What is a shaman?
A shaman is a person who, by lineage or training or both, serves in a spiritual healer role for a community.
The core function of a shaman is to enter into an altered state of consciousness, to travel to the spiritual energetic world, and to respectfully interact with forces, beings, and entities found there, in order to bring healing solutions back to the level of ordinary life.
In cultures that nourish shamanic traditions today, there is generally a widespread awareness that all people are connected to the spiritual energies of our world, such as spiritual forces dwelling in features of the land mass, animals, flora, and humans. In such cultures, each person in the community not only has the natural ability, but also a responsibility, to maintain living bonds with energies and forces that are found using internal sensing and voyaging, rather than external perception and thinking alone.
In that context, a shaman is someone who devotes their life to especially develop competency in the ability to form an especially strong connection with the spiritual world and to communicate spiritual information back to humans in society. A shaman is a sort of emissary, bridging between the ordinary human state of consciousness and deeper states.
What makes a shaman a shaman is that they use their gifts to enter and travel in altered states of consciousness specifically for healing purposes in service to the community and environment, rather than for personal reasons alone.
What are the abilities of a shaman?
Shamans tend to have some inborn ability or sense of calling to work in bridging spiritual with human realms. They may have special levels of sensitivity or awareness that seem heightened compared to others.
Serving as a shaman also requires a high degree of ethics and self-mastery, to ensure that the shaman’s spiritual vessel stays strong and pristine. This is not so much a moral issue as a practical one – a shaman has to be relatively free of impulses, urges, reactivity, and self-interest in order to best be clear and still enough to receive and convey spiritual messages, as well as survive the pressures of the role.
For this reason in particular, it is vitally important that any would-be shaman undergoes appropriate forms of training and embodiment, and that she does her shadow work. This is a protection that helps ensure a shaman will use her sensing, journeying, and communication abilities for community healing, rather than egoic purposes.
Further, the role of a shaman involves concrete practical skills that each shaman must develop, in order to become genuinely masterful and to serve the community faithfully without fear of corruption through personal vulnerabilities or blind spots.
- The ability to enter and stay in altered states of consciousness at will
- The ability to mediate between the spiritual world and the physical world in a way that is understood by humans and can be used in the community
- The ability to serve in a fluid, transpersonal way, serving any aspect or component of the community, including the natural world, which may require expression or healing
What are the categories of healers?
There are three types of shamans you may come across today.
- A shaman from an unbroken tradition, usually an ancient Indigenous culture
- Someone from a shamanic tradition, who creates a synthesis of their tradition with practices more known in the West, who may serve both cultures
- Someone from the Western cultural paradigm originally, who isn’t from a shamanic tradition per se, or who has been long disconnected from their lineage, who finds themselves drawn to the work of serving in a shamanic role
How can shamanism benefit your health and well-being?
Shamanic healing has many applications. Because the worldview of shamanism is that all events in the material world have a source in the spiritual world, any topic may be addressed through shamanism.
Shamanic healers perceive mental and physical illnesses, trauma, addiction, relationship problems, and imbalances in the community or natural world as problems stemming from a blockage, binding, entanglement, corruption, possession, theft, interference, or other kind of problem in the connection between the benevolent inhabitants of the spiritual world and the physical world manifestation.
The job of the shaman is to journey to the spiritual-energetic realm and to form an understanding of what issues are at play that are resulting in an imbalance or illness. Depending on the type of problem, the shaman will work to resolve the issue in the spiritual realm, and then assist in integrating the solution into this world. The shaman may also give recommendations for a cure that is physical in nature, such as to use a kind of medicine, change one’s diet in a specific way, alter bodily behavior, or to explore a certain kind of meditation or practice.
Shamanism is considered especially useful in all “treatment-resistant” cases, where convention Western approaches have not brought lasting relief, and when there are complicated psycho-spiritual issues at play, as in the case of addiction, trauma, and mental illness.
What is the shamanistic perspective on disease?
The main difference between the shamanistic view on disease and the conventional Western medical view is that physical world symptoms originate in an underlying spiritual-energetic cause.
So even when a disease pattern can be identified, such as the flu, the shaman does not consider that to be the end of the diagnosis – rather, the shaman will want to find out what is going on at spiritual-energetic levels that are appearing in the material body in the form of the flu.
In the shamanic worldview, the same symptoms and diseases can be caused by many different kinds of underlying root problems. Two people may both have flu-like symptoms for different spiritual-energetic reasons.
Any illness, whether physical, emotional, mental, relational or even community-wide unrest, may be caused by spiritual disturbances taking place upstream from the material world.
