Shamanic Spirit Medicine, The Good Medicine Cave, Kapaa, HI (2026)

Founded by Scott Silverston in 2015. Grounded, Practical, No drugs — Healing That Works! UNLOCK YOUR POTENTIAL with Shamanic Spirit Medicine, the original online Shamanism School. Explore a path of self-discovery and healing through our unique curriculum developed by Scott Silverston. Whether you prefer live Zoom courses, self-paced video learning, or in-person retreats, we offer a way to study that suits your style. Our comprehensive curriculum covers everything from the Fundamentals of Shamanism to all you need to launch your Shamanic Healing Practice, empowering you to cultivate your unique gifts and live into your full potential as a person and a healer. Shamanic Spirit Medicine's Apprenticeship Training is a transformative journey where you will work personally with Scott every step of the way.

09/10/2026

A Shaman's Sacred Tools - The Drum, The Rattle, And The Feather

The drum is the first tool of the shamanic healer, but it is not the only one. Master drum maker David Craig describes a small family of sacred tools that traditional practitioners work with, each one made with care and each one alive with spirit. Like the drum, they are tools of prayer, and they are treated with the same respect.

The Rattle
We use the rattle in many ways: to call in our spirit helpers, to clear energy, open a doorway or close the healing space at the end of a session. It is made much like the drum, from rawhide shaped and dried, sometimes as a simple circle and sometimes in the form of an animal such as a turtle or a bison. Inside are small stones. Some stones, when shaken in the dark, strike one another and spark. That flash in the darkness is part of the calling, a signal to the spirit helpers that we are ready to work.

The Feather Fan
The feather fan, or wand, is used to clear a space and to carry our prayers upward on the smoke of burning sage. It can be as simple as a single feather or as full as an entire wing. David emphasizes that the spirit of the bird lives within each feather, so even the tiniest feather holds real power. One of his own most sacred fans, given to him by a Lakota elder, is just three feathers wrapped in red with a simple handle. A fan does not need to be elaborate or beaded to be holy.

When he makes a fan for someone, he chooses the feathers by where that person's power lives. A woman who works closely with raven and crow receives a fan of raven and crow. Another would carry other feathers. The handle often comes from a piece of weathered wood found along a riverbank or beach, aged wood that already has a life to it. Everything is personal, matched to the practitioner and the spirits they walk with.

Caring For Feathers
Feathers need tending, much like the drum. In life a bird oils its own feathers, so once they are in your care they can dry out. David suggests working in a little natural oil, a touch of olive oil, or even the natural oil from your own face, drawn along each feather. You can rinse feathers under water, and when one gets bent or wonky, gently run your fingers up the spine to straighten it and bring it back to life. A cared-for feather stays vital and strong.

Extraction Tools
In deeper healing work, practitioners also use extraction tools, a bone, a crystal, a claw, a talon, or the curved tip of an antler, to draw out intrusions that do not belong in a person. What is removed is never touched with the hands. It is returned to the earth or neutralized in salt water, given back to the mother who knows how to transform it. This is advanced, powerful work, done only with real training, protection, and care, never something to play with. We share it here not as instruction but so you understand the reverence these tools carry.

One Family Of Prayer
Drum, rattle, feather, and the rest are, in the end, one family. Each is made from the bodies of our relations, each holds a spirit, and each is a tool of prayer in the hands of someone learning to serve. To work with them is to enter a relationship of respect, with the tool, with the animal it came from, and with the spirits who answer when we call. That relationship, more than any technique, is what makes the work sacred.

Learning to work with these tools begins with learning to journey. If you feel the call, you can start with Fundamentals of Shamanism.

09/08/2026

THE WATER PATH
There are Two Roads Of Energetic Development: One of them promises a great deal but eventually costs you everything, the other helps you build steadily and consistently over time and rewards you with continued nourishmnet and growth for decades.

In the traditions that work with life force energy, there is a distinction between the Fire Path and the Water Path. Almost nobody talks about it publicly, which is unfortunate, because it explains most of what goes wrong in the modern spiritual marketplace.

