What 10 Years of Shamanic Practice Taught Me About Suffering

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.

Ten years of serious shamanic practice has taught me something quite different about suffering, and it's something that contradicts most of what our culture preaches about healing and happiness. And it's this: you don't heal by avoiding your pain. You heal by going directly into it, meeting what you've been running from, and allowing it to transform you.

The darkest parts of your soul - the rage, the shame, the grief, the parts of yourself you've tried to annihilate - don't go away when you ignore them. They just wait. And shamanic practice, done properly, forces you to turn around and face what's been chasing you.

I need to be honest: this work made me physically ill at first. I'm talking actual nausea, migraines, body aches. When you start touching the parts of yourself you've kept locked away, your body revolts. It knows you're approaching something dangerous.

But it was also the most cleansing thing I've ever experienced. Like lancing an infection. The initial pain is excruciating, but what comes out is poison that's been festering for years. The feeling of freedom and being able to finally feel alive in your whole being is nothing short of miraculous.

Let me tell you what I've learned.

Wholeness is true freedom

Suffering Isn't a Problem to Be Solved

The first and hardest lesson: suffering is not a malfunction that needs fixing. It's a fundamental feature of existence.

Our culture treats suffering as abnormal. You're anxious? Take medication. You're sad? Get therapy. You're in pain? Numb it, distract from it, transcend it, manifest it away.

But shamanic traditions start from a different premise: life includes suffering. Loss is inevitable. Pain is guaranteed. Everyone you love will die or leave. Your body will decay. Everything you build will crumble. This isn't pessimism; it's just what is. It's reality; embracing the realness and facing it.

The Buddha's first noble truth is "life is suffering" (or more accurately, life includes dukkha, which is unsatisfactoriness, dissatisfaction, stress). He wasn't being negative. He was being honest.

Shamanic practice taught me to stop treating my suffering as evidence that something's wrong with me or my life. Sometimes suffering means something needs to change. But sometimes it just means you're alive and paying attention.

The relief in this realisation was enormous. I could stop the exhausting work of trying to feel okay all the time.

The Things You Deny Control You

In my early shamanic training, I had a journey that broke me open. I was instructed to meet my shadow, those parts of myself that I'd rejected, denied, hidden away.

What emerged was terrifying: rage that I'd never acknowledged; selfishness I'd pretended didn't exist; hurt that I had ignored. The parts of myself I met were those that violated my self-image as a good, kind, spiritual person.

My first instinct was to push it away, to close the journey, to never go back there. This isn't me. This can't be me. I cannot do this a second time.

But my shaman elder was clear: "The things you deny own you. The things you integrate lose their power."

So I went back. Again and again. I sat with my shadow. I let myself feel the rage without acting on it. I acknowledged the selfishness without judgment. I met the parts of myself I'd spent decades trying to annihilate or forget.

This made me physically sick. I'm not speaking metaphorically. I would return from these journeys and vomit. Get migraines that lasted days. My body was rejecting what my consciousness was trying to integrate.

But slowly, something shifted. The parts I'd been terrified of became less terrifying when I stopped fighting them. The rage was just energy. The selfishness was just self-preservation. The shadow wasn't evil. It was just the full spectrum of human capacity I'd been denying.

Carl Jung said, "I'd rather be whole than good." Shamanic practice taught me what that means. Wholeness includes the darkness. Goodness that excludes your shadow is just performance.

Pain You Don't Transform, You Transmit

One of the most important shamanic insights: unprocessed pain doesn't just hurt you - it spreads to others. What's the saying? 'Hurt people hurt people.'

The parent who was hurt and never healed then wounds their children. The leader with unexamined trauma damages their organisation. The person carrying unintegrated rage finds ways to inflict it on those around them.

We like to think we can contain our suffering, keep it private, not let it affect others. But that's not how it works. Pain you don't metabolise leaks out. You become unconsciously cruel. You create the same patterns that hurt you. You pass the wound to the next generation. Again and again, most times, without even realising it.

In shamanic terms, this is often understood as ancestor work. We carry not just our own unhealed pain but generations of it. Trauma passes down lineages until someone finally stops and faces it.

