How often you should journey depends less on ambition than on what you can hold. For most people the honest answer is once or twice a week. Add a longer journey every few weeks, and take stretches where you deliberately do not journey at all. A shamanic journey is a drum-guided trance in which you travel into non-ordinary reality with a question and come back with something to work with. The working part is why frequency matters. The journey takes twenty minutes. What it asks of you afterwards can take a fortnight.
Almost everyone who writes to me about this is asking the same thing underneath: am I doing enough? Usually they are doing plenty and integrating very little.
How often should you journey?
Once or twice a week suits most people who have a job, a household and a life outside their practice. Beginners do better with once a week and a written record. Practitioners who journey for other people need more, but they also need supervision and proper grounding, which is a different arrangement altogether.
There is no traditional number, and anyone who gives you one is inventing it. In the cultures Mircea Eliade surveyed, journeys happened when there was a reason: someone was ill, a decision had to be made, the season turned. Nobody journeyed on Tuesdays because it was Tuesday. A fixed weekly slot fits people who live by a calendar, and it works. It just isn’t ancient.
Why does journeying more often not mean progressing faster?
Because the journey is not where the change happens. The change happens in the days afterwards, when you act on what you were shown, or notice that you are avoiding it.
It works like a conversation with someone whose judgement you trust. One good conversation a week, and then doing something about it, changes how your month goes. Four conversations a week, none of them acted on, will just make you tired of talking. I have watched people journey daily for a month and come out with a beautiful notebook and no change at all.
Something else happens too. Journey very often and the images start to feel routine, and once they feel routine you stop asking your question properly. If you are already there, my notes on setting a clear intention are the fastest fix, because a vague question produces a vague journey no matter how often you go.
What rhythm suits where you are right now?
Here is what I actually recommend to people, depending on how long they have been at this and what else their life is carrying.
| Where you are | Journeys per week | Length | What matters most |
|---|---|---|---|
| First three months | 1 | 15 to 20 minutes | Writing it down, even when nothing happened |
| Settled beginner, six to twelve months | 1 to 2 | 20 to 30 minutes | One question carried across several journeys |
| Experienced, practising for years | 2 to 3 | Varies | Journeys with a purpose, not out of habit |
| Journeying for other people | As the work needs | Varies | Supervision, grounding, clear closing |
| In a hard patch: grief, illness, upheaval | 0 to 1 | Short | Support from people, not more trance |
| After a big or shaking journey | Pause 1 to 2 weeks | None | Letting the last one finish its work |
Notice that two rows say less, not more. Those are the rows people skip.
What are the signs you are journeying too often?
Over-journeying rarely feels dramatic. It feels like a slow thinning out. These are the signs I see most often:
- The journeys blur together. You cannot remember on Thursday what you were shown on Monday.
- You are foggy for hours afterwards. Mild spaciness is normal for twenty minutes. A whole afternoon is not.
- Your sleep goes strange. Vivid, crowded dreams every night, or waking at three with the sense that something is still going on.
- Ordinary life feels flat. The washing up and the school run feel like an interruption of the real thing. When it flips like that, take it seriously.
- You stop writing anything down. Not from laziness. There is simply too much to keep up with.
- You are journeying to avoid something. A conversation you owe someone, a decision you keep asking the spirits to make for you.
- Nothing you were told has changed anything in three months. A lot of contact, and nothing in your life has moved.
If several of those are true, stop for two weeks. Not one week. Two. Then read your notes from the last two months and do one thing that is written there. If the fogginess is your main problem, the techniques in grounding after a shamanic journey matter more than any change to your schedule.
What happens if you journey too rarely?
You lose fluency. Journeying is a skill, like speaking a second language, and a month away means the first ten minutes go on finding the door again rather than walking through it.
This is the far more common problem. Most people are not over-journeying. They journeyed regularly for two months, then got busy, then felt guilty, and the guilt made the whole thing heavier until they stopped. Once a fortnight, kept up for a year, will take you further than three journeys a week for six weeks and then nothing. If the problem is not how often you go but that the journeys have gone quiet, the eight blocks in shamanic journey not working cover what is usually in the way.
