Shamanic healing is the art of using spiritual influence to empower the internal healing of the querent’s spirit. The practitioner works on your behalf at the level of spirit rather than body or mind. It is not a religion, it is not medicine, and it is not spellwork.
Most people picture a dark clearing in the woods. Firelight, drums, and something at the edge of it they are not sure they want to see.
It is a video call. You bring a question, I tell you what I see. What follows is what is actually happening while that is going on.
What it is
Shamanic healing is the art of using spiritual influence to empower the internal healing of the querent’s spirit. A querent is the one who asks. Every word in that sentence is carrying weight, and the one people skip over is internal. I am not the one healing you. Your own spirit does that. What I bring is influence, and a pair of eyes that can see where the work needs to go.
That is the whole of it. Everything below is detail.
Who actually books this
Not who you would guess. A woman working out whether to leave her marriage after having a baby. A mother whose child was in the grip of mania. A woman who believed her husband was cheating and wanted to know how to carry it.
Ordinary people at the worst part of an ordinary year. Nobody arrives because they are interested in shamanism. They arrive because something will not move.
How I came to it
Not the way you would guess. I spent years in technology and climbed it rung by rung, and I did all of that with epilepsy, from fifteen to thirty. A storm in my skull that came with me into every boardroom.
Shamanic illness is the older name for it, and in the traditions that use it the sickness is spirit knocking. It does not go quiet until the calling is answered. In the same season I stopped running from this path, the storms went quiet. I am not telling you to trade your doctor for a drum. I am telling you what happened to me.
My father came from a line of shamans. His uncle was an Inyanga, a traditional healer in South Africa. Nobody ever sat me down and explained any of that to me. The path was in my blood, and I only found that out the long way round.
My ancestors trained me and they led me to elders, African, Native American and Siberian. The whole of it, the ocean my parents crossed, the office with a view, the storm and what came after, is on the about page.
What it is not
- It is not a religion. There is nothing to convert to and nothing you are required to believe in advance for it to work.
- It is not spellwork. I will not cast a spell on anyone’s behalf, and I turn people away when they arrive wanting something done to somebody else. This work is done on you, with your consent, because you asked for it.
- It is not medicine, and it never stands in place of it. It sits alongside your doctor. That line matters enough to have its own article.
- It is not Reiki. Reiki channels energy into the body. This works at the level of spirit, which is the shape of the thing rather than the flow of it.
Is shamanic healing real?
I get asked constantly and I never mind being asked. What I mind is the dismissal. This is a serious practice and it is ancient. It practically spans the beginning of the universe. It should be respected, and instead it has been demonised in the eyes of people who would rather sell you an addictive pill.
That is my view and I am not going to soften it. It is also not a reason to stop anything a doctor has put you on. If a doctor has asked something of you, do not cease it on my account. That decision sits between the two of you and it stays there.
As for whether it is real, you can test it in one sitting. Bring something specific, and see whether what comes back names a thing you had not been able to name yourself. That is the only claim worth making. If you want to know what the work looks like from the inside, start with what happens in a journey.
Written by Nomad