Shamanism and Sexuality: The Development of Capability

For eleven years I’ve been part of conversations, some of them even confrontational, about what a shaman actually is.
On one end, you’ll hear that shamanism belongs only to specific lineages: born in Peru, born into a tribe in North America, initiated in a bloodline that goes back generations. Anything else “isn’t shamanism.” On the other end, you’ll hear the opposite: that anyone can simply declare themselves a shaman, no roots, no rigor, no definition required at all.

I’ve sat with both extremes for over a decade, and I’ve landed somewhere in the middle: somewhere concrete, somewhere I can actually stand on.
For me, shamanism comes down to one thing: the development of capability.

Specifically, energetic capability,
The ability to access more energy, to hold that energy once you’ve accessed it, and to do something with it. That’s it. That’s the root of it. And here’s the part that matters: those capabilities aren’t reserved for the chosen few. They’re available to everyone. Does that make everyone a shaman? No. But it means everyone has access, in their own way, to shamanic capability. A shaman is someone who feels called to make that capability their entire life — not something they put on and take off, but the way they choose to live.

Merging Is the Mechanism

When someone sits with me and says, “this is going on, I’m struggling with this” what happens isn’t that I diagnose them or fix them. What happens is that I merge with them. I become one with their field, and in that oneness, I can feel the patterns they’re carrying not just hear about them, feel them. And because we’re merged, the resources available to me become available to them, for as long as we’re together.

This is why I say a real ceremony must be void of intention but full of intentionality. Intention is the destination I want this outcome, I want that result. Intentionality is what the road is made of — this is what I’m holding right now, will you hold it with me? Those are two entirely different postures, and confusing them is where a lot of “healing work” goes wrong.

The Word Itself

Shaman comes from saman, a word that originated near Mongolia, among the Manchurian tribes. It meant “the one who knows”. But not knowing in the sense of facts or ideas. An energetic knowing. The ability to vibrate like something else, to know something so completely it can’t be reduced to language.

I mention this because so much of the gatekeeping I’ve encountered over the years hinges on geography and bloodline, as if shamanism could only have started in one place. But shamanism is as old as the human being itself. No single lineage owns the concept.
Which is exactly why cultures that never touched each other, from Mongolia to Egypt to Greece, independently arrived at practices that look strikingly similar.

Sex as a Path of Development

Sex, real, aware sex is one of the ways we develop shamanic capability.
Not sex for its own sake, not volume for volume’s sake. I mean being awake inside the orgasm.
If it lasts three seconds, as it often does for men, or ten seconds, as it often does for women can you actually be inside those seconds?
Can you breathe with it? Vibrate with it? Expand it?

My own teacher, Kenneth Ray Stubbs, once asked a group of shamans how he’d developed so much energetically.
They pointed to a lover of his, a woman who had no idea how developed she was, but whose energy, met repeatedly and consciously, developed his. Because underneath the physiological act of orgasm, there’s an energetic one happening in parallel: a merging of essence, of soul. That merging, held with awareness, is a shamanic ceremony.

The Egyptians and the Greeks Already Knew This

The Egyptians built sexuality directly into shamanic ritual. They’d smoke or drink blue lotus, hold ceremonies, sometimes have sex within temple chambers and through that union, healing happened. Two beings become one; whatever resources each held separately become available to both.

The Greeks approached it differently, more archetypally. They understood erotas as a language: what shows up in your sexual desire and fantasy is telling you what you’re missing, what quality you need to become more whole. If longing pointed toward Aphrodite, you went and worked with Aphrodite. If it pointed toward Apollo, you sought wisdom. The fantasy wasn’t indulgence, it was diagnosis, and then devotion.

Fear, Doubt, and the Yes in Your Body

The single thing I work on most with people walking this path isn’t technique. It’s doubt. Doubt in the process, doubt in themselves, doubt in source. My own answer to it has never been an argument but rather a question.

I ask my own body: would I do this if I knew nothing in my life would change as a result?
The day I could answer yes to that was the day everything in my life changed.

Fear and doubt aren’t the same animal, though they travel together. I like to say fear is the boyfriend of doubt, and frankly, they’re both polyamorous; they’ll get in bed with anyone. In the conversation that closed this call, someone put it beautifully: doubt is uncertainty, fear is about safety. The medicine for doubt is trust. The medicine for fear is love. Not opposites. Medicine. Doubt tends to live in the mind; fear and love live in the body. Which is why, more often than not, the way through doubt isn’t more thinking. It’s getting out of your head and back into your body.