Shamanic Journeying for Guidance and Healing™

The Practice of Shamanism in the 21st Century

Michael Stone
Michael: I'm really excited to introduce my friend and special guest today, Sandra
Ingerman. She's an award-winning author of ten books including Soul Retrieval:
Mending the Fragmented Self, Walking in Light: The Everyday Empowerment of
Shamanic Life and Speaking with Nature co-authored Llyn Roberts. She's the
presenter of seven audio programs produced by Sounds True and the creator of
the Transmutation app.

Sandra is a world-renowned teacher of shamanism and has been teaching for

more than 30 years. She was awarded the Peace Award for Global Foundation
for Integrative Medicine in 2007 and she was one of the ten top spiritual leaders
of 2013 by Spirituality and Health Magazine.

Sandy, welcome to The Shift Summit on Global Shamanism.

Sandra: Yeah. Thank you. It's a delight to be here. It's really exciting that people are
having this incredible opportunity to have shamans from around the world
talking about different perspectives, different aspects of shamanism. It's just an
incredible opportunity for everybody.

Michael: So many people all around the world listening in today, so it is very exciting. I
thought it would be nice if maybe you start with an opening to welcome the
spirits and the people.

Sandra: Absolutely. So it's really important to understand that in the practice of

shamanism, shamans work in the invisible realms. What that means is that
shamans pull a veil open that opens us and helps us to let go of just feeling like
we're always in this tangible manifest form of existence, where only what we
see, feel, hear, touch and smell here in this reality is real. But to shamans, there
are many dimensions of reality that co-exist altogether at the same time.

In this reality, there are what are called helping compassionate spirits who want
to be able to give guidance and healing on a personal level and also on a
collective level. So whenever shamans work, the practice, the whole entire
process, what shamans are going for is opening up that doorway, lifting those
veils between the visible and the invisible realms and stepping through
completely with all of their senses -- seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling --
so that it's not an out-of-body experience but the that shaman actually steps
through into this other reality that is co-existing along with ours.

Michael Stone | p. 1
So the process that the shaman goes through and that I'd like to invite all of us to
go through in a short time that we have together is the very first thing that we
have to do is let go of our ordinary thoughts and concerns, because those act as
an anchor that keep us here in the tangible realm in our ordinary life, the
tangible realm that we already are familiar with, that anchors us here, and we
want to lift that anchor to be able to step into another reality to work with the
helping compassionate spirits.

So I'd like to invite everybody just to close your eyes and put your hands on your
heart, and just start by taking some really deep breaths, cleansing breaths.
Breath is a way that shamans do work with to move into a place of stillness.
We're always moving into a place of stillness because that's where the magic
happens. That's where we can manifest the invisible into the visible is when we
move into a place of stillness.

So by tapping into your heart and taking some deep breaths, and just use your
imagination. Your imagination is a real tool for you in doing shamanic practice.
Use your imagination to just let your ordinary reality, thoughts, and concerns
just drift away for now as you feel your heartbeat, your hands on your heart, and
feeling the love that you have for life and for nature, those things that might not
be ordinary but when those gentle breezes come by or when the sky is just that
beautiful blue, or when you're at a beautiful beach or out in nature, think about
things that you really love about this earth that remind you of the preciousness
of life.

With your heart and from that place of stillness created from your breath, allow
yourself to step through a doorway into the invisible realms where you can allow
yourself to be in a place of nature. Just imagine being in your favorite place in
nature. It might be a beach or it might be a beautiful place in the mountains or it
might be a desert. If there's running water there, listen to the beautiful sound of
the running water and the flow of water and connect to your own flow, how
water flows through you because you're mostly water too. So allow yourself to
connect with the spirit of water.

Feel yourself being connected to the earth where you are. Take a deep breath
and feel that fresh smell of the soil of the sand where you are. Touch the earth
and feel the texture with your fingers and connect to the love of the earth. Let
your heartbeat align with the heartbeat of the earth, the earth being millions of
years old. Connect with that heartbeat that is so ancient that guides us and loves
us and holds us all the time.

