What is Shamanic Healing Really For?

A Shamanic Healing

People come to shamanic healing for many reasons. Some are carrying the effects of trauma, loss, betrayal, or difficult relationships. Others feel stuck in patterns they understand intellectually but have been unable to change. Some describe feeling disconnected from themselves, their bodies, their spiritual lives, or a sense of meaning and direction. Still others have already done considerable healing and arrive with a different kind of question:

There is more of me here. How do I reach it?

After nearly two decades of working as a shamanic healer, I have become increasingly interested in a question that lies beneath all of these concerns.

What is healing actually for?

Certainly, we seek healing because we are suffering. We want relief from what hurts. We want old patterns to loosen. We want greater peace, freedom, vitality, and connection.

But if healing becomes only an ongoing search for what is wounded, we can spend years organizing our lives around the very wounds we are trying to heal.

Eventually another question wants to be asked.

What becomes possible when the wound no longer has to organize so much of who we are?

What Shamanic Healing Can Address

There is no single universal system called shamanic healing. Shamanic, Indigenous and energetic healing traditions have arisen within particular cultures, lands, peoples, and cosmologies, and those distinctions matter.

My own work has been shaped by decades of spiritual study and practice, including contemporary shamanic training with Alberto Villoldo of the Four Winds, with Q'ero medicine people from the Andes in Peru, Native American spiritual influences, Buddhist contemplative practice, my own healing journey, and the thousands of healing and mentoring sessions I have conducted since beginning this work professionally in 2007.

Within my practice, shamanic energy healing works with dimensions of human experience that I understand as spiritual and energetic as well as embodied and psychological. Depending upon what arises, a session may involve practices such as energy clearing, work with the chakras and Light Body, extraction, soul retrieval, sound, journeying, ritual, or other forms of energy work.

Yet I have never understood the techniques themselves to be the heart of the work.

The deeper work is healing. And healing, as I understand it, is a movement toward greater wholeness.

When Understanding Is Not Enough

Many people who come to me have already developed considerable insight into themselves. They know what happened.

They know that a parent was emotionally unavailable, that a relationship was abusive, that a particular experience was traumatic, or that a pattern developed because they needed it to survive something they could not control. They may have spent years in psychotherapy and understand their histories with great sophistication.

That understanding matters enormously. But insight is not necessarily transformation. We can understand why a wound exists while still being organized around it. A person can know intellectually that they are safe and still experience their body responding as though danger is imminent. They can understand why they fear abandonment while continuing to shape relationships around avoiding it. They can recognize that a childhood strategy is no longer necessary while finding themselves repeating it automatically decades later.

This does not mean that psychotherapy, insight, or other healing approaches have failed. I myself have availed myself of them to great effect. Human beings are multidimensional, and different forms of healing work with different aspects of our experience.

What shamanic healing can sometimes provide is another doorway into what has become fixed or bound.

What Becomes Fixed

When something overwhelms us, we adapt.

We may become hypervigilant. We learn to disappear. We become pleasing, controlling, fiercely independent, emotionally inaccessible, chronically responsible for everyone else, or afraid to speak.

These responses are not evidence that something is inherently wrong with us. They are adaptations to the causes and conditions we have had to navigate. Some adaptations are conscious. Many are not.

Over time, what once helped us survive can become so deeply embedded in our bodies, relationships, beliefs, and choices that we begin to experience it as identity.

This is simply who I am.

But adaptation is not identity.

One of the possibilities within healing is that what has become fixed can begin to move. I call this Transmutation. Transmutation does not erase what happened. It changes the way what happened lives within us.

That distinction is essential.

Healing does not require us to pretend that violence was not violence, betrayal was not betrayal, or loss did not alter us. Nor does spiritual healing require us to manufacture gratitude for suffering or conclude that everything happened because our souls needed it.

What happened matters.

And what happened does not have to determine everything that comes next.

Soul Retrieval and the Wound of Separation

One of the practices most commonly associated with shamanic healing is soul retrieval.

Within contemporary shamanic practice, soul retrieval is often used to address what is described as soul loss or soul fragmentation: the experience that some essential dimension of ourselves has become inaccessible through trauma, shock, grief, violence, or other overwhelming experiences.

