Why I No Longer Call My Work Shamanic

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 involving drums, 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.

That is not the context most of us in the modern West inhabit.

What is often called “shamanism” now is more accurately neo-shamanism, a contemporary spiritual synthesis drawing from many indigenous and earth-based traditions while severed, in many cases, from the cosmologies, lineages, ecologies, and communal responsibilities that once gave those practices meaning. It is a portable spirituality. A collection of techniques made consumable for modern hunger. Drum journeys, soul retrieval, spirit guides, medicine ceremonies, energy work, priestess trainings, “become a healer” intensives, ritual technologies extracted from living traditions and repackaged for a culture desperate for mystery but largely severed from its own roots.

And I say this with tenderness, because I understand that desperation. I understand the ache that draws people there. We live in a culture starved of intact relationship to the sacred, severed from land and season and rite of passage, taught to treat the world as dead matter and the body as machine. It is no wonder so many people are searching for doorways back into enchantment. But hunger does not make every offering true.

Let me be clear: this is not a dismissal of every person working within contemporary shamanic spaces. I know sincere, ethical practitioners doing profound and careful work under that banner. I know altered-state ritual can facilitate real healing. This is not an argument against trance, ceremony, or spirit work themselves. It is simply an acknowledgement that the word has ceased to feel precise, or honest, for the work I do, and the worldview from which it emerges.

And over time I began to witness how easily the modern spiritual world mistakes experience for depth, performance for devotion, symbolism for relationship. We become fluent in the language of spirit while remaining estranged from the earth beneath our feet. We speak of power animals before learning the names of the actual creatures who live in the hedgerows around us. We journey to upper and lower worlds while remaining profoundly disconnected from the living world directly before us. We gather mystical experiences and initiatory aesthetics while the deeper ache beneath them remains unmet.

Because what many people are truly longing for is not shamanism, they are longing for relationship and for a world that feels alive again.

And the truer word for that, for me, has always been animism.

Years ago, when I undertook an animist apprenticeship, something in me recognised it immediately, not as a new philosophy, but as a remembering. A truth my body already knew before my mind had language for it. Because animism did not offer me a role to become, nor a title to wear, nor techniques through which to become more gifted or more powerful. It simply returned me to the understanding that the world is alive, and that the sacred is not found by leaving the world, but by entering it more fully.

The sacred was never first met in temples, it was met at the well, at the riverbank, in the forest clearing, at the mouth of the cave and at the threshold where village met wilderness and the known world gave way to mystery.

Our ancestors knew this. Before stone sanctuaries and institutional priesthoods, before doctrine and hierarchy, revelation was encountered in place. In the spring where the water emerged black and cold from the earth, in the oak grove struck by lightning, at the crossing place where the stag appeared at dusk. In the hill where the veil felt thin. The sacred was not elsewhere, it was woven through the land itself.

And though the clerical and animist traditions of these isles have been fractured, our druids erased, our ritual specialists lost, our lineages fragmented beneath conquest, conversion, and time, I do not believe the old ways vanished entirely. I believe they remain in fragments. In folklore, ritual gesture and the half-remembered shape of seasonal customs. And perhaps most importantly, in myth.

Because the old stories are not quaint relics to me. They are maps left by our ancestors, maps of how to be in relationship with a living world.

When I read the tale of Cerridwen and Taliesin, I do not read it as entertainment. I read it as encoded instruction. A story of transformation, pursuit, initiation, and the dangerous pursuit of wisdom. A story that teaches that true knowing is not intellectual. It is swallowed., it burns, it alters the body and it chases you into becoming. Wisdom is not bestowed from above, it is survived.

And while I believe the great patterns of creation echo across all lands, that many cultures touch similar truths, because human beings everywhere are trying to make meaning from the same mysteries of birth, death, dream, instinct, predator, prey, season, and stars, I also believe those truths flower differently in different soils. Myth may rhyme across cultures, but it roots through place. Through local animals, local weather, local rivers, local cosmologies. The recurrence of pattern does not erase the importance of land; if anything, it reveals how deeply human beings have always sought to understand themselves through relationship with the particular world that raised them.

For me, this understanding has become inseparable from hunting. I never thought I would become a hunter. Had you told me years before that hunting would become part of my spiritual life, I would not have believed you. Until I stepped onto this path I had never held a gun. And yet the call came with a force that felt older than preference, older than thought, as though it was Bone-deep, ancient and unrelenting. I did not understand why I was called so fiercely toward it. I only knew the call would not quiet.

The first time I raised my rifle, my whole body trembled. Not with excitement, but with the gravity of what I knew I was about to enter. And then the stag turned and looked directly at me. And in that moment something passed between us that I have never found language sufficient to explain. Because as much as I was hunting him, I understood with sudden and terrible clarity that I, too, was being hunted, hunted by the wild. That the wild was not passive before me, it was not scenery, backdrop or object. It was looking back, claiming me and Initiating me into a covenant I had not known, until then, that I was making.

And when his body fell to the earth, I knew that though I had taken a life, the wild, through that stag, had taken something from me too.

It took some softer, more domesticated illusion I had carried about what it means to be human and the fantasy that I stood apart from death. And it took the comfortable distance modernity places between consumption and consequence.

Because to take life consciously is to be forced into a reckoning many spend their lives avoiding. To stand face to face with the fact that death is not an aberration from life, but its constant companion, that to eat is to participate in sacrifice, that to live is to require death.

And that beneath all our comforts and sterilised supermarkets, we remain creatures whose existence is still bound to blood.

I did not leave that moment feeling powerful, I left it feeling humbled, undone, grief-struck and somehow more honest than I had ever felt before. Because hunting did not make me feel above the animal, it made me remember that I am one.

That is sacred to me, Not because it is dramatic, but because it is true.

It reminds me that spirituality was never meant to hover above life. It was meant to be woven through it, through hunger, death, sex, weather, birth, blood, grief, season, kinship, and survival. Through the ordinary and brutal and beautiful facts of being a creature on earth.

So no I no longer call my work shamanic, because that word no longer tells the truth of what I am doing. What I offer is not a decontextualised spiritual technology, or performance of sacredness, or borrowed language from traditions that are not mine.

What I offer is an invitation into relationship.

Relationship with body, with instinct, with eros, grief, hunger, and death, with the old stories as ancestral maps. with the land itself as text, teacher, and threshold. Because I do not believe what we are starving for is more spiritual experience, I believe we are starving for a way back into belonging.

And belonging has never been found through technique. It has always been found through devotion, through kneeling long enough beside the river, the carcass, the story, the season, the grief, the body, and the land itself that the world begins, once again, to speak.

Everything I offer emerges from this understanding.

The work of Animal Body is not about spiritual attainment, nor performance of wildness, nor borrowed ritual technology. It is an invitation into deeper relationship, with the body as animal, with instinct as intelligence, with myth as ancestral map, and with the land as living teacher.

For those who feel the ache of this remembering in their bones, my workshops, retreats, and mentorship spaces exist as containers for that return.