Inside a Shamanic Energy Healing Session: What To Expect

Drums, rattles, and spirits: shamanic energy healing can be exciting and mysterious. You never know what will show up. That’s because shamanism is designed to connect you to the unseen world, where so much happens beyond our senses.

Experiencing shamanism reminds us that we are more than our physical bodies. That we are more powerful than we ever thought possible and that we are all connected.

Find out what it’s like to receive shamanic energy healing and how a shamanic healer can help you. I’ll share my personal experiences and how it has helped me, so you can see for yourself its amazing potential.

What is Shamanic Energy Healing?

When my 75-year-old mother showed up at the door of Muktinath Holistic Center, she had many problems. She was homeless, for one. And while she was living with my younger sister and her family in a big house, they were fighting almost every day.

It didn’t help that my mother had to meet much of that family’s childcare needs. Or that she felt like she was cooking and cleaning, way beyond her share. But she didn’t have the means to pay for her own housing in New Jersey, which she felt was her home.

My mother felt trapped and helpless. She did not know why life had to be so hard, all the time, right up until her older years.

Still, when my Reiki and shamanism teacher, Sierra North at Muktinath, brought out her drum for a journey to begin my mother’s healing session, we were both surprised.

Brief Introduction to Shamanic Healing

Before we continue with that story, let’s get into some basics.

As I have written in my previous post, What Does a Shaman Do? Answers May Surprise You, shamanism is THE most ancient energy healing practice in the world.

Despite its ancient and remote origins, we’re seeing a resurgence in the interest and practice of shamanism in the West. You can easily find a shamanic practitioner near you these days, although you still may want to find the right one.

According to shamanism, everything is alive and has a spiritual component. A life force flows through everything on Mother Earth and makes us whole. The animals, the plants, the rocks, the rivers, and the wind: they are all alive and willing to speak with us, if we ask.

In shamanic work, we communicate with such compassionate spirits to discover the root cause of our physical, emotional, or mental challenges.

At its core, shamanism is a spiritual practice that supports an individual’s direct connection to nature, spirit guides, and their inner self. Shamanic healing work offers an opportunity to explore and transform parts of your life through guided spiritual insight.

At the end of a shamanic healing session, you may experience feelings of release, clarity, and renewed vitality. It can feel like a journey of rediscovery and a lesson on how your spirit interacts with the world.

The Role of a Shamanic Practitioner

The shaman is said to have one foot in this world and one foot in the spirit world. We are more likely to find a shamanic practitioner, and not a shaman, here in the West.

A shamanic practitioner is someone who has trained in shamanism to help others. A shaman, on the other hand, usually lives in communities of indigenous peoples and has had a lifelong apprenticeship within a lineage.

The shamanic healer’s job is to listen attentively, both to your story and to the subtle messages channeled during altered states of awareness. This role requires profound empathy and respect for your healing process. Their job is to provide a safe space for whatever arises without judgment or assumption.

A shamanic practitioner brings a unique blend of skills, including ritual knowledge, intuition, and often a deep familiarity with nature’s symbolic messages. They employ various techniques such as chanting, drumming, or energy sensing to navigate the landscape of your spirit.

Shamanic Healing Techniques

Several core techniques are at a shaman’s disposal. What you experience would depend on your needs and the shaman’s intuition. These techniques include the following.

Divination: Usually achieved through journeying, a process through which a practitioner achieves a trance state through drumming. The shaman communicates with spirit animals or guides in non-ordinary reality to tell the stories of the past, present, and future.

Dreamwork: Actively uses dreams as a pathway to connect with the spiritual world, to obtain guidance, heal, and grow.

Extraction: Removes sources of harm—energies, objects, or entities—from the physical body or space to restore balance and promote healing.

Psychopomp Work: Guides dying or deceased souls out of the Middle World (the spirit realm of our present world) to a better place where they can take the next step on their path of evolution.

Soul Retrieval: Gathers and reintegrates fragmented soul parts that are lost in the process of trauma or significant emotional upheavals. This process restores one’s wholeness and connection to soul essence.

