The Healing Power of Shamanic Practice
Many people explore shamanic practices to discover how they can change your life and your perceptions and bring healing to your life.
Shamans and the Shamanic Practice
Shamans are men or women who work with energy and nature for healing. During a shamanic journey, shamans enter an altered state of consciousness that allows them to perceive what is otherwise invisible. Their consciousness travels to supernatural, transpersonal realms that people who aren’t shamans can learn to access as well. In their journeys to the past and the future, shamans gain energies and information that can help them, and others live better lives in the present and set a new course for the future. They do this for the sake of achieving healing for themselves or someone else—even, perhaps, their community. Many people explore shamanism in the hopes of gaining healing powers as a result of shamanic practice.
Shamans believe the places they visit on shamanic journeys are real. I believe that, too, based on the experiences I have had personally and in working with shamans around the world. I say to people who have chosen to walk the shamanic path, “Check in with yourself about what you are experiencing. It’s up to you to decide what to make of it.” Shamanism is based on learning to value your own perceptions, recognizing that there’s more than one way to interpret an experience. Ultimately, we are all left with the task of weaving into our everyday lives the energies and information we may have gained as a result of doing shamanic work.
Perhaps the transpersonal realms shamans interact with are places that exist in other dimensions: places we can be transported to when we leave behind ordinary awareness and our identification with our bodies. Whatever the nature of these realms, shamans mediate between them and the world of their communities, all the while maintaining personal consciousness and will.
Shamans work with the past to change the way people’s previous experiences affect them today and with the future to connect them to a better outcome than the one they were headed toward. Like hunters, shamans track for a better future that can be brought back into the present energetically. Shamans also help people to dream into being a new future and new possibilities so that they do not have to continue to live as they have or stay on the same trajectory. All of this work is done to affect minute-to-minute decisions in the present so that ultimately, people can live in ways that are more pleasing to themselves and Spirit.
As a Jungian analyst, I saw similarities between what I was doing with my clients in my practice and what shamans do. I had been helping my clients identify past influences on their mind-sets and behaviors and guiding them to set goals for what they wanted to experience in the future because of undergoing treatment. It’s often easier to focus on current problems and fixing them rather than try to come up with long-term solutions and imagine what can be experienced in the future beyond just relief from the pain being suffered in the present. For many, exploring new ways of being or living often takes a backseat to more immediate concerns.
I find it’s common for people to lack clarity about what they want to experience in the future—at least during some periods of their lives. Not knowing where you are headed can be stressful and even paralyzing. In talking about what the future holds, you might be able to identify fears about bad experiences that you might have. At the same time, you might have a sense of what kinds of experiences you would find enjoyable or helpful. Shamanic work can often stimulate your ability to begin envisioning new ways of being and operating in the world.
At the beginning of my shamanic training, I wasn’t sure where it would take me, but I was ready to start the process. I had done shamanic work that seemed to heal the physical body—mine or someone else’s. That made me eager to learn more about shamanic techniques for physical healing. The Western medical community is aware of the mind-body connection—the ability of our thoughts and feelings to affect our physical experiences and our health. Carl Jung believed that all physical ailments have a psychosomatic component, meaning that our minds affect our bodies. To me, shamanism was another way of acknowledging and working with the mind-body connection for healing that can be both physical and psychological.
However, my main desire in entering a shamanic training program was to satisfy my longing for a richer experience of my life and a closer relationship to God, or Spirit. I wanted to not just believe that we are all interconnected, or accept that idea intellectually, but actually experience it. I wanted to feel that I was a part of a web of energy that encompassed all life and all of creation.
Shamans believe that the separation between us and Mother Earth, her trees, her creatures—and the sun, moon, and stars— is an illusion created by the conscious mind. That notion intrigued me, but it was doing shamanic work, using shamanic practices, that caused me to experience that separation is a trick of the mind. Recognizing and acknowledging our interconnectedness can be powerfully healing for the spirit—and even life-changing.
Whatever your reasons for exploring shamanism, I hope you will go beyond simply reading about this spiritual tradition and use shamanic practices to discover how they can change your life and your perceptions and bring healing to your life.
The Healing Power of Shamanic Practice Excerpt from The Necktie and the Jaguar: A memoir to help you change your story and find fulfillment.
You will also enjoy Carl Greer: Change Your Story, Change Your Life and Carl Greer: The Necktie and the Jaguar
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About the Author
Carl Greer, PhD, PsyD, is a retired clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst, a businessman, and a shamanic practitioner, author, and philanthropist, funding over 60 charities and more than 600 Greer scholars. He has taught at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and been on staff at the Replogle Center for Counseling and Well-Being. Learn more at CarlGreer.com.
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