Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Summer 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard "Walking through Darkness: An Interview with Sandra Ingerman" Quest 112:3, pg 12-19

By Richard Smoley

Sandra Ingerman, a world-renowned teacher of shamanism, is recognized for bridging ancient cross-cultural healing methods with modern culture. She has taught for forty years, including workshops worldwide on shamanic journeying, healing, and reversing environmental pollution using spiritual methods.

Sandra has authored twelve books, including Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self; Medicine for the Earth; Walking in Light; and The Book of Ceremony: Shamanic Wisdom for Invoking the Sacred in Everyday Life, as well as Awakening to the Spirit World: The Shamanic Path of Direct Revelation (coauthored with Hank Wesselman). Her latest book, coauthored with Llyn Roberts, is Walking through Darkness: A Nature-Based Path to Navigating Suffering and Loss (Sounds True).

Sandra is known for gathering the global spiritual community together to perform powerful transformative ceremonies as well as inspiring us to stand strong in unity so we do our own spiritual and social activism work while keeping a vision of hope and light.

This interview was conducted via Zoom in December 2023. It is available on YouTube. An edited version is below.

 

Richard Smoley: Shamanism is a religion associated with primitive tribes. Can you say a little bit about it in a present-day context? How is it practiced by Americans today?

Sandra Ingerman: Shamanism is actually the oldest universal spiritual practice. Archaeological evidence suggests that it dates back over 100,000 years. You can imagine that a practice that started 100,000 years ago had to keep evolving to meet the needs of the people.

One reason that shamanism has been around so long is that it gets good results. I know this sounds a little harsh, but there are shamanic cultures back in the olden days where, if the shaman couldn’t heal the people and couldn’t help them find food, the shaman was actually killed. Shamanism has always been a very result-oriented practice. It’s not, “Oh, isn’t it nice to do a ceremony or take a shamanic journey?” That’s not what shamanism is about. Instead, does it heal the people? Does it heal the land? Does it make our lives better? It’s a practice that has gotten really good results.

When I started practicing shamanism forty years ago, I was a psychotherapist, and I’d hear from a couple of students about different ceremonies that were done for healing. I said to myself, “This can’t be bridged into our modern-day culture. There’s no way to work with this in a session with a client.”

Yet shamanism has evolved so that we can work in a modern culture. We have shamanic practitioners going into schools, helping children look at how they can live a balanced life, connected to nature. We have people dealing with unbelievable trauma who are getting help from Western shamanic practitioners. We have priests and nuns practicing shamanism. We have doctors, nurses, and lawyers practicing shamanism, besides people who are just seeking help in their own lives or who want to bring the work into their community.

Over the years, we’ve been able to interest people in shamanism at a time on the planet where we need help. They can direct help to our culture, where oftentimes healing methods and ceremonies from indigenous cultures just don’t work in a Western world. They’re not translatable.

Smoley: One principal difference between shamanism and conventional psychotherapy has to do with the spirits. As you’ve suggested, shamanism is based on the reality of the spirit world and our capacity to relate to it, whereas modern psychology denies that there’s any such thing. Could you talk about that difference?

Ingerman: I’ll tell you what happened to me as a psychotherapist.

Forty years ago, I moved to Santa Fe, and I had two separate practices. Back in those days, I stuck to the legalities and had two different business cards: one as a psychotherapist, and one as a shamanic counselor.

I was teaching my shamanic clients how to meet their own helping spirits. In shamanism, the most powerful ceremony is the shamanic journey: a practice of direct revelation, where everybody has their own divine helping spirits who can help them, and people can become their own authorities.

My shamanic clients were journeying to their spirits. Their spirits were helping them, giving them advice, and healing them. My shamanic clients were moving much faster than my psychotherapy clients, where we seemed to just be going around in a loop. It could have been that I wasn’t a great therapist—I don’t know—but at some point I saw my shamanic clients moving so fast. I told my psychotherapy clients that I was no longer doing traditional therapy. If they wanted to move with me and become shamanic clients, they could. Otherwise I would refer them out to another psychotherapist. Everybody moved with me except one person.