The shamanic practitioner may utilize one or more of these techniques during a healing session. You can also find group healing sessions that may allow you to experience shamanic journeying and/or soul retrieval.

My Experiences with Shamanic Healing

Shamanism is not something that I would have intentionally reached for. I already had some Reiki training when I found it, and shamanism felt, well … remote. I just never considered shamanism as an option.

But my Reiki teacher, the fabulous Ms. Sierra North at Muktinath, also turned out to be a shamanic healer. She teaches classes in shamanism and offers personal and group shamanic healing sessions.

So now I’m studying shamanism, in addition to Reiki and Pranic Healing. I’ve experienced profound healings through Sierra’s shamanic techniques, including releasing emotional trauma and healing ancestral karma.

Ancestor Healing

For the past two years, I have joined Sierra and others in an ancestor healing ceremony on the closest Friday night to Halloween.

It’s to commemorate the Day of the Dead, really, and to honor and heal our ancestors’ wounds that may still be affecting us. They say that the veil between the worlds is thin around this time and that it is easier for us to reach the spirit world.

Ancestors hold a special place in shamanism. They continue to exist in the spirit world, according to shamanic cultures, acting as our energetic lineage and often serving as our protectors or guides.

But ancestors may also be a source of negative energetic patterns, or ancestral karma, that are passed down through generations. Healing their pain in the spirit world means releasing these negative patterns for current and future generations.

Picture about a dozen people lying down on blankets, in a darkened room.

Our shaman, Sierra, begins her drumming beat, and we all start our journeys inward. We help our ancestors regain their soul loss from trauma, pain, and unfulfilled desires. This facilitates their transition to the next part of their soul journey and cleans up the energetic blockages in our lives.

I won’t describe it in any more detail since this guided journey is Sierra’s.

For my lineage, it’s a work in progress. But my visions have improved notably from one year to the next. It’s always a surprise what shows up in a journey, and I look forward to seeing my next one.

A Home for Mom

Now let’s continue with my mother’s story.

My mother is no stranger to shamans. During her life in South Korea, she’d frequently sought out Korean shamans’ help on certain issues, with some uncanny results.

So when my mother first met Sierra, who is of Irish descent, she immediately took on the attitude that she would have had with a Korean one. With utmost respect and formality.

Even as Sierra showed up to our healing in a pair of jeans and a Hogwarts sweatshirt.

We had not made the appointment for a shamanic healing. Sierra is a healer of many talents, and we trusted her.

After brief introductions tinged with a bit of confusion, we all sat down in Sierra’s lovely healing room adorned with comfy chairs, crystals, drums, and feathers. I sat myself right next to my mother so I could translate.

My mother confessed that she desperately wished for a home of her own. She’d been on the waitlists of many senior housing facilities in New Jersey, but the wait had been years. She felt powerless. She also wanted to resolve the conflict with her youngest daughter, who was a source of much emotional pain.

Sierra listened with focus and frequent nodding. She occasionally spoke to validate my mother’s feelings. She also advised that she’d tackle one thing for the day and see what shows up.

Invocation

First, our shaman invoked her spiritual teachers and guides for their help and protection in this healing.

Invocation is an important step in shamanism and in other healing modalities that protects the space and supercharges it. I didn’t know about invocations until Sierra. But now I feel the energy change through my body when invocation starts, and am certain of its power.

Is it the helping spirits filling the room, as Sierra says? I don’t know. But something much more powerful and higher vibration than I am clearly shows up.

Extraction

After the invocation, Sierra lit up a stick of palo santo and let the smoke permeate around our bodies. Palo santo is a sacred cleansing herb, like sage. But it burns differently and is said to also bring in positive energy.

Sierra cleansed my mother’s body of unwanted energies, which she noted was pretty full.

My mom has been depressed throughout most of her life. I cannot remember her ever being able to modulate her own emotions.

