Have you ever felt like your doctor is only treating one part of you, or just trying to quiet your symptoms without really figuring out why you’re not feeling well? If so, you’re not alone. Many people in the United States are starting to look for different approaches to health and well-being, and holistic healing is gaining more attention. Practices like acupuncture, chiropractic, yoga, meditation, massage, and Reiki are becoming more accepted alongside mainstream medicine, which is a big step forward!
However, despite this growing interest, there’s still a lot of confusion, assumptions, and even fear surrounding holistic healing. You might hear people make fun of these practices, or even express concern about them. This can be really frustrating, especially for those who are looking for a more complete approach to their health—one that doesn’t just cover up symptoms or involve intense treatments.
What exactly is the holistic approach? It’s about seeing you as a whole person. Instead of just focusing on a single symptom, a holistic practitioner looks at how your physical body, mind, emotions, energy, and even your lifestyle and diet all connect. The goal is to find the root cause of any imbalance and help you restore harmony in all these different aspects of yourself.
As someone who practices and teaches many holistic healing methods, I often find myself explaining what they are and clearing up misunderstandings. It’s part of the job! In this article, I want to share some information about a few of these modalities and discuss where some of these common misconceptions might come from. I’ll also share my personal experiences with how these ideas affect both those who practice holistic healing and those who seek it.
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What Do You Really Believe About Holistic Healing?
Take a moment to think about your own thoughts and feelings regarding practices like yoga, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, shamanism, acupuncture, meditation, or Reiki. What are your immediate reactions?
Many of us don’t often stop to ask ourselves tough questions, especially if they make us uncomfortable. But it’s worth considering:
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Why do I believe what I believe about these practices? Did I learn it from personal experience, or from something someone else told me? Was it just an assumption I made, or something I picked up from society or my community?
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Do my beliefs cause me or others unnecessary fear, suffering, or harm? If so, do I really want to hold onto those beliefs?
It’s truly empowering to examine where our beliefs come from and decide if they still serve us.
To help you better understand, I’ll share some information about Reiki, Shamanism, and Yoga. While reading about them is a great start, the best way to truly understand any holistic healing modality is to experience it and explore it for yourself.
And by “experience it,” I don’t mean trying something once, feeling a little uncomfortable, and giving up. It means making a commitment to yourself to explore deeper. It means being willing to go into those sometimes uncomfortable inner places where true healing happens for your emotional, mental, energetic, and spiritual self—all of which are deeply connected to your physical body. You are worth that effort! When you bravely step into discomfort and allow yourself to soften into it, you grow and expand. As your comfort zone widens, you’ll find yourself with less fear, less suffering, and a more fulfilling life.
Don’t let negative judgments, limiting beliefs, or common misconceptions stop you from exploring healing on levels that mainstream Western medicine might not typically address.
Let’s dive into some specifics about Reiki, Shamanism, and Yoga:
Reiki: Balancing Your Life Force Energy
Reiki is a healing technique that helps to balance your life force energy. You might hear this energy called by different names, like prana, chi, or simply “vibration.” Every living thing has this energy, and when it gets out of balance, that’s when we can experience illness, pain, and a general feeling of dis-ease.
Reiki therapy works by balancing this life force energy on physical, spiritual, and emotional levels, often by working with your chakras. Chakras, which means “wheels of light” in Sanskrit, are like subtle energy centers or portals in your body. They both give out and receive energy, impacting your physical and spiritual well-being. Reiki addresses both your symptoms and the underlying causes of imbalance.
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Shamanism: An Ancient Path of Knowing
Shamanism is an ancient healing tradition and a way of life that focuses on our deep connection to nature and the well-being of all creation. It’s not a belief system you simply adopt; instead, it’s rooted in personal experiences gathered through healing practices and seeking wisdom.
Essential parts of shamanic life include journeying (a meditative practice to explore non-ordinary reality), ceremony, sacred dance, and pilgrimages to powerful places in nature. Through these practices, shamanism aims to bring strength, healing, and love into our lives.
A shaman is often known as the “One Who Knows” or a “seer” because their understanding comes from direct, firsthand experience. They are individuals who can help others facilitate their own self-healing. Shamans often take on various roles within a community, such as teacher, spiritual healer, medicine person, or protector of the Earth. They might enter an altered state of consciousness through rhythmic sound, chanting, or drumming to connect with the spiritual world and assist others with spiritual healing, like soul retrievals (recovering lost parts of oneself) or power animal retrievals (connecting with animal spirit guides). They might also be considered a type of medium, intuitive, or psychic.
Many indigenous cultures worldwide share similar core shamanic practices. These tribes have generously begun sharing their ancient healing traditions with outsiders, and as a result, shamanism is becoming more widely known globally.
A note on Plant Medicine: You might hear about plant medicine ceremonies, especially the use of Ayahuasca, becoming somewhat trendy or even a tourist attraction. While plants can be powerful tools for growth and spiritual connection when used respectfully and in moderation, it’s crucial to understand that plant medicine is only a small part of what shamanism is. There’s a fine line between using plants to unblock your connection and becoming dependent on them to connect. It’s important to respect these plants as spirits and not abuse them, as this can have serious consequences. Think about tobacco: indigenous people used it for centuries in ceremonies, never for daily smoking. When non-native people commercialized it, it became abused, corrupted, and toxic. Many shamans don’t use plant medicines at all and have profound spiritual journeys and connections without them. Our daily food and a balanced energy body can also provide all the connection we need.
