With over three decades dedicated to the spiritual path, Simon Sanud is a beacon of ancient wisdom and modern transformation. As the founder of the Soul Bath™ Practice and Integral Men’s Initiation™, author of The Peaceful Power of the Initiated Man, and a regular speaker at the Body Mind and Soul Mallorca Festival, Simon seamlessly blends profound shamanic traditions, Siddha and Tantra yoga, and years of personal initiations into a practical daily practice accessible to even the busiest lives. Simon’s journey is unlike any other: from hundreds of darshan initiations on the Siddha path to energetic initiations in tantric and shamanic realms, he has been guided by ancestral spirits and elemental powers. This unique synthesis has culminated in Soul Bath™, a daily self-healing technique that unlocks the door to deep emotional release, sexual energy transmutation, and relationship harmony—all within four core teachings of shamanic self-healing, conscious relationships, tantric alchemy, and men’s initiation. In this interview with Mystic Mag, Simon shares the essence of Soul Bath™, explaining how it empowers you to release old wounds, dissolve limiting roles, and reconnect with your fullest, most grounded self.
Your journey began with a spontaneous spiritual awakening in 1987. Looking back, what do you see as the defining lesson of that moment, and how has it shaped everything since?
I was nineteen when I experienced this spontaneous awakening, that I now understand to have been inherently shamanic, although I didn’t know it back then. I had been in a prolonged period of deep spiritual inquiry. One day I suddenly experienced a completely pure connection with nature, a new state of consciousness. I kept receiving the message, “heaven is possible on Earth”, that everything around us has spirit, soul and consciousness and that something connects all of us with everything there is. For three days I experienced myself as a conscious being, animating my thoughts, my energy and my physical body. I found my own, very simple, spiritual path, which became my true north for my life decisions that followed.
This spiritual confidence, led me through decades of spiritual exploration including Siddha Yoga, with an amazing guru, Tantra, in an ashram with amazing teachers and a beautiful community.
This same confidence ultimately led me to questioning everything and embracing the path of direct knowledge with core-shamanism, that I was initiated into by my beloved, Diana Beaulieu, in 2020.
The lesson that I learned, from this entire arc of spiritual adventures, is that we can access ancient wisdom directly. We can do this through shamanic journeys. Quite naturally and organically I have found, or been given ancient initiations in my shamanic journeys. They are still intact, held by timeless wisdom keepers in the spirit world and shared with me. I take men on these same journeys, helped by my power animals and I simply facilitate the same initiations for the men that realize that they need this to come into their adult wholeness. It’s ancient and natural. We lost them over the last 6000 years of patriarchal history.
What I have been gifted in hundreds of shamanic journeys, since my introduction to journeying, has culminated in something unprecedented that evolved organically for me in my practice and men’s program: the Integral Men’s Initiations™. Step by step I’ve received the initiatory sequences needed to systematically heal the masculine wound that has appeared over the last 6000 years and to restore the simple wholeness our ancient ancestors had in modern men. It’s a complete 6-stage approach that I now teach to select men who want to become professional facilitators.
You created Soul Bath™ as a daily 20-minute shamanic practice. How does this differ from traditional meditation, and why do you think it resonates so strongly with men?
I received hundreds of shaktipat initiations when I was still with my guru and I realize looking back, that these initiations provided a forcefield that helped me open my own gateway to deeper and deeper meditations.
This gateway has been anchored in my own energetic field and it has evolved through my shamanic practice. For the men I work with, this has made it easy to step into the shamanic energetic field of initiation that I facilitate, even without prior experience. For them it’s an energetic experience not a new belief system. After the shamanic initiation journeys I facilitate, provided the men experience an inner alignment with the energetic field they encounter, Soul Bath can become their ongoing daily process of re-connecting with this transformative power in the spirit world.
Inviting this into their lives, gives men an active structure and rhythm for their self-development, that works on the level of their energetic body, their physical cells, their neuroplasticity, emotions, and soul parts, all in the same space and practice.
