001- Welcome to the Practical Shamanism Podcast

Learn simple ways to connect with your intuitive wisdom and weave your personal power and magic into everyday life. As a former engineer with 20 years of experience working as a shamanic practitioner, Katie Weatherup draws on both the practical and the mystical. Find your way back to yourself while improving your health, relationships, and money results.

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Sound editing by Kevin Young.  You can reach him at [email protected]

DISCLAIMER: The suggestions and information provided here are intended for personal growth and exploration. The content of this podcast is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice or psychological treatment. Please seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical or mental health condition.  

To learn more about me and my work, please visit my website at https://handsoverheart.com

About this Podcast:

This podcast is intended to provide a map for a deeper engagement for the experienced seeker as well as practical, accessible knowledge to the person who wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce shamanism at the start.

A little more about me. 

At 24, I found myself stepping into my adult life with an engineering degree, unmanaged psychic gifts, and a painful lack of interpersonal skills. I was overwhelmed, overstimulated, and exhausted a good deal of the time. Yet, this led me to an amazing journey of self-discovery that continues to unfold to this day. I now have three published books (including Practical Shamanism, A Guide for Walking in Both Worlds) and am thrilled that my full-time shamanic practice has allowed me to work with thousands of clients all over the world. My social circle is rich and extensive to a degree I could never have imagined as a lonely teenager who got along better with her goats than with her fellow human beings.

My mechanical engineering background has helped me focus my healing work on the necessity of system integrity. The human spirit is a highly complex system that can break down in complicated and subtle ways. Much of my shamanic work is oriented toward wholeness. I help people recover their power and magic as well as all the parts they’ve lost, forgotten, denied, and disowned. I’ve done more than ten thousand shamanic journeys and am very comfortable working with the hard, scary stuff.

This podcast is meant to provide a map to bring a key part yourself into a collaborative relationship with the other aspects of yourself. In doing so, your external results, such as success with money, career, and relationship may improve dramatically with less effort on your part.  As Archimedes is reported to have said, “give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I shall move the world,” I’m passionate about finding leverage points in which a small amount of well applied effort creates significant outcomes. Everything I recommend is filtered through the lens of “efficiency”. I assume you’re already living a busy, full life, and if you carve out a bit of bandwidth to listen to my words or do a practice, you need it to make a meaningful difference in your life.

For the internal side, these concepts will help reduce anxiety and give you some new ways to combat depression. Do you play an unkind script in your head that recounts your many failings? I’ll help you understand why, oh why, your mind does that to you and how to redirect it in a happier fashion. I’d love to help you understand how to tend your energy body which is a great way to support improvement with health challenges or clear them before they ever manifest. Also, my hope is to provide you with a meaningful way to engage with your sense of soul purpose and to feel you have a trustworthy internal compass as you navigate through life.

Why shamanism? I found it to be the most aligned framework for helping me to navigate and utilize the information my sense of energy was providing. Core shamanism (a term coined by Michel Harner) refers to the set of practices that are universal or nearly universal across indigenous cultures throughout the world. My shamanic journey has been the work of mastering a set of shamanic skills and then applying them to the challenges of the modern, first world experience, for myself and my clients. If you’d like to geek out a bit more on my take on shamanism, see the link in the show notes. You can read the introduction to my first book on my website: https://handsoverheart.com/2017/01/20/introduction-to-practical-shamanism/

Now, you may be thinking, “But Katie, I’m not sure I perceive energy as you do. Will this still be helpful?” The answer is “yes”! I believe it’s an aspect of being human that we can, with the rights skills for tuning in, get information about the energy in our own system and the world around us. But, you may not know that part of yourself because, for most of us, it’s not validated or engaged with when we’re growing up. As we grow, the human brain is a clearinghouse for sorting which information is relevant and should come to our attention and what should be filed at an unconscious level. There are many examples of this - children validated for forming sounds in their culture’s spoken language, watching the road when we’re driving, and tuning into the conversation we’re having in a crowded restaurant. I imagine a child who could hear sounds in a community in which all members for many generations had been born without hearing wouldn’t develop a cognitive map of this sense but that they would use it in the background to navigate life.

I hope you’ll join me! After 20 years of talking to my guides on a daily basis for myself and others, I have a lot to share and I very much hope you find something here to support your journey.