What Is Practical Shamanism? The Magic Hidden in Ordinary Life

What does it really mean when we say, all our relations?

In shamanic traditions, we are taught that we are related to the animals, plants, winds, waters, ancestors, and the living Earth. But our relatives also include the people whose paths cross ours for five minutes, five years, or a lifetime.

We leave energy footprints wherever we walk, talk, work, love, argue, teach, and intersect.

And sometimes those footprints circle back.

A Song at the Farmers Market

Years ago, when I was working in behavioral health, a younger woman on my team was also studying shamanic wisdom.

She was an awesome team member, although she was rarely interested in my particular brand of wisdom. She followed a different lineage and had her own way of finding what she needed.

During the time we worked together, she met the Brothers Koren and eventually took their year-long Finding Your Voice training. She didn’t tell me until afterward. She was private that way, and a bit of an opportunist. I say that with a smile.

Yesterday, I was at the farmers market eating a piece of pizza when a young woman named Autumn North began singing the classic song “Both Sides Now.” (watch on instagram)

Something in me stopped.

It wasn’t simply that she had a beautiful voice. I could feel the life behind it. Somewhere inside the song, I had the unmistakable sense that this young woman had walked the question.

She wasn’t simply singing about life. She had lived enough of it to bring something back.

And suddenly I thought of my former teammate.

I knew it was her birthday, so I sent her the little video I had taken at the market.

She wrote back and told me something remarkable.

That very day, she had uploaded a song to Spotify. It was a newly remastered version of a song she had originally created during the Finding Your Voice program.

I listened.

And I was deeply moved by what she had created.

There we were, years after working together, connected again through two women singing, an old training, a birthday, a farmers market, and a song.

Was that coincidence?

Maybe.

Practical Shamanism doesn’t require us to turn every coincidence into a message from Spirit.

It asks us to notice.

We Are Constantly Leaving Footprints

This is what “all our relations” has come to mean to me.

We are continually touching one another’s lives, often without knowing how far the ripple will travel.

The teacher you weren’t ready for.
The colleague whose ideas you dismissed.
The stranger singing while you eat your lunch.
The conversation you almost didn’t have.
The person you haven’t thought about in years who suddenly blows through your awareness.

We leave energy footprints.

And other people leave them in us.

Sometimes Spirit seems to use those old footprints like trails through the forest, bringing us back to something we didn’t understand the first time.

Practical Shamanism Happens in the Mundane

This is also the territory of my next book, The Practical Shaman.

I’m interested in the magical moments hidden inside the mundane ones.

Not just visions, ceremonies, journeys, and extraordinary spiritual experiences.

The plumber.
The tile setter.
The farmers market.
The phone call.
The person who unexpectedly says yes.

My bathroom renovation has been its own lesson lately.

The tile setter is notoriously difficult to reach. Yet he answers my call and rearranges his weekend so he can begin my job at exactly the moment the plumber has finished installing the new tub.

Not weeks later, when we thought the work would happen.

Right when the opening appeared.

Then there was the man who called me with a vision about a community club that had reached the end of one chapter and needed someone to help imagine its next evolution.

That phone call has opened an entirely unexpected road in my life.

I could dismiss all of this as scheduling, coincidence, networking, and luck.

And sometimes that is exactly what something is.

But Practical Shamanism asks another question:

What happens when I become quiet enough to notice where life is already trying to move?

The Wind Has Our Back

For me, shamanism isn’t about escaping ordinary life.

It is about becoming more intimate with it.

We listen differently.

We notice timing.

We pay attention to what repeatedly appears.

We recognize when something has energy and when something doesn’t.

We become curious about the person who crosses our path, the invitation that arrives unexpectedly, the door that suddenly opens, or the plan that keeps refusing to work.

This doesn’t mean surrendering our discernment.

Quite the opposite.

Practical Shamanism requires us to develop it.

Not every open door should be entered. Not every synchronicity is an instruction. Not every difficulty means we are going the wrong way.

We still have to choose.

But we don’t have to choose as though we are walking through a dead and disconnected world.

We are walking through a living one.

That is the difference.

The world is speaking all the time through people, timing, weather, animals, interruptions, delays, songs, memories, dreams, and the unexpected turn in the trail.

Our practice is learning how to listen without making everything mean something.

And when we do?

We begin to discover that guidance doesn’t always arrive with drums and rattles.

Sometimes it is singing at the farmers market while you’re eating a slice of pizza.

Sometimes it answers the phone.

Sometimes it changes the schedule.

Sometimes it remembers you years later.

These are our relations.

These are the energy footprints we leave for one another.

And this, for me, is Practical Shamanism:

Pay attention. Stay in relationship. Use your discernment. Follow what has life.

The sacred isn’t somewhere else.

It is moving through the ordinary world right now.

And when we learn how to listen, we may discover that the wind has had our back all along.