Before I get started with sharing my personal experiences, I want to set the foundation for what’s the meaning of being a shaman / healer / spiritual guide.

The Essence of Shamanism

What’s a Shaman?
We are a new people
We are an old people
We are the same people
Deeper than before.- Anonymous American Indian Chant

Shamanism is an ancient spiritual practice that bridges the physical and spiritual realms. The term ‘shaman’ originates from the Siberian Tungus language, meaning “one who is excited, moved, heated, and raised” (Eliade, 1964).

A shaman is a spiritual guide who navigates between worlds, accessing altered states of consciousness to gain wisdom and healing powers. As Terence McKenna eloquently put it:

“A shaman is a person who knows about the other side … one who’s seen the end. And once you’ve seen the end, you can come back to your part in the play and play it with much more vigor because you’re in on the joke.”

The Shaman’s Journey

The path to becoming a shaman often begins with a profound personal experience, sometimes called the “shamanic illness” or “initiatory crisis.”

This process can involve:

• Prolonged illness or near-death experiences
• Vivid dreams or visions
• Perception of spirits or energies others can’t see
• Periods of isolation or unusual behavior

These experiences serve as a spiritual awakening, enabling the future shaman to navigate between different realms of consciousness.

Shamanic Healing Methods

Shamans employ various techniques to heal and guide their communities:

1. Removal / Disintegration of Sorcery: Using charms, formulas, dance, and chanting / specific mantras given to the shaman (some mantras are just personal or family mantras only to be used by the shaman)
2. Removal of Objects: Extracting disease-causing entities
3. Exorcism of Spirits / Spirit Releasement: Calling upon spirit helpers to help in the process to remove the attached energy
4. Soul Retrieval: Recovering lost soul parts from other dimensions (even organs that have been lost in other realms)
5. Confession: Guiding moral cleansing
6. Transfer of Illness: Moving ailments to substitute entities
7. Suggestion and Explanation: Providing insight into illness and healing
8. Shock Therapy: Stimulating the nervous system for healing

I believe that the old ways don’t work anymore. Why, you may ask? Because these are new times with new rules. It’s not that the matrix is broken, but that the rules have changed. The modern shaman is someone who is able to blend the mystical with science, one who can do Reiki or biofeedback and tap into other realms at the same time. One doesn’t take away from the other; in fact, they go hand in hand.

It’s not that the old doesn’t work, but it just doesn’t work as before. 40-50 or even 20 years ago, you’d go to a shaman and they would do everything for you, and it would work. You would feel like your life had changed. But the rules have changed. The old ways do work, but they just don’t work like they did because the planet has transitioned and is asking for people to become self-aware. We can no longer depend on someone else to do the healing work for us.

Yes, of course, shamans, healers, and spiritual guides still have a huge role to play, as do other guides in semi-traditional roles. They may not be believers of the spiritual realm, but their souls are, and therefore you get what you need from them and move on. So the new age requires us to be much more self-aware than before.

Actually, in 1987, something happened that really shifted our energy and brought so much light consciousness to us all throughout the whole planet: a star died and became Supernova 1987A. This supernova really allowed for our consciousness to shift. Then 2012 happened with the transition of the age of our planet, and here we are today.

It really is a different time. What worked before may not work now, not because it didn’t work before, but because the rules of the game have indeed changed.

Modern Shamanic Practice

Today, shamanic practices are experiencing a revival, adapting to modern contexts while maintaining their essence. Many healers now combine traditional shamanic techniques with contemporary therapeutic approaches (this is what I do and like the most), offering a holistic path to healing and self-discovery. In some of the shamanic practices I’m initiated in are very structure and restricting and because don’t play well when I feel constricted so combining techniques is the way I like the most.

As we rediscover these ancient wisdom traditions, we’re reminded of the profound connection between mind, body, and spirit—a connection that shamans have honored for millennia.

The Calling

It’s not a path one simply chooses; rather, it chooses you.

The process begins long before any formal initiation, often in early childhood or adolescence.

