This month we are so excited to feature Berta Kuhnel, one of our most senior teachers with Four Winds!

Berta has been leading Healing the Light Body classes for several years now.  She loves supporting the students as they do their personal work and develop competence as practitioners. 

Berta brings years of experience as an energy worker and acupuncture physician to her work with Four Winds. Her background includes the in-depth study of several energy modalities, including Traditional Chinese medicine.  These studies have deepened her understanding of the body’s energy systems and its beautiful ability to heal itself.

In 2001, when she began her study with Four Winds, Berta was searching for a way to heal the energetic pattern of a health issue. She was drawn to the depth of the medicine wheel work and Healing the Body interventions.  She says, “More than the healing tool I was looking for, it is the first time in all of my trainings that I personally made deep, rich internal shifts in my of way of being in my body and living in the world.”  She feels that the work releases and transforms old patterns and paradigms at a core energetic level. 

In short, Berta’s passion is assisting with the transformation of the planet – beginning with the individual and the community.  In addition to her Four Winds teaching commitments, and her shamanic and acupuncture practice in Sandpoint, Idaho, she is deeply involved in community and planetary transformation. She has taught several local Medicine Wheels, resulting in over 40 full mesa carriers in her town!

Many of Berta’s clients and students joined Berta and her husband, Richard Kuhnel (who works in Eco-Social Sustainable Design) in an international project called Transition Towns, to help bring sustainability and creative development to Sandpoint. The local project is called the Sandpoint Transition Initiative (www.sandpointinitiative.com).  Berta shares that in the beginning of the project, the local medicine wheel graduates gathered to journey into the future to vision a sustainable Sandpoint.  Later, during the first working group meeting, with 125 in attendance, this visioning process was repeated.  As a result, working groups are now in place in Sandpoint, addressing such real world issues as food, waste, education, health and the arts. 

Berta can be reached at berta@balancedhorizons.com