The Fire Path
The Fire Path is the active, willful approach. The practitioner uses mental will and muscular engagement to drive energy upward through the body. The movements are rapid and intense. The energy is pushed rather than led. It is fast, it is dramatic, and it produces something that feels like a result almost immediately.

What it actually produces is a temporary expansion of the upper chakras without any substance underneath them. That expansion feels like insight. It feels like enlightenment. And it collapses the moment the practitioner stops forcing their energy upward, because there was never anything holding it up.

Generating insight by forcing the upper chakras open is a party trick. It is also a trick that ill-intentioned teachers use on students who do not understand that opening the upper centers this way leaves a person highly susceptible to manipulation and coercion. The same mechanism is at work when a skilled politician whips a crowd into fervor and reshapes what they believe. An open upper gate with nothing grounding it is an unlocked door.

The energetic cost is just as real. Driving energy forcefully causes imbalance, agitation, and in some cases serious disturbance. You are burning out the fire that drives the steam by consuming all the fuel. This is why I steer students away from kundalini yoga, kundalini-influenced qigong, forceful breathwork, and anything else that emphasizes the upward current before the downward current is established and embodied.

The Water Path
The Water Path is receptive. It leads energy rather than pushing it. It emphasizes relaxed, natural flow, restoration of the nervous system and the energy channels, and movement that goes down and in before it goes up and out. It is built on what the Taoists called wu wei, effortless effort, growing into a posture rather than straining into one.

The governing principle is simple: sinking before rising. We can safely cultivate only up to the point where we can maintain the downward current that acts as a natural ground wire for everything we are building. Exceed that, and the increased current has nowhere to go but into our nervous system as excess energy that dysregulates us.

Most of what I teach in the early stages is grounding. Filling the cauldron. Learning to root. Cultivating yin. The upward movement comes later, once there is something real underneath it, and when it comes it arrives on its own without forcing it, like an artesian spring rising out of the earth under its own pressure. You do not have to pump it, it arises naturally.

"The Fire Path Is Pushing the River. The Water Path Is Being the River."

Why Slower Is Better
The Water Path does not give you a peak experience on a weekend. It gives you a healthy nervous system that can hold what you are asking it to hold, now and decades in the future, and prepares you for the even deeper healing that we experience in Shamanic Journeys. Water yields to everything and still wears away stone. The slow, steady progress of gentle daily practice dissolves blockages that have obstructed the flow of life force in a person for decades.

Fifteen minutes a day, every day, will take you far further than two hours once in a while. The power builds slowly. Be patient with it.

I teach this material because I have watched what happens to people who take the other road, and because the students who come to me are often the ones repairing the damage from it. If you want to understand and embody a foundation that supports vitality, longevity and sustainable spiritual growth, this is what I teach in Cultivating the Energy Body. We start where the ground is.

Everything else we do, the perceiving, the healing, the seeing inside, rests on that foundation. If you would like to learn more, please visit the Shamanic Spirit Medicine Website.

09/03/2026

How a Shaman Moves Between Ordinary and Non-Ordinary Reality - A Holistic View of Consciousness

Our perception of reality is determined by the state of consciousness we're in when we perceive it. Right now, reading this in your physical body, you're in what I call Flesh Reality (sometimes called ordinary reality), the world we move through in normal waking consciousness. Here, the laws of physics hold: drop your keys and they fall. Your spirit body can fly, but your physical body cannot (at least not without an airplane).

There is another aspect of reality that is not bound by those constraints. Shamans call it the Dreamtime, the Spirit World, or sometimes non-ordinary reality. In the Spirit World, we can fly, breathe underwater, move in ways the physical world doesn't allow. It is every bit as real as ordinary flesh reality, it is a non-physical counterpart to it. When you travel in the Spirit World your physical body stays exactly where it is, in just the same way it does when you lie down and dream.

Journeying Is Not Dreaming, and It Is Not Psychosis
Most of us have had the dream of flying, soaring over the land or carried on the back of a bird, and then we wake. Traveling in the Spirit World is like that, with one crucial difference: in a shamanic journey, we enter with clear intention and keep voluntary control of our actions, rather than slipping in by accident through sleep.

