Shamanic Journeying: A Protocol for Traveling Between Worlds

The Map Behind the Map

Behind the visible world, there is another world. Behind that one, another. The shaman is the one who travels between them — not in metaphor, not in fantasy, but in direct, repeatable, lived experience.

This is not a belief system. It is a technology.

Michael Harner, an anthropologist who studied with the Jivaro (Shuar) of Ecuador, the Conibo of Peru, and other indigenous groups, spent decades distilling the common elements of shamanic practice across cultures. What he found was remarkable: despite having no contact with one another, shamanic cultures on every inhabited continent described the same three-tiered cosmology, used the same techniques to access it, and brought back the same categories of healing and knowledge.

Harner called this shared framework “core shamanism” — the universal bones of the practice, stripped of any single culture’s specific elaboration. He founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies in 1979 to teach these methods to Westerners, arguing that the shamanic journey was humanity’s birthright, not any one culture’s proprietary technology.

The Three Worlds

The Lower World

You enter through an opening in the earth — a hollow tree, a cave, a spring, a hole in the ground that you have actually seen or can clearly imagine. You travel downward: through a tunnel, down a root system, along an underground river. The journey may be dark or luminous, tight or expansive. Eventually, you emerge into a landscape.

The Lower World is the realm of nature spirits, power animals, and ancestral wisdom. Its landscapes are typically natural — forests, jungles, oceans, deserts, mountains — but of extraordinary vividness and beauty. Colors are saturated beyond physical-world intensity. The quality of light is different. Animals here are not ordinary animals. They are spirits in animal form, carrying specific medicines and teachings.

The Lower World is where you go to find your power animal, to receive healing that operates at the instinctual and energetic level, and to retrieve vitality that has been lost. It corresponds, in psychological terms, to the deep unconscious — but “deep unconscious” is a Western container for an experience that indigenous peoples understand as actual territory, actually traversed.

The Middle World

The Middle World is the spiritual dimension of ordinary reality — the same physical world we inhabit, but perceived with shamanic sight. A journey in the Middle World might involve traveling to a distant location to gather information, communicating with the spirit of a place or a living person, or examining the energetic dimension of a physical situation.

Middle World journeying requires more discernment than Upper or Lower World travel. Because it mirrors ordinary reality, it also mirrors ordinary reality’s complexity — including energies and entities that may not have the journeyer’s best interests at heart. Most core shamanism practitioners are taught to begin with Lower and Upper World journeys and to approach the Middle World with experience and caution.

The Upper World

You ascend through a portal in the sky — climbing a tree, riding a whirlwind, ascending a mountain, following a beam of light, being carried by a bird. The passage often moves through layers: clouds, crystalline structures, celestial landscapes.

The Upper World is the realm of teachers, guides, and celestial beings. Its landscapes tend toward the ethereal — shimmering light, vast spaces, geometric beauty, crystalline clarity. The beings encountered here appear in humanoid or light-form and communicate through direct knowing, symbolic images, or occasionally words.

The Upper World is where you go for guidance, for understanding the larger patterns of your life, for spiritual teaching, and for healing that operates at the level of consciousness and destiny. It corresponds to what many traditions call the causal realm — the level of reality where the templates exist from which physical and energetic forms precipitate.

The Journey Technique

Preparation

Set your intention. This is the most critical step. A shamanic journey without clear intention is like a library visit without a question — you will wander. State your intention simply and specifically: “I journey to the Lower World to meet my power animal.” “I journey to the Upper World to ask my teacher about the source of this recurring dream.” “I journey to receive healing for the grief I have been carrying since my father’s death.”

Create your space. You need: a quiet, dark or dim room; a comfortable place to lie down; a blindfold or cloth over the eyes (darkness supports the visionary process); and a source of rhythmic drumming.

The drumming. Monotonous rhythmic drumming at approximately 4-7 beats per second is the shamanic vehicle. This beat frequency corresponds to the theta brainwave range (4-7 Hz) — the same frequency associated with deep meditation, hypnagogic states, and REM sleep. The drum does neurologically what it has done for 40,000 years of human practice: it drives the brain into a theta state conducive to visionary experience.

