My Road to Shamanism

getting sober and learning to channel

The most common question I get doing shamanic healing work is “So… how did you get into this?”

And the question that I hear (accurately or not) is: “How did a big white dude from Ohio become a shaman?”

Which is more than fair. So I figured I’d take a stab at answering it here.

My road to shamanism really began as a sobriety journey.

I was living in San Francisco back in 2020 when COVID hit and forced us all indoors. I had been a heavy social drinker for six or seven years at that point; but in quarantine it became apparent that even as the “social” was falling away, the “drinker” was gonna keep right on chugging.

That didn’t feel right - and with the help of a great therapist / psychiatrist team and a newfound meditation practice, I quit drinking the day after Thanksgiving, 2020.

I got off of antidepressants around that same time. I had been on Effexor for four or five years, but had noticed that it gave me nasty side effects if I ever missed a dose. So I took the opportunity of getting sober to come off of that, too.

The combined comedown from these two things was rough. It took me a couple of months to feel like myself again.

But once I did, something began to shift. I don’t know if I began to feel the positive effects of sobriety; or if some part of me liked proving to myself that I could do hard things; but I started quitting everything.

Nicotine was the next to go. I’d been vaping pretty religiously for a couple years, a habit picked up through drunk cigarettes in college. About three months after quitting alcohol, I went on a trip to the Dominican Republic and left the Juul at home, counting on the language barrier to prevent me from going to the local bodega to buy cigarettes. It was a brutal vacation, but it worked.

Next came coffee, about four months later. I had moved to San Diego at this point, working remotely for a nonprofit consultancy, and had started getting nasty headaches at the end of each work day. I read online that it could have something to do with my 6-11 hours of daily screen time or the 3 to 4 iced coffees I was drinking per day; so I got some blue-light glasses and I quit caffeine. It didn’t really work - the headaches persisted until years later, when I finally stopped working from behind a computer - but once I was through the caffeine withdrawals, I wasn’t going back.

Had I just become addicted to quitting things? Maybe.

The last thing that I quit was a little bit more nuanced: I quit living my life based on what I thought other people wanted me to do (codependency). In early 2023 I took advantage of a work opportunity and moved to Seattle, where I knew no one; started attending Codependents Anonymous (CODA); and took an oath to myself to live each day doing exactly what I needed to do for myself. Believe it or not, this came with extremely similar withdrawal effects to quitting nicotine and caffeine - check out my poem Never Being, written during that time.

---

So at this point it was early Spring of 2023. I was really, truly sober. Living in Seattle. Staying open to whatever life might bring.

And something incredible started happening to me.

I started having channeling experiences.

I don’t know what else to call them, and I certainly had no-fucking-clue what to make of them at the time. A certain warm, glowing, golden-sunlight feeling would wash over me, seemingly at random, and I would get the urge to pick up a pen and just start writing. I’d write for pages and pages, receiving words rather than producing them - it was the sensation of I have no idea what word is coming next, I’ll just kept moving my hand.

It was amazing. And it was also terrifying.

I was fortunate enough to have an incredible therapist and friend at the time (shoutout to Olivia Dillingham) who twilighted as a psychedelic spirit guide. I told her about these experiences and her first instinct was “you really need to check out shamanism.” She introduced me to her acquaintance Rami, who just so happened to be starting his very first shamanic apprenticeship program two weeks later.

Meeting Rami was one of those magical moments where a new person feels like an old friend. It felt like he truly saw me, like he understood my experience. During that initial call he told me that he could give me the tools to turn these channeling experiences on and off like a light switch, and step onto my path as a healer.

I enrolled in his apprenticeship program a week later, and the experience completely changed my life. Not all at once, but in a slow, sustainable kind of way.

The 5-month online program took us through the native Peruvian medicine wheel, guiding us through deep internal healing, while at the same time giving us the tools to hold space for others.

We learned to shed our old stories based in victimhood, and how to become the authors of our own lives. I remember doing a writing exercise early in the course and telling the class afterwards that it had “cracked me open like a glow stick,” opening me to the possibility of an animistic world that might even be conspiring in my favor.

We uncovered and sat with our deepest wounds, learning how to alchemize the pain we have moved through into medicine for others.

And we learned the (frankly magical) healing traditions of the shamans of Peru - illumination, extraction, soul retrieval, cord cutting, etc. - techniques to help clear the energy field and invite folks into their highest timeline in this life.

By the time I graduated from the program in August of 2023, I was a different person. Still flawed, still integrating, still learning; but feeling significantly lighter and brighter.

I traveled to Peru a couple months later with another graduate from the program and got the opportunity to meet the Q’ero people, where many of these shamanic traditions come from. I also got the chance to journey into the Amazon jungle, cleansing myself through ayahuasca and other plants medicines and coming out the other side a much more powerful healer.

Now, almost three years to the date after the start of the apprenticeship, this is what I do. I have opened my own in-person shamanic healing practice Soul Mirror here in Seattle, offering 1-on-1 sessions and community gatherings across two studios.

My practice is still young, and I’m still learning - will always be learning. But I’m happier, and more fulfilled, and more confident that I’ve ever been in my life. I feel that I have found my path, and that I am walking it.

With love,

Drew