Michael Stone | p. 2
 Take a deep breath and smell the air and all of the fragrances of nature and look
around you and take in the beauty and the brilliance of the colors and all that
surrounds you. Allow yourself to connect with the spirit of air.

So, we've connected with the water, and earth, and air. And now gaze up at the
sun and feel the sunlight just shining on you. Absorb its power, its energy and its
light. The sun gives us light as we connect with the spirit of fire.

Let's give thanks for our lives. We all go through challenges, we all go through
changes, we all go through hardship, but life is so precious. And in shamanism,
it's taught that as we give gratitude for our life, we create a foundation where
beauty and harmony can start to manifest in our lives.

Let's thanks the helping spirits, those spirits that we might have seen at some
point in our life as children or as adults if we have a spiritual practice. And even if
you've never heard of shamanism before, you have helping spirits that are all
around you guiding you and holding you in love. Let's give thanks to the helping
spirits who join us through this entire summit and through our lives, reminding
us that the universe is always supporting us. No matter what's happening in our
life, we're always held and loved.

So as Michael and I continue to chat, just keep a sense of awareness as being in

this place and nature and feeling all of your senses becoming alive. Let your
energy field become more expanded out of an ordinary state so that you can
really start to experience the power and what the practice of shamanism is
about so that you get that cellular experience for yourself.

But for now you want to open up your eyes and listen with both your visible and
invisible ears for messages will be given to you on many different levels during
our time together.

Michael: That was beautiful, Sandy. Thank you so much for that.

Well, I talk to a lot of people about shamanism and I often get a response that
well, yeah, that's nice, but it's frivolous and there's a lot to do in the world right
now. Talk about shamanism today and how it's relevant to the issues in the
times that we're in.

Sandra: Well, I think what's happening in the world that we're living in right now is that
because we live in a technological society and we acknowledge more what's
happening in the rational level, our minds and what science can develop and
what we experienced as children as we were able to tap into the invisible realms,
that's something that we did as children. But the veils between the worlds have
closed for many of us, not all, because that's been our social conditioning is get a

Michael Stone | p. 3
life and wake up to this reality and stop being a daydreamer and just focus on
what is here and now.

What has happened is we have closed the doorway to a whole realm of

existence. There are many different dimensions and levels that shamans have
been able travel to throughout time. In those realms of existence, and they're
just as real as what we consider the tangible realm to be, there is a lot of help
that can be given.

The metaphor that I always use is that shamans are like spinners, and I spin on a
spinning wheel and that's why the metaphor makes a lot of sense to me of
where they spin fibers from the invisible realms into the physical world and
create manifest form out of those invisible realms. So in our culture right now,
we're really limiting ourselves as we close the door not only to the richness and
the depths of spirit, and people are really craving that right now. That's why
there's such an amazing resurgence of shamanism right now is just focusing on
material world and collecting more objects and more things. There's an
emptiness to life and the light is going out of people's eyes. So people are
looking for ways to be inspired and to feel passionate about life again and to be
able to dream unlimited possibilities of what we can create while we are alive on
this planet here and now and for the descendants that come after us.

So yes, it is really important for us to be able to take action right now. We all
have to take action on cleaning up our environment and making changes in how
we raise our children and how we live in community to be able to create a space
of peace and harmony on the planet right now. So there's action in the physical
world that we need to take.

But from a spiritual point of view, there is so much that goes on. Everything that
exist in this world starts as an invisible thought, as an invisible word, as an
invisible vibration or invisible energy that when we start to work with shamanic
practices to change our thoughts and the way that we speak in the world and to
work with the helping spirits who can bring through healing, we actually open up
a doorway between the invisible and the visible and can create a tremendous
amount of healing.

So it's really important for us not to get one-dimensional in our lives because
there's a limit to how much we can do when we only take physical action. We
talked about body, mind, and spirit all the time, but it's really important for us to
be able to integrate what we do on a physical level, what we do on a mental
level, and what we do on a spiritual level. When we do that, we move in to a
place of alignment, and that's where we see the opportunity for true change to
happen.

