There are decisions that cannot be thought through. You have all the information, have weighed the options and spoken with the right people. And still something remains open. A hesitation that cannot be argued away. A direction that feels right without your being able to say exactly why.
In classical business logic, that is a problem. In my work, it is a starting point.
What Harner Shamanic Counseling is, and what it is not
Harner Shamanic Counseling is a method developed by Michael Harner, founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, in the early 1980s. The foundations of Core Shamanism grew from his decades-long engagement with shamanic practices in different cultures. What matters here is the choice he made deliberately: to separate the core structure of shamanic journeying from its specific cultural contexts. Not out of indifference towards those cultures, but as a clearly articulated methodological decision.
The underlying idea is that the basic structure of shamanic journeying arose independently in many cultures. What Harner describes is not the property of any single tradition, but a human capacity that has found similar expression across different cultures. The method of Core Shamanism that he developed allows people to integrate this practice into their own cultural and philosophical framework without having to adopt another culture’s cosmology.
This is not appropriation, but an attempt at the opposite. It is a conscious decision not to pretend to be Lakota, Tuvan or Sámi when one is not. The method seeks to protect both the integrity of the cultures from which the observations came and the honesty of the practitioner.
On the language: power animal and helping spirit
HSC nevertheless uses terms such as power animal and helping spirit. This is a deliberate phenomenological choice, not the adoption of a particular mythology. The terms describe what people encounter in the experience in a way that is archetypally accessible and connected to deeply rooted symbolic patterns of human experience.
The alternative would have been to invent an entirely new glossary. But that would create another problem: beginning with definitions rather than experience. A phenomenological approach through familiar images and figures is more direct and more honest because it describes what is actually perceived without immediately pressing it into a new system of interpretation.
Why this language works: Campbell, Jung and the universality of the archetypal
One observation is confirmed repeatedly in my practice: for people shaped by Western culture who open themselves to this particular experience, the images that arise in the Shamanic State of Consciousness are surprisingly accessible. Power animals, wise teachers, thresholds, journeys into other worlds: these motifs are not alien. They are familiar, even to people who have never encountered shamanic work before.
The reason is not a specific cultural transmission. It lies in what Joseph Campbell described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the monomyth: the observation that basic mythic structures, departure, initiation and return, arise independently across human cultures. Campbell traced these patterns comparatively across millennia and continents.
C. G. Jung developed a psychological account of this through the collective unconscious and archetypes. Figures such as the wise one, the animal as a source of strength, the messenger and the threshold can be understood not merely as cultural constructions, but as deeply structured patterns of human experience. Their expression differs from culture to culture, while their underlying form remains recognisable.
For practice, this means that people raised in Western cultural contexts already carry a repertoire of archetypal images through myth, fairy tale, literature and film, even when that repertoire has a secular colouring. The wolf in the fairy tale, the eagle as symbol, the wise elder by the roadside: these are not exotic images. They belong to a shared symbolic grammar that sits deeper than conscious cultural knowledge.
This helps explain why the language of HSC can work even for people with no spiritual background who use the method pragmatically. Archetypal images do not require belief. They require openness to what actually arises in experience.
A note on the historical context
Harner developed the foundations of Core Shamanism in the 1970s and Harner Shamanic Counseling in the early 1980s. That matters because the neurophysiological research now used to describe such states was not available at the time. EEG methods for measuring cortical activity in the theta range, research into the Default Mode Network, and studies of rhythmic sensory stimulation and altered perception all belong largely to more recent decades.
Harner and the researchers of his time could only describe what they observed empirically in the language then available. The phenomenological vocabulary was not a rejection of science; it was the most fitting language available to them. More recent neurophysiological research supports essential aspects of what Harner and his colleagues described in practice: that such states can be real, reproducible and open to explanation in terms of their effects.
What happens in the brain
The acoustic perception of rhythmic drumming in this frequency range can synchronise cortical activity towards theta waves, around four to eight hertz. This range is familiar from sleep and dream research: it appears in the hypnagogic transition between waking and sleep, in phases of deep meditation and during creative insights.
Studies of rhythmic sensory stimulation also point to changes in the Default Mode Network, the network associated with self-referential thought, rumination and the maintenance of our narrative sense of self. In the Shamanic State of Consciousness, the DMN is not simply switched off. Its activity changes. Analytical, linear thinking becomes less dominant, while connections associated with intuitive pattern recognition, emotional processing and embodied cognition can become more accessible.
What emerges is a state of consciousness in which connections can form that the filtering logic of waking consciousness usually suppresses. Not a loss of contact or attention, but a precise and receptive mode of awareness from another perspective.
What this has to do with decisions
Many difficult decisions in organisations and personal life are not information problems. The facts are known. The deeper difficulty is that the person deciding is themselves part of the system about which the decision must be made. They cannot step outside it. Their assumptions, attachments and fears about possible consequences colour perception without being directly visible.
The Shamanic State of Consciousness offers another form of access. Not through distance, but through a changed way of seeing. Looking back on such sessions, people often describe having seen or felt something they already knew but had not wanted to see. Or they recognise a direction that suddenly feels clear even though none of the external facts have changed.
That is not magic. It can be understood neurophysiologically: when analytical filtering briefly becomes less dominant, signals that were previously lost in the noise can come through. Bodily knowledge. Emotional truth. Pattern recognition that had already taken place below the threshold of conscious awareness.
How I work with this
Harner Shamanic Counseling is not an esoteric offering at the margins of my practice. It is a clearly framed method that I use in one-to-one settings when someone reaches a point at which further analysis no longer helps.
This may be a founder facing a pivotal decision and noticing that rational thought keeps moving in circles. A leader sensing a change they cannot yet name. A person in transition for whom the inner logic of the next step is not yet tangible.
The setting is clear: there is a question, a protected space and a defined duration. I accompany the process. What arises is considered together afterwards, not interpreted for the person, but integrated with them.
I make no promises of healing or enlightenment. I create conditions in which another kind of knowing may become accessible. What the person does with it remains their own.
If this speaks to something you are facing, I am always open to a conversation.