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About Shamanic Healing
What is shamanic healing, and how can it help?
What is Shamanism?
Shamanism is one of our oldest forms of spiritual practice and healing, dating back thousands of years, predating organised religion. It is essentially a practical application of the way animists experience the world. For animists, everything is alive, conscious and has a soul – not just humans or even just other animals, but plants, and even the mountains, rivers and the wind too. This makes animism an essentially nature-based and highly practical and accessible form of spirituality.
Shamanism can be used in many ways, including healing (of self and for others) and for personal and spiritual development. Practising shamanism brings a deep sense of wholeness and a sense of the interconnectedness of all life and a deep connection with nature - something that has been lost to many of us in our modern-day, urbanised lifestyles.
Core Shamanism
Shamanism has been practiced right all over the world, and in studying shamanic cultures, anthropologist and shamanic practitioner Michael Harner identified a very consistent set of common beliefs and practices that can be applied and adapted to our modern world.
The Shamanic Worlds
Shamans recognise three different spiritual worlds. The first spiritual realm is called the middle world, the spiritual aspect of the physical world we live in. The second spiritual world, or lower world, is a place of completely unspoiled nature and filled with plants and animals. The third is the upper world which is much more ethereal and filled with human, human-like, and mythical beings.
Shamanic Journeying
Shamans are people who also have the ability to enter into a particular kind of trance state, leave their bodies, and travel the shamanic worlds. This is known as the “shamanic journey”. A practitioner will travel in one or more of the shamanic worlds during a shamanic journey. In a journey, the shamanic practitioner can converse freely with non-human people, receive healing gifts and knowledge, and then bring this back to our ordinary reality.
Spirit helpers and guides
Shamans always work in conjunction with spirit helpers, guides and teachers. It is not the shaman that does the healing, but the guides. Shamans invite the helpful spirits to work through them. A shamanic practitioners's first and foremost guide is their Power Animal, with whom they develop a very deep bond and profound relationship with.
What can shamanic healing help with?
Shamans believe that many illnesses and forms of sickness we experience have a shamanic origin and that these nearly always stem from soul-loss and/or power-loss. The symptoms of both are the same, but the orign and treatment of these are different.
Power-loss comes as a result of our being cut-off and disconnected from nature and undomesticated wildness - something that is sadly endemic with our urbanised lifestyles and lack of wild places. Power-loss makes us weakened and ill and vulnerable to intrusions and entities. These can be removed through shamanic healing however they are likely to return unless we can change how we live our day-to-day lives and do more to connect with nature and wildlife.
Soul-loss can occur for many reasons - most obviously this is as a result of trauma, serious illness, an accident, shock. But commonly it also happens when we send away parts of our soul in order to fit in - our playfulness, creativity, spontaneity, curiosity, joy, passion, wildness, sensitivity, vulnerability, confidence, assertiveness, carefreeness, cleverness, sadness, tears, anger, and so on.
If you recognise some of these symptoms then we can work together on this, amongst other things.
The symptoms of soul-loss are many and can include a sense or feeling of:
somehow being incomplete; that something is ‘missing’
numbness or flatness; of just going through the motions
hopelessness, apathy and indifference; like a spark is missing
being disconnected from life or what is around you; as if you are living in a dream
depression, ranging from mild, to moderate, through to severe
feeling lost, indecisive and aimless
procrastination; time-wasting; or finding it hard to sustain focus or effort
a lack of confidence and self-belief
having a strong inner critic who puts you down and is always on your back
phobias and anxieties; fearfulness
missing memories (where have the memories gone, and why did they go?)
addictions or other compulsive behaviours and/or thought patterns
never having really recovered from a past event
repeatedly returning to a person, location or behaviour that is unhealthy for you
inability to move on from an issue or event, despite efforts to do so
finding it hard to (re)invest in the future with enthusiasm and optimism
grief, fear, anger or rage that you cannot seem to shake off
What happens in a shamanic healing session?
The healing sessions I carry out generally go something like this:
We will spend the first part of the session talking through what issues you want to work with. This will form the intention for the journey.
The next part of the session consists of the shamanic journey itself. This may be to the recording of a drumming track, or live drumming.
I will lead the shamanic journey, so you will be able to just relax to the sound of the drum.
I will replay the journey to you as it happened. Everything that happens in a journey is symbolic as our human brains cannot comprehend non-ordinary reality. So we 'clothe' the experience with metaphors that help us to make sense of what we experience.
We will talk through these metaphors and symbols and discuss what they mean to you and how you use this information.
Some of the core aspects of shamanic practice we may work on together include:
Soul retrieval
Power retrieval
Shamanic healing work such as extraction and intrusion removal
Ancestral and family healing
After-care and bringing shamanic healing into every day life
Based on and adapted from content by Paul Francis and the Therapeutic Shamanism website.