Hypno-Shamanism

I offer online sessions (and face to face) of integrative psychotherapy/hypnosis/energy body work, based on Q’ero Neo-Shamanism, also called hypno-shamanism and neuro-shamanism.

My pathway into this work emerged through training in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, where basic shamanic elements were described in opening and closing the ritual space of group dosing sessions.

Curious to understand my experiences of the four animal guardians, and inspired by fellow students who were embarking on training in Shamanism, I found my way to the Four Winds where I trained over several years in the healing style of the Q’ero nation of the high Andes in Peru. I trained with the Four Winds School both online and in person and directly with Q’ero shamans from the high Andes near Cusco in Peru.

The Q’ero may be considered the “last Incas,” having isolated themselves following Pizarro’s conquest in 1532 and having maintained cultural continuity through extreme isolation, with regular contact with the outside world only since roughly 1996. They speak Quechua rather than Spanish. Their oral tradition with no writing is led by Paqos (healers).

They believe in a nature-based spirituality, and revere Pachamama (Mother Earth) and the Apus (sacred mountains).

Their cosmology includes the Taripaypacha, the “age of meeting ourselves again,” and the idea of Pachakuti—a turning over of the world in which order emerges from chaos. The melting of the sacred Ausengate glacier was taken as a sign that this time has arrived.

Central is the principle of Ayni—sacred reciprocity or cosmic balance.

The Q’ero describe their role as Tukuyayniniyoq—the Great Ayni, a reciprocal exchange of knowledge across cultures. They see themselves as helping prepare the West for a new world.

They hold that human beings can embody a fourth level of consciousness—choosing love over fear, owning shadow, working with community and nature to raise the energetic state of the collective.

Most of the world remains at a third level dominated by fear and base emotion. The fourth level is considered the highest currently embodied (the Dalai Lama is cited as an example), and such individuals are termed Teqse Paqo or Kuraq Paqo—shepherds for humanity (Rabjohns, 2021).

Alberto Villoldo, a medical anthropologist, has studied the Q’ero since the 1970s. Like Carlos Castaneda, he began as an academic but was trained in shamanic practice.

His school (The Four Winds) has been described (by Harper’s) as the “Harvard of neo-shamanism.” Neo-shamanism differs from indigenous shamanism and from core shamanism (Michael Harner’s “common factors” model of unadorned drum facilitating trance journeying (Brunton, 2003)), integrating elements of psychotherapy, depth psychology, and contemplative traditions.

Villoldo’s synthesis includes Gestalt psychodrama, Jungian archetypes, and Eastern practices such as Zen and Dzogchen meditation (pronounced Zok-chen, meaning "Great Perfection" or "Great Completion") a school of Tibetan Buddhism and the indigenous Bön tradition. Rather than trying to change the mind or manufacture a special meditative state, its primary goal is to directly recognize and rest in our innate, primordial awareness (known as rigpa), which is already perfect, pure, and awake.

This provides a frame—able to incorporate psychoanalytic, strategic, hypnotherapeutic, gestalt, IFS, and trauma-processing approaches alongside energy body work addressing somatic and embodied experience, allowing working on multiple levels simultaneously.

When colleagues ask what this work consists of, I describe it concretely. It involves working on the luminous human energy field or aura—a “third space” distinct from body and mind.

The process involves tracking (diagnosing while in a state of light trance), extraction (removing debris or residual energy linked to past trauma), and illumination (washing the field with healthy energy).

A colleague in Central Australia noted strong similarities with local Indigenous healing practices sometimes used alongside Psychiatry and Western medicine.

Reactions from Western-trained clinicians are often sceptical. As one medical hypnotist put it, “when people hear ‘shaman,’ they think of a quack.”
Elements such as shamanic tools, invocation of spirit allies, and the aesthetic features do not translate easily into a rationalist medical frame.
As Bacon noted, “there is superstition in avoiding superstition.”
At the same time, there is clear demand. People in the West are actively seeking shamanism as a form of therapy (Douglas, 2025).

Psychiatrists may encounter South American shamanic elements themselves, through psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: medicine wheel ceremonies, invocation of helpers, and encounters with archetypal intelligences—serpent, jaguar/puma, hummingbird, eagle/condor—representing respectively, transformation, fearlessness, lightness, and perspective. These form the four directions of a “sacred space,” analogous to the therapeutic frame.

Differences from Western Medicine

There are also clear differences with Western medicine. In shamanism, trauma is framed as partial “soul loss,” a freezing of life energy. “Soul retrieval” involves locating and renegotiating “contracts” with split-off parts, with some parallels to parts-based models such as IFS.

Central to shamanic work is the “energy body,” a 3rd domain, distinct from body and mind, treated as a tangible field holding the residue of experience, which can accumulate dense or “stuck” energy and be cleared or replenished. This resembles a form of psycho-physical surgery.

Metaphor is handled differently: in psychotherapy it is interpreted symbolically, whereas in shamanism it is externalised and worked with concretely (e.g., sacred stones or kuyas), similar to gestalt or psychodrama.

Linear causality is also challenged, with emphasis on synchronicity and future-oriented causation as opposed to cause-effect and historical determinism.

An animistic philosophy (everything in the universe is alive and has a consciousness); ayni (cosmic moral balance or reciprocity - reminiscent of Contextual Family Therapy’s “ledger” of who-owes-what-to-whom, but at a cosmic rather than a merely familial level); and the epistemological use of inner knowing/seeing/sensing through dreams, intuition, and inner journeying are central.

Why is Shamanism Becoming more Popular in the West?

Shamanism’s appeal to clients in the modern era includes perhaps its ecological orientation, its sense of meaning, and reconnection to nature, community, and direct spiritual experience.

“Rewilding” the psyche seems helpful in the modern era of AI, tech, dissociation and disembodied, attention-fragmented psyche.

Shamanism also carries an “exotic” allure, spoofed in the books “stuff white people like” (yoga, farmers’ markets, multiculturalism -when it comes to food) (Lander, 2013).

Shamanic practice has been criticised as cultural appropriation.

It may be compatible with aspects of modern physics that medicine has not adequately grappled with; spooky action at a distance-consciousness can be nonlocal, not dependent on the physical body, and capable of extending beyond boundaries of time and space.