For thousands of years, human beings have sought healing not only through the body and mind, but through ritual, story, nature, community, spirituality, and experiences of connection to something larger than themselves.
Long before psychotherapy existed as a profession, cultures throughout the world developed traditions for making meaning of suffering, loss, illness, transition, and death. Some of these traditions are now broadly described as shamanic.
As both a psychotherapist and someone with a longstanding interest in spiritual and transpersonal approaches to healing, I believe there can be meaningful places where these worlds meet.
But I also believe it is important to be thoughtful about how they meet.
Shamanic practice and psychotherapy are not the same thing. One does not replace the other, and spiritual beliefs should never be imposed upon a therapy client. Instead, for people who are interested in spirituality, ritual, symbolism, imagination, nature, or transpersonal experiences, these perspectives may sometimes offer another language through which to explore the human experience.
What Do We Mean by Shamanism?
The word shamanism is used broadly today to describe a wide range of spiritual practices involving altered states of consciousness, ritual, relationship with nature, symbolic journeying, ancestors, spiritual beings, and experiences of connection with realities understood to extend beyond ordinary waking consciousness.
It is important to acknowledge that there is no single universal practice called shamanism. Indigenous and traditional healing practices arise from distinct cultures, histories, communities, and spiritual worldviews, and they should not be collapsed into one tradition.
Contemporary Western practices sometimes borrow concepts or techniques associated with these traditions, while other approaches have developed within modern transpersonal and spiritual communities.
For me, the value of these ideas lies less in claiming certainty about how the universe works and more in recognizing that human beings have always used symbol, ritual, imagination, spirituality, and relationship with the natural world to understand suffering and transformation.
Psychology and the Spiritual Life
Modern psychotherapy has given us extraordinary ways of understanding trauma, attachment, cognition, emotion, relationships, behavior, and the nervous system.
But human beings are not only collections of symptoms.
We are also meaning-making creatures.
We ask questions that don't fit neatly into diagnostic categories:
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What does this loss mean?
How do I live knowing that I will die?
How do I make peace with something I cannot change?
What connects me to other people?
What connects me to the world?
What makes a life meaningful?
These questions have historically belonged as much to philosophy, spirituality, religion, mythology, and ritual as they have to psychology.
A transpersonal approach to psychotherapy makes room for those questions.
It does not require a particular spiritual belief. Rather, it recognizes that spirituality—or the absence of spirituality—can be an important part of a person's identity and experience.
Altered States, Imagery, and the Inner World
Many spiritual traditions use practices that shift ordinary consciousness through meditation, prayer, chanting, drumming, repetitive movement, breath, silence, fasting, ritual, or contemplation.
Psychology also has a long history of exploring imagination, dreams, imagery, symbolism, and different states of consciousness.
For some people, practices involving guided imagery, meditation, symbolic journeying, or focused attention can provide meaningful ways of accessing emotions, memories, images, or associations that are difficult to reach through ordinary conversation.
The meaning of those experiences belongs ultimately to the person having them.
A therapist does not need to decide whether an image encountered during meditation is “really” a spirit, an archetype, a psychological symbol, a memory, an expression of the unconscious, or something else entirely.
Different people will understand those experiences differently.
Sometimes the most useful therapeutic response is simply:
What does this experience mean to you?
Soul Retrieval and the Language of Fragmentation
One concept found in some contemporary shamanic traditions is soul retrieval.
Within those traditions, overwhelming experiences may sometimes be understood as causing a part of the soul to withdraw or become separated from the person. Soul retrieval practices are intended to welcome those lost aspects of the self home.
Psychology uses different language.
Trauma can leave people feeling disconnected from their bodies, emotions, identities, memories, relationships, or previous sense of who they were. People sometimes describe themselves as feeling fragmented, numb, unreal, lost, or as though some important part of themselves disappeared after something terrible happened.
These are not identical explanations, and I don't believe we need to pretend that they are.
But the metaphor can be powerful.
For someone who resonates with spiritual language, the idea of retrieving a lost part of oneself may offer a meaningful symbolic way of understanding the process of reconnecting with aspects of identity, vitality, safety, creativity, or selfhood that became inaccessible during periods of overwhelming stress or loss.
For someone who does not resonate with that language, we simply don't use it.
Ritual and Healing
Ritual is another place where psychotherapy and spiritual traditions can sometimes meet beautifully.
Human beings have always created rituals around birth, death, marriage, grief, transition, separation, reconciliation, and transformation.
Ritual gives form to experiences that sometimes exceed language.
A grieving person might write a letter and burn it.
Someone ending an important chapter of life might bury an object representing what they are leaving behind.