I've done extensive work with my lineage, such as meeting the pain of ancestors who died violently, who were displaced, who carried shame and rage and grief they never processed. And I've felt how that unmetabolised suffering shaped me, created patterns I thought were just "who I am".

The shamanic approach isn't just personal healing. It's interrupting the transmission of suffering. You don't heal just for yourself. You heal so you don't poison everyone around you.

Spiritual Bypassing Is Everywhere

The wellness industry has created a sanitised spirituality that's actually a form of avoidance. It's what psychologist John Welwood called "spiritual bypassing", or using spiritual practices to avoid dealing with difficult emotions, unresolved wounds, or developmental tasks.

You see this everywhere:

• "Just raise your vibration" (translation: don't feel negative emotions)

• "Everything happens for a reason" (translation: don't acknowledge meaningless suffering)

• "You create your own reality" (translation: blame yourself for circumstances beyond your control)

• "Love and light" (translation: don't acknowledge darkness exists)

  
  

This isn't spirituality. It's avoidance painted in spiritual colors.

Real shamanic practice doesn't bypass suffering, but goes directly into the suffering in order to release and heal. The traditional shamanic journey often involves descent, dismemberment, confrontation with death and dissolution. You go down into the lower world, into the underworld, into the places you've been avoiding.

My first serious soul retrieval, which is retrieving a part of yourself you've lost through trauma, involved experiencing the original wounding again. Not thinking about it. Not analysing it. Actually feeling it in my body, meeting the terror and pain I'd locked away.

I came back from that journey and couldn't stop shaking for hours. My nervous system was reliving what it had survived.

But that lost part of myself could only come back by going through what had made it leave. There was no shortcut. No "love and light" bypass. Just direct encounter with what I'd been running from.

Death Is the Greatest Teacher

Shamanic practice involves regular symbolic death. In journey, you might be torn apart, dissolved, consumed by fire, returned to bones. These aren't just dramatic visions. They're encounters with the reality of your own impermanence, your own death and rebirth.

Our culture is death-phobic. We hide dying people away. We use euphemisms. We pretend death is something that happens to other people later, not right now.

Shamanic practice says: you're dying right now. Every moment you're moving toward death.

This sounds morbid. But facing death regularly through practice did something unexpected. It made life more precious, more vivid, more urgent in the best way.

When you truly internalise that you're going to die, trivial concerns lose their weight. Ego games seem ridiculous. You stop wasting time on things that don't matter. You pay attention to what's actually here, now, because you know it's temporary. And you start to realise that what others think about you does not matter. You are free!

Suffering Can Be Transformative (But Isn't Automatically)

Here's a crucial distinction shamanic practice taught me: suffering can transform you, but it doesn't automatically.

Pain alone doesn't make you wise. Trauma alone doesn't make you strong. You can suffer for decades and just become bitter, hardened, smaller.

What makes suffering transformative is how you meet it.

If you meet it with awareness, with willingness to be changed by it, with openness to what it might teach, it can break you open in ways that make you more human, more compassionate, more alive.

If you meet it with resistance, with the demand that it shouldn't be happening, with bitterness and hardening, it just makes you suffer more.

Shamanic practice gave me tools for meeting suffering skillfully:

• Journey work to understand what the pain is asking of me

• Ritual to mark transitions and metabolise grief

• Community to witness and hold the suffering with me

• Cosmology that gives suffering context and meaning

• Practices to stay present with pain rather than dissociating

  
  

This doesn't make suffering pleasant. But it makes it workable. It transforms pain from meaningless torment into something that can catalyse growth.

You Don't Heal Alone

Western therapy is often conceived as individual work. You and your therapist, processing your individual psyche, fixing your individual problems. Sometimes, like with PTSD, all the talking in the world won't help, however.

Shamanic healing is communal. You're embedded in family systems, ancestor lines, communities, the web of life. Your suffering isn't just yours. It's collective. And your healing isn't just yours either.

When I do healing work for clients, I'm not just addressing their individual psyche. I'm working with their ancestors, their lineage, their relationship to land and spirits. Healing ripples out through all these connections.

This has practical implications. You can't heal from relational trauma in isolation. You can't integrate shadow without community to reflect it back. You can't metabolise grief without others to witness it.

The individualisation of suffering is itself a form of suffering. Shamanic practice reminded me that we're meant to carry these things together.