Michael Stone | p. 4
Michael: And the resurgence you talk about is also pretty amazing next to the skepticism. I
think people are realizing that this is an earth-based practice and that in order
for humanity really to survive, we need to get back in touch with that. Talk about
the pros and cons as you see it of people practicing shamanism in the Western
world today.

Sandra: Well, I think that first of all, so much of the resurgence is, number one, people
are looking for methods to feel empowered where we've been living in a society
where we're taught that social conditioning has been where we're taught to give
our authority away to others. There's always going to be a religious leader or
political leader or somebody who knows more than you do in the healthcare
profession. You don't know about your own body or your own intuition. You
have to turn to somebody else.

With all the challenges people are facing today, there's a part of us that knows
that we hold the deep wisdom and keys to working through the challenges that
we're facing on a personal and collective level. So there's this drive. For some
people it's a conscious drive, and for some people I believe I watched people
start to be introduced to shamanism, there's an unconscious part of them that
starts to wake up to "I do have the ability. Shamanism is a practice of direct
revelation. I do have the ability to get answers and solutions to my own issues
that I'm facing in life and to improve the quality of my life. And I have guidance
and I have something to share in my community that can help my community be
stronger and be more healthy."

So that's a real draw and shamanism is very nature-based and we're so

disconnected from nature, and it is creating a tremendous amount of emotional
and physical illness. So when people wake up to the beauty of nature and what
happens to them at some workshops that I teach, I have people just go sit by a
tree for 10 minutes. For some people, that's the most profound spiritual practice
that they've ever experienced. There's such a healing quality as we start to wake
up our connection to everything that exists in the web of life, and we start to talk
to the nature being as shamans have done for over a hundred thousand years.
We feel our connection with the sky and the earth, and we start to feel our
connection with the wind as we start to hear messages come through the
breezes. Nature just has such a healing quality to us and as we align with the
cycles of the moon and the cycles of the season.

So that's the beauty of people waking up to the practice of shamanism right now
all over the world is the power that comes and the creativity and the passion
that gets inspired from people as people tune into their abilities with direct
revelation and also tap back in to nature again so that people start to move in to
a place of harmony where beauty starts to manifest everywhere in the world.

Michael Stone | p. 5
On the shadow side of it, the word "shaman" has become diluted because it now
is a spiritual practice that has become popularized. So there's a lot of
misunderstandings about what the practice of shamanism is, and oftentimes
people who aren't comfortable being in their body and who are feeling very
challenged might start to feel like, "Oh, I can just start to work spiritually but I
don't have to work on an emotional level or I don't have to take care of my
body."

In shamanism, again, it is really important. It's been passed down of how to care
for your body and to work on emotional levels so that you stay healthy and well-
balanced as well as adding that spiritual component to it.

So there are a lot of people who are being introduced to shamanism today, but
the classical definition of shamanism is being stretched. Also, in the world that
we live in, we are so focused on methods and so people sign up for workshops
and are interested in what's a powerful method that I can learn that will bring
healing into my life and healing into others and to the planet.

But in the practice of shamanism, although shamans do use ceremonies that

have healing methods attached to them, actually the magic is behind the
method because they're working on the invisible realms. I find that today in
teaching people about shamanism that people do tend to oftentimes give their
authority away to a human teacher and say, "Teach me a method," instead of
working with that unlimited power of the helping spirits as shamans always did.
Shamans were always hollow-boned who stepped out of an ordinary state of
consciousness and truly brought through the unique power of the universe and
of their helping spirits.

If you look at shamans around the world, you never see two shamans working in
the same way, ever. But in our culture, we oftentimes see people copying a
teacher and trying to go, "Okay now, what was step one and what was step two?
And how do I hold my feather, and what direction do I stand in?" And
oftentimes, because we're so socially conditioned that there's a right way to do
the work that we don't always allow ourselves to completely open up to the
unlimited power of the universe and bring that through.

So I really tried to encourage people that there isn't a right way to practice
shamanism. It really is about stepping out of this reality, entering into the
invisible realms where there are these helping compassionate spirits who have
just unlimited amounts of information and healing energies that can be brought
through if we allow ourselves to truly become a vessel.

