Five Reasons Why You Want Your Children To Know How To Go On A Shamanic Journey

Most children I know journey—practice shamanic journeying—traveling through their imagination.

Only a few know that what they are doing has a name and is a common practice. Many adults, traveling through their imagination, are also unaware that what they are doing is often considered shamanic journeying.

Most children just travel without a name or interpretation. Unfortunately, many also avoid sharing their experiences.

Some children feel it is real. They sense there is a power beyond their experiences. Possibly, some of their experience affects their daily life, providing proof that it is more than daydreaming.

If they share, most likely, they will be told it’s just their imagination.

Those fortunate enough to receive the proper guidance and encouragement from the significant adults in their lives will walk with a most powerful tool for navigating life.

Shamanic journeying is an amazing and empowering tool that many children use without even understanding that this tool has a name and recommended practices.

Before outlining the reasons why you want your children to know how to go on a shamanic journey, let’s first understand what shamanic journeying is.

What is Shamanic Journeying?

In the first step I took in my shamanic training, the teaching about journeying was by experience only. We were taught pieces of the map. The cosmic map. Specific ‘locations’ where we could travel to mediate healing.

At first, it was very confusing for me. I had already been journeying all my life, and in greater intensity after my NDE. Slowly I learned the shamanic cosmology and the map it offers for traveling in the cosmos. Some of the experiences were similar to what I experienced in my journeys before I started studying. Some were different. Later, I was invited to be a co-creator of my own map.

Simplified, shamanic journeying is a form of meditation. Some refer to it as the shaman’s way of meditating. Hence the word ‘shamanic.’ Like most energetic and shamanic practices, the way to understand the journeys intellectually is by experiencing them. Yet, as humans, most of us like to combine experience with some mental understanding.

Types of meditations

There are numerous ways to meditate.

These ways fall into two broad categories:

(a) Meditations that help us quiet our mind and bring awareness, such as to our breath or current experience. These include practices that focus on being. In a sense, mindfulness, now being offered to children in many schools worldwide, fits this category.

(b) Meditative practices that follow a thread of content. Guided meditations are such an example. In guided meditations, someone, the facilitator or guide, offers the person meditating a map to follow. What should they visualize or imagine? Where should they go in their imagination? And so forth.

By their nature, guided meditations are very detailed, which helps the listener follow along and avoid the wandering of the mind. This is one of the challenges many experience when trying to meditate to clear any thoughts or just be in awareness.

Developing the ability to concentrate for longer times, just noticing and letting go, takes time. Often, starting with mindfulness or guided meditations facilitates the ability to concentrate and avoid distractions.

For many of us, when someone says they meditate, the image is of sitting, cross-legged, motionless, and with our eyes closed.

For our purpose of understanding shamanic journeying with children, let’s bring to our shared awareness other modes of meditation such as movement, dance, forest bathing, breathing techniques, drawing, and many other activities that often are the ways children ‘meditate’ or ‘journey.’

From advanced guided meditation to shamanic journeying

Similar to guided meditations, the focus in shamanic journeying is on the thread that appears in the journey: the content/information/guidance retrieved in the journey. We do not try to just bring awareness to the thought or visualization that comes up while we journey. We focus on it, follow it, and allow it to evolve, seeing where it takes us.

In a shamanic journey, guided by someone else, many sections of the guidance are left open, and elements that we cannot make up ourselves can be experienced. Such as meeting a power animal or higher guidance and receiving guidance or information from it, clearing of density that later affects our physical body as well, nourishing ourselves with energy, and much much more.

When we know the map and journey ourselves, much more can open up.

Shamanic journeying is a basic tool in shamanic practices and is also used in many other spiritual modalities. When journeying, we intentionally expand our energetic field and take our awareness, our dream body, our luminous body (we give it various names) and travel to other dimensions, allowing ourselves to experience and see what cannot be seen through our physical eyes.

One can travel to different dimensions of reality, experience energetic aspects of our physical reality, communicate with guidance, retrieve information or soul aspects, mediate healing, and more. The mythical healing stories I share here come to me in the form of simple shamanic journeying, as images that evolve into stories.

How does Journeying happen?

Journeying happens through our awareness.

There are various explanations of what actually happens. Some say that our energy body—the energy that surrounds our physical body and informs it—leaves our physical body and goes somewhere else. I will return to where this somewhere else is in a few paragraphs.

Others explain that there is a cord connecting us to the universe, and that our energy stays around us, and that by journeying, we connect to the thread that connects us to the universe or the energy field. Through this connection, we can experience other places.

