy! Wow was I lucky, living by society’s expectations, I was living life with a “to-do list”. Then one day, I woke up in bed with a stranger, and that stranger was me. Again, my spirit screamed out, and off I went from married life of conforming, to a divorcee with a mission. I was going to prove to the world, not only could I be, as good, but better than a woman with a husband. Super single Mom was my name. The more I was told I couldn’t or shouldn’t the more I did. A single woman can’t buy a house, a single Mom can’t open a nightclub. Yup, I did it all. While I was a dental assistant, my boss sent me to Arizona for a week of training on how to market your practice. The trainer was a woman named Naomi, filled with love and passion, she helped me wake up my spirit. She told us to live life through your heart, believe in ourselves, and make it happen. I came alive. This was the first time I felt energized and alive. I wanted to be her, I wanted to be in front of a crowd. That sent me off to take Dale Carnegie courses on how to influence others, and Zig Ziglar’s Dress for success classes. Then I was introduced to Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra who helped ignite my spiritual journey. Two years later, I was on a stage, teaching a room full of dentists how to motivate their staff and sell dentistry. I felt alive and excited. But after a few years, disheartened, I realized, I was only giving them tools to rip off their patients. Ouch!
So, I left the dental field and went into a more honest world…I opened a nightclub, where people let down their guard, poured out their hearts, and express the part of them they hide from society. I had a sign hanging up in the entranceway, “Welcome to a place where everyone is invited to be themselves.” I saw it all. I watched spirits soar as the facades faded away deep into the night. Many would gather around having deep philosophical conversations that really taught me what I know about the human psyche.
In my personal life, having a son with ADHD, my journey was now turning to learn about natural medicine and awakened the healer within. My war against Ritalin and drugging the human psyche had begun. This was the beginning of my new role as a Messenger. As people came for healing, I found myself working on all levels, physical, mental, and emotional. It was very clear that what I learned as a child was now unfolding before my very eyes, as I freed people from their emotional baggage, the physical ailments drifted away. After 10 years of healing work and teaching others how to heal, I heard the call to action, teach others how to be free. Free of guilt, shame, fear, jealousy, envy, and self-hatred and full of self-acceptance, self-love, passion, joy, and happiness.
After a long colorful journey, I finally realized that the world is a reflection of who we are. As we try to control the masses with rules regulations and belief systems, we put our spirit in a cage! We abuse ourselves and it’s showing itself in our environment and interaction with other living things. Until we as humans learn to love ourselves we will not be able to love and nurture the earth and its inhabitants.
Sounds easy, it’s said all the time but the way had been lost, forgotten. We have abandoned ourselves to create a society. I finally got my answer. In order to save the world, we must first save ourselves. To love and appreciate what is around us, we must learn to love and appreciate ourselves. My destiny had unfolded before my very eyes. I would with all the passion in my heart set out to help people accept and love themselves. Free them of the expectations and limitations they were living by. I was teaching small classes in self-healing and seeing clients on a regular basis. To have someone come for a session heavy with shame or fear and leave feeling light, free and happy filled my heart with pure pleasure.
After the birth of my beautiful baby girl, sixteen years after my son was born, I learned that life has lots of surprises for us. I married her amazing father and began traveling around the world on what I call my spiritual adventures. This brought my work to a new level. I met many indigenous healers and learned quite a few different healing modalities and ways that people view life. On a trip to Israel, I went to visit a Greek Orthodox Church. As I walked to the back of the church I was drawn to a dark alcove with running water. I entered and there before my eyes was a bright purple light that took the form of an angel. I shut my eyes in fear, only to still see the same vision. As I trembled and thought, “Oh Shit!” A soft voice told me not to be afraid. And the vision disappeared. When I got out of the car, my husband stared at me and then told me I had a golden light glowing around me. I blurted out, “I just saw an angel.” The next day we found out the church had been built on top of the well where Mary was visited by Archangel Gabrielle and told she would give birth to Jesus. A few nights later I had a dream. Archangel Gabrielle came to me and told me to share my wisdom. Tell it to the world. Again, reminding me, “Do not be afraid.”I returned back home and began to share what I called, my work in a bag. It was a tool to help people learn and understand their emotions. A program used to identify what is creating discord in your life and what emotions are fueling it. Freeing you to live a happier, more productive life. So, I went from transformational healer to happiness coach. I watched my clients awaken and become passionate about life and those around them. The more I shared this program, the more I was told to write a book and share it with the world. I witnessed hundreds of people change their lives right before my eyes. This inspired me to write the book and program, Navigating Your Life: The Road to Emotional Freedom.
Combining all I learned from my teachers. Master Teo, Artie Red Medicine, Spirit Wolf, Shaman Manos and his wife Barbara, Reiki Master Steve, and many more, I watch my dream of helping others unfold. One day, after assisting a home birth in the morning, comforting a dying client in the afternoon, and counseling a client with stage four colon cancer in the evening, I was asked by a visitor, What exactly do you do? I couldn’t quite answer the question. The next day I consulted Artie Red Medicine and asked him, "What
do I tell people when they ask me what I do?” His answer was short and sweet, You carry medicine within my dear sister, You are a medicine woman.
So, here I am, sharing my story, my work, and my passion for loving life. It is the most exciting and fulfilling time. To all of you that have not found your voice yet, own your greatness. Don’t let fear or judgment from others keep you from shining your light. To hide it would be selfish. Remember the pain you carried before you awakened to your healing spirit? Feel it in your heart and with a knowing, step out and join me in changing the world one person at a time.