Shamanism, Shamanic Practitioner, & Shamanic Healings
Shamanism
Shamanism is the world’s oldest spiritual path coupled with practical strategies for healing and survival. It is of direct revelation, meaning that each person has access to Spirit and spirits without need of any hierarchical structure.
Shamanism is a cross-cultural spiritual path practiced in every continent of the world. It is amazingly similar everywhere even though, throughout history, there has been little contact between shamans in widely divergent parts of the world.
Shamanism is not a religion, nor does it have dogma, a pope, sacred books or any universal set of rules or commandments. In fact, many Indigenous shamans around the world are Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist and practicing members of many different religions.
The word “shaman” comes from the Tungus tribe in Siberia, and it means spiritual healer or one who sees in the dark and who penetrates to the source. Shamanism has been practiced in Siberia, Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, Greenland, and native North and South America.
Around the world shamans are called by many names: healer, curandero/a, walker between the worlds, medicine man/woman, priest, transformer, psychopomp, etc. Shamans may inherit the role from their ancestors, come into it by surviving an accident or disease, display talent for it as a child, or merely seek training on their own.
A shaman is a person who uses the skills and intuitive ability to see “with the strong eye” or “with the heart” and interact with helping spirits to address the spiritual aspect of illness. They can choose to enter altered states at will to perform a variety of functions including ceremonies, engaging in the creation of art, trance dancing, chanting, and healing (to include soul retrievals, retrieve lost power, remove energetic blockages, and more).
As ceremonialists, shamans perform a variety of ceremonies such as birth, marriages, journeying, end-of-life transition, mourning, life transitions and more. The shaman also divines information for the community. Shamans have acted and still act as healers, doctors, priests and priestesses, psychotherapists, mystics, and storytellers.
Shamanism teaches us that everything that exists is alive and has a spirit and that everything on earth is interconnected. The shaman’s role in the community is to keep harmony and balance between humankind and the forces of nature.
Ingerman, S. (2012). The power of Shamanism to heal emotional and physical illness. https://www.sandraingerman.com/abstract-on-shamanism/
Society for Shamanic Practice. (n.d). What is Shamanism. https://shamanicpractice.org/about/what-is-shamanism/
Shamanic Practitioner
“Trained Shamans apprenticed for many years under a master shaman teacher. All members of communities and tribes who follow the shamanic way of life are familiar with the shamanic world-view and practice fundamental aspects of shamanism. They may communicate with nature spirits, pray in the shamanic manner, honor the plants and animal spirits and perhaps do some healing work. Most shamans live in remote areas of the world and not in urban centers. It is not so easy for most people to apprentice with a traditional master shaman.
Increasingly shamans of different areas of the world are traveling extensively to bring their knowledge to people living in urban areas on different continents. Although they have not necessarily grown up in a tribal community and have not apprenticed for long years with a shaman in the traditional ways, many people with great talent are adopting the shamanic nature-based world view and some have learned a vast amount about healing and other aspects of shamanic practice.
These people are called shamanic practitioners. They have not necessarily gone through an old school shamanic apprenticeship but are skilled healers, ceremonialists, and teachers in their own right. Some have apprenticed with master shamans for years but sensitive to appropriation issues they may choose not to call themselves shamans but rather shamanic practitioners
It is acceptable to ask the shamanic practitioner what their training and experience has been. A person who has taken a weekend workshop in shamanism or read a couple of books should by no means call themselves a shamanic practitioner. Since these days some do, it is best to be discerning."
From:
Society for Shamanic Practice. (n.d). What is Shamanism. https://shamanicpractice.org/about/what-is-shamanism/
Shamanic Healing
Quoted from The Power Path School of Shamanism. (n.d). Section “Shamanic Support”, About Shamanic Healing. https://thepowerpath.com/shamanic-support/about-shamanic-healing/
Shamanism is an ancient healing practice that targets the spiritual aspect of illness. A shamanic practitioner, through the aid of compassionate spirit allies, works to diagnosis and heal the patient. While the focus is on the spiritual root of illness, many subsequent ailments, e.g., physical, emotional, psychological, can manifest over time if the primary cause is left unchecked. The practitioner’s overall intention is to restore power and health to the patient.
Shamanic healing addresses areas that most medical training does not cover so the knowledge is complementary and supports and assists in other healing modalities. An example of this would be that, in addition to tending to a person’s physical wounding, a shamanically-trained practitioner would also help to energetically address any emotional or psychological disconnection induced by the wounding.
Shamanic practitioners know that most problems are a result of disconnection and that reconnection to life heals. Many people with only allopathic training do not know this as it is not part of their training curriculum.
Overview of Shamanic Healing
The shamanic perspective is that everything is alive and everything has spirit and awareness. Energy and matter are the same. Everything is vibration and everything that exists is an energy system within a greater energy system. Shamans hold the belief that everything that exists is connected to everything else in a web of energy or life and unseen/inner/spiritual reality affects visible reality.
