Ten years of shamanic practice taught me something wellness culture won't tell you: You don't heal by avoiding your pain. You heal by going directly into it. There's a sanitised version of spirituality that's sold in wellness culture: light, love, positive vibes only. Manifest your dreams. Raise your vibration. Connect with your spirit guides who'll tell you you're special and destined for greatness. That's not the shamanic path I've walked.

We live under electric light that tells the brain it is always midsummer. We heat our homes to the same temperature year-round. We eat strawberries in January and expect our productivity to be identical in February as in July. We demand of our nervous systems a constancy that nothing in our evolutionary history prepared them for.

Soul retrieval is a core practice in shamanic healing that many people find mysterious or unfamiliar. At its heart, it involves restoring parts of a person’s soul that have been lost or fragmented due to trauma, stress, or significant life challenges. This process aims to bring back wholeness, balance, and a renewed sense of self. If you have ever felt disconnected, numb, or incomplete, soul retrieval might offer a path to healing.

David Chalmers gave philosophy one of its most useful formulations when he distinguished the easy problems of consciousness from the hard one. The easy problems concern function: explaining how the brain integrates information, how it discriminates stimuli, how it produces reports about internal states. The hard problem is different. It asks why any of this processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Why is there something it is like to see red, to feel pain, t

Imagine two people make identical claims. Same words, same evidence, same delivery. One is believed. One is not. What changed? Not the claim. Not the evidence. Something about the person making it. The alternative is uncomfortable: that what gets believed is shaped as much by who is saying it as by what is being said. That alternative is, however, well supported by evidence. And it matters far beyond academic philosophy.

Tricksters appear in myths and stories across cultures, often stirring up chaos and challenging norms. Yet, their role goes beyond mischief. Tricksters like Loki from Norse mythology and Coyote from Native American traditions play a vital part in healing and self-discovery through shadow work. This post explores how these figures embody chaos that leads to transformation, helping us confront hidden parts of ourselves.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that has no obvious name. It is not the loneliness of isolation, of having no one around. It is the loneliness of being in a room full of people and finding that you do not quite belong to either half of it. I love people in both halves of that room. And I have found, repeatedly, that fully belonging to either half requires a kind of amputation I am not willing to perform. This essay is about what that costs. And it is exactly the righ

Energetic connections shape much of our emotional and spiritual experience. Many people turn to cord cutting as a way to free themselves from negative ties, but this approach is not always the best choice. Sometimes, maintaining or healing these energetic links can lead to deeper growth and balance. This post explores when to cut energetic cords and when to focus on healing them instead.

The dark night of the soul is a profound spiritual crisis that can feel overwhelming and isolating. It often arrives without warning, shaking the foundations of your beliefs, identity, and purpose. While this experience can be deeply challenging, it also offers a unique opportunity for transformation and growth. Shamanic wisdom provides practical guidance and healing tools to navigate this difficult passage with courage and clarity.

We live in a culture that has decided, largely without examining the decision, that propositional knowledge is the real kind and everything else is something lesser: intuition, gut feeling, superstition, or at best a heuristic waiting to be replaced by a proper algorithm. Ryle, Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, Damasio, Klein: these are not fringe thinkers. They represent decades of serious philosophical and scientific work showing that this picture is wrong. The body knows.

In scientific observation, the observer is supposed to remain separate from the observed. In shamanic journey, they interpenetrate. When I journey to understand a client's situation, I'm not observing it from outside. I'm participating in it. The boundaries between my consciousness, the client's consciousness, and the situation itself become fluid. Where's the boundary? What's subject and what's object?

In a world where technology shapes nearly every aspect of our lives, it’s fascinating to see how ancient practices like shamanism are evolving. I’ve always been drawn to the deep wisdom and healing power of shamanic traditions. Yet, I also recognise the incredible potential that digital tools offer to expand and enrich these practices. How can we honour the sacred roots of shamanism while embracing the innovations of the digital age? Let’s explore this together.

We have inherited a particular story about how knowledge works. Science observes. Science tests. Science replicates. And whatever cannot survive that process is not, properly speaking, knowledge at all. It is a powerful story. It has given us vaccines and transistors and the ability to predict where a spacecraft will be in thirty years. I am not here to dismantle it. But I am here to ask: what does that story leave out? And more pointedly, what does it leave out by design?

Cultural traditions carry deep meaning and history. When people outside a culture adopt elements from it, the line between appreciation and appropriation can blur. This creates tension and misunderstanding. How can we honour traditions while making them accessible in a respectful way? This question matters especially when engaging with multiple lineages and diverse cultural backgrounds. The goal is to celebrate and share traditions without erasing their origins or causing har

The standard framework for burden of proof was developed for scientific claims about objective, repeatable phenomena. Anomalous experiences often don't fit neatly into that framework. When I claim precognition, I'm not claiming a general law of physics. I'm reporting specific experiences that happened to me and, in many cases, experiences I can reproduce. The epistemology is different. And that means the burden of proof question is more complex than it first appears.

The English countryside holds some of the most intriguing and ancient sacred sites in the world. Among these, Stonehenge and Avebury stand out as monumental testaments to prehistoric ingenuity and spiritual life. These sites are not just archaeological wonders; they are part of a larger landscape imbued with local magic and mystery. Exploring the connection between these stone circles and the surrounding countryside reveals a rich story of human connection to nature, ritual,

Shamanic traditions across many cultures describe reality as layered into three distinct realms: the Middle World, the Upper World, and the Lower World. These realms form a map of non-ordinary reality, where shamans journey to seek guidance, healing, and wisdom. Understanding these worlds helps us grasp how shamans connect with spirits and navigate unseen dimensions. This guide explores each realm’s characteristics, their roles in shamanic practice, and practical ways to enga

Free will, as most people understand it, the libertarian variety, where the self is genuinely the ultimate author of its choices, uncaused and unconstrained, is almost certainly an illusion. The interesting question is not whether it is an illusion. The interesting question is why we invented it, what function it serves, and whether we could manage without it or whether it is load-bearing mythology.

The Enlightenment was one of the most consequential intellectual revolutions in human history, and I mean that without irony. The slow dismantling of superstition, the insistence on evidence, the separation of church from state, the idea that a human being has inherent rights not conferred by a king or a priest are genuine achievements, hard-won, and still worth defending. I am not here to burn down the Enlightenment. I am here to notice that it made a promise it could not ke

The idea of otherworldly realms has fascinated cultures worldwide. Among these, the Celtic Otherworld and the shamanic Lower World stand out as intriguing spiritual landscapes. Both are described as places beyond ordinary reality, yet their nature and connection to the physical world raise questions. Are these realms entirely separate, or do they represent different maps of the same spiritual territory? This post explores their similarities and differences.