FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

I am not a licensed therapist or a medical doctor. Shamanic healing is not intended to be used as a replacement for traditional therapy. Through my own experiences, I believe that shamanic techniques work best in tandem alongside professional therapist. Because shamanic work is a spiritual practice there is no way to be licensed, however, I have studied the shamanic training at Life Force Shamanic Arts and Healing and I have earned certificates to be a practitioner through their program.

Yes, I do not record or share any information from our sessions without permission from the client. You are welcome to record your session for your own personal use.

My readings and sessions can be done either online by zoom or in person. If done in person we can meet at a public park or at your home. I live in Downers Grove, IL so there’s no travel fee if done locally. There is a travel fee if done further than 15 minutes from my location.

Yes, the shamanic work that I do is done energetically on the spiritual planes. I work alongside my spirit guides to deliver healing according to the highest good. I am a bridge and a connection between spirit and humans. In my practice, I trust my spirit guides and will not do anything that would cause harm to the client. With that being said, sometimes going through a healing process brings up old or forgotten wounds and traumas. If you feel triggered or unsafe contact your doctor or therapist immediately.

To feel whole, fully alive, and present in this lifetime. Being a human can be messy. We can experience the loss of a loved one, car crashes, health problems, abuse, neglect, and traumas. We make decisions that go against our principles, decisions are made for us that go against our principles, we grow up in societies that don’t support us, people get jealous of us, and people get scared of us. Because of all these scenarios we can get stuck, depressed, anxious and lost. We get hurt and we lose all sense of our selves. This indicates soul loss. Soul loss is a part of us that disconnects for many reasons. One type of a lost soul part is that you were hurt and the pain was just too much to bear and you needed to dissociate from it or another is you got lost and separated from your family at a shopping mall when you were a child and you got so scared you pretended that never happened. A lost soul part is a person’s vital energy that detached because of intense pain, trauma, neglect, became attached to someone else, or was stolen by another individual. Getting a soul retrieval means bringing back these different soul parts back to you and integrating them back into your life so that you may recover from your trauma and experiences.

Journal and think about your intentions. Where are you now on your journey and where you want to be? What do you want to discuss with me? Think about possible times where you think soul loss may have occurred.

The results are varied but here are some signs that your soul part has returned to you. You feel, act and think differently than before such as physical ailments lesson/go away, colors seem brighter and more vivid, you feel more present in life, and you feel more “yourself”. People around you notice a difference in you and they treat you differently or say things like “you’ve changed”. Sometimes memories or past events that you’ve repressed may come back or some sort of internal conflict gets resolved. You may also experience signs from spirit such as finding feathers on the ground or you keep experiencing synchronicities.

First, have compassion for your self and thank each of the parts that left. Offer your self some love by doing some sort of welcoming home ceremony for your soul parts. This could be buying yourself a cake and blowing out candles like it’s a birthday, taking a ceremonial bath with candles, or meditating specifically on this experience. I would also recommend journaling on questions to each of your returned soul parts: Why did you leave? What do you want to tell me? What do you need? Also, if you had a power animal retrieved make sure to sing and dance to your power animal. This is done by moving and singing spontaneously and letting your power animal move through you. Expressing your power animal in this way is very powerful and will help to integrate this vital energy into you.

Soul retrievals are very efficient and go right to the root cause of the problem so you don't need to do them very often during your lifetime. If an individual continues to experience soul loss this can indicate an issue with someone’s core belief about themselves, has a lack of understanding of inter-relational boundaries, and/or lack of understanding of energetic protection. After the session, I will follow up a few days later to discuss how things are going.

My shamanic healing tradition is similar to core shamanic principles. Starting with calling in energetic protection through movement, I go into a trance state to meet with spirit through methods of dance and drumming. In trance, I go to my spiritual center to meet with my power animal/guides where they lead me to where I need to go. I do not use plant medicine to alter my state of consciousness. I was trained through Life Force Shamanic Arts and Healing in Chicago, IL. One of their core teachings is working with the Life Force Wisdom Wheel to connect with spirit.

The practice of shamanic healing is of the practitioner going into an altered state of consciousness and going on a journey on the behalf of a client to the spirit realm to work alongside their spirit guides to retrieve lost soul parts, to gain messages and guidance, to extract and clear negative energy, to welcome and invite healing and positive energy, and to retrieve power animals.

A power animal is part of the vital essence of an individual that is represented by an animal. 

A shamanic journey is when an individual goes into an altered state of consciousness by drumming, movement, chanting, looking at or creating art, meditation, writing, etc. and experiences being in the spirit realm to meet with their spirit guides in order to heal, gain guidance, messages and inspiration. This is done by trusting the spirit guides to lead you on journeys in non-ordinary reality to the upper world (associated with the higher mind/perspective, deities and gods/goddesses), middle world (the world and souls around us) or lower world (realm of ancestors and spirit beings below our physical reality).