Signs and Symptoms

Because I wanted to figure out what was happening to me, I started going into meditation to learn about what was happening. Only after being seriously in the middle of, it all, I started researching and reading. I’ve discovered that potential shamans often experience unusual phenomena:

• Prolonged illnesses
• Fever dreams
• Visions others can’t see
• Apparent delusions
• Behavioral changes

These aren’t just random occurrences. They’re the first steps of an inner awakening, a connection to realms beyond our own.

The Dangers

It’s shocking how close some shamans come to losing their lives or sanity during this process. My spiritual godmother who was considered delusional when she started seeing disembodied energies and demons. She even stopped eating for days, thinking she was losing her grip on reality. In my case, I felt like I was just lost, confused, broken and everything in between.

The Other Side

The experiences of a budding shaman are intense and varied:

• Seeing into other realms
• Communicating with lost souls
• Battling demonic energies
• Witnessing past lives
• Experiencing simulated death or dismemberment

It’s as if they must face the darkest parts of existence to emerge as a guide for others.

The Crossroads

Not everyone who experiences these phenomena becomes a shaman. Some don’t survive the process. Others emerge but reject the call, often due to lack of support or resources. In our modern world, without the tribal structures of old, many potential shamans don’t realize their calling until much later in life.

Dairy of a Wimpy Healer

I’m in awe of these ancient, powerful traditions that are everywhere in the world. Through my journey, I have connected with spirits from several Asian cultures (China, Japan, India, Philippines etc), Egypt, Israel, South America, Natives, Africans (so many), and so on….spirituality does not belong to anyone and it’s a heart-based process so depending on our heart, we can welcome and attract or be honored to have certain energies welcome us to their collective consciousness. This spiritual process has always been a reminder that there’s more to our world than what meets the eye. This openness to what else is out there really a bridge to close the gap between the seen and unseen. The path of a shaman is not an easy one, but for those who answer the call, it’s a profound journey of healing and wisdom.

Most often, the shaman becomes a shaman after going through a prolonged illness or exhibiting certain behaviors that lead the village to notice that the child is meant to pass certain trials to go through initiation. Often, the shaman, as a child or teenager (normally in early childhood), experiences certain situations that may appear to outsiders as if the child is becoming delusional. They may experience an illness that includes having a fever, being bedridden, or seeing things that others can’t see.

Through this process, the person is going through an inner awakening to other realms to understand and be able to navigate through them. The symptoms a shaman may experience range from not being their usual self to the point that others may consider the child is losing their mind, to a more serious illness that puts the person’s life in danger as they go through the necessary tests.

There are plenty of numerous accounts of very powerful shamans who almost lost their lives or sanity in the process. My own spiritual godmother was considered delusional when she started seeing disembodied energies, demons, and lost souls showing up in her dreams, prayer experiences, or in the middle of the day! At one point, she wasn’t eating for days and thought that she was really losing her grip on reality.

My own experience was so overwhelming, it felt like I was an observer of my own life…everyone around me was always happy and cheerful, all the kids always talking and playing, and I would look at them as if I was learning to be human. As if I did not know what made them so happy. I often wondered if they were fake-happy. Even up to my mid 30s I remembered that feeling, when I tried to participate in regular life activities. If I have to say, when was I really born, I’ll have to say 2024 because every year, I become someone knew and I look back and can’t barely recognize my old versions of who I’ve been in this life.

Many shamans come to understand their calling either during or after overcoming these illnesses, or they find the cure for the illness by accepting the shaman’s call. Some of the experiences one may endure during the uncommon behavior or illness include, but are not limited to: seeing clearly into other realms, communicating with lost souls or fighting demonic energies, seeing past lives or lives of people in war, being cut into pieces, dying in a frozen icy area, being entombed, experiencing how all of our bones break into tiny pieces, being buried alive, experiencing a death in this body that feels so real that we may think we are really dead, feeling of being burnt, or any past lives that are very connected to your spiritual powers. These experiences may need to be integrated so that you experience the pain intensely until you can let it go and integrate the gift while releasing the pain and blockages from your energetic body.

