Called to This Healing Work (Drum Healing Ceremony)

​As a fully initiated shamanic healer with an active practice, I am sometimes asked about the work I do. What is "shamanic healing"? What does a healing session look like? 

Here's an excerpt from my personal journal, from almost a decade ago. This narrative gives a pretty good idea of how I might go about offering shamanic healing to someone in my community who has reached out and asked for help. These days (post-pandemic), in addition to in-person healing work, I also offer shamanic healing sessions over Zoom -- which has worked quite effectively for clients I've worked with.

Training to do this work does not qualify a person to teach shamanism. Every instructor I've ever worked with made me agree that I would not teach the healing methods to others, without first going through formal "teacher training." I feel I have omitted enough details in this narrative, about how the technique is done, to satisfy this request from the master-shamans I have been blessed to learn from.

The following story, with a few minor editorial changes, was published in the December 2020 edition (Issue 33) of Shamanism Annual: The Journal of The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, under the title "Drum Healing Ceremony."

At that time, Shamanism Annual had a readership of approximately 20,000 subscribers.


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Called to This Healing Work


by Adam Bosler


Another consequence of being the public host of the "Glendora Shamanic Drum Circle" is that occasionally someone I have never met will contact me through email, asking about shamanism. "Shelly" described herself as very interested in the drum circle, but wheelchair-bound in a way that made it impossible for her to attend.

Over the next several weeks, we ended up sending a few emails back and forth, and getting to know each other a little bit better. It became apparent to me that Shelly is an elderly person living in an assisted-living facility about an hour’s drive from where I live.

*******

We have been emailing for a few weeks now. Not a lot. Just enough to get to know each other a little bit. At one point in the email conversation, Shelly asks if I would be willing to do some journeywork on her behalf. She is suffering from tumors on her spine which are very painful, she tells me. I agree to go to my helping spirits and ask them to do something to help alleviate her suffering. One of the specific things I am shown in the journey is me, at Shelly’s residence, performing a technique, a Drum Healing Ceremony, which I was taught in my three-year advanced shamanism training program.

I send an email, telling her I need to call her on the phone and talk about the results of the journeywork. She emails back: she has a caretaker who comes on Tuesday afternoons, and can get the phone for her, so that would be the best time to call. 

*******

During our phone call, Shelly seems surprised, in a positive way, when I tell her I was directed to make a "house call" and perform a Drum Healing Ceremony for her. I tell her this is, of course, entirely up to her, and in no way am I trying to pressure her into a visit. But if she is interested, I would be willing to come to her place to do the ceremony. She asks how much I usually charge for something like that, and I tell her I'll charge a small fee to cover my gasoline there and back. 

We set up a day for me to go to her place. This will be one of the first times I have worked with a client "out of the blue" who does not know me, is not a friend, or has not already been attending the shamanic drum circle for a few months. As part of my agreement to come to her house, I have emailed her a consent form and liability release — which I was taught how to create and use in the FSS Shamanism Practicum workshop — with instructions to sign it and return it to me by mail.

My main concern is that Shelly understands that I am not promising a medical cure, and she should continue with whatever medical advice she has been given by her doctors. Something in me gets the feeling that Shelly is the kind of person who wants to choose alternative healing instead of Western medicine. I explain to her over the phone how shamanic healing works best in conjunction with Western healing. We want the best of both worlds, not one or the other.

Before the scheduled day arrives for me to go to Shelly's house, the signed release form shows up in my mailbox. It is a great feeling of release for me, to have this kind of official legal kind of form to discuss and share with a client. It adds a level of professionalism to my shamanic healing that helps me let go of worries, and focus on the healing methods. 

*******

The facility is a 600-unit assisted-living complex. The elevator drops me off at the end of a long, empty corridor lined with numbered doors. I find Shelly's door, knock. A Hispanic woman in her thirties opens the door, smiles. I am invited in. One step over the threshold, and I am now standing squarely in the center of the "living room." The kitchen is a simple counter against one wall of this same room. A sink. An electric cooktop. An old, beat-up vacuum cleaner is sitting out and plugged in. The apartment is obviously being cleaned up for the guest’s arrival. I have the distinct sense that my visit is causing extra work for the caretaker. She is cordial, but aloof and distrustful.

The caretaker leads me five steps across the room, introduces me to Shelly, then quickly turns back to her chores in the kitchen area. Shelly reclines at one end of the room, on a small couch. It looks painful, awkward the way her spine is twisted and propped up with pillows.

Shelly and I have seen each other's photos on Facebook, but this is our first face-to-face meeting. She is easily 85 years old. I think to myself: her online photos of herself must be several decades old. She is frail, feeble. Her legs look atrophied to the point of being useless.

