Context and Overview

A Bit About Shamanism

Shamans perform healing work such as power animal retrieval, soul retrieval, extractions, depossessions, and various healings.

Every physical affliction, illness, injury, or disease has a spiritual aspect. Shamanic practitioners work on this aspect of afflictions. Various techniques are used.


We are very serious about our work. Many of us consider it to be quite sacred work. Our teachers are quite serious, too; no certificates, funny hats, glowing wands, nor weekend miracles. Long-term courses of study are the norm. Our teachers generally have had some sort of apprenticeship with indigenous shamans and have studied extensively in the landscape and in the indigenous culture. They have learned and have been initiated and pass on to us what they are able to do under the restrictions, if any, imposed by their teachers. Most all of the teachers guide us in the universal ways of indigenous shamans and not any specific set of peoples, say the Aino of Hokkaido or the Tuva of Siberia.

Shamans do not actually do the work; they communicate with the spirits who provide the information and do the work. The shaman is the conduit, the hollow bone, through whom the healing work is accomplished.


Find Yourself

We all have skills hidden by modern Western cultural norms, which you can find within yourself through shamanic journeying. Get answers to life’s questions through divination, heal your own self through soul retrieval, communicate with ancestors in journeys, and erase negative energies through ceremonies.

Act when an opportunity is presented. Find out what makes you come fully alive. Do that. The world needs people who have come fully alive.

Basics of Shamanism

Shamanic practitioners travel to the spirit world, often called the other side, by journeying to the beat of a drum or by other repetitive sounds.  While there they work with compassionate helping spirits to effect healing for clients. The helping spirits use the practitioner to rebalance the client’s auric field by adding positive energy or removing negative energy.

Effects of Traumatic Events:

  • I just doesn’t feel the same after the event;
  • It feels like there’s a hole inside me since it happened;
  • I just can’t seem to get my balance back. I feel disoriented and can’t concentrate.

Working w/ Mt. Shasta

RavenSites enjoys 42 acres of sloping forested land at an elevation of 3750 feet. Mt. Shasta towers some 10,000 feet to the east above the local land; the Eddy Mountains to the west reach about 5,000 feet up to the crest where the Pacific Crest Trail lies.

I always want to talk with clients at length prior to your visit. Often I will take a diagnostic journey and then talk with you again. Until I do this diagnostic journey I don’t really know what modality I’ll use for healing. After the diagnostic journey and our discussion we can either work here at RavenSites or where you live. If we work here we’ll either work inside or outside my healing lodge near Shasta River or on the land in one of several powerful spots. These locations possess spiritual power because they are focal points of earth energy.


Shamanic Ceremonies

When people experience trauma, they often lose part of their souls. The trauma can be verbal, mental, physical, or sexual; it matters not. Healthy soul parts leave, and a person is not the same afterwards. A person with soul loss “just doesn’t feel the same after …”; feels “like there’s a hole inside me since …”; states, “I just can’t seem to get my balance back, feel disoriented, can’t concentrate.”

Sandra Ingerman using a hula hoop

Power animals are the spirit forms of objects, such as dolls or stuffed animals, you used as a child. You talked with them, they comforted you. When we retrieve a power animal for you it comes home as a familiar helper from the spirit world.

 When a soul part leaves your body it creates an opening in your auric field. Random entities can use that opening to enter your field. That causes an imbalance and loss of energy. Extraction removes that intrusion.

cut round of a tree with a piece missing

Depossession removes the adverse soul part acquired from others: fearful relatives, jealous acquaintances, or former lovers. Shamanic practitioners can cut or extract what tugs at a client’s soul.

mt. shasta/wyeka mountain from the land at ravensites at sunrise with a lenticular cloud with pink highlight symbolizing that new beginnings and a return to life can linger like a lenticular cloud which exists because of a mighty mountain

When you say to yourself, “That was the stupidest thing I ever did…” or someone else places a curse on you, it causes an imbalance. When we unravel that curse it disappears as if it never existed at all.

Sunlight shining through a tiny aperture leading the way to change

A calamitous event, such as a forest fire, or a deadly event, such as a shooting, occurs, negative energy is generated. That harmful energy remains in that house, room, or on the land. A space clearing ceremony neutralizes that negative energy leaving the space as it was before the incident. 

Non-ordinary reality is a spatial place where the compassionate helping spirits reside. It’s not a state of the subconscious, a hypnotic state, nor a dream state. It is timeless, close but far, dark yet light, neither up nor down nor sideways.