Healing Through Compassionate Depossession: A Shamanic Perspective

Many thoughts may come to mind when considering a shamanic healing session. If you have had one before, you may be expecting certain activities and outcomes, such as extraction or soul retrieval. You may also expect to hear a combination of drumming, chanting, singing, and rattling, and you may feel sleepy despite all the noise. You may feel movement, tingling, tugging, or pulling, and you may experience nausea or transient discomfort while the work is underway. You may also experience a range of emotions, from laughter to tears, and you may notice a variety of scenes and images through your inner or outer vision. 

However, what comes to mind when a practitioner suggests that compassionate depossession is required? What if you are the one who senses that this type of work is needed? For many, scenes from movies depicting exorcism come to mind, and these scenes are what give the horror genre its power over our imaginations. They often involve levitation, spinning heads, and spewing blood, as the influencing spirit is scared into an animal that is immediately sacrificed, allowing the living human’s spirit to be free of pain and suffering, and ultimately restored. The Catholic Church has taken over this work for millennia now, with the central premise that all possession is demonic possession. It has also created several versions of rites that describe the steps for priests to complete this work from the 4th century to the 17th century, and most recently in 1999.  

It is not my position to disparage the Church for having kept this tradition alive, as it serves a rare but essential purpose. It is also likely these traditions have their base in shamanic tribal traditions that preceded the Church, with those same traditions later being otherwise destroyed by the Inquisition, iconoclasm, and forced conversion. 

Can you apply this imagery to your lived experience? Your spirit? The likelihood of having an evil spirit, straight from hell, influencing your every move, breath, and thought may seem preposterous. Your belief system may not even include hell, making it even harder to imagine. What I have learned and experienced from years of doing this work may surprise you. 

All the living humans I have encountered have a soul. Some of those souls are beautiful, plump, and radiant. They are filled with power, grace, and compassion, and are plugged in. Those souls can gain power through their connections and be empowered by techniques they have been taught that allow them to build power whenever needed. Remember, this is not the energy field, as spiritual power is more than energy. It has intelligence. Those souls have influencing spirits around them, as we all do, but they aren’t as influenced by them. They get into trouble when they become wispy and weak, are emotionally or physically exhausted, seriously ill, desperate, terrified, or lost, or in my case, hungry for power.

What is it like to experience possession illness? 

Anyone who shares their story will have a unique experience, and most will not share these experiences publicly. I hope that my story will be helpful to you. I was coming down with COVID-19 right before we shut down and was attending a workshop. After dancing an unusually powerful merge with what I thought was a well-known helping animal spirit from the lower world, I felt significantly better in those few minutes. So, I asked the spirit not to disconnect entirely—something we are repeatedly taught never to do. I was struggling, tired, short of breath, and needed to get through the day and a red-eye flight. The middle world spirit took full advantage of this. 

Later in the workshop, when discussing an ethical issue that I felt strongly about, the voice that expressed my opinion was loud, low, and certainly not my own. I apologized later to the person I was responding to, feeling at this point even less like myself. After the workshop, I traveled home and had a fever when I landed, and was very sick for 2 weeks with symptoms consistent with COVID-19. During my recovery, I was too ill to work but not too sick to try to help a friend in the hospital with COVID-19 who was trying to avoid the ventilator. I decided to send power from a new power animal retrieved for me by a friend to aid in my recovery. While sending the power, in my still-depleted state, a snake bit me – lesson number two. 

The instant that I began unraveling the snake from my arm, I knew that I was experiencing possession illness. I had been too sick to notice or deal with it up to this point. I then finished my work and contacted a mentor to request depossession work. I shared the facts of my experience thus far, as well as my humbling admission of the lessons learned, and she proceeded to consult with her helping spirits and then complete the work. 

What had happened was that the spirit was a fire-and-brimstone preacher, along with his pet snake, and they weren’t sure about the work I was learning in the workshop, so they wanted to influence me to do what was “right” in their eyes. There was no nefarious intention. My mentor befriended and psychopomped the snake, followed by the preacher, and then restored my power, completing the process of compassionate depossession for me and assisting the two spirits. 

This work, when done the way it is taught by many tribal cultures and taught without culturally specific nuance in core shamanism, is to assist the influencing spirit(s) in their spiritual progression, rather than harm, kill, or send them to hell, and then to empower the living spirit to restore its resilience from the influence of disembodied middle world spirits. When this work is complete, the formerly influencing spirit has moved on to a place of compassion and is not expected to return. However, the details are typically not discussed with the client, so as not to invite fear or disempowerment. We don’t want to set the client up for more of this work to be required.

Why do influencing spirits want to influence? 

The influencing spirits can have a variety of behaviors, but are often lost, confused, or stuck at the time of their death. Time seems to stand still, and they may still be at war, still guarding a post, still wandering around after a car accident, tinkering in the garage, or still wanting to protect their progeny or land. The clothing they are wearing is the clothing they were wearing at the time of their death: the low-slung jeans of the ’90s, the blue midi dress of the ’50s, or the traditional dress of a warring tribe. Sometimes the influencing spirit is a deceased spouse, pet, child, or grandparent, but most of the time, it is a stranger to the client. To be warm, inside a body, living what is familiar is far more appealing than to be cold, lost, hungry, and alone. 

What is important to remember is that all parties involved benefit from the healing experience of compassionate depossession. The living spirit regains more of its spiritual power and authentic voice, and the once-influencing spirit is now able to move on in its spiritual progression to a place of compassion of its choosing. 

Sometimes, when the influencing spirit catches wind of the work being planned, they will leave and not return, so the depossession work is no longer required. In this situation, the client still needs work to restore their spiritual power, which can be accomplished in various ways, depending on what the helping spirits determine is necessary. Self-care, when taught to the client, is another vital aspect of the shamanic session, as every client can benefit from learning to build their power. 

Not all shamanic practitioners do depossession work, and that is ok. This decision is partly due to the nature of the service and the associated risks it entails. The practitioner needs to be fully empowered and have adequate support from the helping spirits to do the work. The practitioner also needs to know when to say no and refer on. Ideally, a practitioner providing this work does so regularly, confidently, and has an efficient team of compassionate helpers who work with them to deliver the service. 

As a practicing psychiatrist at Vitality Psychiatry as well, there are rare occasions where the symptoms described as possession may be dissociative identity disorder, possession type. In this situation, aspects of the personality that have been fractured or distanced by severe trauma, often from childhood and frequently blocked from memory, present to the patient as influencing spirits. These personality aspects can be ruthless, and usually, the patient requires long-term specialized therapy to restore a more resilient Self. In sporadic cases, both possession and DID, possession type may co-occur. 

If you sense possession illness or a friend shares these concerns with you, I hope that you will have a new story to connect with that helps empower all spirits involved in a compassionate and lasting way.

TAKE ACTION: If building an ethical framework for your independent spiritual practice, while avoiding appropriation, is essential to you, Dr. Kerri Husman encourages you to reach out to learn more. She teaches devout followers of faiths, atheists, those who have experienced religious trauma, and everything in between in the workshops she offers at Mammoth Hills as guest faculty for the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.