Meditations
Jun 22, 2026
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14 min read
Shamanic Journeying: How to Travel the Spirit Worlds
🕯 12 min read · June 22, 2026
What Is Shamanic Journeying?
Shamanic journeying is one of humanity’s oldest spiritual technologies — a method of intentional consciousness travel practiced in some form on every inhabited continent for at least 30,000 years, based on archaeological evidence including cave paintings that appear to depict shamanic altered states. In its traditional forms, the shaman — the community’s specialist in non-ordinary reality — enters a trance state to travel to other realms of consciousness, encounter spiritual allies and teachers, retrieve information, and perform healing on behalf of the community or individuals.
In contemporary practice, largely shaped by the work of anthropologist and scholar Michael Harner (who founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies after his fieldwork with the Jívaro and Conibo peoples of South America), shamanic journeying has been extracted from its specific cultural contexts and taught as a cross-cultural “core shamanism” — the universal foundational techniques that appear across multiple shamanic traditions.
The journey state is produced through rhythmic drumming, rattling, or other percussive sounds that shift brainwave activity from ordinary beta consciousness to the theta state — a deeply relaxed, hypnagogic state in which imagery arises spontaneously and which many practitioners describe as “waking dreaming.” This state is both experiential (genuinely non-ordinary) and measurable (theta brainwaves are detectable on EEG during drumming-induced trance states).
The Three Worlds of Shamanic Cosmology
Virtually every shamanic tradition worldwide, regardless of specific cultural expression, describes a three-tiered cosmological structure: an Upper World, a Lower World, and a Middle World. This remarkable cross-cultural consistency is one of the strongest arguments for the universality of the shamanic experience.
The Lower World
The Lower World is accessed by descending — through a hole in the earth, a cave, the roots of a tree, a body of water, or any natural opening in the ground. Despite its name, it is not a hellish or dark place in shamanic tradition. It is the realm of power animals, nature spirits, and ancestral wisdom. The Lower World has a wild, natural quality — it often appears as primordial landscape, dense forest, ocean floor, underground cavern systems, or vast savannas. The beings encountered there are typically animals, and they function as teachers, allies, and sources of spiritual power.
The Lower World is the most appropriate destination for beginners. The energy is generally clear, the encounters with power animals tend to be immediate and uncomplicated, and the experience of the Lower World as a nurturing, power-giving realm is important for establishing a confident and grounded foundation for journeywork.
The Upper World
The Upper World is accessed by ascending — through the branches of a tree, a ladder, a beam of light, an eagle’s flight, a column of smoke, or any upward movement into the sky and beyond. The Upper World tends to have a lighter, more luminous quality than the Lower World — it often appears as cloudscapes, crystalline cities, libraries of light, or infinite star fields. The beings encountered here tend to be in human or humanoid form: teachers, masters, guides, and sometimes ancestors who have evolved to a high level of wisdom. Upper World journeys are often used for seeking spiritual teaching, broader perspective on life situations, and connection with higher dimensional intelligence.
The Middle World
The Middle World is the spiritual dimension of our own physical world — the non-ordinary reality that underlies and interpenetrates ordinary waking life. It is the realm visited when shamans are doing environmental healing, communicating with the spirits of places, connecting with the consciousness of plants and land, or working with earthbound spirits. The Middle World is the most complex and requires more experience to navigate safely, as it contains a wider range of energies than the clearly positive and supportive beings of the classic Lower and Upper Worlds.
Preparation for Journeying
Creating Sacred Space
Before any journeywork, prepare your physical and energetic space. Clear the room of clutter and unnecessary objects. Smudge with sage, palo santo, or cedar smoke if that practice resonates with you. Create a simple altar with objects that feel meaningful: candles, crystals, flowers, feathers, photographs of those you love. State your intention for the session clearly and out loud, addressing the spirit world directly: “I journey today with the intention of [specific purpose]. I ask for guidance, protection, and support from my spirit allies.”
The Drumbeat
Shamanic drumming is typically in the range of 4-7 beats per second — this rate corresponds to the theta brainwave frequency that the journey state produces. There are excellent recordings of shamanic drumming available for free on YouTube and through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. For a standard journey, choose a recording of approximately 15-20 minutes followed by a distinct callback signal (usually a rapid drumbeat) that signals the time to return.
Physical Setup
Lie on a comfortable surface — a yoga mat, blankets on the floor, or a bed if you are confident you will not simply fall asleep (some practitioners prefer the floor for this reason). Cover your eyes with a sleep mask or folded cloth — darkness facilitates the emergence of inner imagery. Remove shoes and loosen any tight clothing. Have a notebook nearby for recording immediately after.