Plenty of potential shamans simply don’t make it out of this stage if they don’t have the right support, or they make it out but do not accept the shaman’s call due to lack of resources and acceptance from their family or community. Also, if the person did not pass the tests, they may need more time, so everything after sizzles down. If the person is not part of a family or community that has elders who can train and hold space for the child to become who they need to become, this process is normally postponed until later on. This is especially true now when healers are coming to their life path as a healer or guide later in life, since they needed more life resources to be able to accept the path, as we do not have the tribes we used to have 200-500-2000 years ago.

The calling may come in many ways. My own calling to walk the path of a healer/guide started in childhood, but I postponed it until my 30s. I went through a difficult illness from age 2 for most of my childhood up to almost pre-teens. At age 13, I think the doctor finally cleared me and let my grandma know that there was still a little spot of the infection that they couldn’t get to, and that it might come back later in life, so I had to walk a fine line… I don’t know what that meant, and even now I don’t know what it means.

I was seeing so many things I really thought I was going crazy. I begged for my ability to see things and hear disembodied energies to go away. After that prayer, it felt like God listened to me. It was so overwhelming I really worried that I was going truly insane. It was hard to distinguish reality from what was in other realms, but I just thought I must have been making it all up until a couple of days later when the person I saw dying and the feelings I felt were all revealed in real life.

Knowing who was going to die 2-3 or even 1-2 weeks before was so overwhelming. I didn’t think I was able to handle that and my traumas due to the bone infection I had. I was often in a cloudy state of feeling, wondering, “Where is my body now?” Feeling disconnected from my body like flying above it and interacting with certain energies, sometimes they had instructions of what was coming up. Sometimes, some energies showed up looking like weird monsters, although they wouldn’t do anything to me. They were able to see that I could see them and would turn and look me right in the eyes. Sometimes when they turned to see me, I would hide my face to avoid seeing them.

This didn’t happen just in dreams; it was more like daytime, evening, dreams, or whenever. There was no set pattern of only in dreams or only in the evenings or only in the daytime. It was at any time, any day, so I felt like I was haunted by the images I could perceive. Some of them appeared with the issues of how they died, or the weird energies that looked like monsters would be different sizes. Some were very tall energies, some very short, most regular human size. Some looked like zombies, some appeared as cloudy dark clouds, some looked like magical beings with superpowers, while others looked like they were pretty new at being dead, so they had a stronger memory of who they were, making it clear to me that they had died relatively recently.

Some appeared as if they had been long forgotten, so they didn’t even know what they looked like any longer, but they were still hanging on to an image of being human. Others were clearly more supernatural beings with powers beyond my imagination, or shadow figures that were just looking and observing. I also saw the humans who were soon going to pass; some of them were family members of my grandparents or neighbors who were basically extended family.

 

Although in recent or even modern times, the call of the shaman often starts with an elder identifying who in the tribe or family will be the next healer, the person can also receive the call from spirits, higher beings of light, or ancestors in the lineage who identify the person as worthy of such a role. Sometimes, the person would have dreams that awaken this call so vividly that it becomes an obsession to decipher its meaning and potential powers. For a few years, the person may go on a journey of mystical spiritual discovery to find their way through it all.

In this journey, some people are more ‘rational’ than others and may take a shorter time, while others may be in it for several long years. Often, we think of it as a 7-year period where the person goes from awakening to other realms and dimensions, through the infancy of understanding what it could mean, trying to get answers, going deep into it until it feels like an obsession, then coming back to earth, feeling more grounded again, and finally noticing how their life and perspective have changed. Essentially, the person has been transformed.

The calling to become a shaman, healer, or spiritual guide is so intense that most people do not understand why some view it as having no choice, a huge responsibility to handle. Some may undermine those receiving the call by psychoanalyzing it as a superiority complex issue or as an aspect of the self that is wounded, feeling codependent on others and finding value only if they can help others. However, this is not really how it works.