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Yoga: The Path of Union
The word Yoga means “union” or “connection.” The practice of yoga literally aims to connect your mind, body, and spirit, as well as your masculine (yang) and feminine (yin) energies, to help you find your true nature of love and inner peace.
Yoga is much more than just physical exercise. It includes:
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Principles for living (known as the yamas and niyamas) that guide ethical conduct.
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Breath control (pranayama), which helps reduce stress and bring you into the present moment.
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Physical postures (asanas) that cleanse, align, and prepare the body for deeper practices.
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Meditation to quiet the mind.
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A devotional practice of honoring the divine within all beings to open the heart to love.
For many, yoga is a spiritual practice, a lifestyle, and a way of living, just as shamanism is.
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Debunking Misconceptions: My Personal Experience
A common misconception is that shamanism is only about plant medicine ceremonies, when it’s so much more than that. The same goes for yoga—many people assume it’s just about the physical poses, but there’s a much deeper spiritual dimension to it. Both shamanism and yoga are spiritual practices, not religions.
Unfortunately, fear-based beliefs about shamanic practices, Reiki, psychics, and mediums are widespread online and in our communities. These ideas are so deeply ingrained that even some holistic healing practitioners are affected by them or feel their impact.
I once read a book by a well-known shamanic practitioner who claimed that openly advertising shamanic healing or “bragging” about being a shaman would cause your abilities to be taken away. This struck me as a fear-based idea. Once you genuinely connect with the spirit world, you don’t lose that connection for something so trivial. While an imbalanced energy system could certainly affect your ability to perceive the spirit world, publicizing what you do is not the cause.
The fear, misunderstandings, assumptions, and suppression of these holistic practices often come from a long history of trauma. For thousands of years, people who were different—especially indigenous people, shamans, mediums, and psychics—were persecuted by those in power, like certain religious or governmental groups. They were stoned, shunned, burned, hanged, enslaved, or hunted simply because others feared what they didn’t understand, or assumed these practices were “wrong” or “evil.” It’s clear from history that certain groups, particularly in Europe, have historically suppressed cultures and practices they didn’t understand or wanted to control.
Indigenous cultures around the world have opened up their sacred traditions to outsiders, including white Europeans, for a profound reason: for the healing of all of us. Until we collectively heal the effects of past persecution and trauma, the shunning of holistic healing practices may continue. I believe it’s a disservice to our communities and our ancestors to carry this pain, shame, and guilt forward. It’s up to us, as practitioners and facilitators, to heal our own wounds related to this past so we can proudly carry on these traditions and help more people.
I sometimes hear other shamanic practitioners say, “I do shamanic ceremonies and healing, but I would never call myself a shaman.” When someone once said this to me, I could sense the fear, shame, and a bit of ego in their energy.
In online shamanic communities, there can even be heated debates about using the word “shaman.” This kind of debate isn’t helpful; it just creates conflict, confusion, and further judgment. Shamanism and Yoga are both spiritual practices. Someone who practices yoga for their own healing is a yoga practitioner or “yogi”/”yogini”; someone who teaches it is a yoga teacher. In my view, someone who practices shamanism for their own self-healing is a practitioner, and someone who helps others heal using shamanic techniques, has the training, and takes on a community role (as I described earlier) is a shaman. Others may disagree, and that’s perfectly fine. These debates miss the core teaching of shamanism: to look within for answers and guidance. Let’s stop debating titles and instead support each other on our healing paths. We can work together to heal the deeply ingrained pain associated with these practices that has been passed down for centuries.
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Standing Proud in Our Practice
As practitioners and facilitators of holistic healing, we need to stand proud in what we do. The more we do so, the more the wider community will see, feel, and ultimately respect these practices. I believe it would be a disservice to our communities, our lineage, and past generations of healers if we continued to be secretive or afraid of judgment, simply because of someone else’s fear projected onto us.
We, as holistic practitioners, should not be ashamed of what we do. We are providing a great service to our communities by helping people with these powerful practices. We have every right to call ourselves an Ayurvedic Doctor, Reiki Master, Shaman, or Yoga Teacher if we have the training and are in that role within our community, just as a medical doctor calls themselves an MD or a plumber calls themselves a plumber. If you’ve been given a title like “Shaman,” use it with gratitude as a description of your role, free from shame, guilt, or fear.
I refuse to buy into this fear-based programming. I will not be repressed, and I will not be ashamed. And if you are a holistic healing practitioner or facilitator with the training and role to do so, I hope you will do the same. I will continue to use the title “The Chakra Shaman” that my teachers gave me, as it perfectly describes my work: using shamanic techniques to facilitate healing through the chakra system and yoga.
If you are someone interested in receiving holistic care, I hope this article has clarified some things and sparked your interest in experiencing these modalities for yourself. You deserve the help and support you need for your self-healing, and these powerful modalities should be accessible to you, free from all the suppression, misconceptions, and fear that often surround them.
What are your thoughts or questions about holistic healing after reading this? I’d love to hear from you.
You can find me the Chakra Shaman at http://www.thechakrashaman.com
Namaste