I have brought a yoga mat and a drum bag. I am still looking around for a place to set my things, when Shelly calls out to the caretaker: "Perhaps it would be better if we did the session in the bedroom." She is helped, practically carried, to the bed, which is ten feet away through a small doorway. The bedroom door is left open, and the caretaker goes back to stirring a pot on the stove and chopping vegetables, just around the corner, obviously listening to Shelly and me.

The bedroom is so small, there isn't even enough room to roll out my yoga mat, which I normally sit on during shamanic ceremonies. So instead, I sit cross-legged on the floor, the only space available, a foot away from her bed, facing Shelly from the side. I can barely open the drum bag I’ve brought, because the space I’m sitting in is so cramped.

She begins to tell me, again, about the tumors on her spine, which she has described to me over the phone in past conversations. She has trouble walking, she tells me. She has to use the wheelchair pretty much full-time, she says. I know all these things in my conscious mind, based on our previous conversations, but now to witness her state of being first-hand — she is much more incapacitated than I had imagined. She seems to have to strain just to speak.

She has a small window in one corner of her bedroom that looks out at the Southern California sunshine. On the window's ledge I soon notice a small bird pacing back and forth. Shelly has told me before of Musketeer, in one of our phone conversations. So I was not surprised to see her pet cockatiel, but I did not expect the bird to be cage-free. Shelly appears to be smiling and staring out the window, but I quickly realize she is gazing lovingly at her bird-friend Musketeer. "He doesn’t know what to think of you yet. Usually he's over here right by my side." 

I am reminded of a gift I have brought for Shelly, a peacock feather that was molted and dropped right in my driveway just a few days ago. In the town I live in, we have wild peacocks that roam up and down the streets, I tell her. "This is from a female. They're gray, and about the size of a chicken. I believe Mother Nature knew I was coming to visit you — a bird lover — and she gave this feather to me, to give to you." She smiles and takes the feather gently in her hands. She strokes the feather as if she is petting a cherished animal. 

My eyes are still adjusting to the light when I begin to see the bird droppings on the floor around me. The thought dawns upon me that this disheveled bedroom is in fact Musketeer's cage. While the front room and kitchenette were fairly straightened up upon my arrival, it does not appear that this bedroom has been cleaned recently. There is a smell of urine. Several unopened bags of fresh Depends undergarments sit at the ready, on a shelf near the foot of the bed. Shelly points to the phone on a small bedside table, and I picture our previous phone conversations, her laying here in this bedroom-cage and smiling at her roommate Musketeer.

As I am setting out a candle and getting ready to "open sacred space" by calling in Compassionate Spirits and rattling, I look over and see two cockroaches crawling up the wall near the nightstand. Something inside my heart is breaking for this woman. As I rattle and call for help in healing her, tears begin to flow from my eyes. I am soon chanting a prayer of hope and health. Anyone with even an ounce of compassion in their heart would see the sad and lonely situation this woman lives daily. My prayers and rattling and calling in the Spirits have caused a wave of calm to ripple throughout the entire residence. The caretaker just outside the door has stopped banging the spoon against the pan, has stopped chopping vegetables. There is a reverence for the ceremony that can be palpably felt. I look over and see tears flowing down Shelly's cheeks. Even her bird, Musketeer, has stopped prancing around and has settled down comfortably onto the window ledge. Everyone is waiting for some kind of miracle.

With my eyes still open, but blurry with tears of compassion, I begin looking inward, to the place where my guides and helpers usually meet me. I feel that old, familiar feeling of merging with something bigger than myself, something more important than my personal opinions about how the elderly should be treated and cared for. The sadness and the squalor are slipping from my consciousness. A glowing light, a beam of pure healing intention, begins to grow in my inner awareness. I am receiving something from outside of myself, and yet at the same time, am merging with it, so that my physical body can perform the Drum Healing Ceremony.

I pick up the drum and begin playing it near Shelly's frail body. I am being directed how loud to play, where to hold the drum, the proximity to her body. I am following a kind of inner intuition that is difficult to describe in words. The sound coming from the drum fills her small apartment with a booming resonance. The walls of her bedroom are shaking with the sound of the drum. I ask if it's too loud, and Shelly smiles, tells me joyfully, "Not at all!" She looks deeply happy in a way I have not seen on her face until this very moment in the afternoon. 

*******

I call Shelly about a week later to see how she is doing. She tells me that she initially got very sick for three days right after I left. She could hardly eat. Something had shifted inside her body, but she wasn't sure what it was. Then, on the fourth day after the Drum Healing Ceremony, her pain went completely away. "It’s a miracle" she tells me. "I have felt pain because of those tumors for so long. But now it’s just gone!" We talk for a bit longer, but I am hardly listening. Somewhere in the back of my mind I have the distinct sense that "my job here is done."

When I hang up the phone, I go directly into my meditation room, sit in front of my shamanic altar, and begin sending prayers of thanks and gratitude to the helpers who did the healing for Shelly that afternoon, and the following three days. I light some incense. I shake my rattle. I am in awe of the miracles I have witnessed.

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