So I'm hoping that we don't limit the power of shamanism because with the
challenges that we're facing, with the illnesses that we're seeing today

Michael Stone | p. 6
 personally and collectively on the planet, we need to open ourselves up and not
limit ourselves to following particular steps of a practice. I hope that makes
sense.

Michael: It makes total sense and it's so true. I know in the circles that I do, people are
wanting doing to do the practice with their mind, with their head, and you
mentioned about the body and people are so disembodied in our culture. Many
of us are so numb or so not in touch with our feelings and our senses, and that's
such a huge part of shamanism. Can you talk about embodiment, our feelings
and using all of our senses as a shamanic practitioner?

Sandra: Yeah, absolutely. In my 30 years of teaching shamanism, it is true. So many

people are attracted to spiritual work because life here hasn't been that
comfortable. I mean let's face it, we've all been through a lot of challenges on a
physical level, and so here comes a practice of being able to go into these realms
and see these amazing scenes and feel these amazing feelings and have the love
of the helping compassionate spirits.

And in some ways what's happened in our culture today is that shamanism has
become an out-of-body experience. People actually talk about it as an out-of-
body experience that you take a journey and you travel outside of your body into
these other realms.

But the definition of a shaman, shaman being a Tungus word that comes from
Siberia, is shamanism as a practice. So shaman is a man or woman who does go
into an ecstatic state of consciousness, and that means again moving ordinary
thoughts out of the way and concerns pulling up the anchor, but that shaman
takes ecstatic flight into the invisible realms with his or her entire body.

When you watch shamans work around the world and if you go to Siberia and
watch shamans work in Siberia, they're dancing and they're singing and they're
drumming and they're in that other world, seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting,
completely in those invisible realms, and they're moving and they're dancing
with their helping spirits and they're talking to their helping spirits. Not like
they're watching TV or a movie, but they've actually opened up the veils.

It's almost like you take a hike into the woods, you take your body with you.
You're not just seeing where you're going to go in the woods. You're walking the
path; you're feeling the leaves under your feet; you're smelling the damp air as
you're walking; you're feeling the sun coming down on you; you're listening to
the beauty of the sounds of the birds and you're walking, walking, walking the
path, absorbing all the beauty of nature. That's what happens in a shamanic
journey.

Michael Stone | p. 7
 In teaching people shamanic journeying, when I can really get people to stand up
and drum and rattle, sing and dance, and actually see yourself walking on a path
into the invisible realms and opening up your sensory awareness, that's where
those psychic abilities really start to wake up and you start to be able to bring
through all this information and you start to feel yourself actually in another
realm, meeting with helping spirits who that's where you can really start to bring
through the power of the invisible realms.

When you're just seeing it in your mind, as if you're watching TV, you're
dissociated from the experience. You're not having that true embodied
experience that shamans have always had for thousands of years that allowed
them to really be able to gather that power from the invisible realms and then
carry it back and be that vessel and be that channel, and it's way beyond a
mental experience or visualizing.

People get really stuck in visualizing because oftentimes we're such a visual
culture and we use the word "seeing" in our journeys. But in shamanism, seeing
is a full bodied experience. The word "seeing" in shamanic culture is actually
meant what are you hearing, what are you feeling in your body, what are you
seeing, what are you smelling, what are you tasting so that it's a real full-bodied
experience. I think that once we start to wake up to the beauty of having a body,
that's why we were born here, to have full sensory awareness in this world and
to stop trying to escape our body and to work through the pains and the traumas
of our past that make us want to escape.

Once we start to work through, whether it's through spiritual practices,

psychotherapy, dance, whatever we choose, qigong, tai chi, whatever practice
we choose, meditation, to work through some of those issues that keep us out of
our body, we wake up to a world and we go, "Where have I been?" There are all
these incredible nature beings here and I can communicate with them and I can
have a completely different experience of life when I finally really do feel myself
fully back in my body again.

That's why shamans around the world perform soul retrievals to help people get
back into their body after a trauma so that they can feel fully present here, and if
they do spiritual work, they don't dissociate from their bodies but really
experience it on a full-bodied level.