Melinda Maxfield’s 1990 research at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology demonstrated that shamanic drumming at 4-4.5 beats per second reliably produces theta wave entrainment in listeners. EEG recordings showed that within minutes of exposure to rhythmic drumming, subjects’ brainwave patterns shifted from beta (ordinary waking consciousness) to theta (visionary, dreamlike consciousness). Many subjects reported vivid imagery, emotional processing, and experiences consistent with shamanic journey descriptions — even without prior training or belief.

Drumming recordings are widely available. A typical journey drumming track runs 15-30 minutes with a “callback signal” — a distinctive change in rhythm (usually rapid drumming followed by silence and then four slow beats) that signals the journeyer to return.

The Journey

Lie down. Cover your eyes. Start the drumming. Breathe deeply several times and state your intention silently or aloud.

Visualize your entry point — the opening in the earth for the Lower World, the ascending pathway for the Upper World. Begin to move through it. Do not try to control what happens. Do not analyze while journeying. Simply notice: What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? Who or what is present?

When you encounter a being — an animal, a teacher, a guide — approach with respect. State your intention. Ask your question. Listen. The response may come as words, images, feelings, body sensations, or sudden knowing. It may be direct or symbolic. Receive whatever comes without judgment.

If the journey feels unclear or empty, simply wait. Not every journey is vivid. Some are subtle. Some are felt more than seen. Beginners often expect cinematic visions and miss the quieter frequencies of genuine shamanic experience.

The Return

When you hear the callback signal, thank whatever beings you have encountered and retrace your path to ordinary reality. Come back through the same opening you entered. Feel your body on the ground. Wiggle your fingers and toes. Open your eyes slowly.

Immediately journal your experience. Details that seem vivid during the journey can evaporate within minutes, like dream content. Write everything — images, feelings, words, body sensations, things that made no sense. The meaning often becomes clear later.

Sandra Ingerman and Soul Retrieval

Sandra Ingerman, a psychotherapist and shamanic practitioner trained by Michael Harner, developed the most widely practiced protocol for shamanic soul retrieval in the Western world. Her 1991 book Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self brought this ancient healing practice into therapeutic context.

The concept: when a person experiences trauma — physical, emotional, sexual, psychological — a part of their vital essence may dissociate and leave. In psychological terms, this is dissociation. In shamanic terms, a “soul part” literally departs to the spirit world, where it remains until someone comes to bring it back.

The symptoms of soul loss include: chronic depression that does not respond to treatment, a sense of incompleteness or emptiness, inability to remember parts of childhood, chronic immune deficiency, inability to move forward in life, addiction (using substances to fill the empty space), and the feeling of “never having been the same since” a particular event.

In a soul retrieval journey, the practitioner travels to non-ordinary reality — typically the Lower World — to locate the missing soul part, negotiate its return, and blow it back into the client’s energy body (typically into the heart center and crown). The client may feel warmth, tingling, emotional release, or a sudden sense of “coming home.”

Finding Your Power Animal

The power animal is one of the most fundamental concepts in shamanic practice. Every person is born with at least one power animal — a guardian spirit in animal form that provides protection, vitality, and specific medicine (gifts, qualities, wisdom).

Loss of power — what shamans call “power loss” — occurs when the power animal departs, often due to neglect, trauma, or prolonged violation of one’s own nature. Symptoms overlap with soul loss: chronic fatigue, repeated illness, depression, vulnerability to misfortune.

A journey to find your power animal:

1. Set intention: “I journey to the Lower World to find my power animal”
2. Enter through your usual opening, travel downward
3. In the Lower World landscape, wait and watch for an animal that appears
4. The traditional test: an animal that shows itself four times — in four different positions or from four directions — is offering itself as your power animal
5. Ask: “Are you my power animal?” Accept the response
6. Spend time with the animal. Ask what medicine it brings. Ask what it needs from you
7. Return with the animal — invite it to come back with you to ordinary reality

Power animals are not pets. They are autonomous spiritual beings that have agreed to walk with you. The relationship requires reciprocity: acknowledgment, gratitude, and embodiment of the animal’s qualities in daily life. Dance your power animal. Draw it. Learn about its biological counterpart. Let its medicine inform your choices.

