The term 'shamanic' has become very loaded and confused. The word shaman comes from the Tungusic šamān — "one who knows" — spoken by the Evenki peoples of Siberia, where Russian explorers first recorded it in the late 1600s. It was never meant as a universal label. Mircea Eliade's 1951 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy turned one small Siberian term into a global category, and the result has been contested ever since: critics point out that a Navajo hataałii and a Buryat böö have little in common beyond a Western shorthand, that the word carries colonial-era baggage, and that "shamanic" has been co-opted by a wellness industry that often borrows techniques out of context. None of that criticism is wrong. It's actually pretty fair. But for me, the point is, most of the world has come to use the term because it's useful. The Maestros in Peru I work with and the mystics in Java included. That genie's out of the bottle and he ain't going back in.
In my work, I don't try to recreate any single tradition, nor do I claim to be a shaman — in the modern sense let alone the Tungusic sense. I just need a word for how I've come to work most naturally in my healing, and I use the word "shamanic" because it's the closest shared vocabulary in English, even though no single word captures what's actually happening.
My natural style is energy-based but it's not Reiki. I'm trained in Reiki and I offer it, but when I began offering practice healings in my Reiki training my instructor told me off for going too far from their standard protocol. I had to learn to reign it in. In an in-person session I'm walking all around the room making sounds and making different physical gestures as I tap into subtle energies in the field, process them through my body, pull stuff out and send energies in — and the Reiki model restricts all that. Remotely I'm doing the same but it's via your astral body rather than your physical body.
Most of how I'm working is instinctive and not coming from specific 'training'. It's coming from the medicine work that I've done and how it's opened up various capacities in my system. It's come from the empowerments I've received, the practices I've done, the allies I've built and the past life skills I've reactivated through doing the work. The Q'ero indigenous shamanic system I was fully initiated into in the Andes. The Egyptian Priestess initiation I had in Giza. All the various forms of magick I've trained.
That's also the traditional model. No matter what part of the world they're from, shamans have never attended a set of weekend courses working through a pdf curriculum. I'm not sitting there logically analysing your energy body like in Chinese Medicine even, trying to work out what the underlying pattern is. I'm trained enough in Chinese Medicine to have a language for when Spirit shows me someone has an imbalance in an organ and to have an idea of what that means, or if a particular channel is blocked, but my work with that would be on the intuitively guided end, not assuming a level of training I don't have.
If it's appropriate I will use tools — empowered symbols, chants and sounds I've activated — or call on my allies to help me with something. Isis and the other Egyptian Neteru, Hindu and Buddhist deities, tobacco and the plants and trees I've dieted, other beings from the Devic Kingdom and from other realms who I've built trust with. They're all there, and they're able to offer healing on levels that I'm not able to access. I'm just the conduit for that work. But often I don't actually have to call on them, they come through me naturally.
So, if you're interested in my shamanic healing sessions, they give me a great deal of flexibility to work with you in the way that readily wants to come through. But if you're someone who needs the safety of a fixed protocol, or if you're not yet comfortable with the sound of all that, that's really fair and there's no pressure to try it. My Reiki sessions are the other end of the spectrum.
