Shamanic Practice Taught Me More About Physics Than Physics Taught Me About Shamanism

I'm a Cambridge researcher who practices shamanism. Here's the weird part: shamanic practice taught me more about quantum mechanics than quantum mechanics taught me about shamanism.

Here's something that will sound backwards: my shamanic practice has actually deepened my understanding of physics more than my physics knowledge has illuminated my shamanic work.

I know how that sounds. I'm a researcher at Cambridge studying plasma physics and quantum entanglement. Surely the arrow of insight should go the other way? Surely scientific understanding should help me comprehend spiritual practice, not the reverse?

But after years living in both worlds, I've discovered something unexpected: the shamanic worldview prepared me to grasp aspects of modern physics that purely rational training often misses. Meanwhile, knowing quantum mechanics has taught me almost nothing useful about how to journey, how to work with spirits, or how to facilitate healing.

Let me explain what I mean.

Shamanism teaches becoming uncomfortable with the unknown

What Physics Didn't Teach Me About Shamanism

First, let's be clear about what physics hasn't done for my shamanic practice:

It hasn't validated the spirits. Quantum entanglement doesn't explain spirit communication. The uncertainty principle doesn't justify shamanic cosmology. No equation tells me whether the entities I encounter in journey are 'real' in an ontological sense.

It hasn't improved my technique. Understanding wave functions doesn't make me better at drumming, journeying, or soul retrieval. Knowing about plasma dynamics doesn't help me navigate non-ordinary reality.

It hasn't resolved the ontological questions. Physics can't tell me whether spirits exist independently or are aspects of consciousness, whether shamanic healing works through energetic mechanisms or symbolic transformation, whether non-ordinary reality is a place or a state.

My physics training is simply the wrong tool for shamanic work. It's like trying to use a telescope to examine your own eye. The instrument isn't designed for that purpose.

This was actually liberating to realize. I could stop trying to make shamanism 'scientific' and let it be what it is - a different way of knowing with its own validity.

What Shamanic Practice Taught Me About Physics

But here's where it gets interesting. Shamanic practice has fundamentally altered how I understand and work with physics in several unexpected ways:

1. Comfort with Paradox

In shamanic journey, I regularly encounter what seem like logical impossibilities:

• I'm simultaneously here and there.

• Time moves non-linearly. I can spend hours in journey and return to find minutes have passed.

• The same entity can appear in multiple forms.

• Contradictory things can be simultaneously true.

  
  

My rational mind initially rebelled against this. These are logical contradictions!

But shamanic practice taught me to sit with paradox, to hold contradictory truths without needing to immediately resolve them. And this, it turns out, is exactly what quantum mechanics requires.

Particles are both waves and particles. Light is both continuous and discrete. A quantum system can be in superposition - genuinely in multiple states at once. Measurement outcomes can depend on observer perspective in ways that seem to violate basic logic.

The physicists who struggled most with quantum mechanics were often those who needed reality to be logically consistent in conventional ways. Einstein never fully accepted quantum mechanics, partly because he couldn't tolerate the fundamental indeterminacy.

But I'd already learned, through shamanic practice, that reality doesn't always conform to logical either/or categories. That seemingly contradictory things can coexist. That paradox might be a feature of reality, not just a limitation of our understanding.

This prepared me to engage quantum weirdness with less cognitive discomfort than many of my colleagues experienced.

2. Multiple Perspectives on Reality

In shamanism, there's a concept often called 'levels of reality' or 'worlds', such as ordinary reality, upper world, lower world, middle world. These aren't just metaphors or states of mind. They're experienced as distinct domains with their own inhabitants, rules, and logic.

The key insight: reality looks fundamentally different depending on which domain you're operating in. What's true in one isn't necessarily true in another. You can't judge the upper world by ordinary world standards.

This multiple-perspective framework turned out to be crucial for understanding modern physics.

In relativity, there's no single 'correct' perspective on reality. Different observers moving at different velocities experience time and space differently, and they're all equally valid. Simultaneity is relative. There's no absolute now.

In quantum mechanics, different measurement bases give you incompatible but equally valid descriptions of the same system. The relational interpretation suggests that quantum states are relative to observers.

Physics increasingly shows that reality doesn't have a single, privileged perspective. Different frames of reference, different measurement contexts, and different scales reveal something true, but none is the complete picture.

