Shamanism has power, but without ethical guidance, cultural context, and integration, its modern use is incomplete. We need a framework to make it meaningful, responsible, and sustainable.¹
First Encounters With Shamanism
Shamanism has given me many gifts: connection to nature, a well-honed intuition, and an understanding of my dream world are just the most beautiful examples. However, present-day or modern shamanism is dangerously and sadly mixed with shallow quick-fix strategies that bypass the medicinal essence at the heart of its ancient practices.
As a spiritual practice that connects people to the sacred realm, shamanism is a highly necessary and beloved gift for humanity today. It helps us connect to nature, to our inner worlds, to magic and mysticism, to our identity and family lineage, and most of all to each other on the basis of equality, love, and understanding. I have applauded its rise in popularity, because my fellow humans need these practices and experiences to feel more connected, fulfilled, and less alone.
I myself felt intensely grateful when I was first taken to the lower, middle, and upper worlds in trance journeys guided by drums, rattles, the heat of the sweat lodge, or trance dance. I loved how my spirit guides felt like long-lost friends, and how I could connect to the world around me with heightened intuition, love, and respect for nature and people.
I could also face my personal problems in family, health, and even the problems of the world from a more authentic, loving, and detached perspective. I was no longer identifying with my traumas and pains. I realized they were part of a larger story I was telling. In short, shamanic practice gave me self-love, a sense of power, and a knowing I never thought possible.
But Trust me, I am a Shaman is not an article about the benefits of shamanism. It is a warning, and a strong critique of present-day popular teachings, practices, and rituals, especially those involving plant medicines and ungrounded guidance by people calling themselves shamans.
¹Theodora has a unique and grounded perspective to the realm of shamanism. With a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Practical Theology, as well as many years of experience in the psychiatric field, she has explored the intersections of culture, spirituality, and mental health. Her personal journey into shamanic practice began at the age of 25, and over the years she has cultivated deep experience and understanding of these traditions. Today, she works alongside an established shamanic practitioner, teaching online courses in shamanism and helping others explore these practices safely, responsibly, and meaningfully.
“Trust me, I am a Shaman.”
This sentence has stuck with me since my first encounters with shamans. I was a 25-year-old, slightly naïve girl who longed to connect with her spiritual and magical side. I fell in love with shamanism, and with most shamans I met. How sexy is it that his spirit animal is a Puma and he can read mine as well? How magical his bright shiny eyes, how powerful his drum.
At spiritual centers I found myself surrounded by beautiful, intriguing people. They looked radiant, smelled exotic, and spoke with depth. They claimed to heal me, to lift me from sadness, to look deep into my soul. Though as white and Western European as me, they handled sacred medicines from faraway countries, taught by “teachers of the jungle and the desert.”
These uber-special people, who call themselves shamans.
But then I learned the difference… the hard way.
These shamans did not help me, nor the people they were supposedly healing. They separated us from our inner wisdom, from our community, and ultimately from Mama Gaia herself. Listening to them rattle off their knowledge, their spiritual courses, their trance states, I felt unworthy and stupid.
As I said before, I was also aware of the beauty and benefits of these practices, as I was lucky to have a great teacher – a shamanic practitioner – who never proposed to “heal” or “fix” me, but who helped me connect and grow healthier. To understand the difference, I looked at what is truly missing in much of present-day shamanism by tracing its roots.
The Ancient Roots of Shamanism
Let’s get back to basics.
Shamanism is one of the oldest and most authentic spiritual practices in the world. Across continents and throughout the ages, its core has remained the same: shifting inner focus to the unseen world with the help of rhythm or plant medicine, to retrieve knowledge and healing for the community.
From the steppes to the jungles of Peru, from the icy north to the deserts of Australia, first peoples practiced it. It may be the oldest spiritual tradition on the planet. Communities depended on shamans to guide them through difficulty, keep them connected to earth, sky, and stars.
To “become” a shaman, children were often chosen at a young age. Their training took years, and their initiations were brutal – triggering experiences of symbolic death and rebirth, so they could travel to the spirit realm and return with wisdom. Shamans lived at the edges of the community, serving it by keeping it safe, strong, and connected. A shaman recognized by their people had undergone years of discipline, training, and ordeal.
So what changed?
Shamanism gained mass popularity through the writings of Carlos Castaneda – beloved, but still heavily disputed. His books, whether real or fabricated, revealed sacred knowledge to the entire world, opening the door for anyone to appropriate and use these practices.
The books themselves are beautiful, treasure troves of mystical stories. But they sparked a trend hijacked by consumerism and shallow ideologies. After Castaneda, others built the hype. Now, ayahuasca ceremonies can be found in almost any Western city. Exaggeration? Maybe. But you get the point.
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Shamanism As A Brand
Shamanism has become a brand – associated with tattooed bodies, feathered elders, or circles of people puking through a “life-altering ritual.” Exotic animals, throaty chants, psychedelic spectacle.