Michael: That's brilliant. I don't think that most people realize that it was only since the
'70s really in the West that we're practicing shamanism by laying down and
listening to a drum beat and in fact for tens of thousands of years before that,
shamanism had evolved always in the way you say, in the beating the drum and
singing and climbing the ropes to heaven and all the different ways that shamans
get in there. But also, the reason that shamanism has survived for 50,000 to

Michael Stone | p. 8
 100,000 years is that it has constantly evolved the persecution through burning
at the stakes, through all these different things, and it continues to evolve. Can
you talk about the evolution of consciousness and where are we going with this
practice now that it entered in to the western world?

Sandra: Yeah, absolutely. It is true that shamanism was a very active process. The
shaman has always been very, very active. You don't see in shamanic cultures in
different parts of the world that shaman lying down and listening to any kind of
music. The shaman makes his or her own music and that opens the veils into the
invisible realms.

I do believe so strongly that the reason that shamanism is still alive today is
because of the results. It's always been a result-oriented practice. If the shaman
could not be able to find food sources or heal the people, the people died.

So everything in shamanism is always about results. And in order to get results,

whatever practice you're using, that the helping spirits have had to change the
practices to be able to make them applicable to the times and the culture,
because again, if you're taking a practice from another culture, like for myself,
I'm a licensed psychotherapist and I started to bring soul retrieval back in the
1980s into our culture working with people who had suffered trauma. What I
found is I had to keep changing the work, and changing the work, and changing
the work.

It wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing or that the soul retrieval practices
from different parts of the world didn't have power. It was that in order to work
with modern-day psychologically sophisticated culture, I had to be able to learn
how to speak to my clients differently than maybe a shaman would speak to his
or her client in South America or in Central Asia. We have a different culture.
We're brought up in a different culture. So there are ways that make the practice
more accessible to us, and so shamanism keeps evolving so that it actually
creates results in the culture that we're living in.

I'm really fascinated to see how shamanism is going to be evolve past my

generation and into a younger generation because I can already see with the
younger generation, as you teach kids how to journey, they have their own way
of doing the work that's different than how you watch adults today practice
shamanism. So it's all about how the practice stays alive and stays relevant is
that it has to be able to meet the needs of the people and to create results that
keep the practice going and inspired.

That means oftentimes we have to let go. This is a challenge for all of us to let go
of what we've learned and to keep opening up to the ways that helping spirits
are ready to help us evolve and make changes and move into more of working,

Michael Stone | p. 9
 not so much with form but opening more to the formless energies. The spirits
actually don't have a form. They're formless. The evolution that's happening
today as we're moving more into understanding unity consciousness is more and
more people who are practicing shamanism or opening up to a more expansive
state of being able to bring through those formless energies that can transform,
have the power to transform whatever is happening in communities and on the
planet.

We are evolving to a place of understanding what shamans always knew about

the power of love and about the power of light, which comes from that place of
being able to merge and experience on a cellular level a place of source and
oneness and not so much separation and how that really stirs up and cooks
within us to end up manifesting change in our collective.

Michael: One of the things I think that is so different too is how contemporary shamanism
is unique in that it's so individualized compared to shamanism historically has
been a community event, you don't go to your shaman and say, "I need a
diagnosis and I need a healing. Tell me what to do and give me a root to chew
and whatever." In the old days, the whole community came together to do the
healing, and I think that that's something that's important in the evolution. Can
you talk about the role of community in changing the individual and collective
narrative in a shamanic way?

Sandra: Absolutely. In a shamanic culture, when you are born, the whole community saw
a unique gift that you are bringing to the community, and the community was
dependent on you shining your gift. In the community, because as each person
was able to bring their unique gifts and strength into their community that
strengthen the community at large and created a healthy community. So if one
person in the community got ill, that meant that there was a weak link in the
community now. The strength that originally was dependent on for everybody
being able to be healthy together, you had this special piece that helped the
whole entire health of the community, that piece, that gift was not gone.

So it was really important for the whole entire community to show up because
everybody really wanted to not only see you heal because they loved you,
everybody was held in love in the community, but your strength was really
needed. In our culture, we come into this world and we're taught we're
socialized to fit in. Fit in to society. Don't stand out too much. Don't shine your
light too brightly. Don't dream. Just fit in.