How to Journey to the Lower World: Step-by-Step
This is the foundational journey that all beginners should begin with.
Step 1: Set Your Intention
Before beginning, choose a clear, specific intention for the journey. For a first journey, the classic intention is: “I journey to the Lower World to meet my primary power animal.” Write this intention down and keep it in your consciousness as you descend.
Step 2: Find Your Entrance
As the drumming begins and your eyes are covered, allow the rhythm to carry you into a relaxed state. Visualize a specific place in nature that you know well — a forest, a hillside, a beach. Look for a natural opening in the earth: a hole between tree roots, a cave entrance, a crevice in rock, the bottom of a stream or pool. This is your entrance to the Lower World. Every journeyer develops their own entrance, and it tends to remain consistent across many journeys.
Step 3: Descend
Enter the opening and descend. You might feel yourself sliding down a tunnel, floating downward through earth, following a root system, or swimming downward through water. The descent can be brief (a few seconds) or extended (several minutes of tunnel travel). Do not try to control or direct it — allow the drumbeat to carry you. A key marker that you have arrived in the Lower World: you emerge into a natural landscape with light, color, and three-dimensional space.
Step 4: Explore and Encounter
Once in the Lower World, allow your senses to open fully. What do you see, hear, feel, smell? Move through the landscape with curiosity and openness. Your power animal will make itself known — often by appearing repeatedly or approaching you directly. It may be an animal you expected, or one that completely surprises you. Any animal that appears three times or approaches without fear is worth engaging with.
Step 5: Interact and Receive
Greet your power animal with gratitude and respect. Ask your intention question if you have one, or simply allow the encounter to unfold organically. Pay close attention to everything the animal shows, demonstrates, or communicates — through image, gesture, sound, feeling, or inner knowing.
Step 6: Return
When the callback signal sounds (the rapid drumbeat), thank your power animal and any other beings you encountered. Return the way you came — up through the tunnel, through the entrance, back to your physical body. Take a few moments to reorient before moving.
Step 7: Integrate Immediately
Write, draw, or voice-record every detail of the journey immediately. The imagery fades quickly, like a dream. Include what you saw, heard, felt, any dialogue that occurred, and your emotional state throughout.
Meeting Your Power Animal
Power animals are one of the foundational spiritual relationships in shamanic practice. They are spirit allies in animal form — sources of protection, guidance, and specific spiritual power. Every person has at least one primary power animal, according to shamanic understanding. They do not represent the qualities of their species in a symbolic sense alone — they are living spiritual presences with individual personalities and particular gifts to offer.
Common experiences of meeting a power animal include: a sense of immediate recognition (“I know you somehow”), a feeling of being welcomed or claimed, an influx of specific physical energy associated with the animal’s nature, and a quality of communication that transcends ordinary language.
Once met, work with your power animal by returning to the Lower World to consult it, by carrying its image with you (a drawing, a photograph, a figurine), by spending time in nature with actual animals of its species, and by embodying the quality it represents in your daily life.
Meeting Spirit Guides in the Upper World
The Upper World journey for meeting spirit guides follows the same basic structure as the Lower World journey, but the ascent replaces the descent. Visualize a way up: climbing a tree until you emerge through the canopy, riding a beam of light, being carried by an eagle, floating upward on breath. When you arrive in the Upper World, meet whatever being presents itself with openness and discernment.
A key practice of discernment: ask any Upper World being directly, “Are you of the light? Do you serve the highest good?” Genuine spirit guides will answer affirmatively and consistently. Beings that evade this question, give confusing answers, or make you feel uneasy are not reliable guides and should be thanked and dismissed.
Upper World teachers often offer teaching in the form of images, demonstrations, or experiences rather than verbal instruction. They may show you a quality you need to develop, a situation from a higher perspective, or give you a gift (symbolic) that carries specific meaning for your life.
Integration: The Often-Neglected Key
The journey itself is only half the practice. What you do with the experience afterward — how you integrate it into your understanding and your life — is at least as important as the journey itself.
- Record immediately and thoroughly: Keep a dedicated shamanic journey journal. Date each entry, note the intention, transcribe the entire experience without interpretation or editing, then record your thoughts and feelings about it.
- Sit with the imagery: Allow the symbols, images, and encounters to work on you over time. Meanings that are not immediately clear often become so over days or weeks as life events illuminate them.
- Act on the guidance: If a spirit ally showed you something specific to do or change, do it. Spirit guidance that is never acted upon tends to stop being offered. The relationship with the spirit world is reciprocal — it requires your engagement and response.
