Shamans are responsible to the spirit world for keeping their people in harmony with nature. In the community s/he serves, a shaman is responsible for healing the people, and sometimes their animals, too.
What Is Shamanic Healing?
Shamanic healing is a form of energy healing. It involves manipulating energy in the spirit world by dealing with spirits, In the spirit world, shamans use hearing, taste, touch, movement and other kinds of “images” as well as visual images.
While shamans may also do several other types of healing, using herbs, laying on of hands, singing or chanting, and so on, some kinds of healing are distinctly shamanic:
- Journeying in the spirit worlds to ask for, discover, barter for, steal, or battle for the cure for an illness or injuries.
- Retrieving souls or pieces of souls that may have been lost (due to accident, illness, or emotional trauma) or stolen.
- Extracting spirit intrusions that may have entered (or been sent into) the body and be causing disease, accidents, or mental illness.
What Makes Shamanic Healing Different?
Shamanic healing requires believing in the spirit world and dealing with the spirits. If you don’t believe, you may be doing some other kind of healing, but it isn’t shamanic.
Shamanic work is very active. It depends on the skill and imagination of the shaman to be effective.
Shamanic healing is very rooted in the land and in the particular beliefs of the shaman’s own culture. Each culture has its own system of myths and symbols, its own way of dealing with spirits and the spirit world.
Even administering medicines involves dealing with spirits. The medicines are empowered by the shaman in a ceremony and might have little or no effect without the shaman’s energy working on them.
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Shamanic Healing Methods
Certain healing methods are specific to shamanism, such as soul retrieval, extraction of intruding spirits, guiding the spirits of the dead to the spirit world, and so on. Most require coaxing, bargaining, or battling with spirits while journeying in the spirit world.
Shamanic healing methods always involve manipulating/changing energy in a symbolic way that makes sense in the shaman’s own culture. That is, shamans work with the images and metaphors of their people, whether they are journeying to the spirit world or working in ordinary reality.
For a description of shamanic intrusion extraction, see The Way of the Shaman, by anthropologist Michael Harner.
For a discussion of soul retrieval, see the Soul Retrieval section of this site.
For information on guiding the spirits of the dead to the spirit world, see the Soul Release (Psychopomp) section of this site.
Learning to Be a Healer
The key requirement in learning to be a healer is willingness to be of service to others—even to people you don’t know or normally might not even like. You must offer yourself to spirit as a channel or vessel for healing.
That’s what all spiritual or energy healing work is about. Only the methods for delivering the energy differ. Different healing methods work for different people.
Shamanism works by manipulating images. It is an active, take-charge method of healing.