With shamanism, we can give a client the ability to have their own self-directed revelation. They get their own answers instead of having to follow what an authority figure is sharing with them. Oftentimes that’s good information: the therapist doesn’t have the same perspective that the spirits have. The spirits have no body. They’re out in the divine realms, and they have a different perspective to us in the world.

Some people who are in therapy want that comfort of having a therapist. It depends on people’s personalities. Do they want to become their own authority figure, or do they want the help of somebody else? I see the practices as being very different, but a lot of psychotherapists are now bridging shamanism into their practices. They teach their clients how to journey as well as doing psychotherapy work. That’s another way that shamanism has evolved: it has been bridging into psychotherapy a bit.

The other important point is that when a person goes into psychotherapy, it’s the therapist who does the diagnosis of what’s going on for them. In shamanism, if I go to my helping spirit and say, “This is my diagnosis of my client,” my helping spirit may say to me, “Oh, Sandra, that’s such a beautiful theory, but that has absolutely nothing to do with what’s happening with your client right now.” The beauty of shamanic work as a psychotherapist is, I can defer to the helping spirits, who see what the client really needs.

Part of the looping with my psychotherapy clients was that we weren’t hitting the core issue, so we kept on having to talk around and around. The helping spirit I’ve worked with for forty years now has never been wrong. When I journey for a client, the very first thing he does is say what the core issue is and what needs to be healed. Once you get that core issue, everything falls into place.

Smoley: You’ve mentioned the shamanic journey. Could you give us some idea of what it entails?

Ingerman: Shamanism is about ceremony, which is a way for us to come back to place of stability and center. Our ego mind gets disturbed by what’s going on in our lives and the world.

When we perform a ceremony in shamanism, we move away from our ego, we step away from our humanness, and we allow our spirit to connect with helping spirits.

In shamanism it’s believed that when we’re born—all of us, whether we believe in shamanism or not—there are helping spirits who come in, volunteer to help us, protect us, and keep us safe and healthy throughout our lives. They won’t prevent our big lessons, so yes, tragedy comes into our life, because we have to grow. But it’s believed that we always have these spirits around us.

A shamanic journey is a ceremony where we do preparation work—singing and dancing, meditation, spending time in nature—to step away from our ego so that it is not coming into the journey. It’s our spirit speaking to these divine spirits.

In shamanism, it’s said that there are three worlds. There is the lower world, which seems very earthy. It’s a wonderful place, and there are helping spirits, power animals, guardian spirits. Guardian spirits could be a tree or a plant or a fairy; there are also teachers, mystics, ancestor figures.

Then we go to the middle world, where we have the opportunity to speak with nature, but working in the unseen. We step into a different dimension of reality with nature; we can talk to trees and plants as indigenous people used to do, and say, “What are your healing properties? What’s your story? What has your life been like?” We get to communicate with nature. And that’s probably the biggest illness in our culture today: how disconnected people are from nature.

The third world is the upper world. So there’s the world tree: the roots go down to the lower world; the trunk is the middle world; the branches go to the upper world, and we climb up using different tools and ways to get to the upper world. That’s where many teachers in human form live again. We have a variety of spirits that we can go to. They could be ancestors, religious figures; people see goddesses and gods from all different cultures. Teachers can be very surprising: a young child could come in as a teacher.

Once we start to journey, we learn who our helping spirits are. We journey to the lower world, we journey to the upper world, and we ask for a teacher or power animal or guardian spirit. We wait to see who shows up. We don’t pick them. They pick us.

Then we forge an amazing relationship, so that whenever we go into a shamanic journey, our spirits are there. We know they’re going to be there. We know who our spirits are.

As I’ve said, I’ve been working with this one spirit for forty years, so how can I not trust what he says? He’s never been wrong. It’s amazing to have that kind of support.

How can people enter into a journey, moving their humanness out of the way so that their spirit can fly into the unseen realms and they can have direct revelation and conversations with these amazing spirits? Typically in most cultures, some kind of percussion is used to go into an altered state; in most cultures a drum is used. That’s what I use. Rattles are used; I also use rattles. People in different countries also use bowls and bells. A didgeridoo might be used in Australia.