It is marketed as transformative healing, but too often leaves people stranded with unsettling realizations, inexplicable dreams, and an even deeper longing to “do it again.” What’s missing is grounding, ethics, community, and the committed guidance of a teacher.
Guides and facilitators often train through visits to shamans in Peru, India, or Thailand, for 3 months to 2 years. They usually have no hereditary ties to these cultures, no childhood practice, no community recognition.
And here lies the difference:
Learning the symbols and practices of another culture is not the same as living them from birth. Like learning Spanish fluently at 25, one can speak well, but the depth of poetry, humor, and cultural nuance will never equal a native’s.
Shamanism depends on deep intuition, ancestral stories, and instinctive knowledge. If you grow up hearing your grandmother speak of spirits, you carry a living cultural framework for handling them. If not, your knowledge is secondhand. It lives in memory, not in bone.
And so, in the West, psychedelic ceremonies are most often the most dangerously ungrounded. People are led into altered states with little preparation or context, dropped into vast experiences, then offered a couple of online integration calls. They are transformed, yes, but left without a framework, without elders, without community.
There is a vast gulf between ancestral landscapes – where these plants grow in cultures attuned to earth, spirit, and wisdom – and the Western world, flattened into commerce, stripped of mystery, and ruled by isolating individualism. Teaching and facilitating such ceremonies without strong and long term framework and support in the West is risky, unethical, and, honestly, very stupid.
Long Forgotten Western Shamanism
We once had shamans and a lived spiritual culture here too – in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands. But many of these cultural spiritual foundations have all been stamped out by either Christianity or science. What remains lives in fragments, at the fringes and without any daily connection to the real living thriving culture.
Mostly, we no longer feel in our bones what it means to connect to the sacred self, to commune with spirits, or to open and close portals to the unseen. And in a world ruled by money and empirical proof, our intuitive self has little power.
So you attend a ceremony, are “healed” by a self-proclaimed shaman, and feel reborn. But then what? How do you integrate? How do you give meaning to fleeting visions and dreams? What teacher or guide can help you take the next step?
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What is Needed Now
I began with what I love about shamanism. The question is: what would it take for the new wave of shamans and facilitators to hold ceremonies in a way that allows these practices to truly take root in our society?
Stories.
We need stories again, symbolic, cultural, shared. Stories that teach children before they even understand, that pass knowledge through community and lineage. We can begin by sharing our dreams, our visions, our inexplicable, magical and crazy experiences, and by reconnecting with silence, nature, love, and meaning.
Ethical guidelines.
Crossing into the unseen world carries risk. Without training, protection, or understanding, one can open portals that invite trouble. Shamans have always known this, which is why they lived with strict codes of practice. A good example of this is given in Castaneda’s books. Don Juan called this approach ‘impeccability.’ It means using your energy with full awareness, acting with integrity, taking responsibility for your choices, and freeing yourself from ego and self-importance – so that your spirit is focused and strong in the face of the unknown.
A shamanic practitioner, or anyone taking plant medicines, carries a sacred duty to honor beauty, connection, and the sacredness of nature and humanity. If you feel called but lack this training, then at least honor your experiences deeply. Share them, live them, create with them. Do not dismiss them as unreal, or bury them in shame.
A New Framework
Without the correct attitude, training, awareness and ethical guidelines, ceremonies risk alienating people further from themselves and their communities. Instead of healing, they fragment. Instead of connection, they create disorientation.
A truly transformational ceremony requires:
👉🏼 A long term foundation of sober journeying and spiritual practice.
👉🏼 Ethical guidelines for living as a strong, good person.
👉🏼 Shared stories, myths, and teachings about the seen and unseen worlds.
👉🏼 Knowledge of risks, protection, and lineage.
If we fail to hold these bridges responsibly, we misuse ancient knowledge and lose its potential to help us survive as a species.
Facilitators can act responsibly by:
👉🏼 Developing deep, long-term experience in spiritual journeying, not just surface-level knowledge
👉🏼 Offering ongoing integration support after ceremonies
👉🏼 Grounding practices in ethical and cultural understanding
👉🏼 Encouraging connection to community, nature, and personal accountability.
Conclusion
Present day shamanism has the potential to reconnect us with something we have long forgotten: the sacredness of life, the unseen worlds, and our own intuitive wisdom. But without ethical guidance, cultural awareness, and integration, it becomes just another form of consumption – a spiritual escape that leaves us more isolated than before.
The ceremonies and medicines themselves are not the problem. What is missing is the context, the framework, the responsibility that once made shamanism inseparable from community. Ancient shamans were not performers; they were caretakers of the collective. They did not just open doors to other worlds, they helped people carry the knowledge back into daily life.
If modern shamanism is to truly serve us, it must evolve. We need to restore the bridge between the mystical and the practical, the personal and the collective. We need practices that ground us, remind us of our duty to each other, and weave the wisdom of ceremony into everyday life.
Only then can modern shamanism become more than a fleeting experience. Only then can it become what it was always meant to be: a path of healing, connection, and responsibility to the greater whole.
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