I’ve done a lot of clinical trauma training and have many spiritual experiences, and I can tell you, it’s easy to pathologize the shaman’s calling because most people don’t receive this call. It’s not meant for everyone, and the ultimate call to awakening may also be confused with the shaman’s calling. The need to heal and the awakening that there is more to this reality is often misunderstood. The shaman/healer/spiritual guide calling goes a step further than wanting to know there is more to life than this reality or that there is value in this life. It’s more like the calling has chosen the shaman/healer/spiritual guide, not the person choosing the calling. Does that make sense?

Shamans, healers, and spiritual guides who are meant to travel through different realms to perform soul retrieval, to help others and put them first, to see for others what they cannot see for themselves, and to help others navigate their inner mindscape and soul wounds are truly answering a call. If you choose to push yourself to be noticed in the spirit realm, most people won’t make it. I know of a few cases of people so obsessed, but they never really got that call, so they push on and on. Malignant disembodied energies would use these people in a way that’s so tricky that by the time they realize they’re in a hot mess, it’s almost too late. Their minds have been so fragmented that there is little to do for them due to all the damage received. These are rare cases, but they do happen.

A shaman/healer/spiritual guide calling that’s beyond our human desires is irresistible, with an inner directive toward becoming a healer with no other choice. It cannot be denied even if we try to be the most traditional, logical person in human form. I’ve tried so many times to deny this calling for half of my life, fighting it in childhood, in my teenage years, and in college because what I wanted most was to be normal. I fought it through early adulthood until one day I gave up. In mid-adulthood, I finally surrendered.

I fought it for so many years, on and off, that I was angry with ‘God’, angry with the higher spirits I’ve communicated and worked with, angry and willing to believe what I knew not to be true just so I had a reason to be angry and frustrated. I tried to get rid of my altar more than once, I tried to let it all go so many times, I tried to move on with no progress whatsoever. It was almost like being stuck with this huge, glowing, round gift in my hands and feeling like it’s so overwhelming that all I want to do is throw it away as far as I could.

Then I felt like, if I can help someone who is in pain just like I once was, why would I throw that away? Why would I get rid of a part of me that I knew to be real? Yet the part of me that desperately wanted to be normal was asking me to throw this thing away… It was almost as if multiple versions of me would argue right in front of my eyes, all giving their points of view so I could make a decision. And because I couldn’t make a decision, I tried to hold my breath and hope that something would change, that something would magically change so I wouldn’t have to decide.

I mean, I even tried to ask, “What’s the worst that could happen if I don’t do this thing of ‘being a healer,’ ‘shamanic priestess,’ ‘spiritual guide,’ or whatever term you could think of to describe me?” But do you know what’s most interesting? Every time I had those thoughts, my mom and I would have some conversation unrelated to what was happening with me internally, and she would say something like, “You know, gods and spirits only choose people to do healing work if they are able to handle it.” It was almost as if she could read my mind, and I would look at her with a questionably raised brow, and she would respond, “Oh, I thought you just asked me that!” And I would be like, “No, we were talking about XYZ. How is that part of that conversation?” And she would say, “Oh, I thought you asked me that right now!”

She had done that over the years at least two handfuls of times when I was at rock bottom, ready to give up. I shouldn’t be surprised; she really is master number 33. Yes, I know! I put a lot of emphasis on that, but if you knew my mother, you would clearly understand that this woman is a powerhouse of light and wisdom beyond her years.

A Native American shaman, Essie Parrish, said, “I’ve been a doctor and will be one for all my life on this earth. That’s what I was created for, to cure people. Every time I treat anyone, I move upward in skill, I move upward.” (Eliade 1958: page 88).