A person learning to forgive themselves might create a private ceremony marking that decision.
Someone mourning a death might build an altar, light a candle, visit a meaningful place, plant something, create art, or develop a personal ritual of remembrance.
None of these practices needs to be understood as supernatural in order to be meaningful.
But for someone who does experience ritual spiritually, that dimension can also be honored.
The important thing is that the meaning belongs to the client.
Nature as Part of the Therapeutic Landscape
Shamanic and Indigenous traditions frequently understand human beings as existing within relationship—to community, ancestors, animals, land, seasons, and the natural world.
Modern life can leave us profoundly disconnected from those relationships.
For some people, reconnecting with nature becomes an important part of emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
This doesn't have to be complicated.
It can mean noticing the changing seasons, walking in the woods, gardening, sitting beside water, observing animals, watching the night sky, or simply remembering that our lives occur within a living world much larger than ourselves.
For clients who find meaning there, nature can become another source of reflection, grounding, ritual, and connection.
Shamanic Journeying
Some people are interested in a practice commonly called shamanic journeying, which typically involves entering a relaxed or altered state of attention—often with repetitive sound such as drumming—and engaging with imagery, landscapes, figures, animals, ancestors, or other experiences that arise.
People interpret these experiences in very different ways.
Someone may understand a journey spiritually and believe they have encountered a guide or another realm.
Another person may understand the same kind of experience psychologically—as imagination, symbolism, archetypal material, or communication from less-conscious parts of the psyche.
I don't believe therapy requires us to settle that question.
What matters therapeutically is whether the experience is meaningful, grounding, and useful to the person having it.
When practices such as meditation, visualization, symbolic journeying, or ritual are incorporated into my work, they are offered collaboratively and only when they are appropriate to the individual client.
They are never requirements for therapy.
A Word About Psychedelic and Plant-Medicine Traditions
Discussions of contemporary shamanism frequently include psychedelic or plant-medicine traditions, including ayahuasca and other psychoactive substances.
There is growing scientific interest in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and research continues into the potential benefits and risks of several psychedelic substances for particular mental health conditions.
That research should not, however, be confused with ordinary psychotherapy or with traditional ceremonial use.
These substances can carry significant psychological, medical, and legal risks and require appropriate screening, safeguards, professional competence, and attention to the law.
I do not believe that spiritual enthusiasm should ever substitute for those considerations.
Cultural Respect Matters
Any discussion of shamanism also requires humility.
Many practices described as “shamanic” originate within Indigenous cultures whose spiritual traditions have survived colonization, religious suppression, displacement, and exploitation.
Those traditions are not simply collections of techniques available for Western therapists to extract and repackage.
I believe we have an obligation to approach them respectfully, acknowledge where practices and ideas originate when that history is known, avoid claiming authority we do not possess, and remain aware of the difference between learning from a tradition and representing ourselves as belonging to or speaking for that tradition.
There is room for spiritual exploration without pretending expertise we don't have.
So, Does Shamanism Belong in Therapy?
Sometimes.
More precisely, the client's spiritual world can belong in therapy if the client wants it there.
For one person, healing may be understood entirely through psychology and neuroscience.
For another, faith may be central.
Someone else may find meaning in Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, earth-based spirituality, ancestral traditions, Jungian psychology, meditation, mythology, nature, or something they cannot easily name.
And some people want no spiritual framework whatsoever.
All of those positions deserve respect.
My role as a therapist is not to tell someone what to believe.
It is to become curious about the world as they experience it and to help them explore what brings greater understanding, freedom, meaning, connection, and authenticity to their life.
For clients who are interested in transpersonal or spiritual exploration, practices involving ritual, symbolism, imagery, meditation, nature, or journeying may sometimes become part of that work.
For clients who aren't interested, they don't.
Making Room for Mystery
Psychotherapy asks us to understand ourselves.
Spirituality often asks us to consider our relationship to something beyond ourselves.
I don't believe those questions have to compete.
There are things psychology can explain extraordinarily well. There are also questions about love, death, consciousness, meaning, beauty, suffering, and existence that human beings have been contemplating for thousands of years and may continue contemplating for thousands more.
I am comfortable leaving some room for mystery.
For me, an integrative approach means being willing to draw from psychology, philosophy, depth psychology, spirituality, creativity, nature, and the wisdom people discover within their own lives—without insisting that any single framework contains every answer.
Sometimes healing comes through understanding.
Sometimes through relationship.
Sometimes through grief.
Sometimes through meaning.
Sometimes through simply finding a way to come home to ourselves.
And sometimes we don't need to know exactly what to call the path that brought us there.
