Reading · Shamanic Journeying · Inner Exploration
5 Books About Shamanic Journeying
If you're curious about shamanic journeying, spirit guides, symbolic inner worlds, soul retrieval, or simply what it means to turn your awareness inward, these are five books I recommend exploring.
Beyond Reading About It
What Is Shamanic Journeying?
I became interested in shamanic journeying because it offers another way of exploring the inner world.
Depending on the tradition or the person describing it, a journey may involve entering a symbolic landscape, meeting a guide, encountering an animal, receiving information, working with energy, or reconnecting with a part of yourself that feels distant or forgotten.
You can understand those experiences spiritually. You can also look at them through the lens of imagination, symbolism, or the unconscious mind.
I don't think you always have to decide which explanation is correct before the experience can be meaningful.
A note about the word “shamanic.”
Shamanic practices come from many different Indigenous and traditional cultures, each with its own history, teachings, and ceremonial practices. The books on this page largely represent modern Western approaches to shamanic journeying. They can be valuable introductions, but they should not be confused with belonging to or being trained within a specific Indigenous tradition.
My Recommended Reading
Where I Would Begin
You don't need to read all five. If you're completely new to this work, I would start with Sandra Ingerman and move from there depending on what interests you.
Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner's Guide
If the whole idea of shamanic journeying is new to you, this is probably where I would begin. Sandra Ingerman introduces the basic idea of entering nonordinary inner landscapes, working with guides and power animals, and developing your own experience of the journey rather than simply reading about it intellectually.
Why I recommend it: It is approachable, practical, and doesn't require you to already understand shamanism before you begin.
View the Book →Awakening to the Spirit World
This book expands beyond the mechanics of taking a journey and looks more deeply at direct spiritual experience, connection with the unseen world, and ways shamanic ideas can become part of everyday life.
Why I recommend it: It gives you several perspectives instead of presenting shamanic practice through only one voice.
View the Book →The Way of the Shaman
Michael Harner was highly influential in bringing what he called Core Shamanism to modern Western audiences. This is one of the better-known foundational texts on journeying, altered states of consciousness, and his approach to shamanic practice.
Why I recommend it: If you want to understand where much of today's Western language around shamanic journeying came from, this is an important book to know.
View the Book →Shaman, Healer, Sage
Alberto Villoldo approaches shamanic work through energy, healing, personal transformation, and teachings he connects with traditions of the Americas. It moves beyond simply learning how to journey and into a much larger spiritual framework.
Why I recommend it: This is a good next step if you're interested in the energetic side of the work and how inner experience may connect with healing and transformation.
View the Book →Soul Journeying
This book goes further into soul retrieval, the idea of working outside ordinary concepts of time, and using the journey to explore events from the past as well as the direction your life may be moving toward.
Why I recommend it: It overlaps with some of the questions that interest me most: what we carry from the past, what may be ready to change, and what can happen when we experience something inwardly instead of only analyzing it.
View the Book →My Perspective
Reading Opens the Door. Experience Changes It.
Books helped me understand that there are many different ways people have explored consciousness throughout history.
But there is a point where reading about an inner journey and actually experiencing one become two very different things.
During my own work with clients, I don't try to reproduce a particular book, belief system, or shamanic tradition. We begin with you. We follow the emotion, image, sensation, symbol, memory, landscape, guide, or experience that naturally begins to appear.
Learn how emotion, imagery, symbolism, parts of self, and inner landscapes can become part of the experience.
Explore the Spiritual Side Shamanic Journeying →Learn more about the shamanic influences within my work and how a guided journey may unfold.
Your Own Experience
Curious What Your Inner World Might Show You?
A Soul Journey is a private guided experience that can move through Past Life Regression, Inner Journey work, symbolic landscapes, guides, Higher Self experiences, or something completely different. We don't force the destination. We follow what begins to emerge.
Not ready for a private session? You can begin at home with my $27 Soul Journey Audio Course and start discovering how your own inner experience naturally communicates with you.