Imagine my surprise when reading an excerpt from a shamanic book from the late 80s about how the shamanic calling produces a feeling of limbo, a floating feeling, and this phase of the calling being embodied in total confusion. Well, my whole life has been a huge ball of confusion… even when I’m not confused, I’m confused about not being confused. The chaotic energy we feel can be so overwhelming, lasting a long time, and while looking back at it, it has been what drives my need to get to know myself and other realms better, it’s still a mystery. Some things do not have a common answer, and no answer would be revealed from this realm. Once I came to be okay with not knowing or having all the answers that were satisfactory for me, things started to change. A new version of me was being born or reawakened… the aspect of my soul I’ve seen in my trances became clearer and more exciting than ever before. My respect for aspects of me and my journey became such a source of gratitude that I thought, “Oh my God, now I am going crazy and thanking my ‘demons’; now I have really lost it.” Don’t get me wrong, not all demonic energies are alike…in fact having the discernment to know when a demonic energy is there to a challenger vs destructive energy that is consumed with the idea of harming you is very different and knowing when to extra by negotiating or by force (exorcism style) require a level of discernment so not all demons are to be played with. I give this warning because I do have a lot of clients who start doing sacred medicine and interact with certain energies…some of these energies are master trickers and tricking others is what they are really good at!

Whether you want to or not, you become a different person. Even if you go through the trials and don’t move forward with the calling, there is a deep feeling that most of you is gone if you don’t accept it, so eventually, you end up coming back to it.

It’s important to note that some healers are more artistically inclined than others, so a shaman with an artistic quality may be the one who plays the drums or sings. Most people these days are used to the shamans from the Amazon region singing Icarus during ayahuasca ceremonies. But there are many more ways that a shaman can show artistic qualities, such as by being accepted and having the power to play the drums at a speed that calls certain energies. In our Ancestral Spiritual Practice of 21 Divisions, those who have the power to play the drums for Fiestas de Palo are truly gifted with the ability to sing ancestral songs and play the drums or Guira…each drum is associated with a different elemental energy and planet. In the old days, not sure about now in the DR, but the ancestors used to go into the mountains, into the woods to find the right wood to make the drum. They had to be guided to find the right one. This is not just anyone playing the drums; this is someone who has the power to heal with music. By playing the drums, güira, tambourine, flute, guitar, or whatever instrument is being used, like maracas, they can ACTUALLY invoke the energies associated with those instruments to open portals and allow certain energies to heal. This is different from someone playing the guitar without the power to use the right frequencies or words that would transport the person or energies between realms. Does that make sense? Yes, music in general heals, but what I am referring to is using music/sound to transport people to other realms and invoke energies through portals so that they meet with these people seeking healing to experience the magic of their energies. In essence, the human and beings are meeting halfway to do healing work, with the musician using their power to invoke and play the instrument in alignment with what’s needed to provide the healing.

In 21 Divisions, the person praying has the power to pray, with her words and readings she is actually using her gift to bring wisdom and integration to those in the praying circle. Some of those Misas are so powerful you could easily enter a deep trance state unlike anything else you’ve experience…and yes, there is no sacred medicine from any plants, its just prayer work….community, songs, and basic musical instruments.

In some cultures, we don’t consume medicine but we did once. Our Taino Ancestors used Yopo in the Dominican Republic for a long time. Our African Ancestors used different medicines that they couldn’t take to the island when they were brought over. Its medicine that’s still being used in Cameroon, and other places to go into deep healing work. The Africans and natives had to learn to go into deep trance without any medicine and it worked! So, we had to learn to go into deep trance with our intention, community and sound.

 

Some shamans have artistic gifts along with natural mystical tendencies or abilities to see, hear, and sense without any sacred medicine. This is the case for those in 21 Divisions, Vodou, Séance, Spiritism, Palo, Candomblé, Umbanda, Macumba, etc. You become a healer by channeling certain energies that teach you things or come through you to do things for others so that others can heal. Other traits may include just having certain mystical tendencies… these tendencies could trigger others easily where they may feel like they always know what you are thinking, or perhaps having hallucinations, hypersensitivity, illnesses such as schizophrenia and epilepsy, or even homosexual tendencies which set them apart. I want to quote Coyote (1987) for the last three aspects I mentioned so you know that I am not just pulling this out of thin air. Other shamans throughout the ages have mentioned these traits because when we are able to perceive beyond this realm, sex is no longer either/or, and these illnesses that are normally looked down upon and put people in a little cage of being less than are actually what makes them able to perceive beyond. Without the right guidance, of course, people get lost in what they experience and may get so wounded that it becomes a physical trauma that most can’t let go of without a lot of help and patience. Another key aspect is that the person may not be able to see things the way that most do, so they may appear one-sided to most.

