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I make sacred art,  meaning spirit-led (or shamanic) paintings inspired by other worlds. I have been walking between worlds for as long as I can remember. My paintings can be found on book covers, in art collections and private homes all over the world.

 My three great passions in life are: Motherhood & Shamanic Work with Children (helping children develop a spiritual toolkit for the challenges that life throws them), Making and Teaching Sacred Art and Shamanism (as teaching courses in shamanism as well as offering individual healing sessions).

I also love traveling, playing the cello, rock art,  and learning foreign languages!

I teach shamanism and sacred art internationally. Use this link to read more about the courses I teach, or sign up for my newsletter.

Over the last three years I have pioneered a shamanic program for children and young people called the Time Travelers

Colleagues have encouraged me to write up my experiences in book form and that is a project I will enjoy working on in 2015!

I will also publish a children’s book called The Dream Healer in 2015.

The most ‘extreme’ thing I have ever done is working as a volunteer in a field hospital in Bangladesh and assisting with eye surgery!

One of the most moving and life changing things I have ever done is living in the desert and working with children in the slums outside Lima, Peru.

Then I had three children of my own, over a period of four years, and the adventures became family adventures!

Today I live in London with my husband (Ulric Almqvist) and our three sons (Quinn 2000, Elliott 2001 and Brendan 2004).

I divide my professional time between teaching, seeing individual clients for shamanic healing sessions, painting and writing. Our family does a lot of sailing (we have spent a lot of time sailing in Central America, the Caribbean and The Baltic Sea)..

In the evenings you will find me playing the cello – though in truth I prefer  playing in the forest, engaging in a dialogue with the trees, the wind and the animals! (See the painting “Song of the Wind”).

My husband is Swedish and we used to live in Sweden. My ‘spiritual home’ is the Far North. Many of my paintings are inspired by the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis), Inuit Mythology, Sibera and time spent in Greenland, Iceland and Spitsbergen.

I am Dutch. I grew up in The Netherlands and attended Art School in Amsterdam. Then trained as an Art (Psycho) Therapist in the UK and this was followed by intensive training in Shamanism with Simon Buxton, Naomi Lewis and Kate Shela, Betsy Bergstrom, Ruth Aber, Chetna Lawless and last but not least the wonderful Sandra Ingerman in the USA!

Guided by Spirit I paint portraits of spirit children (i.e. children in the spirit world, children dead to their parents in our everyday reality. I made a small film about this work last year: You will find it below the text.

I feel passionately that children should be encouraged to feed their innate spirituality and that we need return Rites of Passage and Initiation to our culture in close partnership with the elders of the community.

Our youngest son Brendan wrote and published a book called The Love Hall in 2014, when he was 9 years old. It became a ‘spiritual bestseller’ and took the world of shamanism by storm. You can order a copy by emailing me.

For me all of these activities are expressions of the same thing: living a child-centered life close to Spirit.

Feel free to email me for more information about any of these things!

Imelda Almqvist, April 2015