Shamanic Services
Our birth into this world is not a one and done event.
More and more of ourselves continues to arrive throughout the entirety of our lives.
Illness and crisis arise when there is not enough room.
Owning our own life power is a conscious, active, and ongoing choice.
Shamanic Healing and Pathwork
“The shaman’s idea of power is similar to our concept of energy, yet it includes more: energy as well as intelligence and self-confidence. Spiritual power is not political power or power over others. It is power essential to one’s health and ability to survive.”
Michael Harner, Cave and Cosmos
~~
Shamanic practice works with the spirit of our problems, illnesses and pains, with aims to restore an inner balance of power to help us live our lives to the fullest of our abilities.
The life power we all possess is literally behind the scenes of our habitual awareness, because it produces our habitual awareness. For this reason we generally cannot see for ourselves the true nature of our disharmony.
This true nature becomes apparent in spirit, and shamanic practitioners learn to engage with it.
~
There are many facets to this work, from receiving shamanic healing, to engaging in your own pathwork.
We generally need to start with receiving. All of us can benefit from the kind of healing that contributes balance to our life power. And working with spirit requires a tangible experience of the effects of their work that we can personally recognize and acknowledge. Such experience is unique for all of us, and can be crucial to the success of our healing.
In regards to our own pathwork, we may choose to deepen our relationship with spirit for a number of reasons. Maybe we want direct exposure to the creative wisdom of the spirits, or we desire access to higher qualities of agency in our lives. Or, we may wish to become their colleagues in delivering their healing power to this world, because they cannot do it without us.
~
If you are interested in receiving a healing or pursuing this work, please request a discovery journey.
All sessions, in some form or another, include shamanic healing, which works directly with the causal forces and conditions shaping a person’s experience. This may involve extraction healing, power and soul retrieval, divinatory messages, ancestral healing, compassionate psychopomp—the loving and compassionate helping spirits will know where the present energy most requires rebalancing.
My primary shamanic practice and training is based in core shamanism, as developed by Michael Harner. Core shamanism extracts the near-universal, essential practices of indigenous shamanism worldwide from their specific cultural adornments. Its nonpartisan substructure offers advantageous accessibility to those of us in the West who have been isolated and removed from the wisdom of our own shamanic heritage.
More crucially, the neutrality of core shamanism offers room for us to discover for ourselves what lost lineage(s) may be calling to us, to help us feel whole, because every single one of us has shamanic heritage.
An aspect of power retrieval, I single out entrainment due to its importance in honing our Will—that is, our capacity for choice—and developing effective energetic hygiene. Entraining energies are life energies: they saturate and surround us, inside and out, as our habit-forming, habit-staying and habit-breaking agencies. What entrains us long term becomes our embodiment—and when we lack conscious relationship to the prime movers of our experience, they essentially supplant our Will, ushering us toward inertia, fragmentation and accompanying conditions of stuckness.
Power is not intellectual, but it IS intelligent. Its mastery requires visceral yet humble confrontation. Power itself is our best guide to developing an aptitude for conscious entrainment that supports embodied vitality. But power, in its raw causal forms, takes getting used to. Too much too soon, or too much all the time without conscious, intentional outlets, can serve to burn us out. Power needs to move. Without our conscious response, its momentum disorients our awareness before we know what is hitting us. Learn how to responsibly and sustainably manage the recovery of your capacity.
Also intrinsic to most shamanic work, divinatory messages are messages from the helping spirits, who have the ability to communicate to us from beyond the here and now. They focus on the information that most helps us heal, and to maintain balance at this particular time in our life.
That said, divinatory messages tend to refrain from simply telling us what (we think) we want to know. In measures beyond we know how to acknowledge, the future is always malleable. Our task at hand is to move in conscious harmony with collosal powers of change that are presently demanding we learn how to carry our own weight. The helping spirits have commissioned themselves in helping us in this, and they are very well aware of our tendency to want to set things in stone. But as strong as stone can be, it can only move, and very precariously, by other forces. When we embody knowledge that we have turned into stone, change can be unbearable.
Our helping spirits know us. And because they are truly loving and compassionate—it is the only way they know how to be, having surpassed the trials of our world—they will always act in the interest of our best development.
The heart of shamanic practice is the shamanic journey. This is where one enters what Michael Harner termed a Shamanic State of Consciousness (SSC), which is how we journey to the spirit realms to communicate with the spirits and bring their healing to the world. I have been trained in the Harner Shamanic Counselling (HSC) methodoloy, which is the instruction of shamanic journeying. It is different from mentorship because it opens the way to your learning directly from spirit for yourself.
Anybody can learn to shamanic journey. Most of us already journey, in some form or another, whenever we engage in creative work or any kind of visionary flow or channeling state. As amazing as such states are, with them we tend to enter a kind of blind-receive mode where our living and vital discernment very often steps aside—and with it our conscious Will. Something else takes over. These are states we revere—and truly, in no way do I mean to diminish creative flow. But we have to be responsible. The advantage of the shamanic journey, again, is developing our own conscious relationship with the powers behind the ecstasy.
If you are interested in developing and deepening your relationship with your own helping spirits via the shamanic journey, please be in touch.
Working shamanically in groups can offer incredible support to all of this work. There is power in sharing our shamanic experiences, and not just for ourselves. Our helping spirits immensely enjoy the collective attention of an intimate social setting where conscious receptivity to the jewels of their expression is the norm, not the anomaly. We get to witness just how interconnected we all are, and how we cannot do it all ourselves, because sometimes the only way around our blind-spots is with the mirror of someone else.
Group offerings may include shared healing, intentional journey topics, teachings, ritual practice, or simple shared spaces for collective learning and witnessed encounter.
If you are interested in group experience, either online or in person, please send me a message. If I receive the interest, I can get something started.
Ethics in shamanism is of preeminant concern. We are all sovereign beings, and we are all on our own path. When the medium of a work necessarily involves unconscious currents, it is of very real consequence that there are powers that can and do enter into these spaces, and manipulate our consent for doing so, without our conscious permission. And it works both ways.
In shamanic practice, we learn methodologies that enable us to bypass another’s sovereignty. Our helping spirits may be all-knowing, but we humans are not, and we can misinterpret their message, “hear what we want to hear.” In the words of my Foundation’s president Susan Mokelke, “none of us is wise enough to know what another’s soul wants or needs.” When we act in abeyance of another’s free choice, we do not contribute to balanced resolution. We do not heal.
I promise to only work with the conscious, express permission and informed consent of any client seeking my help, and to only conduct shamanic work within my abilities.