I want to make a side note here:

A lot of research has been done in the medical community before introducing psychedelics and sacred medicine to the medical field. What they have found is that what most people previously considered to be completely delusional and pathological problems in these shamans were misdiagnosed and misunderstood. With the renaissance of ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, and other medicines that are in clinical trials with psychotherapy, they are realizing that a lot of these previous perceptions were completely inaccurate and that perhaps most of these people diagnosed with schizophrenia and epilepsy were just hypersensitive to these other realms of consciousness.

Scientists are studying how certain drugs like LSD and PCP affect people’s brains. They noticed that these drugs could make people act in ways that are similar to how some people with schizophrenia act. This made them wonder if there might be a connection between how these drugs work in the brain and what happens in the brains of people with schizophrenia.

They found out that these drugs and some medicines used to help people with schizophrenia both affect special parts of the brain called “receptors.” These receptors are like little switches that turn on and off different things in our brains.

The scientists think that by learning more about how these drugs work, they might be able to understand schizophrenia better and maybe find new ways to help people who have it.

However, some people who practice traditional healing in different cultures around the world have a different view. They believe that what doctors call schizophrenia might actually be a spiritual problem rather than a medical one. They think it happens when a person’s spirit or soul gets mixed up or separated into different pieces. They call this a “spiritual crisis” and have their own ways of trying to help people who experience it.

So, while scientists are looking at the brain to understand these experiences, some traditional healers are looking at the spirit. Both groups are trying to find ways to help people who are having trouble, just in different ways.

Dr. Stan Grof often discusses how some transpersonal states of being could easily be identified as pathological, especially if the person starts talking about being able to know what others are thinking or feeling, experiencing delusional magical thinking, having clairvoyance, or visions of entities or energy fields that aren’t visible to all. To most doctors, psychologists, and mental health providers, this clearly indicates that the person is losing touch with reality.

I want to pause here because it’s important to note that although those considered schizophrenic or epileptic could have started with these symptoms as a calling or while searching for something by using marijuana or other drugs, eventually there is damage to the brain, and different neurons can’t fire properly, so that regions become isolated. The person can no longer control their mental state, whereas a shaman eventually learns to enter these transpersonal states willingly and return to their regular consciousness. Actually, a responsible shaman won’t enter an altered state of being if they know they need to ground their energies and feel more balanced before making those trips, to avoid further complications.

Another important note I want to make is that a shaman is able to leave the conscious ego behind at will (eventually) and come back to regular consciousness after doing the work needed to assist someone. People who aren’t able to hold that energy together eventually fragment to the point that their ego is fragmented, making it nearly impossible to come back to self without a significant amount of inner healing work. For a shaman, the odd behavior or illness I mentioned earlier allows them to learn how to come back to self over and over again after trials and many difficult experiences, making the person truly a master of finding their way back to self, to the point that they truly become an archetype of the phoenix rising.

So, what’s the shamanic / healer / spiritual guide initiation?

This is how I’ve learned to see it: a journey less traveled that leads to tons of confusion but eventually becomes so easy that we laugh once we see everything we ‘endured’ in retrospect.

The initiation starts with the odd behavior or illness and coming to the point of accepting or ‘curing’ the illness by surrendering. This process could include either the thoughts of “OK, I know how to heal this” or “I just have to let go, and then I’ll be able to fully grasp that which I feel is about to be.” Or it could involve learning to overcome the behavior or illness through willpower and discipline.