While we hear from practitioners like John Welwood that traditional meditation is sometimes used to transcend, rise above or spiritually bypass the actual healing of our wounds, Soul Bath™ helps us fully engage with the healing process in a focused and manageable way. We do this through the help and support of ancient energetic healing fields, that are really our birthright within the human family.
Soul Bath™ has naturally developed into a practice that integrates into daily life, rather than affording us occasional peak experiences, whose effects then fade, after a retreat weekend for instance. I have actually done some research on this and there doesn’t seem to be any meditative or shamanic approach out there at the moment that utilizes the powerful dynamics of shamanically based initiations into energetic fields in the spirit world in combination with a daily practice as an ongoing self-healing method. This is exactly why I’ve developed the Facilitator Certification, to train qualified practitioners, who can safely guide other men into these powerful energetic fields. I want this to spread and become useful to more men. The men I’m training are becoming professional leaders capable of earning high compensations for facilitating this work. Internationally I see opportunities for them across the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and Europe where the core-shamanic framework is establishing itself, with lots of room to grow. This work proves itself again and again as an ancient and at the same time new modality that can help, where other modalities seem to be at a loss.
What type of services do you offer?
Thanks for asking this question, Katarina and thank you for what you and your colleagues do at MysitcMag.com. It’s great that such a site exists!
I share the knowledge and the practices I learned and further developed from man to man, within group dynamics that I hold sacred. I offer a Practitioner & Facilitator Certification Program – a comprehensive 14-month program for discerning men who want completion in their healing AND become authentic leaders in men’s work. This is for men ready to experience and learn a unique system of transformation that is very methodical and be supported in their own development as a professional facilitator in men’s work.
Throughout the program there are regular live sharing circles, live shamanic initiation journeys, providing the container for deep inner transformation of the trainees themselves, healing and revealing their own innate inner strength. What we enter into energetically are pre-patriarchal harmonious masculine qualities, timeless wisdom, concrete practical knowledge, and ancestral inner strength.
The intention is to give men an opportunity to experience and learn the energetic initiations systematically, learn the daily Soul Bath™ practice and how to teach it and receive enough knowledge to have a strong context. It’s a system the facilitators can then teach in their workshops, or use in private sessions.
The Integral Men’s Initiations™ program contains Six Sacred Shamanic Initiation Journeys – connecting men with ancient ancestral beings, Four Soul Powers, energetic disentanglement, healing inherited father-line trauma and enough time for integration and deep healing after each initiation. For instance, some men experience alleviation from chronic pain or skin condition, as a side benefit of this deep energetic process.
The sessions are live online, but the aspiring facilitators can also join in-person for some or all of the sessions, depending on where I am teaching at the time. There are 3 live sessions a month of 2.5 hours each and the rest is based on downloadable audio practices that take 20 minutes a day. Even though 14 months is a commitment, 3 sessions per month, 20 minutes a day and some study, integrate quite easily, even into a busy schedule. The aspiring facilitators learn shamanic journeying with the drum and how they can give clearing and healing sessions to clients as shamanic practitioners in their own right and even give the integral men’s initiations themselves.
Expanding the principles even further and looking to the future, pioneers on this path can learn how to bring ancient tribal integrity into modern businesses and how to transform a workplace into a sacred space, in which everyone can develop and heal, helping their team become self-empowered, learning to heal their own triggers, even while they are growing in their work environment.
For the certified graduates of the program, I offer an optional ongoing monthly circle, in which they can continue to enjoy the support of the group and share case studies for which they would like to receive guidance.
It’s a path that has organically opened up for me in my life and in my workshops. Each one’s own truth is always respected as a sovereign reality and the learning is about transformation — not just knowledge or increasing outer achievements, although that can happen as a natural result of our work. When we remove blockages, or we dissolve energies of self-sabotage, for example, all things we want to manifest tend to flow more easily, of course. The identifying and dissolving of obstacles is one aspect that emerges quite clearly through the shamanic lens, which is generally not included in “positive thinking” approaches and the Law of Abundance.