What's happened is it's really affecting our entire world community. What you
see today, it's really tragic to see this happening, but where communities start to
come together is through tragedy. So when an environmental disaster or some
kind of climatic event happens, and governments say they're going to come in

Michael Stone | p. 10
 with money to help rebuild. But basically the money is not there, the support is
not there, and so communities are now being forced to come together to help
each member in the community rebuild after a climatic event. Or after there's
been a shooting or some act of violence, the community comes together to try
to support each other.

Communities now, because they need to, are coming together to grow food and
to help each other survive. So it's almost like we're being forced back into
community life but through tragedy where from a shamanic point of view, it's
the community where we all thrive together and we all have the opportunity to
share our gifts and to strengthen the community at large. So we're really seeing
people being forced to move back into those old time ways, and it's not just
about me, me, me anymore because we need each other and people are waking
up to how much we need each other. In shamanic cultures, you are born
understanding that the community acts as a whole and has the strength.

What was really interesting for me, I had the opportunity to work for a little bit
with an Uchi shaman from Siberia. Grandfather was about 94 years old when I
worked with him. He was known. His fame in his community was performing soul
retrievals. He didn't speak any English and he just wanted to dance and sing and
do shamanic work. He didn't want to have rational discussions.

But one of his assistants and translators said to me, "You know, we really find it
interesting that when you perform a soul retrieval that you actually bring the
soul back to the person." I got very confused when I heard this because I
thought, "What do you mean bring the soul back to the person? Of course you're
going to bring a person's lost soul parts back to the individual." And I said, "Well,
where do you bring the soul parts back to?" And the translator responded that
Grandfather brings the soul part back to the room of the community.

I thought about that for a while. When you look at shamanic cultures where
community was so important, it wasn't about healing the individual but any
healing of the individual healed the entire community. So in the Uchi tradition, it
was passed down to bring back the soul part to the community at large which
was a real teaching for me because there is such a power in community, and I
think we're looking at how we've lost a big richness and depth to life by getting
too caught up in our individual lives.

Michael: That's true. And the community holds who we are, be it a positive or a negative
thing also.

Sandy, we're running out of time, I'm afraid. But given what we've talked about
today, what's one thing you'd like to leave us with, like a next step for our

Michael Stone | p. 11
 listeners that they can use this for their own healing or making changes in their
lives?

Sandra: Well, from a shamanic point of view, it's really important for us to work in the
invisible realms. What we can do is we can start to work with aligning our
thoughts and words, because the energy and the vibration of our thoughts and
words start in the invisible realms and actually manifest the world that we're
living in. We end up dreaming the world that we're living in through our
thoughts and words, and also our thoughts and words make up the daydreams
that we use throughout the day.

So learning practices and starting to focus and bring more discipline, it's like
learning how to exercise, so you need to do it slowly and have a lot of
compassion for yourself that you're learning a new skill to start to watch and
observe and be conscious of the words and the thoughts and the daydreams that
you have throughout the day, because from a shamanic point of view, we are
always dreaming this world into being, and something that we can all do
together to help to heal ourselves and the planet is to focus on using our
imagination to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell the world that we do want to live
in instead of dreaming a world into being that we don't want to live in.

So start to work with focusing your day dreams throughout the day so that we
can join together as a global community to start to change the dream of the
world and also connect with nature. Nature is the greatest healer. Just really
takes just a little bit of time, it doesn't matter if you live in a city or a rural
environment, just take a little bit of time and as you walk down the street, touch
a tree and smell the air and look up at the sky. Connect your heartbeat with the
heartbeat of the earth, and that will bring healing for yourself and also for the
planet too.

Michael: Sandra Ingerman, my friend, it's been so good to have you on this Shamanism
Global Summit. Thank you so much from all our listeners, I'm sure, for taking the
time to be with us today on the summit.

Sandra: And thanks for inviting me. Thanks, Michael.

© 2015 The Shift Network. All rights reserved.

Michael Stone | p. 12