When we hold on to our negative thoughts, emotions, and patterns and give them power with our attention, they stay stuck in our energy field and become things. Other entities, some with consciousness and others not, are also drawn to such negative emotions and feed from them.

If you don’t intervene, these passengers in our energy field influence us to perpetuate or worsen our negative patterns.

Talk about a cycle, right?

Shamanic Journey

Sierra lowered her drum from its place on the wall after the palo santo. She would journey for my mother, she said, and see where spirit takes her.

My mother and I listened and waited as Sierra drummed around us, with her eyes closed. Our shaman occasionally stopped to focus on her trance. I’m not sure how long it took for her to open her eyes and address us.

I will paraphrase Sierra’s visions from my mother’s journey. The stories are more symbolic and not meant to be understood as facts. The emotions conveyed and released are real, however.

My mother had been abused and even killed by my father’s family in a previous life, the story started. (My parents were enemies in life.) Because of the unfulfilled life that she lost, she came into this world wanting to achieve great success for herself.

But in this life, many other challenges remained. My mother and her mother had always had a bad relationship. (My mother had always felt picked on by her mother and excluded from the family’s love and wealth.) The spirit of my grandmother had never fully transitioned out of this world, Sierra said, and was now interfering in my mother’s affairs.

Psychopomp

All this time, my mother was flabbergasted by the accuracy of the emotions that Sierra saw. She started to cry at the mention of her mother.

It was time to help my grandmother finally transition, Sierra said. She called my grandmother’s spirit into the room. She then instructed my mother to bow to this spirit and to say words of forgiveness and blessing. Saying goodbye with kindness will help release her spirit better.

My mother said the words through tears. It was difficult, but she did it, clutching at her chest. The room was hot with emotion and tears.

Sierra and I sent my grandmother Reiki energy. Sierra used kind words to guide this spirit to move on from this world.

Soul Retrieval

My mother was tired, but the healing journey continued.

Sierra also saw during her journey that my mother had left parts of her soul in Korea. The feeling of homelessness remained deep inside her.

She helped my mother bring back those lost parts of her soul through more drumming and chanting. My mother verbally summoned herself back into wholeness, receiving the returning parts into her abdomen (solar plexus).

Closing

The healing session took almost two hours.

When it was finally over, my mother was speechless and exhausted. Sierra seemed back to her old self, smiling in her Hogwarts sweatshirt. I remained in awe of the experience, as I often find myself with my teacher.

Did It Help?

My mother truly appreciated the experience and reported feeling deeply refreshed and peaceful inside. The experience did not directly answer the questions that she went in with. But for her, it healed something intangible and visceral.

Nothing extraordinary happened, until it did.

About four months after this healing, my mother received a letter from one of the senior housing facilities. An apartment was available for her.

It was the closest location to my sister’s place and a full one-bedroom with private parking. A garden-style apartment with trees outside her window.

My mother has lived in this home for the past two years and absolutely loves it. She has space to live as she wants. She has friends living in the same complex and a community that looks out for her.

Even though the challenges with the youngest daughter continue, she now has a place to retreat to whenever they fight.

How to Choose a Shamanic Practitioner

I am super lucky that Sierra is my teacher. She has so many talents and is amazingly connected to spirit. But most of all, she is just a ball of love, empathy, and wisdom.

If you want to find a shamanic practitioner near you, start with the directories provided by:

Healers listed in these organizations will have the training and certification to help you.

Most of all, trust your intuition and the sense of connection you feel with your shamanic healer. The right shaman will make you feel safe and empowered with complete respect for your experience.

Final Thoughts

Shamanism is the world’s most ancient energy healing practice. Like nature, it never went away and is here for you to answer any questions you may have.

Connect with the spirit of your ancestors, the wind, and the rivers. Connect with the spirit of YOU.

This post was all about shamanic energy healing and what it’s like to experience one. Does reading about my experiences help you understand it better? Please comment below with any thoughts or if you have any questions!

Inside a Shamanic Energy Healing Session: What to Expect