Shaman in practice

A woman draws on an ancient civilization's rituals to learn healing

Victoria Johnson doesn't tell strangers she practices shamanism.

She prefers to call it "healing work." If someone probes further, she'll offer more details, but telling people she's a shaman invariably conjures up an image of a witch doctor, a wizard or a sorcerer.

Johnson, who will be speaking on the Shaman's Way of Healing at the Unity Center of Peace Church in Chapel Hill on Saturday, said she is none of the above.

A former FBI agent and later a federal prosecutor, Johnson embraced shamanism slowly, and for the most common of reasons.

Juggling both her job and her responsibilities as a mother, she increasingly felt stressed out physically and emotionally. For a while, the one thing that relaxed her was acupuncture. So she abandoned her law career and went to study the traditional Chinese healing method.

But all along, she believed there was a way to heal the body without using needles. After moving from Florida back to North Carolina in 2001 -- she had grown up here and vacationed in the mountains for years with her husband -- she came across a book that changed her life. That book, by Alberto Villoldo, was "Shaman, Healer, Sage: How to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine of the Americas."

"I read that book and I knew [Villoldo] was my next teacher," said Johnson, who lives in Brevard, south of Asheville. For the past few years, Johnson, 52, has been studying the medicine wheel and the healing practices of the Q'ero people of Peru. She now works as a shaman practitioner and as a teacher for Villoldo's training organization called The Four Winds (www.thefourwinds.com) based in Park City, Utah.

Johnson said shamanism has helped her answer the big questions of life: Why she's here and what she wants to be. For her, the answer is helping support others on their healing journey. She does so through a series of techniques, including visualization and work with stones, that help reorient a person's energy toward balance and wholeness.

The cycle of life

A shaman is a person who journeys into an altered state of consciousness to acquire power for healing illness, whether physical or psychological. Getting there may involve the ritual use of hallucinogenic plants, a drum, a rattle or a dance. Other shamans use stones or bones or animal skin. The goal is to interact with the spirit world on behalf of a community or a client.

The word "shaman" comes from the Tungus language of Siberia and refers to a person who makes a journey into an altered state. Shamans are indigenous to many cultures, on every continent. But Johnson learned her brand of shamanism from the South American Incas, the ancient civilization in the Andes Mountains of what is now Peru.

At the heart of her method is the concept of a medicine wheel, a circle representing the cycle of life. Divided in four, it represents the four directions, each with its own spirit or energy field. By traveling south and west, for example, a person releases wounds and traumas from the past and begins to walk in a different path. The north and west directions stoke visions that can help people achieve their destinies.

Today's shamanic practices are mostly used for therapeutic and personal development. In that sense they differ from the ancient rites of indigenous shamans, said Michael Winkelman, a professor at Arizona State University who has studied shamanism.

In hunter-gatherer societies, he said, shamans were as concerned with harm as they were with healing, directing their spiritual powers in positive as well as negative ways. Shamanic rites were communal events that might last all night long. Shamans themselves were charismatic leaders who directed the movement of hunting and warfare.

But that doesn't mean modern-day shamanism is a sham. Altered states of consciousness that accompany shamanic rites can produce feelings of profound relaxation, Winkelman said. Rituals allow people to bond with one another so that the body releases opioids or the "feel good chemicals" that stimulate the immune system.

"These ritual altered states of consciousness enhance communication between the lower brain system and the frontal brain and give us access to information not accessible to consciousness," Winkelman said.

Finding the energy field

Today's shamans function much like other therapists. They hold office hours, seeing people for help with physical, emotional or spiritual problems. During a session a person may lie on a massage table and the practitioner cradles the client's head. There may be a period of talking through issues. Then the practitioner might work on the client's energy field without ever touching the body, or by placing a stone on one of the body's energy fields -- the stomach, the heart or the throat, for example.

"Sometimes folks come to us who have tried everything and nothing works," said Johnson. Shamans don't discourage Western medicine or any modes of treatment such as psychotherapy, massage or acupuncture. "We want to support people on all levels."

Pat Heavren, one of Johnson's clients and a practitioner herself, said shamanism has restored her marriage and brought her happiness. Unlike psychotherapy, it works on regions other than the cognitive mind.

"It draws on areas that are intuitive, the forces of the natural world, the archetypal, the collective unconsciousness," said Heavren, who lives in Hamden, Conn.

For Johnson, who once was an agent in the FBI's organized crime and narcotics squad, shamanism has brought a greater balance between her masculine and feminine sides.

"The way I live in the world is far less from the masculine energy," she said. "It's not so much about doing to make things happen. It's about allowing. It's living from a place of synchronicity."