There are many ways to reach non-ordinary reality, and not all of them are healthy or sustainable. Intuition and dreams are gentle doorways. But hallucination and psychosis are doorways too, and they are very different. When someone who hasn't received the mental-health care they need is overwhelmed, perceiving things they can't manage and unable to function in daily life, that is not shamanism. That is psychosis: a person who has gone too far into the Spirit World and cannot find the way back, unable to close the door between the worlds.

This is an essential distinction. A shaman knows how to enter the Spirit World at will, and to return at will. The point is never to escape material reality, it's to enrich it. The experiences we have in the Spirit World are meant to complement and strengthen our day-to-day life in the physical world. That is what makes it empowering rather than destabilizing.

The Middle Road: Staying Grounded Between the Worlds
If we want to be genuinely effective, both in helping others and in caring for ourselves, we have to maintain the balance between flesh and spirit. Our well-being depends on staying grounded in daily life while we simultaneously open to spiritual awareness in a safe and repeatable way. We take the middle road: opening, safely, while keeping both feet on the earth.

Cultivating that balance is a skill that has often been discarded in the search for instant enlightenment and peak experiences. Balance results from the ability to shift between states of consciousness deliberately, at will, with clear intention, in ways that do not harm our nervous system and which protect our physical, mental and emotional well being. Shamanic Spirit Medicine teaches you how to open the door, do the work, and close it again — safely, ethically, and at a time and place of your choosing.

Why We Don't Rely on Substances
To be truly free to command our own dreaming we cannot become dependent on ingesting substances to move between the worlds. We begin by learning to journey with the drum. And as we develop, many of us find we no longer even need the drum: we can drop in at will by entering that place of sacred silence within, relaxing and down-cycling our brainwaves into the Theta state, where the doorway between the worlds opens on its own.

This is how we expand our perception of reality in a way that is safe, sustainable, and entirely our own — grounded, drug-free, and under our own conscious control. I've written more about the brainwave states of shamanic journeying and how the drum guides us into Theta. And because we perceive the world through the agreements we carry, learning to move consciously between the worlds is also how we learn to command our own dreaming.

If you'd like to learn to journey this way — safely, at will, and without substances — that is exactly what we teach, beginning in Level 1 - The Fundamentals of Shamanism. You can find more information on the Shamanic Spirit Medicine wesbite.

09/01/2026

HOW TO REACH THE LEVEL WHERE REAL CHANGE HAPPENS
There's a particular pattern I notice with my clients who have already tried many other healing modalities before they find me. They've read books, seen intuitive healers, experimented with Reiki, worked with coaches, taken self-help and personal development courses, and they often understand their own patterns better than most therapists. They know where their fear comes from, why they keep choosing the same kinds of partners, what their anxiety is truly about. They can name it all, but they keep falling back into what they have said they no longer want.

It is important to understand: insight is not the same as change. Knowing why you do something often doesn't stop you from doing it again. And there's a reason for that, a reason that points directly at how real lasting change happens, and why so many well-meaning approaches don't deliver it.

The Agreement Underneath
Beneath every limiting pattern is an agreement.

Not a conscious one. You might have never sat down and decided "I'm not worthy of love" or "if I'm fully myself, I'll be abandoned." But somewhere, usually early, you drew a conclusion about who you are, the world around you, and your place within it that embedded these types of sub-optimal agreements as rules that you needed to accept and live by.

These agreements have been running your life ever since. They shape what you reach for and what you avoid, who you're drawn to, what you believe you deserve. They run underneath your thoughts, not within them. And that location — underneath — is the whole key to solving the problem.

Why Affirmations Don't Work
This is the part most people don't realize.

The agreement doesn't live in your thinking mind. It lives deeper, in the older, emotional centers of the brain — the part that learned, long before language, how to keep you safe. Your conscious mind can stand in front of the mirror every morning repeating "I am worthy, I am safe, I am enough," and the agreement underneath doesn't shift. The cake is already baked, the affirmations are the frosting that looks pretty on the outside.