Relatively new archaeological evidence has revealed a minimum of 200,000 years of peaceful indigenous tribal life before hierarchical disruption spread over the earth 6000 years ago. My program includes a major paradigm and perspective shift in relation to the traditional King/Warrior/Magician/Lover archetypes. I have been shown in shamanic journeys that these traditional archetypes carry shadow and conflict patterns, built up over 6000 years of patriarchal history. When you invoke the Warrior, for example, you’re connecting with the energetic field of every warrior who ever lived, which of course includes killing, conquering and enslaving as part of the package. What we can do alternatively, is be initiated into the power of the Fire Element directly. We can then easily access the inner fire of pure self-discipline, without energetic fields of distortions, such as the warrior energies, attached to it. With my Four Soul Powers™ initiation I work with pre-patriarchal harmonious masculine qualities, authentic masculine power without violence, domination, tunnel vision or constant internal conflict. This connects men with their own existing energetic resonance field of discipline and strength. Instead of struggling with internal resistance, and trying to “pump up” their willpower, they align with existing, yet normally untapped, energetic forces within them, powerfully supported by the elements. Each of the four elements energetically support human skills and talents in the four main areas of life, once we consciously connect through initiation and practice. This approach gives men real tools to call on their inner qualities, skills and strengths and start to weave them into their lives, making fundamental changes possible.
Connecting with the qualities of the earth element, for instance, can look like this: instead of the woman saying ‘I have to think of everything,’ the man uses his natural Earth Element gift of foresight to anticipate important needs proactively. When she realizes she doesn’t have to carry the entire mental load alone, the stress energy that was projected onto him disappears. It’s simply about sharing the cognitive labor of running a life together. Natura, if you are in tune with your earth qualities. If not, Four Soul Powers provide a path towards revealing these qualities within you.
What makes all of this unique in the personal development market is that no one else is offering systematic shamanic healing and initiation facilitator training combined specifically with men’s work certification. Trainees aren’t just men who are actively healing – they’re becoming facilitators with a rare approach that no one else offers in this combined way. They will be able to lead men’s circles that support real transformation and workshops that include real shamanic men’s initiations, as well as offer shamanic healing sessions to private clients.
There is an application process for this program to ensure that the men that sign up are ready for this process themselves and for holding this transformative space for other men. It’s for men who have decided they’re not just investing in personal healing, but in becoming professional agents of change, facilitating the healing and self-empowerment of men in their communities.
My program includes private sessions with the trainees to give them direct support in their discovery of the kind of facilitator or practitioner they want to become. I also continue to give workshops with initiations for participants and private sessions based on this modality to clients. In these I cover shamanic clearing and healing sessions, as well as disentanglement sessions, dissolving self-sabotage, intuitive guidance on life decisions, expelling energies that overshadow or energetically attack and couple sessions for healing chronic conflict patterns. I have live and pre-recorded online class series on couple healing, self-healing and tantric men’s alchemy. My website, www.soulrise.earth is the best place to read about all of this in more detail.
Many personal development approaches are discussion-based, while you emphasize energetic initiation. Can you explain why working at the energetic level is essential for lasting transformation?
I have myself experienced and heard from clients that meditation and therapy aren’t enough to heal symptoms like depression, low self-confidence, triggers of defensiveness in relationships, lack of life force in the body, and even chronic physical pain that doesn’t seem to have any physical causes. Even after 15 years of daily meditation, I myself was barely able to calm down resurfacing layers of pain, when I felt triggered in my relationships. I usually just had to wait for the emotional wave to subside. So, even regular daily meditation didn’t heal my deeper childhood wounds.
Some men I have worked with, were able to understand their defensiveness and the problems in their relationships, through talk therapy. But neither for me, nor for many of the men I work with, did this remove the underlying cause of the symptoms. My understanding of this is that deeper wounds don’t live on the level of the mind — In journeys, I experience them as plasma-like energetic deposits of pain in the field of our energy body, and complex frozen emotions in the soul parts that have been fragmented through traumatic experiences.