I have worked with soul retrieval for many years. But my understanding of what is happening within healing has continued to deepen.

I now understand many forms of wounding through what I call the Wound of Separation.

Trauma, abandonment, betrayal, violence, oppression, and other forms of suffering can leave us experiencing ourselves as separated—from other people, from the Sacred, from our deepest nature, and sometimes from life itself. This separation can become organized within the body and nervous system, our beliefs, our relationships, our choices, and our identities.

Yet I do not believe the deepest self has been destroyed.

I use the term Individualized Soul for the vast and enduring consciousness that we are: an individualized expression of Love-Light with its own continuity, identity, particularity, creativity, experience, and unfolding.

Wounding can profoundly obscure our access to that deeper self. It cannot annihilate it.

This is what changes the meaning of healing for me.

Healing Is Also Remembering

If the deepest dimensions of ourselves have not been destroyed, then healing does not have to manufacture a new self to replace the wounded one.

Healing can become a process of Remembering.

By Remembering, I do not mean primarily recovering memories of the past or discovering who we might have been in another lifetime. I mean recovering greater access to Who We Truly Are beneath the adaptations that formed around our wounds.

Sometimes what becomes available through healing is surprisingly ordinary.

Someone speaks when they would once have remained silent.

A person who has always taken responsibility for everyone around them discovers that compassion does not require rescuing.

Someone whose sensitivity once overwhelmed them develops greater discernment about what they are perceiving and what belongs to them.

Strength that became armor can become courage.

A voice that disappeared can return.

The person has not become someone else.

More of the person who was already there has become available.

A Natural Pathway of Transformation

Over many years of healing, spiritual practice, and working with others, I have come to recognize a movement that seems larger than any particular technique I use.

I call it the Natural Pathway of Transformation.

Something Enters our awareness and asks for attention. We Open sufficiently to encounter what it carries. What has become fixed begins Transmuting. Something essential becomes available through Remembering. And what has shifted begins Illuminating how we understand ourselves, make choices, enter relationships, and return to our lives.

These are not five steps that happen neatly in order.

Healing spirals.

We encounter something again at another depth. A wound we thought we had finished with reveals another dimension. Something we could not approach ten years ago becomes possible to meet now because we are no longer the person we were ten years ago.

Shamanic healing is one way I activate and partner within this larger movement. It is not the movement itself. The actions of rattling, drumming, chanting, ringing bells, striking the energy field with feathers, and using my hands are simply working with what is already there in service of shifting inner and outer experience.

What Are We Healing Toward?

This brings me back to the question with which I began.

What is healing for?

There are times when the answer is simply: to suffer less.

That is enough.

Not every wound needs to become a lesson. Not every healing experience needs to lead to a calling. We do not need to turn suffering into spiritual achievement in order to justify healing it.

But sometimes, as a wound becomes less able to organize our lives, we discover that something else has been waiting behind it.

A capacity.

A love.

A voice.

A way of seeing.

A desire to create or teach or protect or serve.

Something we have always carried may finally have enough room to emerge.

This is one of the places where healing begins to touch what I call Medicine.

Medicine is not the wound itself. Nor is it simply a talent, occupation, spiritual gift, or predetermined life purpose. Medicine can emerge through the particular intersection of what we have always carried, what we love, what life has taught us, what healing has freed in us, the choices we make, and what we become capable of offering.

This is why I no longer think the deepest question of healing is only:

What happened to me?

That question matters. We must be willing to tell the truth about what happened. But another question can eventually stand beside it:

What is becoming possible in me now?

That question turns us toward the life beyond the wound.

And perhaps that is one of the deepest purposes of healing: not to erase the life we have lived, but to become increasingly free to inhabit the life that is still ours to live.

Are You Ready for a Different Kind of Healing?

If you recognize something of your own experience in these words—if you understand your wounds but sense that something remains fixed, bound, or inaccessible—a Shamanic Healing session can offer another way of entering the healing process.

In a 90-minute Shamanic Healing session, we work with what is present and ready to be encountered, allowing the healing to unfold in relationship with your own body, energy, spirit, and deeper knowing.

Schedule a Shamanic Healing Session

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