The Neuroscience of the Journey

What is happening in the brain during a shamanic journey?

Theta brainwave entrainment. Drumming at 4-7 Hz drives the dominant brainwave frequency into the theta range — the same frequency associated with hypnagogic imagery, deep meditation, and REM sleep. Theta is the frequency of the “twilight zone” between waking and sleeping, where the boundary between conscious and unconscious becomes permeable.

Default Mode Network modulation. Preliminary research suggests that shamanic states, like meditation and psychedelic experiences, involve changes in the Default Mode Network (DMN) — the brain’s “narrative self” system. When the DMN quiets, the rigid sense of “I” softens, and information that is normally filtered out of conscious awareness becomes accessible.

Temporal lobe activation. The temporal lobes — particularly the right temporal lobe — are associated with mystical experiences, feelings of presence, and visionary imagery. Michael Persinger’s “God Helmet” research showed that electromagnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes could produce experiences remarkably similar to shamanic journey content: encounters with beings, feelings of cosmic significance, and the sense of traveling to other realms.

Reduced sensory gating. Ordinary consciousness filters out approximately 95% of available sensory and cognitive information. Altered states — including theta-dominant states — reduce this filtering, allowing more information into awareness. What feels like “entering another world” may be, in part, perceiving dimensions of this world that are normally gated out.

Safety and Discernment

Shamanic journeying is generally safe for psychologically stable individuals. However:

Grounding is essential. Always return fully. Feel your body. Touch the ground. Eat something. Rushing from a journey into ordinary activity without grounding can leave you disoriented and energetically vulnerable.

Not all information is trustworthy. Discernment is as important in non-ordinary reality as in ordinary reality. Test the spirits: Does this being feel compassionate? Does its guidance serve your highest good? Does it empower you or create dependency? Does its advice align with love or with fear?

Contraindications. People with active psychosis, severe dissociative disorders, or recent acute trauma should approach shamanic journeying cautiously and only with experienced guidance. The technique opens the unconscious, which is therapeutic for most people but potentially destabilizing for those whose boundaries are already compromised.

Differences from guided meditation. Guided meditation follows a script — someone else directs your imagery. Shamanic journeying is self-directed — you set the intention, but the content arises autonomously from non-ordinary reality. This makes the journey more unpredictable and potentially more powerful than guided visualization.

Hank Wesselman: The Spiritwalker

Hank Wesselman, a paleoanthropologist who studied human evolution in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, had a parallel life as a shamanic practitioner. His Spiritwalker trilogy documents his spontaneous shamanic journeys to a future Earth, 5,000 years hence — journeys that began without his seeking them and continued for years with increasing clarity and detail.

Wesselman’s contribution was bridging the scientific and shamanic worldviews from within a single life. As an anthropologist, he understood the dismissive stance of Western science toward non-ordinary experience. As a journeyer, he could not deny the reality, consistency, and transformative power of what he experienced. His work models the integration of rational inquiry and shamanic knowing — not abandoning one for the other, but holding both.

Building a Regular Journey Practice

Weekly journeys — Set aside one hour per week for journeying. Same time, same place, if possible. This creates a rhythm that the psyche recognizes and responds to.

A journal — Keep a dedicated shamanic journal. Record every journey: date, intention, entry point, what you encountered, what you received, what you felt. Over time, patterns emerge that are invisible in any single journey.

Relationship with your power animal — Daily acknowledgment. Not elaborate ritual — simply a moment of greeting, gratitude, and invitation. “I carry your medicine today. Guide me.”

Progressive depth — Begin with Lower World power animal journeys. As comfort and skill develop, explore the Upper World. As discernment matures, approach the Middle World. Build the foundation before attempting the advanced work.

The shamanic journey is perhaps humanity’s oldest spiritual technology. It predates every organized religion, every sacred text, every temple. It requires nothing but a drum, a dark room, and the willingness to discover that the universe is far larger, far more populated, and far more communicative than the modern worldview suggests.

What question would you carry into the Lower World tonight, if you trusted that something there was waiting to answer?