With extensive musical training, having gotten a dual bachelor's degree in music performance and music education, as well as a master’s degree in music performance, I have gravitated to the musical instruments of shamanism, including one’s voice, since my training began in 2018.  However, it made my musical passion, even since preschool (I was the first one to whistle in my class), make total sense.  Just because I began formal training in shamanic practices beginning in 2018 doesn’t mean I wasn’t practicing it already.  I just didn’t know it — and this is something I hear from my clients all the time as well.

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First — and foremost, in my opinion — is the drum.  In many countries, including the United States, indigenous peoples had their drums banned by colonizing governments until the late 20th century; that is how powerful work with the drum can be, and how much western society feared those who wielded that power.  Just as I named every instrument I’ve ever owned, shamans view their instruments as beings, not things.  A drum is a friend, a colleague, a teacher, and a guide.  When we perform a ceremony commonly referred to as a shamanic journey, the drumbeat at a certain beat-per-minute has been scientifically proven to alter consciousness by shifting brainwaves from beta (awake) to alpha (relaxed and open) to theta (most creative while still alert).  The drum holds the journey, and the callback brings us back from the Spirit World, often referred to as non-ordinary reality or NOR, to ordinary reality, also known as OR.  The drum can be a healer and a diagnostic tool as well, though I do not use it that way so much.

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Second is the rattle.  We still, even in so-called developed cultures, give our infants rattles to play with — the magic of their sound and the joy of moving our arms to make the noise is intrinsic.  As children, we remember so much of our transition from soul to incarnation in this lifetime, and much of shamanism comes quite naturally.  It is only due to cultural pressures that we lose it.  Due to many of our ancestors’ extreme migratory behavior, we have lost connection to the ancient wisdom of the lands where we came from and must begin to find shamanic practices of this time and place anew.  The rattle helps to shake things up, can be fabulous for diagnosing energy and power in the body, and works brilliantly as an antennae for connecting to the helping Spirits.  While one can absolutely provide the same monotonous rhythm required for journeying with a rattle instead of a drum, I do not work this way.

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While there are many more instruments to consider, such as the Australian didgeridoo and the Asian-European mouth harp, the one I specialize in is our own voice.  Being a woman in a patriarchal society, this has been quite the journey; and I want to give a tremendous shout out to my teacher, Zara Waldebäck, for introducing me to the formal practices of healing song and working with my voice.  Cultures everywhere have special power songs for all occasions.  Some songs are for the moment, some passed down for generations, some of their Spirits’ own inspiration for the work they do and are repeated.  As a musician, improvisation terrified me — until I met this work as bringing a song to life, rather than worrying about how good my performance was.  When I do a healing song session, which is especially powerful in my work for animals and trees, I am not coming up with a pretty song on the spot.  I am the hollow bone, welcoming the song to sing through my vocal cords and out of my entire being.  As a woman who has been silenced by dangerous men, I can say that was one of the most influential practices for me to learn, which is why it is often the focus of my work with my clients.