The dictionary defines a shaman as one who acts as a medium between the visible and spirit worlds; practicing sorcery for healing or divination.

We all have images in our heads of the stereotypical Hollywood shaman dressed in feathers and wearing a mask who sings or dances or takes peyote and goes into a trance muttering cryptic words only to have eyes go wide and reveal the central clue in the movie or cause a shift in reality that effects one of the characters.

That is not what I do.

In it’s simplest form, what I do is create a bridge between the patient and the spirit world so that they can receive healing. There are three steps in this process, creating a connection with the patient, opening the door to the spiritual world, and building a bridge between the two.

There are many ways to create a connection with a patient, but the three that I mostly employ are talk, needles (Acupuncture), and hands on therapy (Craniosacral Therapy). Which one I focus on depends on what the patient needs or responds to best.

The next step is more tricky: opening the door to the spirit world. This is a process that is experiential in nature, and I learned how to do it from studying one on one with my mentor over the past five years It is very difficult to describe in words. My experience of it is that I feel things outside of my body. Sometimes it is the presence of spirits or souls or angels in the room, sometimes I feel connections to a greater power, sometimes I feel nothing I can articulate in words.

The last step is creating the bridge between the two. In traditional societies, great ceremonies and rituals were used to link the person with the spirit world. The drums or dances or chanting would lower the person’s sensory barrier and make them more receptive to the connection with the spirit world. I use acupuncture and Craniosacral therapy for the same purpose – it becomes my ritual, my way of inducing a state of deep relaxation in which the person is receptive to the connection, and the healing that flows from it.

People always ask me if I need the patient to “Believe” in what I am doing for it to work. The answer is no. But they need to be open enough to be receptive to the connections.

People also ask what I do with the connection once it’s made. The answer is that I “do” nothing, I just wait and see what happens. It’s different for every person.

A Story of Shamanic Healing:

(Please note that the details of the case have been changed slightly to respect the patient’s confidentiality.)

When I first started working with Sheila, her main complaint was back pain that had flared up nine months earlier. She was in such severe pain that she had difficulty driving her car, and difficulty working at her job. Most days she just lay in bed trying to endure the pain.

After taking her health history, and checking her pulse, I began the treatment with needles and Craniosacral therapy. Once she relaxed, I was able to make a Shamanic connection with her. I only felt one thing emanating from her: fear. It dominated her being. When I made contact with her lower back – the center of the pain – the fear escalated into shear terror. I was able to maintain the connection with her while we both experienced this terror. I liken it to holding someone’s hand as they go through a difficult situation. When I finished the treatment, her reaction was to ask me why I had caused her to feel such fear. I responded that she was scared already, I was just helping her to relax enough to feel it. I gave her homework to place her hand on the most painful spot and allow herself to feel her fear.

Over the next few weeks, she reported that her pain began to diminish, but wanted to know why she was feeling scared all the time? Again, I told her that she had been scared before, and the fear was causing her to have such tension that her back muscles had begun to spasm.

Over the course of the next few months I found out that although she was living alone, she had a very complicated family situation. We began to work with different members of her family as they came up. Her primary memory of her father was a man who baited her into arguments and then made sure she lost. During the treatments, I could feel the presence of her father in the room and was able to help her come to peace with a man who had been dead for 20 years.

Gradually, over the course treatment, her back pain lessened into an occasional nagging ache, and she is now able to take a plane trip to California that she had thought she was going to have to cancel. As an indirect benefit, She is much more even tempered now, and more pleasant to deal with.

Her medical issues were caused by her spiritual issues with fear. Not a specific fear that was traced to a specific event in her life, but the primal fear that was dominating her being. When that was lessened, we were able to deal with the issues which were preventing her from moving forward in her life. This is just one example of how Shamanic healing works.

Who could use Shamanic Healing?

My style of healing can treat any type of health problem from general malaise to stress to chronic illness to issues of mental health. Shamanic healing is indicated specifically when a person seems to jump from illness to illness without getting better, has a chronic illness that just seems to linger, or has a condition that is not responsive to treatment.

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