Ancient wisdom
for modern healing
Shamanic healing is one of humanity's oldest healing traditions — a profound path of working with the natural world, the spirit realm and the deeper self to restore wholeness and wellbeing.
Shamanic healing is one of humanity's oldest healing traditions — a profound path of working with the natural world, the spirit realm and the deeper self to restore wholeness and wellbeing.
An Ancient Practice
Shamanism is the world's oldest spiritual and healing tradition, found across virtually every indigenous culture on earth — from the forests of Siberia and the steppes of Central Asia to the Celtic lands of Ireland and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. At its heart is a fundamental understanding: that illness and suffering often have roots that go deeper than the physical body alone.
The shamanic practitioner works as a bridge between the visible world and the unseen realms of spirit, nature and ancestral wisdom. Through this bridge, they seek to identify and address the deeper causes of imbalance — whether emotional, spiritual or energetic — and to facilitate a return to wholeness.
In the hands of a skilled and experienced practitioner, shamanic healing can be a deeply transformative experience, offering insight, release and a renewed sense of connection to oneself and to life.
"The soul always knows what it needs to heal. Shamanic work creates the space for that healing to unfold."
How It Works
Shamanic healing rests on the understanding that everything in existence is alive with energy and spirit. When we experience trauma, loss, prolonged stress or spiritual disconnection, this energy can become fragmented, blocked or depleted — manifesting as physical illness, emotional pain, a persistent sense of being lost, or a feeling that part of oneself is simply not present.
Shamanic healing works to restore this lost energy and vitality. Common practices include soul retrieval — a ceremony to recover parts of the self that have become separated through trauma or shock — extraction healing, which removes energetic blockages or intrusions, and ancestral healing, which addresses patterns and burdens inherited across generations.
The practitioner typically enters an altered state of consciousness — often facilitated by rhythmic drumming — to journey into non-ordinary reality on behalf of the client, seeking the guidance of helping spirits, power animals and ancestral allies.
Shamanic work is not a replacement for medical or psychological care; it works alongside and complements it — addressing dimensions of a person's wellbeing that conventional medicine may not reach.
Shamanic Practices
Every shamanic healing is unique, tailored to the individual's needs as understood through the initial consultation and the guidance received during the healing itself. Joy draws on a rich body of training and experience to bring forward whichever practices are most appropriate.
In shamanic understanding, trauma, shock or prolonged stress can cause parts of the soul to separate as a protective mechanism. Soul retrieval is the ceremony of journeying to find and restore these missing aspects of self — often experienced as a profound sense of coming home to oneself.
Energetic blockages or 'intrusions' — patterns of dense or misplaced energy that do not belong to the individual — can accumulate through difficult experiences. Extraction work locates and removes these intrusions, freeing the energy body and restoring healthy flow and vitality.
In shamanic cosmology, each person has guardian animal spirits that walk alongside them. When a connection to these allies has been lost, a person may feel depleted, unprotected or lacking direction. Power animal retrieval restores this connection, bringing renewed energy and clarity.
Many of the patterns we carry — emotional, physical, behavioural — have their roots not in our own lives but in the experiences of those who came before us. Shamanic ancestral healing works to transform inherited burdens and reclaim the gifts and strengths of the ancestral lineage.
Drawing on many years of apprenticeship and trainings in Plant Spirit Medicine, Joy works with the healing spirits of plants through ceremony and relationship. Plant spirit work offers gentle yet potent support for emotional clearing, grounding and reconnection to nature.
As a certified Sacred Art Practitioner and Facilitator, Joy also uses the creative process as a path to healing and self-knowledge. Sacred art making bypasses the analytical mind and opens a direct channel to the deeper self — a powerful complement to other healing work.
Joy's Training & Experience
Joy's shamanic practice is the product of sustained, serious training across multiple traditions and teachers spanning over eighteen years. She approaches this work with the same rigour, care and whole-person perspective that characterises her homeopathic practice.
Her training spans core and classical shamanism as well as specialised work with the womb as a vessel for alchemy — a six-year deepening that brought together the wisdom of the feminine with the oldest healing traditions of the earth.
Five year training in core and classical shamanism in both UK and Ireland.
Six years deepening shamanic practice — working with the womb as a vessel for alchemy
Five-year apprenticeship in Plant Spirit Medicine with Carole Guyette at Derrynagittah, Ireland
Certified Sacred Art Practitioner and Facilitator of Sacred Art workshops
An Integrated Approach
One of the distinctive things about Joy's practice is the way she weaves shamanic healing with homeopathy — two profound systems that, while very different in form, share the same deep commitment to treating the whole person at every level of their being.
For patients who are open to it, Joy can draw on both in a way that feels entirely natural — listening deeply to each person's needs and bringing forward whichever approaches are most aligned with their healing journey.
Shamanic healing can be particularly supportive for people experiencing:
A sense of feeling lost, disconnected or not quite themselves · Grief and bereavement · Patterns that repeat despite other therapeutic work · The aftermath of trauma or shock · A desire to understand themselves more deeply · Spiritual questions or a longing for meaning and purpose · Exhaustion or a feeling of life-force depletion
Joy offers shamanic healing in person and, for certain forms of work, via Zoom. Do reach out with any questions.