Some years ago I led a sacred pilgrimage to Peru with thirty-three people. It was an amazing and insightful journey for each of us. When we were on the bus and returning to the airport, I noticed the sadness in one of the women’s eyes, and I asked her, “What is so heavy on your heart? Will you miss Peru?”

She told me that she dreaded returning to Florida because she would have to face her ex-husband again, and it was a very difficult relationship. I told her that if she was serious about wanting this relationship to change to give me a call, and I would sit down and talk to her and see what we could do to change the energy that she held for him. A few weeks passed, then she called my office, and we sat down and had a wonderful talk. I was so surprised when she told me that this man had been her “was-bund” (her ex-husband) for about twenty years.

The more she talked, the more I realized that she was the problem and that he was being held captive by her unwillingness to allow him to move on. She was quite shocked when I asked her if she felt selfish for keeping him from moving on with his life and told her that his dreams were waiting on him to come true just as her dreams were waiting on her to come true. As long as she was unwilling to let him go, she was in his way, and why would she want to keep him from having the life he deserved? We did some good work together. I led her through an ancient Celtic shaman technique called recapitulation, and we removed the “energy cords” that kept her responding to him as her past self rather than as the person she had become over the years. She was so relieved that she was finally able to set him free and their relationship could take a new form.