What is the difference between shamanic healing and psychotherapy?

Shamanic healing focuses on spiritual, energetic, and soul-level imbalances by working with the spirit worlds as part of maintaining whole health. It is is not a substitute for any licensed health care, including psychotherapy, which addresses mental health specifically, to help a client understand their own issues.

Is shamanism the same as spirituality?

Not necessarily. We can be shamanic in our spiritual practice, but we can also be very passive in our beliefs about spirit. Shamanism involves interactive, direct relationship with the spirits and spirit worlds.

Is shamanic practice religious?

No. It is spiritually serious, but not dogmatic, institutional, or belief-enforced. While some religions are considered shamanic, the reverse is not a given, and is not what I’m offering.

What makes shamanism different from sorcery?

Intention, mainly. Sorcery tends not to question interfering with the free will of other sovereign beings. Shamanism can indeed involve sorcery, but not here—and hence the importance of ethics in shamanic practice.

What does ‘shamanism’ mean?

The term arrives from Siberian tradition, and has in recent times become a wide-spread accepted catch-all for the practice of working with spirit.

What is the point of shamanism and shamanic healing?

To directly engage the causal forces of natural life (i.e. spirit) restoring ourselves to balance, rather than solely focusing treatment on the apparent surface symptoms of struggle and illness.

Doesn't shamanism involve plant medicine?

Not here. Some shamanic traditions make use of plant medicine, however most do not. Rhythmic sonic drivers, such as drumming, rattling and song, are just as effective in achieving a shamanic state of consciousness, with the added benefit of you retaining hold of your own conscious faculties.

I have concerns about cultural appropriation.

I am a trained practitioner of Core Shamanism, as developed by Michael Harner, which extracts the near-universal, essential practices of indigenous shamanism worldwide, stripped of specific cultural adornments.

The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, founded by Harner, is nonetheless active in the preservation and restoring of indigenous shamanic cultures that have invited such help due to their experience of religious and political oppression over the centuries.