You can talk about your pain for years, start to understand its complexity quite well, which is important of course, but still you may not actually dissolve its deposits in your energy body and soul parts. Again, of course, therapy has its place and a trained therapist giving us an overview of the lay of the land of our unresolved pain has a big value in our healing process. C.G. Jung emphasized the importance of working with what he called the shadow, the emotions that we don’t consciously digest. They develop their own dynamic within us. Working with empathetic, gifted therapists can lead to healing. But, the energy of the pain layers has to be dissolved on the deepest level, not just understood in the mind and talked about.
I have had clients who turned to me and asked, “How can it be that I worked through my topics for seven years in talk therapy without advancing much in my healing process and now I have had a major breakthrough after three shamanic sessions?” This, I explained, is due to us having cleared an energetic layer of pain with the help of one of my power animals, Jaguar. When done safely and skillfully, this process allows us to connect with suppressed emotional pain, receiving an energetic clearing of it, like plasma being scooped out of the energetic body. Lasting change does not come from solely analyzing our pain, but by clearing it and healing the fragmented soul part associated with that emotional pain.
The actual healing part of this core-shamanic process is magical as well. We can connect with truly powerful fields of healing energy in the spirit world and then re-connect with it in daily practice.
Once a few weeks of this self-healing have been invested, what happens next is an inner homecoming: our own original strength, our inner light, that is beneath all of the pain layers, starts to charismatically re-appear –in our eyes, in our face, our voice, body posture and in our energy.
In a world in which men depend on having their strength intact, imagine what this means for someone who has been living with depression, insecurity and lack of self-confidence! It can be a game changer to arrive in your inner strength and confidence, to say the least.
The energetic initiations I offer include guided shamanic journeys, where men connect directly with ancient ancestral strength, healing and wisdom. These encounters happen in expanded states of shamanic consciousness and men consistently describe them as life-changing. One participant, Claus, took 10 minutes to return from a journey because he was so deeply connected to the elemental energies of that initiation. This isn’t metaphorical – men are meeting actual ancestral collective beings who remember how masculinity worked before patriarchal distortion began 6,000 years ago.
I have had amazing feedback about this and seen it in several men I have worked with. Men can come back into their natural power, with a light in their eyes and power in their body. On top of all that and only as an apparent side effect, some chronic pain has been reported to have disappeared by some of the men I work with. This is not a claim I make up front. It’s not on the list of benefits that I put in the foreground, but it’s strikingly powerful when it occurs as part of a process. If someone’s chronic pain happens to be based on energetic pain stored in the body and we identify and clear that layer, the effects can be liberating.
I find it important to manage expectations. This work takes dedication and time. How quickly we progress, depends on how regular we are with our daily practice and our expression space time. It’s a matter of prioritizing the healing process over a few other things in life. I don’t push. I respect that everyone has their own inner timeline.
What does “peaceful power” look like in practice, especially in relationships, fatherhood, or leadership?
That’s a very pertinent question. It took me a year to come up with the title “The Peaceful Power of the Initiated Man”. I feel it expresses the essence of my work. It clicked for me when I realized that what I am doing is helping men reveal the inner strength and power that is already within them.
One of the books that has blown me away the last few years is “The Fall” by Steve Taylor. He has done humanity the service of going through and analyzing the work of archaeologists over the last decades. Their findings, he says, are very different from the colonial point of view of our 19th century archaeologists. A view that we have somehow collectively not fully shed: we still think of ourselves as more refined, peaceful and harmonious than our ancient ancestors of the stone age. If you ask yourself that same question right now. What is the sense that you get? Are we more civilized and peaceful than our stone age ancestors?
It wouldn’t be unusual if you felt our ancestors were savages. I always thought those must have been brutal times, with warring tribes against other tribes, rape, pilaging, neglected children, with the survival of the fittest and strongest dominating over all others.