That's why affirmations rarely hold. It's why willpower drains us and creates more stress, because you are constantly fighting against an underlying truth that you never consciously chose. It's why you can understand a pattern completely and remain entirely inside it. You're trying to reason with a part of yourself that runs on emotional rather than rational processes.

Real change requires going to the level where the agreement was made — and rewriting it there.

The Missing Step
Shamanic techniques are ancient, and they are powerful. Soul retrieval, extraction, rebalancing the energy body are all essential parts of the healing process.

But here is something I noticed, both in my training and in my own personal healing: in the traditional way, the agreements that run our lives change by accident, not by conscious design, they are rarely identified and spoken into conscious awareness.

Most shamans perform a ceremony or a healing and something shifts. But what shifts is often not clearly identified at its root. Perhaps a person's deeper agreements will accidentally rewrite themselves as a byproduct, unnamed and unrepeatable, or perhaps not. The healer wasn't aiming at the agreement, they were performing the ritual and trusting the ritual to do its work. It was effective, but not optimized. Sometimes the deepest layer moved. Sometimes it didn't. And no one could quite say how or why.

What I developed in Shamanic Spirit Medicine is a way to make that step conscious and deliberate — to stop leaving the most important part to chance.

Making It Conscious
Rather than performing a technique and hoping it reaches the root, I teach you how to use shamanic journeys to identify the specific agreements holding a pattern in place. You learn to locate it, remove the old imprinting that no longer serves you, and rewrite it in a way that allows you to live into your full potential.

I call this process Commanding Your Dreaming. In shamanic understanding, we dream our experience of reality according to the lens through which we perceive the world. Our lens is colored by the agreements we carry, and we live as though the world that we perceive through that lens is simply the way things are. Your agreements shape the dreams you've been living inside, often since childhood, without ever choosing them. When you learn to rewrite your agreements, you take command of your dreaming and consciously direct yourself to perceive the world through a new and more accurate filter. When your filters shift, you live differently.

The shamanic techniques are still there. Soul retrieval, extraction, energy work — I use all of them. But they're used as tools to support the overall process, not the full process themselves. Rewriting your agreements in a way that truly allows you to shift long ingrained patterns, learning to command your dreaming, is the goal - and it's why the healing lasts instead of fading back into the old groove a few weeks later.

This is my own approach, developed and tested over many years, and as far as I've found, it isn't taught anywhere else. It's the difference between healing that happens to you and healing you can understand, direct, and learn to do for yourself.

Lifelong Shifts
I saw the profound impact of Commanding Your Dreaming with one of my first students.

She was an experienced healing professional, someone who had spent her career helping others and had built a thriving practice in a major metropolitan area. But she had struggled with addiction since she was a teenager. We had just completed the classes on rewriting agreements. Two days later, she arrived for our next session and told me what had happened.

The night before, for the first time since she was thirteen years old, she had gone to sleep without the craving to get high or have a few drinks. The struggle was gone, the war between her will power and her imprinting was gone. The craving she had felt every single day of her adult life, through decades of struggle and forced periods of sobriety, simply wasn't there. No more internal conflict, no more push and pull, sobriety was no longer a fight, it had suddenly become a natural part of who she was.

"There hasn't been a day since I was thirteen when I didn't want to get high," she told me. "Until yesterday."

She hadn't used willpower. We hadn't talked her out of anything. We had gone underneath the behavior to the agreement driving it — and rewritten it where it lived. The craving didn't have to be fought, because the thing generating it was no longer in place.

That's the difference. And it's why I do this work the way I do.

One Session, or the Method Itself
People often ask whether they need a session or a course. The honest answer depends on what you're after.

A single healing session rewrites one imprint — we go to the root of a specific pattern, and we change it. For many people, that one shift is exactly what they came for, and it's enough.

But we don't carry just one self-limiting agreement. We carry dozens, hundreds, even thousands — small ones and large ones, layered over a lifetime. My courses exist for people who don't just want one pattern changed, but who want to learn the method itself and carry it for life.

