The Joy of Shamanism

I've written about suffering. I've written about death. I've written about shadow work and lineage wounds and the parts of shamanic practice that make you physically ill before they make you whole.

All of that is true. And I meant every word of it.

But there's something I haven't said yet, and it feels overdue: shamanism has also brought me more joy than almost anything else in my life. Genuine, unperformed, sometimes absurd, frequently overwhelming joy.

Not the sanitised, Instagram-filter kind. Not the 'love and light' performance that passes for spirituality in a lot of wellness spaces. Real joy. The kind that catches you off guard. The kind that arrives in the middle of something ordinary and briefly makes you incapable of speaking because the beauty of being alive is simply too large to contain.

I think I've underplayed this. And I think that's a disservice - both to the practice and to the people who might need to hear that the path into the deeper dimensions of reality is not only hard. It is also, frequently and surprisingly, hilarious and breathtaking and full of a kind of aliveness that I didn't know was available to me before I started this work.

So let me tell you about the joy.

Connection with others and the land

The Land Is Funny, If You're Paying Attention

I grew up in a culture that treated nature as scenery. Something to look at through a car window, or visit on a bank holiday, or use as a backdrop for a photograph. Not something to be in relationship with. Not something that might have anything to say.

Shamanic practice broke that open for me completely.

The first time I journeyed to the spirit of a particular piece of land near where I live, I was expecting something solemn. Ancient. Perhaps a little intimidating. What I got was something I can only describe as gently teasing. The quality of the presence that met me was warm and faintly amused - the way a very old, very patient being might regard a very young, very earnest one who has just worked up the courage to knock on the door.

It was funny. Not in a way I could explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it. But unmistakably, quietly funny.

And that has been my experience of the natural world ever since I learned to actually pay attention to it. There is a quality of playfulness in nature that our rushed, distracted, screen-focused lives completely screen out. The way light moves through particular leaves at a particular time of day. The behaviour of a bird that seems, somehow, too pointed to be coincidence. The way certain places have a quality of personality - a mood, a character - that is completely consistent every time you return to them.

Paying attention to this - really paying attention, not as a nice idea but as a practice - is one of the most reliably joy-producing things I know how to do. And shamanism taught me how.

The Spirits Are Not What I Expected

I'll be honest: before I had my own direct experience of working with helping spirits, I had a vague, culturally-conditioned idea of what they'd be like. Serious. Ethereal. Speaking in the kind of portentous, slightly medieval language that shows up in fantasy novels.

Some of them are serious. Some of the work is profound and weighty and requires every bit of focus and reverence I can bring to it.

But some of my helping spirits are, frankly, comedians.

One of my guides has a quality of absolute, unhurried absurdity. When I arrive in journey in a state of enormous self-importance about something I'm worried about, there is often - not always, but often - a response that is so completely disproportionate in its lightness that I am reminded, quite efficiently, that I have lost all perspective. It doesn't feel dismissive. It feels loving. Like being gently defused by someone who can see the whole picture and knows that the thing I'm catastrophising about is not, in the scope of things, catastrophic.

Laughter in shamanic practice is not a failure of seriousness. It is, I've come to believe, itself a form of medicine. The ability to be in genuine, roaring, helpless laughter is a marker of aliveness. And the spirits, in my experience, understand this very well.

What Aliveness Actually Feels Like

Before I found shamanic practice, I lived most of my life at about sixty percent. I didn't know that's what I was doing. I thought that was just how life felt - a sort of moderate engagement with experience, punctuated by occasional highs and lows, but mostly just the steady hum of getting through.

I didn't know there was more available.

The first time I journeyed properly - really dropped into the lower world, really made contact with something that was unmistakably not my imagination - something in me woke up that I hadn't known was asleep. It was like going from a photograph to the actual landscape. The colours were more saturated. The dimensions were deeper. The sense of being in direct contact with reality, rather than experiencing it at one remove, was almost overwhelming.

That quality of aliveness doesn't stay at peak intensity or you'd burn out very quickly if it did. But it has become the baseline. The floor has risen. The ordinary world, experienced from the inside of a shamanic practice, is simply more vivid than it was before. More layered. More interesting. More strange and beautiful and worthy of attention.

A walk in the woods is not the same walk it was ten years ago. Not because the woods have changed. Because I have learned to actually be in them - to feel them, to notice them, to be in some kind of living relationship with the land I'm moving through rather than simply moving through it.

That is not a small thing. That is, I think, the difference between being alive and actually living.

The Joy That Arrives Through the Hard Work

I want to be honest about something, because I've spent enough time in spiritual spaces that perform relentless positivity to know how hollow it rings: the joy I'm describing is not separate from the hard work. It arrives through it.

The deepest moments of aliveness I have experienced in this practice have often come directly after - or directly within - something that was also difficult. The moment a piece of shadow work completes and something that has been locked inside you for years suddenly releases. The moment a soul you've been journeying to crosses over and you feel the room change, the weight lift, the quality of the air shift. The moment you make contact with an ancestor you've been carrying as grief and feel the grief transmute into something warmer and more complex.

These moments are joyful in a way that nothing comfortable or easy has ever quite matched. Because they are earned. Because they arrive on the other side of something real.

The joy of shamanism is not the joy of avoiding difficulty. It is the joy of being fully alive to your experience - all of it, including the parts that are hard - and discovering that when you stop running from your life and turn to actually face it, it is so much more extraordinary than you gave it credit for.

Joy Is Not a Luxury. It Is Information.

One of the things shamanic practice has taught me is that joy, like pain, is not incidental to spiritual life. It is data. It points to something true.

When I feel genuine, unforced joy in a journey, it usually means I'm in contact with something real. When I feel the lightness that comes after a piece of difficult work completes, it means something has actually shifted - not just been talked about or intellectually resolved, but genuinely moved.

Joy is the body's signal that it is in contact with life. With something real. With something that matters.

We have been so conditioned to treat joy as trivial - as the province of children and simple pleasures and things that don't require much of us - that many of us have entirely lost touch with it. We treat suffering as more serious, more worthy of attention, more spiritually significant.

But the shamanic worldview doesn't rank them that way. Both are information. Both are medicine. Both are part of the full spectrum of being alive that this practice asks you to inhabit.

And joy - the real kind, not the performed kind - is one of the most powerful indicators that you are moving in the right direction. That the work is working. That you are, slowly and imperfectly and with great stubbornness, becoming more wholly yourself.

This Is Available to You

I say all of this not to describe some rare, gated experience available only to people who've been training for a decade. I say it because I believe - having watched it happen with clients and students and people who came to me absolutely convinced that joy was something that happened to other people - that this quality of aliveness is available to far more of us than we think.

It doesn't require a perfect life or a resolved psyche or even a particularly settled spiritual practice. It requires attention. Willingness. The capacity to be genuinely, openly present to your experience, including the experiences your culture would prefer you to screen out.

The land is there. The more-than-human world is there. The richness that lies just beneath the surface of ordinary experience is there, all the time, waiting for anyone willing to slow down long enough to feel it.

Shamanism, at its heart, is not a system of beliefs. It is a set of tools for paying attention. For being present. For being, in the fullest and most embodied sense, alive.

The joy is a side effect of that. A very good one.

And I want it for you.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is a researcher, philosopher, and shamanic practitioner. If you're curious about what a lived shamanic practice might open up for you - not just the hard parts, but the extraordinary ones - she'd love to hear from you. Reach out at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit www.magicinharmony.com.