The spirit world is the non-ordinary realm all around us where we can interact with our spirit guides and subtle energies around us. You can call it the universe, source, or all-that-is. It’s the unseen and in-between of what we experience in our human day to day lives.

A spirit guide is a being within the spirit world that is helpful, benevolent, loving, protecting and empowering. They can be guardians, angels, ancestors, sacred beings, spirit animals, gods, goddesses, elementals, faeries, etc. 

An altered state of consciousness means using a method to changes the waves and functionality of your brain. The methods I use are a combination of breath work, meditation, visualization, dancing and movement, drumming and rattling. People respond differently to all sorts of stimuli. Personally, I am most alert when moving (kinesthetic), am relaxed while making art or looking at beautiful things such as nature (visual), and am most sensitive to music/sounds and I find that I best go into trance in complete silence (auditory). Different brain waves are beta for focusing, alpha for relaxation, theta for meditation, and delta for sleeping. Theta brain waves are where you want to be for shamanic journeying. Beating a drum at a rate in alignment with theta brain waves helps to go into trance.  I do not use drugs or plant medicine to go into trance.

Channeling is opening up to the higher mind, higher self, and/or your spirit guides and allowing them to speak through and bring messages to the questioner. I typically will open up through movement and drumbeats and then write down the words that come into my mind.

"Here’s what I see. I see an old man or woman. They take off their glasses and rub their eyes. They’ve been thinking with worry in their heart. Deep sadness and longing. Looking out the window they seeing children playing and flying kites. With a deep sigh they stand up. Bones tight and creaking. The onset of age has brought great weariness. The soul seeks and longs to go home. Lost in their thoughts. Reminiscing of times past. Of a life lived with regret and pain that they never found their way. Stepping out the front door they come face to face with a frightening and snarling dog. It snaps and jolts them out of reverie. They break down and state in horror. Moments pass and they look up to see the dog is gone. Was it ever there? If so, what a horrible experience to be treated in such a way. Was this a warning? Go back inside? They don’t want to. So they keep going. Step by slow step reaching toward the railing of the front steps seems to take ages. They world Is askew and starts to shake and tremble. Spots form behind their eyes. What is happening? They reach the steps and start to go down. They fall. Into the Earth. However, death is not as it seems. The grass grows up all around them. Flowers sprout and grow throughout them. Everything is glowing. All the colors surround them. They expand into loving awareness. They are looking at their life now with compassion and love. This life that moments ago were reflected as wasted is now seen for what it was. A series of experiences that were necessary to live through to get to the next stage. With peace and acceptance they move on.

This message is about the acceptance of their brilliance and that all the trials experienced in life are teaching tools. Be aware of them and love and accept the life to be lived for what it is. Have compassion for the mistakes made and live with the knowledge that it has all been well lived."

Consciously controlling and slowing down your breathing helps you to relax and go into a meditative state. Focusing on the breath is a good way to take your attention off of the thoughts that tend to race through the brain. Meditation is the state in which one just exists and connects with the present self. The ideal state is to be connected to all that is and to feel love and compassion for yourself and all that is including your fellow humans and the nature all around us.

Divination is using certain tools and methods in order to connect with intuition and spirit guides for gaining insight, information, inspiration and guidance in regards to questions asked. I often use divination daily just to see what kind of themes I will be dealing with throughout my day. Sometimes I will ask what my highest message is or if I need to know the potential outcomes of two choices I can make. A few examples of divination tools are tarot, runes, and the pendulum.

Tarot is a tool that can be used to intuitively connect with messages based on visual symbols that represent different aspects of our lives. The most basic representations revolve around cups (water and emotions), pentacles (earth and physical resources), wands (fire and inspiration), and swords (air and thoughts). Another overall theme of tarot is the major arcana and it revolves around the archetype of the Fool starting at zero and goes on a journey to the end of the World at number twenty. There are so many ways to use tarot and many different interpretations of the meanings of the cards. The way I use tarot is to pull a card and then go on a visual journey into the scene depicted to divine the story or the message that needs to be delivered. The traditional meanings of the tarot cards then support the journey experienced.

Intuition is connecting and trusting the sources of information that comes to you by means internally. It can be a hunch, a feeling in the gut, or a sudden insight. Some different types of intuition are clairaudience (inner hearing), clairvoyance (inner seeing), claircognizance (inner knowing), clairtangency (knowing from touch).

I do not. I believe in free will and based on the decisions that we make in life things can go in all sorts of directions. I approach divination as a tool to help us to make decisions and to guide us towards the outcome we would like to see in our lives.