The Body Keeps the Score (and the Spirits Know)

Here's something that surprised me: the spirits I work with in shamanic practice are less interested in my thoughts and beliefs than in what's happening in my body.

Trauma lives in the body. Unprocessed emotion is stored somatically. You can have all the psychological insight in the world, but if the wound is held in your tissues, it's still there.

When I started serious shadow work of meeting the parts of myself I'd rejected, my body rebelled violently. Nausea, migraines, muscle pain, skin eruptions. My system was trying to expel what I was bringing to consciousness.

This wasn't psychosomatic in the dismissive sense. It was the body doing what it does: holding what the mind can't yet process, and releasing it when it finally gets permission.

The spirits I work with consistently direct attention to the body. "Feel where this lives in you." "Let your body show you what it knows." "The answer isn't in your head; it's in your gut, your chest, your throat."

Western culture treats the body as a vehicle for the mind. Shamanic practice treats the body as intelligent, as carrying knowledge the conscious mind doesn't have access to, as the place where real transformation happens.

Suffering Breaks Open the Heart

The strangest thing suffering has taught me: it can make you more loving, not less.

You'd think experiencing pain would make you harder, more defended, less willing to be vulnerable. And it can, but only if you meet it with closure.

But if you let suffering break you open instead of shut you down, something extraordinary happens. You become more tender. More compassionate. More able to hold others' pain because you've learned to hold your own.

The people I trust most aren't those who haven't suffered. They're those who've suffered and let it make them kinder rather than bitter.

There's a Buddhist practice called tonglen, which is breathing in others' suffering and breathing out relief. It sounds masochistic. Why would you voluntarily take on more pain?

But the practice recognises something profound: when you've learned to metabolise your own suffering, you can help others metabolise theirs. Your capacity to be with pain, both yours and others', increases.

Shamanic practice gave me this capacity. Not by making me immune to pain, but by teaching me how to be present with it, how to let it move through me, how to let it break my heart open rather than shut it down. And heal quickly.

What I Tell People Starting Shamanic Practice

When people come to me wanting to learn shamanic practice, especially if they've been steeped in wellness culture spirituality, I'm honest about what they're signing up for:

"This isn't light and love. This is descent into darkness. This is meeting what you've been avoiding. This is letting yourself be dismembered so you can be put back together differently.

You will have to face your shadow - the rage, the shame, the grief you've been carrying. It will make you sick at first. Your body will rebel. You'll want to quit.

But if you stay with it, if you let the process work on you, something shifts. The poison comes out. The parts you've rejected get integrated. You become whole instead of just good.

This doesn't make your life easier. It makes you more capable of being fully alive, which includes being fully present to suffering as well as joy."

If you want feel-good spirituality, this isn't it. If you want transformation, keep reading.

The Unexpected Gift

After ten years of this work, here's what I didn't expect:

I'm not happier in the conventional sense. I don't have less pain or fewer problems. I haven't manifested a perfect life or transcended suffering.

But I'm more alive. More present. More capable of feeling the full range of human experience without needing to escape it.

The parts of myself I was terrified of - the shadow, the rage, the capacity for darkness, I've integrated them. They don't control me anymore because I'm not fighting them.

The suffering I've experienced - and I've experienced plenty - has made me softer, not harder. More compassionate, not more bitter. More willing to be broken open, not more defended.

I can sit with others in their pain without needing to fix it or bypass it. I can hold space for darkness without being consumed by it. I can meet death, literal and symbolic, without quite so much terror.

This is what shamanic practice gave me. Not transcendence of suffering, but the capacity to be with it. Not escape from darkness, but the ability to navigate it. Not protection from being broken, but the knowledge that I can be shattered and put back together and be more whole for it.

The wound is where the light enters, Rumi said. But first you have to stop pretending you're not wounded.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher, philosopher, and shamanic practitioner. I work with people who are ready to do the hard work of meeting their shadow, metabolising their pain, and becoming whole rather than just good. This isn't gentle work, but it's transformative. If you're ready for it, reach out at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit www.magicinharmony.com.

What has suffering taught you? How have you learned to meet pain in ways that transform rather than harden you? I'd genuinely love to hear your story.