I feel that when I journey, my energy field expands. I don’t leave my body. I expand. The expansion connects me to the energetic field around me. Once I am connected to the energetic field, I can follow threads to various locations—both mine and those of my clients, when mediating healing for them.

I am sure there are more scientific explanations for journeying. And maybe at some point, I will research them and add them here.

Guiding children, teens, and families in journeying, I’ve learned that most parents, and especially children, feel most comfortable with the last explanation—that of us expanding and thus being able to connect to greater wisdom and sources of healing and information.

More than once, especially when first journeying with teens, at least one person in the group usually brings up the fear of leaving their body.

Once they understand that in journeying, we don’t leave the body but expand, their comfort level in experiencing this is anchored.

After experiencing the journeying, which is very basic in the first steps, most don’t ask for additional intellectual explanations. They know it, are reminded of their ability to travel, and walk with the personal experience of how healing and powerful it is. Thus, the chatter of the mind is calmed down.

Explore the Shamanic Journeying with Children & Teens Online Course: Deepen and Learn How to Share Shamanic Journeying with the Children & Teens in Your Life. 

Drumming & Shamanic Journeying

Drumming is an important element of shamanic journeying. Drumming, in specific rhythms, affects our brain waves and helps to induce an altered state. When we are in an altered state, non-ordinary realities are more acceptable.

BUT! Not all children or teens like drumming or are ready for the altered state drumming induces.

While drumming can enhance the richness of most children’s and teens’ journeys, not all of them enjoy it. Why?

(1) Many are sensitive to noise; thus, the loud drumming distracts them or, even worse, awakens the stress they experience in noisy environments.

(2) There are children and teens for whom the altered state created when their journeying is accompanied by drumming is too expansive. It takes them further than they are ready to go or are mature enough for.

(3) Daily drumming is not accessible to most children and teens. And they already journey without it.

(4) In general, drumming while journeying mostly takes place in two forms: either a steady rhythm or a rhythm that is in line with the invitation offered by the guide to the journey. The better kids know the map, the more they go wherever their heart takes them, regardless of any instruction or invitation. Thus, if the drumming is in a changeable rhythm, my experience has taught me that it often confuses them (especially the younger ones).

I love the drumming sound and the invitation it brings. So do most adults I know. However, as with every element, practice, or tool we wish to share with our children, we should always explore and verify that what we know as common, expected, or customary may not always work for them or be in their best interest.

Where do we travel to in Shamanic Journeying? What is the shamanic map?

Many cosmologies paint a picture of how the vast universe and the Earth within it operate and are structured.

There are also many maps that help us understand who we are and the energetic aspects of our being. These maps offer us a path by which to evolve and grow. Different maps emerge from diverse cultural perspectives.

Beautifully, most of the central elements in these maps converge and are connected. One such known work is the work of Caroline Myss, showing how the Hindu chakra system, the Christian sacraments, and the Kabbalah’s tree of life all converge, sharing many aspects and meanings (See: Anatomy of the Spirit, by Caroline Myss, 1997). Many others have shown this same idea, relating and connecting us to ancient shared wisdom.

There is some controversy about the source of the shamanic map. Is it indigenous? And from which culture? Or maybe it is slightly adjusted or Westernized? By which teacher? And what other maps, such as those originating in Eastern cultures, have been integrated into the shamanic maps of the Western world?

These are important questions, but they are not within our focus here.

Generally, in today’s Western/modern shamanic conceptualization, the classic shamanic map distinguishes between the under-world, the middle-world, and the upper-world. It also offers a map of additional dimensions of reality.

Allegedly, we travel/journey to each of these locations for different types of healing.

In reality, and these are two slightly funny words to be using when writing about dimensions beyond our physical reality, the map of the cosmos is enormous. It goes far beyond the maps as they were once taught.

In current times, with veils constantly being pulled back, shamanic practitioners, energy healers, and cosmic journeyers can reach very distant ‘locations’ to retrieve information, channel wisdom, and mediate healing to humans and the Earth.

The younger children are, with their mind less trained, and more in the now, they fly. They soar to other dimensions of reality with no awareness this is what they are doing. They have their physical reality, while other realities of energies and beings and more, those that as adults, we refer to as non-ordinary realities, are just as active and just as much a part of their lives.

Shamanic Journeying with Children

Five reasons why you should want your children to know how to go on a shamanic journey

(1) Children have an innate ability to journey. Using their imagination, they touch on information from the energetic field we are all connected to. So if they journey anyway, it is better to have them know how to do so in a healthy and safe way.

(2) Journeying is an adventure, rich and healing, and it is an experience through which children can easily access and receive energetic nourishment.

(3) Journeying facilitates the development of children’s ability to imagine. And imagination is key to becoming creators.