Shamanic practice had already taught me this. I'd learned to shift between worlds, to recognise that what's true in journey might not be true in ordinary reality, to hold multiple valid perspectives without needing one to be 'the truth'.

When I encountered these ideas in physics, they felt familiar rather than bizarre.

3. The Observer Matters

In shamanism, the practitioner isn't a neutral observer. Who you are, your relationships, your intentions all shape what happens. The same journey undertaken by different people will yield different results. The healer is part of the healing system, not separate from it.

This violated my scientific training, which emphasised objectivity and observer-independence. Science seeks to eliminate the observer's influence, to find truths that hold regardless of who's looking.

But quantum mechanics introduced a genuine observer problem. Measurement affects the system. You can't cleanly separate the observer from the observed. The measurement apparatus matters. Context matters.

This doesn't mean consciousness creates reality. But it does mean that the assumption of complete observer-independence, which is so central to classical physics, breaks down at fundamental levels.

Shamanic practice had already made me comfortable with this. I was used to recognising that I'm embedded in what I'm investigating, that my presence matters, that clean subject-object separation isn't always possible or even desirable.

4. Non-Local Connections

One of the most startling aspects of my life since childhood has been experiencing what seems like non-local knowledge: knowing things I have no conventional way of knowing, receiving information that seemed to arrive through channels I didn't understand.

I won't claim this proves anything about physics. But it makes me viscerally familiar with the feeling of non-locality before I encountered it mathematically.

Then I studied quantum entanglement. Two particles can be correlated in ways that transcend space. Measuring one instantly influences what you'll find when you measure the other, regardless of distance. No signal passes exist between them (to our current knowledge). The connection is non-local.

Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" because it violated his intuitions about locality. But it didn't violate mine. I'd always experienced connections that seemed to transcend ordinary spatial relationships.

Again, this didn't make the physics easier because you still need the math, the experiments, the rigorous thinking. But it made the weirdness feel less alien to me. I had a phenomenological reference point for non-locality that purely abstract study wouldn't have provided.

5. The Limits of Language

Shamanic experiences are notoriously difficult to put into words. You return from a profound journey and try to describe it, and language feels inadequate. The experience had a clarity and intensity that evaporates when you try to capture it verbally.

This frustration taught me something important: not everything that's real can be adequately represented in language or conventional logic.

Physics, especially quantum mechanics, bumps into this same limitation. We have mathematical formalism that works brilliantly for predictions. But when we try to translate that math into everyday language and concepts, we get paradoxes, confusion, and competing interpretations.

The math is clear. The physical meaning is deeply unclear.

Niels Bohr said, "If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet." Richard Feynman said, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

These aren't admissions of failure. They're recognitions that our everyday conceptual framework may be fundamentally inadequate for what quantum mechanics is describing.

Shamanic practice had already taught me to be comfortable with that inadequacy. To recognise that experience can exceed conceptual grasp, that working with something doesn't require being able to explain it in ordinary language, that the map is not the territory.

6. Embodied vs. Abstract Knowledge

Physics, as typically taught, is almost entirely abstract. You work with equations, thought experiments, mathematical structures. Your body is irrelevant. In fact, it's kind of in the way. The ideal is pure rational understanding.

Shamanic practice is the opposite. It's deeply embodied. You feel the drum's rhythm in your bones. You experience the journey through your senses. The knowledge comes through your whole being, not just your rational mind.

This taught me something crucial: there are different kinds of knowing, and abstract conceptual understanding is only one of them.

When I returned to physics with this awareness, I started noticing something. The physicists who had the deepest intuitions weren't just those who could manipulate equations. They had developed embodied, almost visceral, senses for how physical systems behave.

They could 'feel' when an equation was right or wrong. They had physical intuitions about symmetry, conservation, dynamics. This wasn't just metaphor. They had internalised patterns to the point where their bodies responded to physical problems.

The best physics isn't purely abstract. It's grounded in physical intuition that's almost shamanic in its embodied quality.

7. Respect for Mystery

Perhaps the deepest lesson shamanic practice taught me is to respect mystery rather than always demanding resolution.

In journey, you encounter things you don't fully understand: symbols whose meaning is partially opaque; entities whose nature is ambiguous; experiences that resist interpretation.