Once the illness is overcome, we enter a learning phase, with much of the learning occurring in the dream realm. This is why I love dreams and the power of dreaming. We go into mystery schools, and if you have elders in living flesh, they will also take you under their wing and teach you all they know that they feel you are ready to learn. They won’t teach you things you can’t grasp yet because everything is timed in divine order. Some of these teachings could include how to heal various conditions, how to use your hands for specific issues, or how to navigate through the mindscape of a client and how to get to a specific place to find their lost souls. Most of these teachings occur in the dream realm, but they can also occur at random times and places.

Some clients I’ve worked with have experienced revelations in everyday settings. One was in a supermarket full of people when she started seeing and understanding things that no one else would be able to comprehend. She actually ended up hospitalized after that experience in a local green market because she started acting a little wild. Most people looked at her with fear of being attacked by whatever she was channeling; the police were called, and she ended up in a hospital that sent her to a psych ward.

A shaman’s view, regardless of what’s happening, is always going to come from a spiritual basis first and foremost. I recently had a client-friend – honestly, at this point, she is more of a soul sister than anything else – ask me if all issues come from the spiritual first or if they could first come from the physical. I couldn’t help but say something along the lines that, in my opinion, everything starts at the spiritual level first and trickles down to the physical. Obviously, a medical provider is going to say everything starts with the physical, a psychiatrist may say everything starts at the mental level, a psychologist may say everything starts with an emotional state.

I don’t want to make it seem like I am so great (but I am that great lol, btw that was a joke!), but everything to me really does start at the spiritual level that trickles down to the mental, to the emotional, then to the physical. Of course, if we do a good job, we can decipher ALL the components, including the spiritual aspects of the self that allowed for whatever physical symptoms we may experience. And because I have taken so many clinical trauma trainings in the last few years and counting, I feel pretty confident in saying that everything does start at the spiritual level and trickles down to the physical. When it gets to the physical, it’s because it has gone unnoticed for a long time and has become materialized, or perhaps past lives allowed for the symptom to exist long enough so that now you notice or experience the symptom in the physical because it has been in the works for multiple lifetimes and has finally materialized. This means you can become much more aware of it and can decide to be intentional about working on it. So essentially, I see the physical symptoms as a gift and a time watch to let us know it’s only a matter of time until we release whatever allowed or created this physical symptom to manifest.

Another key point I want to make is that there are indeed some symptoms that have their origin in the spirit realm instead of the physical realm. In that case, we first treat and release the energy causing the symptom and then restore balance to the energy lost that allowed this energy to cause an issue to anchor into the physical body.

For those who are indeed healers (shamans, spiritual guides), there is a significant challenge we all face: we can be in two places at the same time. In psychology, this may be seen as a huge issue where the person is seriously wounded and separated from self, resulting in major dissociation issues. However, if you are walking this shaman’s path, being in two places at the same time may initially look like, “Oh my god, I am a complete loser who can’t even anchor myself in my body” (if you are still going through the process of understanding what this is all about). Eventually, it becomes, “I am aware I am here and there, and now what do I have to do to help this person in the best way I can, and be okay with doing so, so I can return to my body in the most efficient way possible?”

We all know there are many dimensions, and therefore these dual consciousness states for shamans’ mean being able to travel through time and space to heal, gather information, do soul retrieval, and influence people or events without compromising aspects that may result in negative present and future outcomes. So, some of the work done is to help the client while taking everything else into consideration and asking the hard question: What is this soul (this client/patient) responsible for, and how can we help that person come back to balance and heal?

As we go through more advanced training, we can align the body and mind into one functional, aligned, balanced unit.

Okay, I am going to leave my journal up to this point because it’s been a long day, and we are in the middle of Hurricane Milton.

Let me know if you enjoyed this diary!

Warmly,

Victoria

ps. check out this blog on animals in our dreams.

#shamanism #shaman #healers #spiritualguides #lightworkers #starseeds #healingjourney #woundedhealer #woundedhealerarchetype #shamanarchetype

Ref: Overcoming Alienation and Separation with Shamanic Methods, Their Relations to Contemporary Alternative Medicine by Claudette Aras 1991