About Shamanic Psychotherapy

What is Shamanic Psychotherapy?

In my clinical practice, I find that many people come to psychotherapy looking for growth and healing on both psychological and spiritual levels, but the spiritual leaders in their life don’t have the clinical training or experience to address the psychological elements of their pain. And many times, therapists don’t have the spiritual language or connection to address their patients’ pain on a spiritual level. Shamanic Psychotherapy works on the psychospiritual level, or where the self and the soul meet.

Shamanism is rooted in experiential spiritual connection, based on a disciplined practice of altering consciousness at will to access power, wisdom, and healing.

What are Sessions Like?

So, some details about what the spiritual part of the experience of Shamanic Psychotherapy might look like. First of all, I respect and honor your sovereignty, so you are free to accept or decline any invitation I make in our work together.

  • I will ask you about your spiritual language and your spiritual lineage. This might include your religious history or lack thereof, current religion or faith tradition or lack thereof, spiritual connection or lack thereof, religious trauma, spiritual confusion, your spiritual pain, and what sense you have of the spiritual growth you are looking for. If we discover we speak different spiritual languages, I will invite you to collaboratively develop a shared language so we can meet in the dimension of Spirit to do this important work.
  • Meditation, ceremony, and ritual
  • Jungian depth psychology and shadow work
  • Becoming native to your body, your home, and the land you live on
  • Healing your relationship with the Earth
  • Ancestral connection
  • Gratitude practices
  • Dancing, singing, drumming, rattling
  • Shamanic journeys for wisdom and healing
  • Working with archetypal energies, tarot, oracle cards
  • Reading, discussing, and exploring spiritual literature
  • Calling in the elements and working with energy and chakra alignment
  • Plant medicine (I currently offer collaborative retreats, referrals for, and collaborative work with experts in this area)

It is important to note that spiritual belief is not required to benefit from Shamanic Psychotherapy. In other words, you don’t need to “be spiritual” in order to work with me.

In terms of the clinical part of Shamanic Psychotherapy, this is the work I’ve been doing all of my career. I continue to specialize in trauma, substance use issues, and couples and family work. My clinical training and education continue to be the foundation for my practice, and you can be confident that our work together will be grounded in the theory and ethics of clinical social work and the psychotherapies.

A Word About Indigenous Shamanic Cultures & Cultural Appropriation…

Shamanism originated in indigenous cultures all over the world, early in human history when humans were more connected to the worlds of spirit. I am a white woman of (mostly) Irish, English, and Scandinavian descent. I am not indigenous. To the best of my knowledge, my ancestors came to this land as immigrants and then proceeded to participate in the colonization of this country. I am not indigenous. I have been naturalized to this land, but I am not indigenous to the lands of my ancestors either. This was heavy on my mind and heart when I felt the call to shamanism. It felt very important to find a teacher or a way to learn that did not steal from indigenous shamanic cultures. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies was founded by a Western anthropologist, Michael Harner, who studied indigenous shamanic cultures over several decades and learned that cultures separated by oceans and continents and generations shared universal or near-universal principles, values, methods, and techniques for healing. He learned that this wisdom and these practices can be taught, learned, and utilized without taking or appropriating the rich cultural traditions, rituals, songs, dances, etc. that form the context of shamanism in these cultures, and that’s what he set out to do. I wish to serve my lineage as a cycle breaker of generational trauma and moral injury. I want to give more than I take, and I want to do no harm.In my own practice, I am committed to the ethical practice of shamanism, especially in terms of respecting the indigenous cultures in which shamanism originated and ensuring my work does not claim or appropriate any culture of which I am not a part. Any cultural practices, such as Ho’oponopono, the ancestral Hawaiian art of setting things right, and the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, that may come up in our work together, are precious gifts given to the whole of humanity from these cultures, or utilized with the express permission of leaders of those cultures.