Psychoshamanism
by John Omaha
Copyright, 2020-2021 by John Omaha All Rights Reserved

Psychoshamanism unites the science of psychology with the spiritual practice of shamanism. Psychology studies human behavior. It attempts to understand how human behavior develops, what the forces are that influence its development from prenatal to early childhood through adolescence and early adulthood. Psychology identifies stages of development and what the effects are in later life if there are challenges in an early stage. For example, parental neglect in childhood, whether maternal or paternal, imposes patterns of dysfunction on that child in adolescence and in later life. Psychology studies the effect of trauma on a child’s development. One useful evaluation tool, the Adverse Childhood Experiences scale, is a survey of childhood maltreatment that assesses emotional, psychological, sexual, and physical abuse. Psychology has developed skills and tools—protocols—for treating and resolving the adolescent and adult dysfunctions that result from trauma or developmental challenges. Psychology is concerned with the emotional, physical, mental, and behavioral dimensions of human experience.

Shamanism is concerned with the spiritual dimension of human experience. Shamanism orients a person toward the numinous dimension of their experience. According to the shamanic world-view, everything is alive and interrelated that is articulated in the concept of “every living thing.” Not all living things are animate, rocks for instance are living things that are not animate. However in the shamanic world-view rocks—or stone people—are living beings and in the shamanic state of consciousness stone people can and do communicate. Water is alive and communicates as the photomicrographs of Dr. Masaru Emoto demonstrate. Plants and trees communicate. Animals of all kinds communicate. Shamanism teaches openness to our oneness with every living thing, and it provides training and techniques for communicating with the entirety of living things. Shamanism shows how to bring the enormous power of the non-ordinary world to bear on human, ordinary-world challenges. Shamanism is an adjunct to psychology for understanding and healing the personal problems we humans often encounter. In this article I will report on how psychology and shamanism—psychoshamanism—can work together to provide relief for human suffering, in this case my own challenges with depression and the negative thoughts that caused it.

Human brains are constantly active. The conscious mind comprises those activities we are aware of, and the unconscious consists of the brain activities that we are not aware of. We can be aware of thoughts, feelings, and memories—for example the thought “I have to go to the store today” accompanied by the memory of the last time I went shopping a week ago, and by the feeling of anxiety, nervousness about getting the chore done. That’s the operation of the conscious mind.
Attitudes and judgments that affect decision-making are often held in the unconscious. If the shopper hates shopping because they were punished in childhood by a parent while on a shopping trip, those memories are often held in the unconscious, out of awareness. From their position in the unconscious those experiences affect current behavior. The adult resists doing the chore without knowing why. The adult feels uncomfortable about going shopping and resists taking care of the chore because of the discomfort.

The brain begins recording experiences from before birth onward. In infancy and early childhood the part of the brain that forms narratives has not yet formed and so experiences before the age of about five are not recorded. Nonetheless the experiences exist and affect current behavior. The adult is unable to recall or remember what happened in early childhood that gave rise to a particular adult behavior. To continue with the example of the woman who dislikes shopping, she may not be able to recall being shamed in a crowded store in front of others when she was three, but that childhood experience influences her adult behavior. She resists doing the chore of shopping because of painful feelings held out of awareness in her unconscious. One of the core tenets of psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy is that by observing adult behavior we can deduce what the person’s childhood experience was.

A depressed adult feels sad, even anguished, much of the time and resists activity, especially activities that formerly brought happiness. In my book Murder Chronicles, I described my own depression as self-murder. I murdered my self through my resistance to writing; refusing to do an activity I am good at and that I enjoyed. By observing my resistance to writing, which was unconsciously motivated, I was able to uncover what happened to me in childhood. In my own therapy I realized how little I was praised in childhood and how often I was criticized and shamed for not behaving as my parents required. On top of that I was punished for self-expression. My parents were trying to train me to be obedient and to be the person who satisfied their needs for a son who brought praise to them. Creative writing was not an activity they approved of. All of these childhood experiences rose like bubbles of methane gas from the depths of the ocean floor when I decided to close my psychotherapy practice and devote the remainder of my life to expressing myself through authorship. My resistance to writing and the anguish it caused, which manifested as depression, helped me understand what happened to me in childhood. The unconscious reveals itself in adult behavior and also in dreams. Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious,” and it is that road I want to explore in this essay.

Psychological dream work and shamanic practice come together in working with dreams. For thirty years I have been practicing shamanism in sweat lodges, vision quests, and shamanic journeys. Those years of experience prepared me for a powerful dream I received and for the use to which I put it. In the dream I was conducting a sacred ceremony in a very primitive backwoods setting. A group of ten or so people were assembled and were attentively listening to me. Suddenly a bunch of bikers showed up. They were loud and disruptive. I realized that if I asked them to respect the ceremony they would turn their anger toward me. I would become the focus. Instead, I told them that I had a song that wanted to be sung to them. I had my drum and began to sing the song. Now I was not the focus. The song had said it wanted to be sung to them. The song was the focus. As I began to sing, the bikers joined our circle, sat down and listened respectfully.


Combining psychology and shamanism this is the meaning I made of the dream experience: The primitive setting reveals that the dream concerns the deep levels of my mind, the place where the unconscious resides. The sacred ceremony suggests the mental state I strive to inhabit in my life and in my writing. The bikers represent the negative thoughts and attendant feelings that drive in from my unconscious and disrupt my self-expression. The dream showed me how to soothe the unruly, intrusive thoughts and feelings. I need to sing a sacred song to them!

Writing is not the only place where the disruptive unconscious thoughts show up. One of the most unpleasant used to occur almost nightly as I was dropping off to sleep. Psychologists call it the hypnogogic state where the conscious mind is powering down and the unconscious can reveal itself before the brain goes completely into rest mode. In this state I often found myself teetering on the edge of a hundred-story building or poised on a steep precipice. The experience was terrifying. I had never had any means to intervene. That was my first target; it was the first of the unruly bikers. As I was moving into sleep mode the night after the biker dream, I was once again standing unsteadily on the railing on the roof of a skyscraper. The moment I became aware of what was happening, I began to sing the sacred song to the intrusion. I did not try and stop the intrusion,, because after years of trying that had never worked. Instead I sang to the intrusion. I sang the song a few times and gratefully realized I was no longer teetering on the edge of the building. I felt enormous relief. Since then I have used the skill to write. When negative thoughts try and intrude, tell me I am an awful writer, and stop the sacred ceremony of my authoring, I sing the song and then I am able to effortlessly write. Over a few weeks the intrusions have diminished in all areas of my life. Most importantly I write, and I feel less depressed. I used this skill when I began to work on this very essay this morning.

The behaviors that trouble our adult lives usually have their origin in adverse childhood experiences or in subsequent trauma. These troublesome behaviors can include addiction, overeating, bulimia, anorexia, alcoholism, anxiety, and as in my case, depression. When we act out these behaviors we are “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” which is one definition of insanity. Psychological problems cannot be resolved at the same organizational level at which they were created. To heal, we must shift to a higher level than the problem. In the case of my difficulty writing, the song is a shamanic intervention, and that is a higher level of organization than the problem of depression. You can access three of my shamanic songs on my website, and I will happily snail mail you a CD with 13 songs if you will compensate me $15.00 for the cost of the CD, the transfer, and the postage. In this essay I have described and illustrated psychoshamanism and offered a means for readers to use it. Create an altar, a sacred space, in your home and start healing.

Aho Mitakuye Oyasin
John Star Eagle Omaha

Star Man