“Shamanism was never built by men. We just let them take the credit.”
Shamanism is the oldest spiritual practice on earth, and it was led by women from the beginning. Across cultures—Siberian, Amazonian, Korean, Celtic—the shamans who held authority were as often female as male, and in many traditions, more often. Women shamans held economic power, spiritual authority, and the trust of their communities. This is not a modern idea. This is history we forgot. Now we are remembering.
You grew up with the image of the shaman as a solitary man in a cave, or a male elder, or a figure of exotic spiritual power. That image is a European creation. It came from colonizers who saw women practitioners and either erased them from their records or dismissed them as secondary. The real history is different. The real history is that women kept shamanism alive.
I have spent twenty years in shamanic practice, and I have sat with women from Peru, Russia, Korea, and my own lineage in Europe. In their traditions and in their bodies, they carry what the world forgot. The work of soul retrieval, of journeying, of holding space for healing, was women’s work. It still is. And the world is finally ready to see that.
So what is calling women back to shamanism now, and why does it matter?
1. Women hold the memory that shamanism was never about power over.
In most shamanic traditions, the shaman’s role was not to command spirits or impose will. It was to listen, to retrieve what was lost, to heal what was broken. These are not acts of domination. They are acts of relationship. And relationship is what women were trained for across cultures, even when that training was called something else.
The shamanic lineages led by women were built on consent, reciprocity, and the understanding that your power grows by giving it away. A woman shaman did not rule her community. She tended it. She went into the invisible worlds and brought back what her people needed. That is not less powerful than domination. It is more powerful. It changes things without breaking them.
Now, when the world is exhausted by power-over systems, women shamans are showing what power-with looks like. And that is why the world is listening again.
2. You cannot do soul retrieval the way most men were taught to do it.
Soul retrieval is the work of carefully bringing back what has been lost or fragmented in a person. It is not a rescue operation. It is a negotiation. It is a conversation with the parts of the person that left, asking what they need to come back, what promises need to be made, what the person needs to change so that those parts can stay.
Women shamans held this work because they understood fragmentation. They lived in bodies that were not entirely their own, in systems where they had to split themselves to survive. They knew how to speak to the parts of a person that were protecting themselves. They knew how to listen instead of command.
The male shamanic traditions that were passed down in writing taught dominance: command the spirits, prove your power, assert your authority. That is not soul retrieval. That is spiritual violence. And it does not work. The women who are emerging now are showing a different way.
3. Women shamans understand that healing is not fixing.
In the healing sessions I hold in Portugal and remotely, I sit with people who have been to every healer, taken every supplement, fixed every problem they can identify. And they are still fragmented. They still feel like something is missing. That is because healing is not about fixing what is broken. It is about integrating what was lost.
Women shamans understand this in their bodies. We know about integration. We live it. We bleed and our body integrates it. We feel fear and our nervous system learns to digest it. We hold impossible contradictions and we do not shatter. Integration is not a healing technique. It is the way women survive. And now the world is learning that survival is what healing actually is.
4. The rise of women shamanism is not separate from the rise of feminine leadership.
Across cultures right now—from Korea to Peru to Europe—women are stepping into shamanic teaching and healing roles, not despite the masculine model but because they are done with it. They are not waiting for permission. They are not apologizing for their power.
The S/HE Forum on women and shamanism in September 2026 brought together women from lineages all over the world, not to reclaim some lost golden age of female shamanism, but to build something new. Something that honors the old ways while standing in the present moment. Something that does not have to choose between strength and tenderness, between authority and listening. That is the shift happening right now.
5. Women know how to hold paradox, which is what shamanism actually teaches.
Shamanism is not about answers. It is about learning to live the questions. It is about holding the invisible and the visible at the same time. It is about knowing that something can be both true and not true, both healed and still breaking. That is not confusion. That is maturity.
Women are trained for paradox from childhood. Be strong but not threatening. Be ambitious but not selfish. Be loving but not weak. Be sexual but not slutty. We learn to hold contradictions in our bodies the way shamans hold multiple worlds. We do not have to learn it later. We are already doing it. That is why women have always been the keepers of shamanic knowledge. Not because women are naturally spiritual, but because women are practiced at the mental and emotional flexibility that shamanism requires.
6. The feminine is rising in shamanism because it was never actually lost.
This is the truth that changes everything. Shamanism did not lose its feminine foundation. The feminine foundation of shamanism was hidden, written out of the historical record, dismissed as secondary. But women kept practicing it. In small groups, in families, in the practices that were called witchcraft or herbalism or midwifery, women held the work. Now, as the world reaches for healing and relationship instead of domination and extraction, shamanism’s feminine root is becoming visible again. Not as something exotic or special, but as something essential. As something that was always there.
I was twenty-two when I first journeyed, and I came back knowing something had shifted. Not in a magical way. In a way that made every other path feel wrong. I wanted to study with a teacher, and I looked for shamans everywhere—India, Peru, workshops, lineages. I kept finding men, mostly. Or women who had been trained by men and who taught the way men taught. When I finally found a woman teacher, I wept in the first session. Not from the journey itself, but from the permission. She moved through the shamanic world the way I wanted to. Not proving anything. Not dominating the spirits. Just in relationship with them. Just asking. Just listening. She showed me that I did not have to become like the men I had studied with. I could be a shamana the way I actually was. That changed everything. And now I see that same recognition in the eyes of every woman who comes to learn with me.
Now It Is Your Turn
What did you learn about shamanism from the stories you were told? And what would change if you learned it from the women who have been keeping it alive? Tell me: What does feminine shamanism mean to you? Is there a woman practitioner or teacher whose work has shaped you? If you have felt the call to shamanic practice yourself, what has held you back?
If you want to explore shamanic healing and learn from a woman teacher, I offer healing sessions remotely and in Portugal, where we journey together to meet your own guides. You can also learn more about Elements of Shamanism, my foundation course on shamanic practice.
In many traditions, yes. Siberian shamanism, Korean shamanism, and Amazonian shamanic practices often elevated women healers equally or placed them in central roles. What changed was the documentation—colonizers wrote the history, and they wrote it from a male perspective.
The difference is not inherent but cultural. Both men and women can practice shamanism deeply. But when women reclaim shamanism on their own terms, they often bring practices that were suppressed: soul retrieval as negotiation rather than rescue, healing as integration rather than fixing, leadership as tending rather than commanding.
No. The healing and teaching I offer is for anyone. But the recovery of shamanism’s feminine root is something the world needs to see and feel, regardless of the gender of the person learning.
The world has spent centuries following power-over systems. Those systems are failing. As they fail, people reach for something different. The feminine root of shamanism offers that something. It is being called back not because it is trendy, but because it works.