In Level 1 - The Fundamentals of Shamanism, you learn the foundations of how to journey, and you first meet the agreements that run you in the background. In Level 2 - Shamanic Self Mastery, you learn to change those agreements in full: this is where you gain the power to command your own dreaming — to find your limiting agreements and rewrite them yourself. You learn a repeatable process that you can use again and again, for the rest of your life. A session is a healing. The courses are a skill you keep.

If you'd like to understand the deeper mechanics of how journeying reaches these levels of the mind, I've written separately about the brainwave states of shamanic journeying.

If you feel drawn to Shamanic Spirit Medicine, you can begin with a conversation, a healing session, or, if you want to learn the method yourself, Level 1 - The Fundamentals of Shamanism.

The pattern you've been managing for years was never a life sentence. It was an agreement. And agreements can be rewritten.

08/27/2026

When people picture energy healing, they often picture hands hovering a few inches off a body, working in the space around a person. They are visualizing the outer edges of our energetic structure. There are deeper levels, and at the deepest we find the place where our vital immunity resides.

Proper Energy Body Cultivation moves in stages, slowly yet consistently, progressing over time at a speed that allows the learner's nervous system to integrate each level before moving to the next. Every person is unique, and there is an art to finding the right pace to make consistent progress without overloading the circuits.

You start by learning to feel the breath in the belly. Then the lower dantian as a reservoir. Then qi moving through the channels and how to open and close the energetic gateways. As you become more proficient, you work at progressively deeper levels within the energetic circuitry of the body. You learn to lead qi through the blood, the organs, and eventually how to circulate it through the bone marrow.

When you can do that, you are working the interior of these circuits at the deepest energetic level available to us. You are nourishing the channels from inside the bones themselves, from the place where our immunity resides.

When you lead fresh qi through the center of the vertebrae and the long bones, washing the marrow, you are working directly on the tissue that generates your physical and energetic defenses. This is why bone marrow washing has been at the center of closely guarded martial arts traditions for centuries, and why the practitioners who know how to do it properly tend to age differently than others.

How To Get There
The first requirement is practice. This work is meant to be applied and embodied. Developing a cognitive understanding of energy body architecture and the proper methods of cultivation is important, but it is no replacement for consistent daily practice. Once we learn how to practice correctly, 15 minutes a day is all that is required to create an enduring shift in our energy body circuitry. That is a small investment for a huge reward.

The second is finding an effective method of confronting the obstacles that will inevitably arise on your path. The practices are powerful, and they dislodge long repressed energy that has been trapped deep within us. This is where Shamanic Journeying comes into play. Throughout the apprenticeship and later in the specialty courses that I offer, we are continually refining the process of removing blocks to the effective flow of life force energy through our system. As you progress through the levels of course study, you acquire more and more tools with which to unlock the next layer of healing.

A Continuous Unfolding
People sometimes want healing to be an event. One session, one course, one clearing, and then it is done and behind them. That's not how it works.

Creation is not a finished event, it is an active, ongoing, unfolding process, and we are part of it, which means that we unfold too. There is no final version of you waiting at the end of the work to be arrived at, we are works in progress, always.

My own practice looks very different than it did ten years ago because I am different now than I was then. I have grown, healed and evolved. My practice is alive, and as I continue deepening my personal healing, I increase my capacity to help others.

My Work Evolves Because I Do
I only teach what I embody. I receive instructions in my personal journeys about the next course I am supposed to teach, and before I bring it forward to share, I work within myself to master and embody it. The internal part, the embodiment, takes months. It is this unseen part of the continuous work that I do on myself which catalyzes Shamanic Spirit Medicine to be a living method that continually grows and evolves, renewing and regenerating itself.

The most valuable thing I can give you is the capacity to do this for yourself, for the rest of your life, whenever the next layer surfaces for you. To teach you how to embody a living healing modality that incorporates authentic Energy Body Cultivation with the ability to journey for yourself. To show you how to shift the hidden agreements that have been holding you back, how to recover your own soul parts, how to heal the conflicts buried in your ancestry and how to develop true Inner Vision so that you can continue to meet the depths of your healing as it unfolds.