But, recent archaeology reveals that not only did our ancestors live very peacefully, with no killing fields of ancient wars older than 6000 years being found. They apparently also had a very healthy and natural relationship with sexuality. They despised individuals that tried to set themselves above others as dictating leaders, or to amass more resources than others, like we have experienced in the feudal system and now capitalism. Tribes had a consensus decision making process! A concept that the most advanced thinkers of our current times are advocating as more integrated and fair than democracy! This is huge! And it begs the question, if you compare this with the state of affairs in our world today and throughout 6000 years of recorded history -what happened? We have seen the most brutal times. Wars upon wars. Suppression of women. Abuse of children. Enslavement. Inequality. Super rich and super poor being a foundational part of our way of living.
According to Steve Taylor there was a specific event in history that changed the way humans lived on the earth for the worse: the appearance of hierarchy. This created King and Queenship, ownership of land, top down power structures, priests, warriors, warring city states, all of them starting in Sumeria, the lands between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, today’s Iraq.
Why am I so passionate about this archaeological news, that seems to have had very little impact so far? And why did this change my entire view on men’s work and archetypes? It reveals to me the source of the inherited collective traumas our father-lines are suffering from. All the wars have broken the line of nurturing fatherly energy that each son AND each daughter WOULD have received, had there not been this succession of wars throughout our history. The warring factions spread out from Sumeria to the rest of the world, bringing the system of enslavement, societal stratification and war into Europe, into India, then China, down to Africa and ultimately to the Americas and Australia. Before this event, all lands were inhabited by indigenous people who lived peacefully. The entire population of all the indigenous people of our world have been overrun by the system we still live by.
I feel very strongly that in terms of what we call on in men’s work, for instance the archetypes we have all grown up with, are hierarchical and have conflict and drama built into their psychological and emotional dynamics. Hierarchy equals top down power, domination and in its extreme, enslavement of nature, animals and humans. The King dominates the rest of the archetypes. The warrior is his slave that has to do what the King says, or “off with his head”. The same is true for the Magician, who has to bend his talent of accessing direct knowledge, to advise the King on his next strategic moves. The poor Lover has no idea how to fit into this world and ends up being an artist, entertainer, prostituting his sacred gift of connecting to source and dancing with it in art, music and his own sexuality. He has to do this to the tune of the energetic field of Kings and Queens that are not in their harmonious inner power. Today, this hierarchy has simply translated into the power structure we now see, but it causes the same brutal effect. It destroys harmony and increases inequality.
Enter–the “peaceful power”, to finally answer your question. Within the context of what I just shared, it’s the inner strength that men, and also women, used to have before they were traumatized by recurring cycles of war and its disruptive effects to the nurturing line of fatherly and motherly energies every child has the birthright to receive on this planet. With the disruption of this line of human nurturing, with a full spectrum of love, confidence, sense of belonging, we have lost the harmony and hence the calm, rooted, unshakable inner strength and peaceful power that we would have had, had history not taken the turn 6000 years ago, that Steve Tayler and many archaeologists write about.
And out of this realization came the reason for the title of my book: By going into the spirit world I myself and a whole new generation of core-shamanic practitioners, can rediscover the original, timeless initiations and healing dynamics that are still there. They are still the same as experienced by our ancient ancestors and we can come into our harmonious, peaceful power once again. This answer may seem long in relation to your short and concise question, but searching for the answers I just described, has taken me over ten years and hundreds of journeys to discover. Amazingly, a lot of them have been confirmed in terms of their newly discovered historical contexts by the archaeologists Steve Taylor writes about. The implications of what this means for men’s work, I find well worth sharing in detail. To me it opens up a clear path ahead.
If your Integral Men’s Path succeeds in scaling globally, how do you imagine men, families, and workplaces might look 20 years from now compared to today?
