This is a question I am asked a lot. The answer is both simple and not so simple. But first, take other people’s perspective very lightly, including my own. This is a very personal and intuitive journey. Deep down, you know who you are (or you will soon) and no one else has the authority to tell you otherwise. However, watch out for that ego because it loves the word Shaman.
I will start with an example. Before my first Ayahuasca Ceremony, the man who owned the facility said, “Everyone walks out of here thinking they are a Shaman, if you have that experience, I assure you that you are not”. Right off the bat, I can’t tell you how appalled I am that a person could go on invalidating others he does not know. Especially one who serves Ayahuasca. How he could tell you your experience is false before you even have it. The world is filled with toxic people like this who will give you their own reasons why they think you aren’t who you say you are – that’s their problem though, not yours.
It doesn’t matter what your Shamanic calling looks like, it doesn’t matter if you are “white” or if you weren’t taught by an elder member of some tribe. Of which there are so few in existence. It doesn’t matter if you were born into it or if you had a NDE or catalyst for initiation. It doesn’t matter if you have trained in a tradition because tradition is sometimes meant to be left in the past and so you must train from Source, a modern teacher, or Mother Earth instead. The truth is, we live in a new paradigm, in a new world, and the Shamanic calling has had to adapt.
There are a lot of people out there dropping the S word. People who think it just means healer. People who have studied with a tradition for many years and believe that means they have “earned” the title through training. Those who think being a Shaman means prestige and enjoy tickling their ego with such labels. And so many shysters just trying to prey on people who need help.
In an attempt to provide guidance and support to others, I want to share about my path, from the beginning right up to what’s going on today. I am here to help those who believe they are on a Shamanic path, have begun the initiations or just need some direction. There is no need to walk this path alone.
My own initiations began with Ayahuasca, but the real crazy training didn’t start until almost two years later (I call it “crazy shaman shit”, more on this below). I chose the Ayahuasca experience to be my catalyst in this lifetime – to open up those gates at a predetermined moment so as to allow me to step fully into my role. This gave me the opportunity to live a life of trauma, repression and mental health struggles so that I may know how it felt and how to heal it once I was on the other side.
I had a pretty wild experience in my first Ayahuasca journey. I dove into it fast and before I knew it I was holding the weight of the room. I was holding 60+ people in their journey and I felt like my back was breaking under the weight. This group had no Shaman on the weekend that I drank and I will never forget what it felt like to be called into that role in such a manner. To be called into a space that was not held in Divine love, that was not protected or cleared properly, one that I had no way to prepare for. During that weekend I didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know why my experience was what it was and I didn’t know that an initiation had started. (Side note: Shamans are the ones who hold the container for people to do their work. Drinking Ayahuasca without a Shaman is spiritually dangerous AF).
That was the beginning of the end of my 9-5 work. I was falling apart with fear and confusion, flailing helplessly as my world was unraveled. I felt like I was losing my mind in psychosis, constantly being thrown into that “other world” space. The one where you speak to ancestors and guides, or touch the raw part of the wounds of our world. The one where Ayahuasca takes you. It was the longest year of my life and I am still not sure how I made it through.
Thankfully, one by one, teachers began to appear on my path, but it was a solid year of torment and pain before things began to really even out. I had some phenomenal human teachers, but my greatest teachers have been the plants, which is why I call myself a Plant Medicine Woman.
After I was able to work with my first teacher, I was told in my meditations to keep going with the Plant Medicine. At this point, my guides were excited to have me there and the plants began to speak to me as well. The instructions I was given by the spirits were about sitting with small doses of Plant Medicine, twice a week, while all of my repressed traumas would be allowed to come to the surface. And so I sat as prescribed in that meditative space, opening to the plants with doses of .3g, something that should have barely touched my mind, and allowed what needed to come to the surface to come up. Phobias, anxieties, memories, stored emotions, and many other things came up in those sessions. On the last day of my weekly work, the Medicine gave me my first sexual trauma memory. On that day, she told me we were done and it was time to move onto the next phase.
After these months of working with small doses of Mushroom Medicine, the repressed memories and emotions began to come up on their own. I was able to release them without going into a journey space and continue moving forward on a daily basis. One by one, people were starting to become attracted to working with me and before I knew it, I was trip sitting with them. However, it wasn’t just trip sitting. Every time a person sat with me, they would walk away with healing and I would walk away with a healing, an important lesson, or a new ability. I was being shown how to clear a specific energy, thought patterns, or physical ailments during each session.