How do you build a rhythm you can actually keep?
Pick the rhythm you could hold in a bad week, not the one you want in an enthusiastic one. Then build it into your week instead of leaning on willpower.
- Fix one time, not a number of times. Sunday morning before the house wakes up beats a vague plan to go three times a week.
- Give it a proper container. Same corner, same drumming track or live drum, same opening and closing. Your body learns the cue and drops in faster.
- One question per fortnight, not one per journey. Carry one question across two or three journeys and the answers get usable.
- Write for five minutes afterwards. Two sentences are enough. The notebook is where you start to see the pattern. That is also why small daily practices alongside the journeys help.
- Build in a pause. One week off every six or seven weeks, planned in advance so it does not feel like failure.
- Let someone expect you. This is the one that actually holds people. A partner, a friend, or a circle that meets on a set date.
If that last one is your weak spot, that is what our monthly Lightkeepers’ Hearth journey circle is for. We meet once a month, journey together to live drumming, and then say out loud what came back. People keep a rhythm they would not keep alone, not because the content is special but because the date is in the diary and somebody is waiting.
My own rhythm, and how often I get it wrong
I live in Portugal and I journey twice a week: once on Sunday morning with a question of my own, once midweek for whatever the work in front of me needs. Between those, nothing. In my first years I journeyed almost daily and I was proud of it. What I was mostly doing was asking variations of the same question and enjoying the scenery.
The correction came from a teacher who asked to see my notebook and then asked when I had last done anything I had been told to do. I could not answer. I took six weeks off, which felt like backsliding, and came back to a practice that was slower and considerably more useful.
I still get it wrong in one specific way. When something in my life is unresolved, I journey more, and it always looks like devotion. It is usually avoidance. Michael Harner wrote in The Way of the Shaman that the work is judged by its results in ordinary life, and that is still the only measure I trust for frequency. If nothing in your week is different, the number of journeys is not the problem.
When a lower frequency is the responsible choice
Journeying is not therapy and it is not medical care. It sits alongside them. Some situations call for less, not more. Acute crisis. Trauma surfacing faster than you can hold it. A history of psychosis or dissociation. Treatment for a psychiatric condition. In any of those, talk to your doctor or therapist before you take up frequent journeying. Go gently, or leave it for now. Anyone who tells you that more trance is the answer in that situation is not looking after you. You can read where the honest limits sit in is shamanic healing safe.
Frequently asked questions
You can, and some experienced practitioners do for a season with a clear reason. For most people daily journeying produces more material than they can integrate, and you can tell because the journeys blur together. If you want a daily practice, use short grounding or gratitude practices on the other days and journey once or twice a week.
Fifteen to twenty minutes of drumming is plenty for a beginner, and twenty to thirty minutes suits most regular practice. Longer is not deeper. A forty-minute journey with a vague question gives you less than a fifteen-minute one with a clear question.
No. Breaks are part of the practice, and the spirits do not keep attendance. You will lose some fluency, so expect the first journey back to take longer to settle. Plan breaks rather than drifting into them, because a planned pause does not carry guilt with it.
Once a week for the first three months, at the same time each week, with a few lines written down afterwards. That is enough to build the skill and slow enough that you notice what is actually changing. Add a second journey only once the first one feels ordinary.
A short journey for comfort and support is fine, and meeting your power animal when you are low often helps. What I would not do is take a heavy question into trance while you are already overwhelmed. On those days, choose people, rest and food over more trance, and save the question for a steadier week.
Look at your ordinary life, not your notebook. Over three months, something should have shifted: a boundary held, a decision made, a relationship handled differently. If your journeys are rich and your life is unchanged, journey less often and do more with what you were given.
About the author: Carolin Mallmann is a shamanic practitioner and coach based in Portugal. She has been journeying since 2009, trains people online through One Shamanism, and holds the monthly Lightkeepers’ Hearth journey circle. She writes about shamanic practice the way she teaches it: slowly, and with room for doubt.