Well, I do hope that what I am discovering through my work will spread through my practitioner and leadership paths, but even if it does spread relatively quickly, I believe it will take us, and I mean all of humanity, about 200 years to come into some semblance of emotional, energetic and psychological wholeness again. In this I include family life and community life, an organic way of interacting in relation to collective decisions more directly than we currently do, maybe by rediscovering consensus decision making. I also mean coming into an ethical way of exchanging goods with each other, including value based currency that is safe from speculation and any kind of automatic indebtedness or inflation. Many analysts and authors claim that our growing divide of super rich, super poor and the disappearing middle class come from that.
I do believe that all areas of society can be harmonized, once we each come into wholeness within ourselves through a methodical system of healing and initiation. That to me means healing all of our childhood wounds, coming into our full power as adult men and women, coming into full empathy with each other and respecting each other, as well as all that lives. With the ancient view of the world, animism, we can restart our relationship with nature. Not by installing more rules, but by feeling our connection to ourselves within living nature, all of it. In animism all have life, soul, spirit and consciousness. If we wake up to this, we will likely develop the empathy we need in order to respect all life on this planet and the planet itself. If we can let go of the need to feel that we are the masters of this planet, the highest in evolution, then we stand a chance to dissolve our sense of separation, become happy and not need excessive wealth building in order to feel like we have enough.
Regardless of the variable of a time frame, let’s imagine a healed ancestral line of men and women, whether through my modality or one of the others out there, passing on harmonious nurturing masculine and feminine energy to every child. Let’s imagine and co-create communities, where we don’t just hand off responsibility to those “up there” and complain about the decisions that are being made in our name, but communities where we each contribute to the decision making process and reach true consensus decisions with which everyone is at least comfortable. Let’s imagine workplaces that we transform in to sacred places of co-creation, where we grow into our own deeper vocation. Let’s imagine and co-create a path of life that gives us each a sense of belonging to our community and to the human family as a whole, a life that is full of meaning at each stage of it, full of opportunity to heal.
What we can aim for together, by working on ourselves and respecting each other, is coherence. For this I propose reintegrating our ancient initiations, so we can advance and each come into our own inner strength. This way masculine strength can become known as a harmonious, warm, protective, supportive, helpful dynamic in our communities. We can make an intention together that the next generations will reclaim the harmony our ancient ancestors had, and will find the path back to men and women being true equals, in every part of the world. I really feel deep within me that this is not impossible, in light of the new findings of the archaeologists. These values are not utopian. They are ancient history, meaning we have it in our souls and in our DNA to do this.
What it takes is taking a good look at ourselves and daring to face our shadows, as C.G. Jung insisted. What we don’t look at remains an unconscious dynamic, the effects of which we are then subjected to over and over again. What we dare to look at and dissolve shamanically, we are able to shed. I can say that I know from experience in me and in clients, that there are deep energetic layers that are obstructions to our own inner harmony. When we shed these, one layer at a time, our inner strength starts to be more and more feelable by others. We ourselves get less triggered, because some deeper causes have been dissolved, soul parts have been healed. At this point all of our interactions can flow more smoothly, conflicts can be about what is actually at hand, in the now, rather than charges of energy of the past shooting up from our unconscious, out of control.
All of this combined means that we have the strength to heal and stabilize ourselves and others and by extension the dynamics of the entire world. This may sound grandiose, but when we ourselves make healing our priority, when we heal inherited trauma and connect with our authentic inner strength, there is of course less projection and conflict energy within us to obstruct constructive interactions. This can inspire others to do the same, even right then and there in a challenging interaction. There are millions of such inspiring interactions needed on this planet, of course, but in its simplicity it can be done one step at a time, one man or woman at a time. With a profound and vast collective ripple effect, all can be touched positively this way, with individuals, with groups, communities, companies and countries. All interactions and relationships can be improved naturally, when we simply decide to methodically heal our layers of emotional baggage as they come up. In time, the majority of children can grow up with emotionally available fathers, partners can feel supported by their husbands, and communities can benefit from men who courageously carry the collective interests of all in their heart and follow through with all their natural inner strength. My modality is only one of the ways of supporting the healing every step of the way. There are many beautiful modalities out there to choose from. Choose any modality. I am here if mine rings true for you: www.soulrise.earth