Then there are plant spirits, which many shamans use to go into the unseen realms. Plant spirits are wonderful, but we can use a drum or rattles. With these methods, we can make the information accessible to us on a day-to-day basis, because we can still hold our consciousness. We can get practical answers like, what do I do in the next minute? What do I do tomorrow? instead of the bigger, planetary, cosmic things we might be shown using plant spirits. What I love about shamanic journey is how practical it is.

Smoley: On this topic of communicating with nature and nature spirits: one of those enigmatic creatures is the bee. The bee has many esoteric dimensions, both symbolically and in many other ways. Maybe you could talk a little bit about bee shamanism. Do you know anything about that?

Ingerman: I’ve put out this message for forty years now, so people know I’m strict about this: every time a helping spirit comes to you, it’s bringing a unique gift that you personally need, not what anybody else needs; it’s what you need.

Shamanism is a practice to empower yourself so that you become your own authority. I tell people, if you want to know about what the symbolism of Bee is for you, journey to Bee, and ask Bee for yourself.

I have a hard time with books saying that this creature means this, and this creature means that, because I’ve found that people miss the unique gifts that the universe is trying to share. They go into generic work, they go into what one author discovered, but we really need to keep our own authority. If we want to know what Bee is about, I tell people to go to Bee and talk to Bee.

Smoley: That’s very helpful. In the course of these spirit conversations, there is always the possibility of being deceived. In your new book, Walking through Darkness, your first chapter is on Coyote, which is well known as a trickster figure, often portrayed in a cartoonish, Wile E. Coyote kind of way. Your chapter suggests that deception is possible; it is part of the game. Could you comment a bit about this? How do you sort through deception?

Ingerman: I was using Coyote as a metaphor. My coauthor, Llyn Roberts, and I used animals as metaphors; we weren’t talking about them as real spirits.

I use myself as an example. The book is about my roadmap of how I got through the dark night of the soul. I have a disorder that developed nine years ago, so the book is about how I’ve worked with it. If you have something rare or unknown, people jump out at you and say, “I can help you. I know exactly how to help you. I can cure you in one month, or two months. Just do whatever I say.”

That whole chapter was about how, when we’re walking through the dark night of the soul, it’s not spirits that try to trick us. The spirits are trying to help us, if we would listen to them. But people we meet can act as coyotes, as tricksters who try to deceive us and bring us to the wrong path. A lot of them are heart-centered and compassionate. They feel that they can help, but they plant seeds of hope that aren’t going to grow. In that chapter, I was trying to share how people who are dealing with a lot of darkness are often prey to human beings who want to be authorities and say, “Follow me: do this, and I can help you.”

Those of us who are dealing with mysterious ailments find that until we go inside and talk to our body and soul ourselves, we’re going to be deceived by other humans, because they don’t know what’s happening for us.

I know people get lost in how spirits deceive human beings, but I’ve never taught that in forty years. I believe that your intention creates your reality. If you believe the spirits are going to give you good information, they’re going to give you good information.

Smoley: One thing that precipitates dark nights of the soul is the deaths of loved ones. Perhaps you could talk about the shamanic approach to this subject, both in terms of the bereaved and working with the recently deceased.

Ingerman: For some people, the next step of their healing process is life; for others, the next healing step is death. We demonize death in this culture. We do everything to try to avoid it. Many people are terrified of death and don’t understand what’s coming.

Death is the next step of our evolution to bring us to a new dimension of reality. From a shamanic point of view, working with death is not so much about trying to keep people alive, but trying to help people have a good journey back home. One of the best things that you can do for a person who’s dying is to go into a meditative state and move away from your ego, from your mind. Drop into spirit, and see yourself as a being of light, because that’s what we all are. Our spiritual identity is actually light. When you sit in a state of light with somebody who’s dying, it brings amazing peace for them.

In this culture, we immediately say, “No, grandma, no, mom, no, dad, you’re not going to die. Stop talking like that; that’s crazy talk.” That’s not what dying people need. They need people who are going to hold space. Listen to the dying person as they talk about their memories, their fears; sit with them in meditation, being in a place of light.

