What is shamanic healing?

A guide to shamanic energy healing — what it is, how it differs from Reiki and plant medicine, and what to expect in a session.
What it is
Shamanic Energy Healing

In short

Shamanic energy healing works with the energetic and spiritual roots of what's keeping you stuck or off balance. Guided by the compassionate spirits, the practitioner illuminates limiting patterns, retrieves lost parts of yourself, and rebalances your energy so you feel clearer, more at ease, and more connected to yourself and the beauty around you.

Going deeper

It's an ancient form of spiritual healing grounded in the understanding that our physical, emotional, energetic, and spiritual well-being are deeply connected. The practitioner works in relationship with helping spirits, serving as a bridge between the spirit world and the person or community seeking healing.

Shamanic practitioners receive information through psychic or intuitive abilities, including seeing images or visions (clairvoyance), hearing messages (clairaudience), feeling energy in the body (clairsentience), and direct knowing (claircognizance). Guidance may also come through dreams, symbols, or other experiences beyond the ordinary senses.

A defining feature of shamanic practice is the healer’s intentional relationship with the spirit world. The practitioner serves as an intermediary between the helping spirits and the clients or communities they support, receiving guidance and facilitating healing on their behalf.

Through this relationship, shamanic practitioners work to identify and shift spiritual, emotional, or energetic patterns that contribute to imbalance, disconnection, or feeling stuck. The work may involve bringing things to awareness, clearing what no longer belongs, retrieving lost or disconnected parts of the self, and supporting a person’s return to greater wholeness and alignment.

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How Is Shamanic Healing Different from Reiki?

Reiki works through the practitioner as a channel — the Reiki healer opens their own energy field to conduct intelligent, healing, universal life-force energy and uses their hands to help that energy move through the client's system as it needs to. The practitioner doesn't always know where the energy will go or what it will do; the goal tends to be more broad: overall healing, lifting the spirit, calming the system.

Shamanic healing works through a different mechanism: the practitioner and the helping spirits engage the client's energy field in a more targeted, diagnostic way: identifying whatever is already present — whether that's a pattern, a blockage, or something ancestral — and addressing it with specific guidance and energetic healing techniques. Reiki can be just as targeted in terms of where the healing energy goes, but the process is usually more subconscious and less direct: the practitioner trusts the energy to find what needs attention without necessarily knowing in the moment what's being shifted.

Donnie is a certified Reiki Master / Teacher, and often closes a shamanic healing session with Reiki, using it to seal and settle the work.

The two aren't in competition, and neither is more complex than the other. They're simply different healing modalities for different needs.

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WHAT TO EXPECT
What Happens During a Shamanic Healing Session?

A session begins with a short conversation about what you're carrying and what you're seeking. Some common intentions & questions are:

  • What is my purpose right now?
  • Why do I feel stuck?
  • Are there any cords I need to cut?
  • What ancestral or karmic patterns are running my life?
  • Why can't I use my voice the way I want to?
  • I think I'm a healer, what do I do next?
  • Is this relationship/job right for me?
  • How can I support my inner child?

From there, Donnie enters a meditative state using a shamanic drum and journeys to the spirit world on your behalf. She takes your intention to the helping spirits, which may include guides, ancestors, nature spirits, etc. depending on what you're working through.

Donnie will tell you everything she's experiencing in the journey so that you can be an active witness to your own healing. She'll come in and out of the drum trance, describing in real time what she's seeing and hearing — so you understand what's being worked with, what's being released, and what's being restored as it happens, rather than receiving a summary after the fact.

At the end, she'll seal the work — often with sound, Reiki, or crystal healing — to anchor what happened in the spirit realm into this world and lifetime. She'll also share specific integration guidance from the helping spirits: this might include a ritual bath, a particular practice, growth areas, or resources worth exploring. Your "homework" will be tailored to what came through in your session.

"Donnie was able to uncover and bring resolve to past experiences, that I was unable to resolve over the course of decades in my own talk therapy sessions. As a current practicing talk therapist today- I highly recommend integrating her energy work into one’s personal healing journey."

—K, THERAPIST
Meet your guide
Why Work With Donnie?

Because she has walked a version of the path you're likely on right now.

Donnie studied psychology and neuropsychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge, co-authoring work published in leading research journals. She went on to build a successful career in marketing — building the life and checking the boxes she had been taught defined success. And then something deeper began calling her home to herself.

Despite "making it" as a marketer at a relatively early age, she left because she couldn't ignore what was asking to come through her. She also couldn't deny how misaligned her old roles felt. She followed the call of her soul's purpose in the same way she now helps others listen for and follow their own.

With roots in Celtic and West African lineages, Donnie is clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient, and claircognizant. She's deeply committed to the integrity of her practice and has trained with trusted teachers in shamanic energy medicine, Reiki, and crystal healing.

In their words, clients most often leave sessions with Donnie feeling "lighter." She has a gift for making the unseen tangible, turning energetic experiences into something you can actually feel and grow from, not something distant or performative.

You may feel especially at home with Donnie if you are drawn to an approach that is both intuitive and grounded. She works with people who are new to this kind of healing, as well as those who have been on a spiritual path for many years.

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"Donnie is and has a rare gift. My friends and I started working with her earlier this year and she has had a profound impact on all of us. Her ability to heal and bring enlightenment is remarkable."

—V, FOUNDER

Is Shamanic Healing Right For Me?

Shamanic healing brings you into greater harmony and wholeness — which means everyone can benefit from it in some way. But it tends to be especially illuminating for people who are feeling like something is missing, unclear, or stuck. People who've been willing to address something and still haven't gotten to its root, despite everything they've already tried.

It is not for someone looking to test or debunk the practice. It also isn't for someone unwilling to receive messages that might lovingly challenge them.

If you're open to healing and gentle honesty, shamanic work is for you.

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Frequently Asked Questions
A few more things people like to know.
Do I need to believe in spirits for it to work?

No. The only thing you need to be is open to receive. Many clients arrive curious rather than certain about the spiritual realm, and that's a perfectly good place to start.

No. Shamanism isn't tied to any single religion, and it doesn't require you to adopt a new belief system. It's an ancient spiritual practice, not a religious one, and many people integrate it alongside their existing faith or spiritual life without conflict.

Not in Donnie's practice. Some shamanic practitioners do work with plant medicine as part of their tradition, but that's not what happens here. This is purely shamanic energy medicine: no substances; guided entirely through trained sight, energy work, and connection with helping spirits.

It's common to feel something in the hours or days afterward -- many clients report a sense of relief or being lighter; filled with purpose and urgency; tears; fatigue; or waves of feelings that are more pronounced than usual.

Rest, water, grounding, and gentleness with yourself help the work settle in fully. Donnie will also leave you with specific self care and integration guidance at the end of your session.

It varies! Some clients come for a single session around a specific question or need; others return regularly as part of an ongoing practice or mentorship.

Donnie will offer guidance on what's needed as part of your first session.