This continued on for about a year. Until the day that the Medicine told me to move to the PNW. I was sitting in ceremony with a client and she said,
“You can stay here and you can help people. Or you can do something more. It will be hard, but you will help more people.
This was the pivotal moment in my life where I could answer the Shamanic call. It was always my choice to go deeper into this work and to help with the collective as well as begin building a community.
As soon as we landed in Portland that next year, the real Shamanic training started. This is what I call my Crazy Shaman Shit. It didn’t start with a teacher. It didn’t start with an exercise. It started spontaneously, and I have always wondered if that is part of a true Shamanic calling.
It started at night. I was visited every night by a line of people wanting to be moved on. They were stuck, tormented or confused, and wanting guidance on where to go next. Sometimes the beings that visited me weren’t human at all, but they knew I could see them and they stood in line too. Every night, the line would appear and I would talk and move them and sometimes I would just close my eyes tight and wish them away.
My next layer of personal work came forward after that. I was thrown into Medicine Ceremony every night (much like a Psilocybin or Ayahuasca space), without ingesting a thing, and forced to surrender to what needed to come through. “it’s time to let go of the attachment to your husband”, “it’s time to let go of your kids” or “it’s time to make a choice”. Anything I was avoiding looking at in my life, through intention or simply being unaware, was brought to the surface to be confronted and processed. There was no hiding from healing my own trauma and shadows. That is the real beauty of being a Shaman. The plant spirits, and my higher self, hold me accountable and on track, bringing me into the spirit world as needed to clear obstacles and move forward in my path.
The next thing was when I started seeing portals. I could feel things coming out and being pulled in through the portals, unable to shut them down without knowledge of how to do so. I covered the ones I could and said a prayer because in Portland, none of the portals I saw were good.
Alternate timelines came up next. Every night I was brought into different timelines involving the people of my life. I was shown how to clear the timelines, what the different potentials were to every decision and life path, our relationships in different timelines, and how trauma impacts those timelines, as well as our current one. Through that process, I was being attuned to the ability of clearing other people’s timelines.
The last few months have included many new abilities, but my biggest has been astral traveling. I travel to other people’s dreams and we do work there. We clear their past, their barriers and I am shown their physical pains in my own body so that I may correct them on my massage table. When people are preparing for Ceremony with me, they often see me in their dreams and have old memories and emotions resurface for processing and release before we sit together to do the work. Sometimes ugly demon-looking beings visit me in my bedroom to try and scare me off of a specific client I am seeing the next day. They know I am coming to clear them, and they are scared.
Sometimes I am taken for lessons in other dimensions (I think?), where I sit with other healers to learn new things or make contact with a race I have not yet met. I meet people who look like humans but are not and sometimes I sit with other elders and we discuss the progress of what is happening on earth, sharing our experiences and discussing how to move forward.
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Yea, it feels that way too.
At this point I am also coming into many physical or 3D abilities. Allowing me to put my hands on people and see their multidimensional body. This allows me to diagnose but also to pull threads that no longer belong there. For example, I can pull pedophile energy out of a field. I can sense it like a rotten egg and tell if it is stored somewhere due to a person’s sexual trauma or even their parents’ sexual trauma. I can often also see the frequency of certain traumas and I am able to channel in the matching frequency to clear it.
Just the other day I was thrown into Ceremony space at an airport. Someone needed help and I was called in, I was asked to hold space for someone was about to be crushed under the weight of a trauma and they asked for help. I threw up, had to step outside to smoke some tobacco and I kept on going on through security after that because that’s just what this work is. There is no attachment, there is no resentment or struggle, it’s just what I am built for.
One of the most important aspects, though, and I think this sets the Shaman apart from the healer, is the desire and the ability to impact the collective. The drive to build a community, to be able to pull energies from the collective for transmutation or clearing, and the ability to see the bigger picture without getting caught in the details. It requires a sincere un-attachment from all things so that your view is from above and not through a lens.
Will your initiations look like mine? Maybe. Maybe not. But they will look similar. From what I gather, being a Shaman means this:
It means you travel between this world and the next to help those on both sides. You speak to spirits and you have healing abilities that are beyond explanation. You help others heal, not out of being a “wounded healer” or “of service to others” but because you were built to do so and you are driven to heal. You do not work for free because we are not in tribal culture, you have no community taking care of you. You help the world out of great strength and passion, not from a place of control or need. You help because it is your calling, not your burden – and you do so unapologetically.
To me, this is what it means to be a Shaman
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Do you have a Shamanic calling and need support in that process? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us because it’s not something you have to tackle alone.
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