- Move the energy: After powerful journeys, particularly ones involving difficult material or significant energy, move your body — dance, shake, stomp your feet, take a walk. This helps integrate the journey’s energy into the physical body rather than leaving it floating in mental space.
“The shaman is not someone who escapes ordinary reality. The shaman is someone who knows how to move between ordinary and non-ordinary reality in service of healing.” — Contemporary shamanic teaching
Frequently Asked Questions
Is shamanic journeying the same as astral projection or lucid dreaming?
Shamanic journeying, astral projection, and lucid dreaming share the quality of intentional consciousness exploration in non-ordinary states, but they differ in important ways. Lucid dreaming occurs during sleep in the REM state; the practitioner becomes aware within the dream and may learn to direct it, but the primary content is generated by the personal unconscious. Astral projection traditionally refers to the experience of the consciousness leaving the physical body and traveling in the ‘astral plane’ — a layer of reality close to the physical world. Shamanic journeying is distinct in that it is intentionally induced through rhythmic drumming in a relaxed waking state (not sleep), it is purposeful and goal-directed (driven by a specific intention), and it involves engaging with spirit helpers in defined cosmological territories (Lower, Middle, Upper World). The quality of the experience in journeying tends to be more stable and consistent than lucid dreaming, and the interaction with spirit allies provides an external reference point that purely subjective dream exploration lacks. That said, all three practices develop similar faculties of inner perception and consciousness navigation.
What if I don’t see anything during my journey? Does that mean I’m not doing it right?
Not seeing vivid visual imagery during a journey is extremely common, especially in early sessions, and does not mean the journey is not happening or not working. People are radically different in the primary sense modality through which they receive non-ordinary information. Visual people (‘clairvoyant’ tendency) see imagery. Auditory people (‘clairaudient’ tendency) hear sounds, voices, or music. Kinesthetic people (‘clairsentient’ tendency) feel sensations, emotions, and physical impressions. Some people primarily receive information as inner knowing (‘claircognizant’) — a sudden, clear certainty about something without visual or auditory content. If you are not seeing clear imagery, pay attention instead to what you feel in your body, what sounds or fragments of language arise, and what you simply ‘know’ during the journey state. It is also worth noting that journeying develops with practice — those who have been doing it for years typically have richer, more vivid, and more reliable experiences than beginners. Give yourself at least ten to twenty sessions before drawing conclusions about your capacity.
Is it safe to do shamanic journeying alone, or do I need a teacher?
The Lower World journey with the intention of meeting a power animal is generally considered safe for solo practice by most practitioners and teachers of core shamanism. The Lower World is the most reliably positive and nurturing of the three shamanic realms, and the foundational journey to meet a power animal is a well-established practice that has been taught to thousands of beginners worldwide without significant issues. That said, working with a trained teacher — either in person or in a structured workshop format — provides significant advantages: proper orientation to the practice, the ability to ask questions, a group field that can amplify and support the journey experience, and guidance for interpreting what you encounter. Middle World work, soul retrieval (which involves journeying for the purpose of recovering fragmented aspects of a person’s psyche), and work with difficult spiritual material are more advanced practices that genuinely benefit from teacher guidance. If you practice alone, using professionally produced drumming recordings, setting clear intentions, working in a physically safe space, and journaling thoroughly are the most important safeguards.
Does shamanic journeying conflict with religious or spiritual beliefs I already hold?
This depends significantly on the specific beliefs and the traditions you are working within. Shamanic journeying is a practice, not a religion — it does not require belief in any specific deity, cosmology, or spiritual framework beyond a basic openness to non-ordinary states of consciousness. Many people integrate journeying successfully with Christianity (finding that the Upper World teachers they meet resonate with their understanding of angels, saints, or Christ consciousness), Buddhism (the Lower World often resonates with the bardos and spirit realm of Tibetan Buddhism), Judaism (Kabbalah and merkavah mysticism include similar practices of consciousness ascent), and various pagan, Wiccan, and animist traditions (with which shamanism shares deep roots). Some conservative religious traditions do explicitly prohibit practices that involve non-ordinary states of consciousness or contact with non-physical beings. If you are part of such a tradition and this is important to you, the conflict may be genuine and worth taking seriously before engaging with journeywork. For most people, however, the practice of journeying deepens rather than displaces their existing spiritual connection.
This page describes what the Meditations tradition teaches and how people practise it. It is not a prediction and not medical, psychiatric or crisis advice. How we research and write · report an error