This doesn't mean you do it on your own - far from it. Support is available at every step along the way: from me as a teacher, from others within our community of students, and by requesting a formal healing session. There are times for all of us when we hit a wall and may need assistance from someone else. The best healers and teachers recognize this within themselves as well as in others. It is what keeps us real, keeps us humble, keeps us human.

If a teacher or a healer pretends that they are already complete, that they have healed all there is to heal, walk away. Because that is a person who is not honest with themself and therefore cannot be authentic with you. Interdependence is the nature of all human life, of the entire Web of Life. If we stop growing, we stagnate. Maybe it is something we aren't able to see for ourselves because we are too immersed in the situation to get perspective, or maybe we unearthed a layer that is just too painful to confront on our own. Whatever it is, asking for help when we feel vulnerable takes courage.

What To Do When You Hit A Wall
Whatever the reason you hit a wall, the key is recognizing it for what it is and knowing how to navigate it effectively. You do deep healing, something profound shifts, a pattern that had run your life for decades loosens its hold, and you see a glimpse of your full potential. You feel inspired, energized, and have the sense that you have finally arrived.

Then you become aware of something else, something underneath the layer that you just resolved. Something older, deeper, heavier, or more frightening. Something you did not remember was there, and which you maybe wish you could put back in the dark place where it was hiding. This is what I call the wall.

Sometimes we are eager to confront the next layer, but sometimes we resist it because it can feel like too much. We feel what we walled off a long time ago, something we walled off because we never wanted to feel it again, and we might want to put it right back where we found it.

The Choice Point
When we fully recognize what is happening, we can confront it honestly and say "I am not ready to look at this right now." That's fine, it's appropriate, and it is something I do often. I name it for what it is, acknowledge the need to resolve it, and put it aside for a later time when I have the bandwidth to address it properly. Within a few days or a week, the space opens for me and I bring that layer of healing to completion. There is no need to push through something before its time. After putting it down for a moment, if we still feel overwhelmed by what we uncovered, that is the time to ask for help.

But if we are not aware of where we are in our process, if we are blind to the wall itself and shove what we uncovered behind it without fully acknowledging what is happening, the part of us that built that wall starts to play games with us. We can blame others, or the work itself, or pretend that our healing should be complete. This is the same part of us that created the wall to begin with trying to take over again, trying to make us feel safe by projecting our pain outwards in a sideways manner. It is what the psyche can do when standing at the edge of something it is not yet prepared to face. The logic mind tries to protect the identity it created in us by making the doorway to healing look like a bad idea.

If You Are At The Wall Right Now
Some of you reading this are standing at the wall right now.

Know that you do not have to go through it today. There is no schedule here, nothing to push through. Pushing at something before you are ready creates its own distress. Resting at the wall is perfectly fine. That is the medicine of winter time, and as long as you are honest with yourself about where you are and why you are choosing to rest, your time off will nurture and prepare you for the time when you are ready to resolve what you need to confront.

And know that you have support on your journey if you want it. I am here to assist with session work if requested. But you have to ask. Ethical healers never overstep boundaries by poking into territory another is not yet ready to face. We observe and share about the specifics of what we see below the surface only when invited.

Beyond The Apprenticeship
The Apprenticeship gives you the foundation and the core methods of Shamanic Spirit Medicine. For some people that is a complete path in itself. But it is not the end of what there is to learn.

The courses that came later evolved as my own practice evolved. Healing Our Ancestry, because I kept seeing how conflicts between the bloodlines of our personal ancestry are carried forward as conflicts internalized within us. Inner Vision, because I keep refining my capacity to perceive, and have been guided to share these methods for training and healing at a depth far greater than where most practitioners are satisfied.

Every one of my courses exists because I hit a wall, resolved what was behind it, and found healing on the other side. It is a gift that keeps giving, even when the challenge of confronting old pain that we buried for years seems too large for the moment.

There is always more to heal, more to learn, and more ways to grow - and there always will be.

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The Good Medicine Cave
Kapaa, HI
96746

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https://shamanicspiritmedicine.com/

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