In a shamanic journey the practitioner uses a steady drumbeat to enter a deliberately altered state holding one question, travels in that state on your behalf, and returns to tell you what they were shown. A session runs an hour. You are not required to enter any state yourself, see anything, or believe anything in advance.
The last journey I made for someone put the two of us at sea.
What came for them was a turtle. That was their power animal, and the work was to align them to it. I will come back to that. First, what is actually happening.
It starts with a question
Nothing happens without one. A journey with no intention returns noise. The question gets agreed before anything begins and it is usually more specific than people expect. Not what should I do with my life, but what is underneath the thing that keeps happening with my brother.
The drum
I use a drum. A monotonous beat, held steady somewhere around two hundred beats a minute, and it does most of the work of getting me there. This is the least mysterious part of the whole practice. Almost every tradition that arrived at this work independently arrived at rhythm, and rhythmic driving at that tempo has a measurable effect on brain state. It has been studied.
There is a beat to go out on and a different beat to come back on. The structure is the safety mechanism. When it takes, I feel my energy buzzing, almost electric. That is how I know.
The three worlds
The map most practitioners use has three levels, joined by a tree. The lower world is instinct and the earth, and practical help tends to come from there. The middle world is this one, seen differently. The upper world is teachers and the long view, and its answers run more philosophical than practical.
Treat that as a map, not a description of a place. It organises where you are looking. Practitioners who take it too literally get worse results, not better.
What you do
Less than you expect. When I journey on your behalf, your job is to stay on the call and be honest about the question. You do not have to enter any state, see anything, or believe anything in advance.
“You never take without giving back.”
What comes back
Images, mostly. Sometimes a scene, sometimes an animal, sometimes one blunt sentence. It is rarely a set of instructions.
The turtle did not arrive with instructions either. It arrived as itself. The half of the session that matters is the part afterwards, where the two of us work out what it is pointing at and what it is asking of you.
What if you find nothing?
People ask whether I ever come back empty handed. You usually find something.
The harder part is the timing. Some of what comes back lands the moment you hear it and some of it makes sense a fortnight later. That is normal, it is why integration exists as its own session, and it is the same reason soul retrieval is never a first appointment.
Written by Nomad