From a shamanic point of view, most people transcend out of what we call the middle world. I talked about the middle world as a place of nature. The middle world is Earth School. We’re here to learn; we’re here to evolve. When a person dies, they don’t belong in Earth School anymore; they’ve graduated. They might need some more teachings and healing, but it’s time for them to leave the middle world.

In a Judeo-Christian culture, of course we all want to go up, so we talk about people going up to the heavens, going back to the divine, to the upper world, to beautiful territories. From a shamanic point of view, people typically do that on their own, and different cultures give the soul different time lines to grieve its own death. Some cultures say that a soul has a year to grieve their own death before they’ve moved on. But most cultures give about three days before they bury or cremate a person. I would never do any work to help somebody cross over for at least three days.

If everything goes right, we all transcend on our own. But from a shamanic point of view, it’s understood that there are circumstances where souls get stuck in the middle world: they don’t know they died. This is one of my specialties. I’ve worked with students where we go back to the Vietnam war. We go back to an airplane crash, and everybody’s wondering where the ambulances are. Why isn’t anybody here? They don’t even know that they died. You oftentimes have to take them back to their homes and show them how their family has aged and their loved ones have died. That’s how long they’ve been gone.

Once they’re convinced, you can start to escort them up to the upper world. Oftentimes we have to do psychotherapy on spirits to let them know that they don’t belong here anymore. A lot of times a husband or wife or lover won’t leave the middle world because they want to take care of their loved ones. In that case, it has to be explained that they can’t help their loved ones while they’re stuck in the middle world. They need to move on.

This aspect of shamanism is psychopomp work, and psychopomp is a Greek word which means conductor of souls.

If a person dies in a terrorism attack or a war, is shot, or dies of drug abuse or suicide or some way that wasn’t expected, the death was a surprise, and the soul gets confused. In these cases, we have to do psychopomp work: talking to the soul, letting them know a loved one is waiting for them. Sometimes a loved one will come down and help.

It’s not OK to wander the earth as a ghost. Basically, we all know what that’s like. We’ve all had some kind of visitation or some weird feeling that there’s a spirit in the land, our house, or someplace we’re visiting. A very important part of shamanism has always been to keep the middle world as clear as possible, where those of us who are here for Earth School are learning our lessons, and those of us who need to transcend have left.

For those of us who were left with our loved ones gone, grieving is an important part of shamanic work. Grieving is a process that takes time: we really have to take the time. I remember working with a banker who said to me, “My mother just died, and I’m in such a state of grief, but my bank made me come back to work immediately.” We don’t give people the time to grieve the way people did in indigenous cultures: doing ceremonies, making sure that they’re in a good place, making sure that we honor them.

 I love to lead ceremonies for funerals. When I do, I always have people tell a funny story about the person who left, and I go around the group and have people share a story about that person; then we all release that person. For the one who’s deceased, part of the healing is being released by everyone who loves them instead of being pulled back down here.

Smoley: My family lives where Indian burial mounds are about a mile due west of us. It is a forest preserve, and you can walk around through it, which we do regularly. It always has a slightly unwelcoming quality. Trying to attune myself to whatever’s going on there, I’ve gotten the impression that the people who lived there a thousand years ago decided to become local nature spirits and become guardians of the land. They’re not too friendly to the newcomers. That’s just my impression. Does that make any sense from your point of view?

Ingerman: Absolutely. In my forty years of teaching and traveling, the first thing I do is journey to the local ancestors. I learned this on my own going to workshops. We were flooded out. The weather was always bad. We couldn’t do our ceremonies.

It finally came to me that there are ancestors that choose to stay here to protect the land, so I tell people to call in the helping ancestors of the land. Always use the word “helping.” That means you’re dealing with divine, not deceptive beings, because in the middle world, people who haven’t crossed over can cause some problems. They’re not divine beings. They’re still stuck here. They haven’t transcended yet.

I always say to the ancestors of the land, “I’m bringing a group. We’re really open-hearted people. We don’t know your ways, but we want to learn how to bring healing, how to bring balance back to this great earth. Will you please honor us and help us as we do our work?”