(4) Many children today find that it is not always easy for them to ground (see more on grounding here). Practicing their journeying abilities also anchors their ability to ground back after a journey, an ability that later can aid in any moment they need to ground.

(5) Journeying is a safe and healthy method for connecting with one’s intuition, knowing, or spiritual guidance. For children, it becomes a way to receive compassionate, loving guidance on every aspect or challenge they face in their growth.

Underlying assumption: Children Journey!

The children I meet cannot be considered a representative sample. That said, I feel comfortable claiming that most children journey, as do adults—at least those who have maintained an active imagination.

How often do you find yourself imagining something? Your mind wanders, but not toward the list of things you still have to get done, but to somewhere else? To nature? To a wished-upon circumstance? Some pick up a thread from an image evolving in their minds, and without even noticing, a whole story has been told. And suddenly, the clock shows it is half an hour, or even an hour later, and you wonder where you are?

Children do this as well. And the younger they are, with their mind less trained, and more in the now, they fly. They soar to other dimensions of reality with no awareness this is what they are doing. They have their physical reality, while other realities of energies and beings and more, those that as adults, we refer to as non-ordinary realities, are just as active and just as much a part of their lives.

They journey with their eyes closed and when they are relaxed, and they journey while active, moving around, and being with other children. Play, when given the freedom to imagine, takes them to many places.

Some journey mostly during their sleep, and others as daydreaming.

Did you also do this when you were a child? Do you still now?

Teaching children the map

When reminding adults about their ability to journey, we start by teaching a map. When we know the map of where we are going, driving there usually feels a little safer and calmer.

When our child goes to school or a friend’s house for the first time by themselves, many parents make sure they know the way there, the way back, and how to stay safe when crossing the road or if a stranger approaches them. Once we know they have learned the rules and the map of the nearby area, we allow them to expand it, going to farther places, maybe taking the train or the bus. Much depends on who our children are, where we live, and our approach as parents. Either way, as they grow, their map expands.

The same is true with journeying to other dimensions.

Should we teach them a map?

Journeying connects us to a greater field of energy. Most of what children encounter is magical and positive. Yet, some children enjoy the expedition and adventure so much that they often find themselves journeying too far. This is more characteristic of journeying within one’s dreams. But it can also happen in intentional journeying when awake.

My experience with the children and families I guide is that teaching the map (a very basic and specific map, suitable for children and age-appropriate) is most valuable for several reasons.

• It calms us, their parents. Many parents, who did not receive guidance as children, carry negative memories from their journeying. From confusion to scary encounters where they felt lost or did not know what to do.
• Sharing is not always easy. We go to such magnificent places that many children (as many adults) don’t always find the words to describe them. When both child and parent know the same map, sharing is easier. The child can say, I went to healing pools, and the mother immediately knows where that is and how that looks (although we each imagine these places slightly differently).
• When the children know the map and where they can go, their wandering and explorations usually narrow to those ‘locations’ that they know. These ‘locations’ are so rich that the urge to journey too far and to unknown places decreases.
• Knowing the map also means knowing the rules of how to journey within it, and how I travel from one place to another and find my way back.

Children journey with their eyes closed and when they are relaxed, and they journey while active, moving around, and being with other children.

 

Explore the Shamanic Journeying with Children & Teens Online Course: Deepen and Learn How to Share Shamanic Journeying with the Children & Teens in Your Life. 

Basic concepts in any shamanic journeying that are especially important with children

• We always travel only to known places on the map.
• We always start from and return to the same exact ‘imagined’ location. Preferably a place we also know from this lifetime, which helps us to ground.
• We meet our guidance or power animal, and we journey together. This way, when we are not sure of something in our journey, we have a guide who we know and trust to guide us.

Summary

Shamanic journeying is an amazing and empowering tool that many children use without even understanding that this tool has a name and recommended practices.

When we offer children the framework of knowing the maps, positive healing practices, and safe journeying, including how to ground back, we slightly limit them. I often wonder if this binding of them is right. Spirit, my guidance, repeatedly assures me that yes, it is. As without the framework, many children get lost in journeying, develop fears, and thus stop using this essential tool. A tool that is part of who we all are and that is there for us to stay connected to our essence and to walk life on Earth with guidance.

Wish to know more about shamanic journeying?

See a recommended list of books on shamanic journeying HERE, and about a specific book for teens: The Hidden Worlds.

Did you get here from an older post or pin offering a free guide to shamanic journeying with children? Until recently, there was indeed one offered – Now, based on feedback from parents who worked with the free guide and reflected they need more, I offer a comprehensive course on shamanic journeying with children and teens.