Why I No Longer Call My Work Shamanic

Written By Louise Amador

On animism, myth, hunting, and why I believe many of us are not seeking shamanism at all, but a way back into belonging.

There was a time when I called my work shamanic, not because I wished to borrow gravitas from traditions that were never mine, nor because I desired to cloak my work in borrowed mystique, but because for a while it seemed the closest approximation for the terrain I was moving within. I worked with drum and trance, with descent and deep imagery, with ritual and altered states, with the body as threshold and the psyche as living landscape. I worked with instinct and dream, with animal archetype and myth, with the strange and ancient intelligences that begin to stir when the rational mind loosens its grip and the deeper body is permitted to speak. At the time, “shamanic” felt like the nearest available word for the kind of work I was doing.

But over the years the word began to feel increasingly untrue in my mouth, as though each time I spoke it I was naming something adjacent to the truth rather than the truth itself. Not because the work had ceased to be sacred, nor because I had abandoned ritual or mystery, but because the deeper I went into the work, the more I realised that what I was actually devoted to was not shamanism—not in the way that word is commonly understood, and perhaps never had been.

Traditional shamanism, in the true sense of the term, is not simply spiritual work involvingdrums, visions, or altered states. It is not a generalised label for anyone who works with ritual or spirit. It is not a self-appointed identity, nor an aesthetic, nor a modality one adopts through training. The shaman, within the cultures from which that role emerged, was a specific ritual specialist formed inside an intact cosmology, inside a people, a place, a lineage, and a shared understanding of reality in which spirit, sickness, land, kinship, ecology, ritual, and community all belonged to the same coherent world. Their authority arose not from self-identification but from communal recognition, often through ordeal, rupture, illness, initiation, and years of apprenticeship. Their role made sense because the wider culture knew what they were and how they belonged.

There is a way that sovereignty is being spoken about now that, on first touch, feels like a kind of long-awaited medicine, like something that has been buried in the body for generations finally being given language again, a turning back toward the self after centuries of quiet compliance, a reclaiming of voice, boundary, choice. And yet the longer I sit with it, the more I feel a subtle dissonance, not loud enough to reject outright, but persistent enough to stay with, as though something essential has been lifted out of the deeper ecology it once belonged to, leaving behind a version that feels clean and powerful, but somehow unrooted, as if it no longer knows the land it came from.

Because sovereignty, in its older sense, did not belong to the individual in the way we now speak of it. It was not something you declared, nor something you crafted through identity or affirmation, nor something that began and ended at the edges of your own body.

Do you know about the intelligence in your hands?

Long before I ever believed that the mind was the seat of knowing, I understood intelligence through touch. In old myth, creation did not happen through speech alone; it happened through contact. The world was shaped not only by what was spoken, but by what was held, pressed, softened, and carried.

In Celtic lore, sovereignty passed through the hand. To take the king’s hand was to take responsibility for land and people. The loss of a hand meant the loss of the right to rule. When the god Nuada lost his arm in battle, he could no longer reign, not because he was weak, but because wholeness of hand meant wholeness of relationship. Only when a new hand was forged out of silver could order return. Authority did not live in the crown or the voice. It lived in the hand.

Hands were never symbolic, they were authoritative.

There is a way the body speaks that is so quiet it is often mistaken for absence. It rarely comes as alarm or collapse, just a slight pause, a hesitation in the breath or a subtle turning away. Most of us were never taught to listen for this. We were taught to listen for intensity, for emotion, for rupture, for catharsis. We learned to trust the moments that arrive loudly and the experiences that feel undeniable.

But what I have learned is the body’s deepest intelligence rarely announces itself that way. It whispers first. And when it is not heard, it does not shout, it goes quiet. What I have come to notice as I lean into the land, as I watch and listen is the first question any animal asks is not

‘What does this mean?’, Nor is it ‘where is this going?’ Or ‘how do I feel about this?’

It is simply ‘ Is this safe?

This question is not fearful but ecological.

I have been sitting with the idea of braided ecology, the truth that none of us are shaped by a single thread, but by many lives woven together inside us.

Not just our personality, our wounds or our brilliance, but the entire ecology we grew inside. And by that I mean our nervous systems, class backgrounds, cultures and mythologies, our trauma lineages.

And further expanding that into the land that held us, or didn’t, pressures that shaped us. The protections we received, or learned to live without and those losses we were asked to metabolise far too young, without the structures to hold us. All of it braids itself into the body.

When we look at ourselves in this way we notice that we are not individuals floating in isolation but ecosystems in motion, carrying weather patterns that began long before us.

When we look at a person through a single lens, neurodivergent, traumatised, anxious, working class, sensitive, too much, not enough we begin flatten something vast. We reduce a living landscape into a label. We miss the soil conditions, forgot the climate. We overlook predators, the absences, the overcrowding, the droughts, the storms. And right there we miss the entire ecosystem that made us

Sometimes, when I move on all fours across the woodland floor, something in me begins to listen differently.

It is not listening with ears, exactly, although they do prick, tilt. It is not my mind listening for information, but the skin, the muscle, the blood. It’s a kind of whole-body orientation that belongs to the animal beneath the language. The one that does not ask if it’s safe,  it simply knows, or it doesn’t.

When I let this part of me lead, I do not feel like I’m moving through the land. I feel like I am  part of it,  one moving element within a larger, breathing field. My  rhythm slows. My  gaze softens. I start to feel less like a self, and more like a body. And not just any body, but  a prey body. 

Attuned. Responsive. Alive to everything.

And yet… there are no wolves here. No big cats. No bear or lynx or waiting teeth.

I live in a country,  like much of Western Europe,  that has long since eradicated its apex predators. And still, my body moves like prey.

So I find myself asking:

What happens to the part of us that is born to be hunted when nothing is chasing us?

Spiritual Dogma, Performance, and the Return to What’s Real

We thought we were walking away from control.

When we left religion, or the systems we had grown up in, we told ourselves we were free. We found breathwork, the moon, movement, ceremony. We said we had returned to the wild.

But something old came with us.

The need to perform. To be good. To belong. To have the right language, the right body, the right spiritual hygiene. We did not burn the temple. We just changed the costume.

And for many of us, especially those of us who work with the body, the sacred, or the mythic, there has been a quiet knowing: that we’re still tangled in something we didn’t mean to carry.

I have been sitting with this. Watching how even the language of “masculine” and “feminine” can become a new doctrine. How wildness becomes another product. How sacredness becomes another mask.

For most of us, the separation begins early. Not in a single moment, but in many small ones that stack quietly over time. A cry that’s met with silence. A trembling dismissed. A truth corrected. A hunger shamed. These moments, though often invisible from the outside, begin to pull us away from ourselves.

We are born wild. Not reckless, but wild in the truest sense, unshaped, whole, and fully alive to instinct and sensation. Our first movements are not performative. We reach, cry, sound, not to be seen, but because that’s what life does. We are mammals, first and always. We arrive like wolf cubs, expecting to be met.