I can tell miracle story after miracle story of what has happened when I started doing that. Storms would clear; hurricanes would clear, so we could do our ceremonies. We’ve always been supported, but I always have to call in the helping ancestors first.

I will never travel to a place until I journey and talk to the local spirits, tell them the intention and whom I’m bringing, and ask for their permission to come. If I’m traveling on a vacation, I do exactly the same thing: “I’m coming to your land to rest. Will you help to make this trip without obstacles for me?” I believe that talking to the helping ancestors is one of the most important things to do before we step onto land that is not our home.

Smoley: This may be one of the problems in the American psyche. I was a student in England for a couple of years. I had many friends there, and still do. I had a sense that their connection with the land—particularly with those that are sensitive in the ways we’re talking about—is very different from ours, because they are the descendants of the ancestors of that land. Their ancestors have been there for thousands of years. Here the whites came in as invaders, so there seems to be a break in the American psyche between who we are and our connection to the land and the spirits of the land. Could you address that?

Ingerman: I talked about that a lot in my earlier books. I think if you don’t honor your ancestors, and you don’t know who your ancestors are—which happens to a lot of us in America—you have no future. You need to know there’s a line: there’s past, present, and future. There is no future when you don’t care who your ancestors are or you don’t honor them in any way.

For me, this has been a big issue in that my ancestors emigrated to escape being murdered and wiped out. When they came to America, all they wanted to do was integrate. So throughout my life, I could never get anybody to tell me about my relatives. Until I started working with Ancestry a year ago, I didn’t know where my grandfather came from. I asked his sister, and she said, “I don’t know. Why do you want to know?” To me, it’s a real illness of our culture.

If you go to an indigenous culture for healing and you say you’re from America, the first thing they’re going to do is try to connect you to your ancestors. They see that one of the biggest causes of illness in America right now is that we have no connection with our ancestors.

From a shamanic point of view, it’s our ancestors who have our back. Our ancestors want us to be successful. They want us to be healthy, they want us to be happy, but a lot of people in the West reject their ancestors because they were traumatized growing up. They projected all the way back beyond their parents to their ancestors. This is a real cause of illness, because if we honor our ancestors, we have more support than we ever realized. A lot of people here don’t want to know about their ancestors, and I find that unbelievably sad.

I remember one of the first times I was teaching in Austria. At lunch a man was talking about how he still lives in the house that his ancestors lived in 900 years ago. I couldn’t believe it. What would that feel like to be so connected to one’s ancestors? I’m struggling just to find out where my ancestors came from.

Smoley: People who have worked with ancestral spirits often find that the ancestral spirits themselves need healing work. Could you talk a little bit about this?

Ingerman: I recently taught a class where I had people go back and ask their ancestors if they needed healing. The power of journeying is so wonderful because we get answers, we get direct revelations, so I’ve been able to help a lot of people.

Through journeying, we can go back and ask, what stories need to be healed? What stories need to be changed? How can I change my behavior so I change the story of our ancestors so that we’re moving forward to a better life instead of repeating all the traumas that they’ve gone through?

There’s healing that can happen. There’s also information that we can get about changes we need to make in order to stop carrying forth our looping behaviors. We’re carrying all these stories in our DNA; oftentimes we just continue to live them out.

Smoley: To go on to another subject, a major theme of shamanic work is working with power animals. Could you talk a little bit about power animals—discovering them, interacting with them, enabling them to help you?

Ingerman: They are one form of helping spirits. Again, it’s believed that when we come into this world, we are accompanied by guardian spirits. If this is not an actual animal—if you’re not working with Tiger, Bear, or Eagle—you don’t use the term power animals. You don’t call a tree a power animal; you don’t call a fairy a power animal; you don’t call insects power animals, so I use the term guardian spirits. They volunteer to protect you when you’re born. You wouldn’t have an eagle as a power animal; you have Eagle. You have the whole species that is protecting you energetically.

Power animals can live in the lower world and in the upper world. They live in the transcendent realities and are considered divine beings. They come into our lives and work with us in healing.