Further, shamans believe there are certain types of contemporary illness that are especially likely to have a spiritual component. These are psychological diagnoses listed in the DSM, including trauma and addiction.
Finally, shamanistic healing works in tandem with any other form of healing and does not consider itself to be in competition with other forms of healing. A shamanic healer may receive the information from spiritual realms that the client should pursue a Western healing methodology for help resolving a specific issue, for example, or to get a massage, reiki, acupuncture, and so on.
In general, once the issue has been identified, anything in the material realm might be part of the integration of an energetic cure into the physical body.
What is shamanistic healing?
Shamanistic healing has three components, roughly corresponding to our Western conceptions of diagnosis, cure, and recovery.
The first service a shamanic healer performs is to discern what the nature of the spiritual-energetic disturbance is. She must accurately perceive and fully understand the complexity of the problem, assessing which spiritual forces and energies are involved in creating the blockage, as well as where in the material body these blockages may be manifesting.
Because most human beings are not currently using their native abilities to journey inwards and take care of their spiritual bodies, there are many issues that can arise simply through our ignorance and neglect of the spiritual energetic world.
For many people, the spiritual body is like a beautiful piece of property in another country, that we do not know that we own. We never visit, and therefore it exists in a state of disrepair, taken over by forces in the environment, some of which are not in our best interest. Some malevolent energies may start to live there or take pieces and parts away since no one is there to defend and protect the space. Although this picture may be a little scary, the good part is to realize that by returning to this place and taking command of it, we can reinhabit our own spiritual world and clean it up, and heal it. The shaman helps us do this.
The second part of the work is to bring a cure to the problem, through facilitating interactions between the energies. This may mean removing energies that are present in the client’s energy body, which should not be there, such as superimpositions, implants, overlays, siphoning cords, mismatched spiritual body parts, and so on. This also may mean returning missing parts of the client’s spiritual body back to the spiritual body, retrieving components that belong with and to the client’s energy field. There can also be rips and tears, damage, or areas that need to be restored through reconnection to unity.
Finally, the shaman will help the client integrate the energetic changes into the physical body, a process which requires some time for the client to adjust to the changes and re-stabilize after “energetic surgery”. Typically, a client will receive suggestions for concrete actions and practices they should do to continue to stay in alignment with the cure and to help embody the changes made in spiritual energetic realms into the here-and-now physical body and material world life.
How do I find a shamanic practitioner?
Unless you are part of an indigenous culture with shamanic practitioners on hand, you will need to actively search for a credible and qualified contemporary shaman practicing in your area. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies can be a good place to start, as it maintains a registry of people offering services, who have been trained formally. Perhaps more important than a specific type of training, however, is that you are able to ask questions about this healer’s approach, to your satisfaction, and that you get a good feeling from the practitioner.
As with any practitioner of any type of healing, remember that no legitimate healer will cross your boundaries, judge, or apply any force of persuasion or convincing. It is never necessary to let go of your self-protecting parts before you are ready, nor should you undergo experiences that you do not feel fully comfortable and safe with.
For women with trauma especially, it is important that you pay attention to signals in your body that let you know whether or not this person feels safe and legitimate to you, rather than letting your mental body persuade you against your instincts.
Is there good evidence for shamanic healing?
Shamanic healing is only just now starting to be studied in clinical contexts, such as through randomized control trials. However, the fact that shamanic approaches have persisted for many thousands of years points to their utility in human society – if shamanic methods did not work they surely would not exist in every culture around the world. There is currently a growing body of evidence being collected more formally, through self-report by clients who have received shamanic healing and experienced its benefits.
Villa Kali Ma offers shamanism for women
We use many different healing tools at Villa Kali Ma. Though we walk seemingly distinct paths and use different languages – some of us are Clinical Psychologists, or yoga teachers, or massage therapists, gardeners, or artists – the way of the shaman represents the quintessential truth of all healing.
It makes perfect sense to us that the root cause of a woman’s deepest troubles can be found and healed foremost by journeying deep within, where we can access benevolent spiritual-energetic allies who can guide the unfurling spiral of our healing. We also understand the wisdom that all pain and imbalance come from somehow getting disconnected from the unified heart of all of life.
At Villa Kali Ma, we offer shamanic healing for women as a part of our recovery programs for healing from addiction, mental illness, and trauma. As experiencers and healers ourselves, we value the many effective and powerful methodologies offered by native indigenous tribes and their traditions, as well as many of the modern approaches facilitated by Western shamanic healers of today.