The temptation is to explain everything, pin it all down, make it all fit into a coherent framework. But sometimes the wiser approach is to sit with not-knowing, to let mystery be mysterious.

This attitude has been invaluable in physics.

Modern physics is full of genuine mysteries: the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the reconciliation of quantum mechanics and general relativity, the hard problem of consciousness if we include that in physics' domain.

Some physicists respond by becoming dogmatic and insisting their preferred interpretation is obviously correct, dismissing alternatives, claiming certainty where none exists.

But shamanic practice has taught me a different response: acknowledge the mystery, work with what you can, hold your interpretations lightly, remain open to surprise.

The universe doesn't owe us explanations that fit our conceptual frameworks. Sometimes the most honest response is wonder rather than certainty.

The Unexpected Synergy

Here's what surprised me most: shamanic practice and physics aren't just compatible - they're mutually enhancing in unexpected ways.

Shamanism gave me:

• Comfort with paradox and non-classical logic

• Facility with multiple perspectives on reality

• Acceptance that the observer can't always be separated from observed

• Visceral familiarity with non-locality and entanglement-like phenomena

• Recognition that language and concepts have limits

• Understanding of embodied knowing

• Comfort with irreducible mystery

  
  

All of these made me better understand physics. Not because shamanism taught me physics (it didn't), but because it gave me cognitive and experiential resources for engaging with the genuinely weird aspects of modern physics.

Meanwhile, physics gave me:

• Rigour about what I can and can't claim to know

• Appreciation for the power of mathematical precision

• Standards of evidence for empirical claims

• Humility about where shamanic insights do and don't apply

• Recognition that subjective experience and objective reality are different categories

  
  

This made me a better shamanic practitioner: more careful about claims, more rigorous about what I actually know versus what I'm interpreting.

Why This Matters

I'm not arguing that everyone needs to practice shamanism to understand physics. Plenty of brilliant physicists have no spiritual practice at all.

But I am suggesting that:

Our culture's sharp division between rational/scientific and intuitive/spiritual knowing is artificial and limiting.

There are capacities, such as comfort with paradox, facility with multiple perspectives, embodied intuition, comfort with mystery, that can be developed through contemplative and spiritual practices and that turn out to be valuable for scientific work.

Similarly, there are capacities, like rigour, precision, empiricism, and careful reasoning, developed through scientific training that enhance spiritual practice.

The assumption that these domains are opposed, that good scientists must reject spirituality and serious spiritual practitioners must reject scientific materialism, impoverishes both.

What I Tell Students

When students ask me how to reconcile scientific and spiritual ways of knowing, I tell them:

"Don't try to make them the same thing. They're different modes with different purposes.

But do recognize that developing capacities in one domain can unexpectedly enhance the other.

Meditation might not teach you physics equations, but it might give you the mental flexibility to grasp quantum weirdness.

Physics might not explain your mystical experiences, but it might give you rigour about what you can actually claim to know.

The integration isn't about making science spiritual or spirituality scientific. It's about developing multiple ways of engaging reality and recognising that each has its place."

An Invitation

If you're a scientist who's been dismissive of contemplative or spiritual practices, consider: you might be missing out on ways of knowing that could enhance your scientific work.

Not by providing content (shamanism doesn't have scientific theories to offer), but by developing capacities, such as cognitive flexibility, comfort with paradox, embodied intuition, acceptance of mystery, that turn out to be valuable in science.

If you're a spiritual practitioner who's been suspicious of science, consider: rigour, precision, and empiricism aren't the enemy. They're tools that can make your spiritual practice more grounded and credible.

The division between these ways of knowing is largely artificial. Both are human capacities for engaging with reality. Both can be developed. Both have value.

And sometimes - unexpectedly, mysteriously - one illuminates the other in ways you'd never anticipate.

That's been my experience, anyway.

Shamanic practice taught me more about physics than physics taught me about shamanism. And I'm better at both because of it.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, a researcher at Cambridge studying plasma physics and quantum entanglement, and shamanic practitioner trained in Norse and Andean traditions. I work at the intersection where these ways of knowing inform each other in unexpected ways. If this resonates, reach out at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit www.magicinharmony.com.

What unexpected connections have you found between seemingly unrelated practices or fields? I'd love to hear your experiences.