I work with a guardian spirit that you would call a power animal. My helping spirit is for my questions and for my clients. He does all healing work on my clients, whereas my teacher in the upper world helps me with writing, teaching, and developing courses to help the planet.

We have a variety of spirits, and power animals are just one of them. That was the point I was trying to make before: when a modern-day practitioner journeys to meet their power animal, often the first thing they will do afterward is run to some symbol book and look up the meaning instead of realizing that their power animal came to them for something incredibly specific. It’s a gift. It’s a strength. They’re bringing something to that person that they’re not bringing to any other human being on the planet. Power animals come to us for very individual reasons. When you journey and you meet a power animal, it’s part of the discipline to discern why. Why did they come into your life? What do they have to teach you?

I try to teach the discipline of developing a strong relationship with a power animal so that they’re your buddy instead of going to some book to find out why. That way, you lose the gift that this power animal is bringing into your life, because you think it means something else.

Back in the eighties, as I was traveling, teaching forty workshops a year around the world, people would keep giving me gifts. One year, people kept giving me gifts that featured owls: an owl fetish, an owl feather, an owl mask. I said, “OK, something’s going on with Owl. Why is Owl coming into my life?” Instead of running to a book, I took a journey, and I said, “Why is Owl coming into my life?”

My guardian spirit came to me and said, “It’s not that Owl sees in the dark; Owl has a particular radar that you’re going to need soon.” Then the journey stopped, and I let it go, because in shamanism, when you journey, you’re outside of time,  so soon can mean another lifetime. But actually the answer manifested quickly to me.

I was teaching a workshop in St. Louis, and I had to come back late at night because I had clients on Monday. I’m on a plane, and there are no lights; the crew is walking up and down the aisles with flashlights. All of a sudden, the captain comes on and says, “I bet you’re wondering what’s happening. We’ve lost our radar. We’re getting ready to go through a storm, and I don’t know how to get through it.”

Obviously we got through the storm; I’m still here. But what a lesson I got! My power animal, who is a guardian spirit, told me I would need radar soon. And here I am in a plane, and the pilot is saying, “We have no radar.”

If I had gone to a book and looked up Owl, there’s no book on the planet that talks about Owl having the gift of radar. I would have missed probably the biggest lesson of my life: that the universe was trying to protect me from an event before it happened by giving me a spirit that could help.

What an amazing lesson to get: that the universe knew something was going to happen to me in the future and was giving the help that I needed in the present. I would have missed that lesson if I would have gone to a book.

 Smoley: That’s a great story. I’m coming to the end of the questions I can think of. Do you have anything else you would like to add?

Ingerman: As a collective, we are going through a very dark time. From a shamanic point of view, it’s an initiation. We’re actually being initiated: our ego is being stripped so that we can step into a higher consciousness.

That’s what’s going on in the planet right now, with all this dissolution and destruction. We are experiencing an amazing amount of loss, but it is the loss of unhealthy ways of thinking and living. From a shamanic point of view, as our ego is stripped and our mind can no longer figure out a solution, that’s when the power of our spirit steps in. Our spirit is a reflection of Source, of the creative powers of the universe; it knows everything.

We have all this knowledge that’s within us, but it’s covered up by our ego, by advertising, by social media. We lose what our spirit is really trying to evolve to, so we’re going through a powerful time of loss. This time is bringing us to a place where we can remember why we’re here. We are nature; there’s only oneness, there’s only love, and there’s only light. That’s where this initiation is trying to take us.

It’s important to find practices that help you learn how to tune into nature, read the signs that the universe is giving us moment to moment through omens, and work with some kind of discipline so that you can go deep. You can let your ego be stripped, and you can feel the amazing feeling that happens when your life is filled with spirit. All of a sudden, there’s a knowing; there’s no fear. You’re dropping into a place of honor, kindness, compassion; you realize that you’re walking forward with a whole community of people to create a different story than the story that we’re living right now.

With all the pain and suffering that’s happening right now, this is actually a positive time. It’s a time when we need to hold space for each other and see each other in our own light and our own divine perfection.

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