Working within this system of perceptions, the shamanic healer strives to create balance and harmony of the spirit. This is a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual balance and can be focused on the individual or the community. This also can be applied to anything that exists. Shamanic healers act as intermediaries between the Spirit world (or non-ordinary reality) and the physical world.
By using shamanic practices, a wide spectrum of healing is possible. Shamanic healing takes place in many forms, depending on what Spirit recommends. This can include plant, herb, and mineral spirit medicine, the use of song and other instruments to move and transform energy, visualization, soul retrieval, extraction, hands on massage or physical body manipulation. The shamanic practitioner understands the necessity to use both nature and spirit in healing and that true healing is whole and complete: body, mind and spirit.
Is Every Shaman an Intuitive Healer?
Yes, every shaman by definition has training in healing and this training includes developing intuitive skills, reliance on intuition, and extensive practice in shamanic healing techniques that includes praying, singing, soul retrieval, shamanic extraction methods, shamanic journeying, working with allies and spirit animals, and a host of other approaches requiring the use of intuition. Simply put, every shaman worthy of the name is an intuitive. So, it would be true to say that at the core of shamanic healing is intuition.
Conversely would it be true to say that every intuitive healer is a shaman? No, it is not true because not every intuitive necessarily has training in shamanic ways of seeing the world, nor are they trained in many of the techniques that shamans use. For example, central to a shaman’s work is the communication with and use of allies, singing as a form of healing, and shamanic journeying. Not all intuitive healers are trained in these methods nor do they automatically have this information. This does not mean that many intuitive healers are not highly competent because they can be, yet some may not know anything about the work of shamans.
Shamanic Intuitive healing is nature based so it always involves the use of natural elements like the light of the sun, moon, and stars, the energy of the earth, the elements, earth, air, fire, and water, plants, animal allies, and so on. It relies more on tried and true ancient technologies related to perception, sight, sensing, knowing, and feeling while it does not discredit modern technologies, the insights of quantum physics, and the latest scientific discoveries related to health science.
The shamanic perspective as we have come to understand it is that the future belongs to the marriage of modern science and the ancient understandings of shamanic tradition, both/and rather than either/or.
Becoming a Shamanic Healer
Becoming a shamanic healer does not mean abandoning one’s knowledge of first aid or all the knowledge gathered through training in various modalities. Indeed medical doctors, physician assistants, nurses, chiropractors, dentists, naturopaths, psychologists, psychiatrists, Social workers, acupuncturists, practitioners of Chinese medicine, massage therapists, and many other types of practitioners have training in shamanic healing and use it adjunctively to their training in their various fields of specialization.
Shamanic healing addresses areas that most medical training does not cover so the knowledge is complementary and supports and assists in other healing modalities. An example of this would be that, in addition to tending to a person’s physical wounding, a shamanically-trained practitioner would also help to energetically address any emotional or psychological disconnection induced by the wounding.
An extraction or removal of an energetic parasite may be needed in addition to the administration of medication for anxiety or depression from an allopathic doctor. Sometimes de-cording may be necessary, a cutting of energetic cords to an intrusive person such as a relative or acquaintance. Often a shamanic practitioner will call in an ally to help or offer some extra protection for the patient from a plant or animal ally. In most cases it is not a question of either allopathic treatment or shamanic treatment but both/and.
Shamanic healers are particularly skilled at identifying trauma either long past or recent and tending to the repercussions of its presence in the individual or in the family structure. Shamans are aware that healing goes beyond physical stitches, setting bones, surgery, or pharmaceutical medications.
Healing takes place at many levels and the impact of trauma may be deep and pervasive in the patient’s life. A shamanic practitioner knows that even though physical healing has taken place the traumatic impact of an accident or event often requires attention even years later. This is why they use techniques like soul retrieval, shamanic journey method, and extraction not just for physical foreign bodies like shrapnel but energetic intrusions that are not detectable to the unpracticed eye.
The practitioner may also use such techniques as removing epigenetics and ancestral patterns through specialized Toltec extractive methods and the Tibetan Bonpo practice of duplication. Shamanic practitioners may at times direct the patient to focus their attention on specific parts of their body and especially locations in the brain.
Summary
There is, of course, much more to shamanic healing that has been written here because shamanic healing has been around for many thousands of years and has a rich history. It is, after all, the ancestral healing method predating all of western medical practices of the modern world.
This does not mean that it has been entirely replaced by modern allopathic medicine. Shamanic healing continues to be a primary source of healing for millions of people around the world and an adjunctive form of healing for many millions more.
Shamanic healing continues to be a powerful approach that includes age old methods and diagnostic tools now lost to allopathic medicine to its detriment. Fortunately, increasing numbers of western trained medical doctors are now aware of the contributions and value of shamanic healing, especially when they have run out of options for helping their patients using modern methods.