How to Develop Your Shamanic Senses: A Guide to Sensing, Feeling, Projecting and Directing Energy
One of the most common questions I receive from people beginning a Shamanic practice is some version of: "How do I know if what I'm experiencing is real, or if I'm just making it up?" It's a beautiful question, and it points to something essential about Shamanic development — the cultivation of energetic fluency. In Shamanic practice, your ability to consciously sense, feel, project, and direct energy is not a mysterious gift that some people have and others don't. It's a skill. And like any skill, it develops through practice. In this article I'm going to walk you through exactly what these skills are, how they work, and how to begin developing them.
The Two Core Skills of Shamanic Consciousness Practice
At the foundation of all Shamanic energy work are two core capacities:
Sensing and feeling — the ability to perceive, receive, and notice energy: in your body, in your field, in the space around you, and in others. This is the receptive, listening side of energetic work.
Projecting and directing — the ability to move, transfer, and guide energy with intentional awareness. This is the active, expressive side of energetic work.
Every Shamanic practice draws on both of these. When you are Shamanic journeying to connect with a spirit guide, you are sensing and feeling — receiving information, images, sensations, and messages. You are also projecting — sending your consciousness into the spirit realm and directing your intention toward what you are seeking.
When you are working as a Shamanic healer with a client, you are sensing and feeling their energy field — perceiving blockages, intrusions, soul loss, and areas of depletion. And you are directing — inviting healing forces into their field, guiding energy to move, directing extraction work.
The two skills work together. Both are learnable and can be developed with practice, and the help of validation.
During my very first Shamanic training in 2003, I swallowed my initial anxiety (would I be able to do this? Is this real?) and dove right into trust and surrender of what I was sensing. We practiced Shamanic journeying in pairs, and when I shared with my partner what I had sensed and felt on her behalf, she quickly validated everything I had perceived as extremely accurate, helpful and relevant for her. I felt relieved to have many experiences like this early in my practice, that allowed me to build trust and confidence in my ability to accurately perceive energy. This helped me build a strong foundation for my growing Shamanic healing work and allowed me to consciously develop my skills.
"Am I Making This Up?" — The Question Every Beginner Asks
Let me speak directly to the doubt that most beginners carry.
When you extend your awareness into a space, into a body, or into the spirit realm, and you notice something — a sensation, an image, a feeling, a knowing — a part of your mind will immediately ask: "Is that real, or am I imagining it?"
Here is what I want you to know: the imaginal intelligence is real intelligence. The faculty of imagination is not the opposite of perception — it's a type of perception. The Shamanic realms and the beings who inhabit them communicate through exactly this channel: images, feelings, sensations, symbols, knowing.
When I first began my Shamanic practice in 2003, I felt the same concern I hear from many of my students — “how do I know I’m not just making things up?” But when I asked my teachers about it, they all encouraged me to embrace what I perceived as my imagination. From the Shamanic perspective, imagination is a valid sensory intelligence that allows the practitioner to transcend beyond ordinary reality into subtle realms of perception and collaboration with spiritual forces.
The way you develop trust in your perception is not by waiting to be sure before you act on it. It's by practicing, noticing, journaling, and tracking what happens over time. You begin to build a body of experience that tells you: yes, when I sense something in that particular way, it tends to be accurate.
This is why consciousness practices — the exercises for sensing and feeling, and projecting and directing — are so important. They build the muscle. They make the channel clearer, more consistent, and more trustworthy over time.
Three Exercises I Teach in the Foundations of Shamanism
Here are three consciousness practices I teach in the Foundations of Shamanism course to help students develop energetic fluency and confidence. You can begin working with them on your own.
Exercise 1: Sensing and Feeling in Space
Sit comfortably with your eyes closed and your hands resting palm up on your legs. Take a few deep breaths to arrive fully present.
Front and behind: Extend your attention to the space in front of your body. Feel it. Notice any objects there, and then feel beyond them — all the way to the wall in front of you, and maybe beyond. Then shift your attention to the space behind your body. Do the same. Then extend in both directions simultaneously. Notice whether one direction is easier than the other.
Sides, above, below: Repeat this process for the space to your right, your left, above your head, and below your feet. Then both sides simultaneously, both above and below simultaneously, and finally, all directions at once — 360 degrees around you in a sphere.
The expansion-contraction breath: On your inhale, draw all of your awareness as deep inside yourself as possible — compressed like a tiny, dense marble of light. On your exhale, expand your awareness out in every direction simultaneously, as far as you can. Repeat several times.
What this develops: Multi-directional awareness. The ability to sense and feel what is all around you simultaneously. In Shamanic journeying and healing work, this translates to the capacity to hold attention in multiple directions, dimensions, and relationships at once — what I call energetic bilocation and multilocation. This practice also supports the foundation of intentionally directing your energy through expansion and contraction. This direction can later be refined.
Exercise 2: The Layers of the Body
This is a practice in sensing and feeling into the interior of your own energy body.
Choose one hand. Bring your attention to it completely. Then move your awareness through the layers, one at a time, from outside in:
The skin — feel the air on your skin, the warmth, the texture
The muscles — feel their warmth and strength
The blood — feel the current, maybe feel your heartbeat in your thumb
The bones — feel the crystalline, mineral structure
The marrow — that spongy tissue where new blood is born
The light at the core of the marrow — your starseed consciousness
Then hold all layers simultaneously. Then transfer that full awareness to your other hand. Then jump back to the first. Then both hands simultaneously. Then slowly expand that whole-body awareness through your wrists, arms, shoulders, neck, head, chest, abdomen, hips, and all the way down to the tips of your toes.
What this develops: Precision of attention, depth of sensing, and the ability to project and direct awareness with intention. The "jumping" is projecting. The holding of all layers simultaneously is an advanced form of perceptual multilocation.
Exercise 3: The Tiny Self
This is a practice in deliberate perspective-shifting and Shamanic bilocation.
Project a tiny version of yourself — perhaps an inch tall — to stand in the palm of one hand. Then enter the perspective of that tiny self. Feel the squishy palm beneath your feet. Wrap your tiny arms around a finger like a tree trunk. Look up and see your full-size face above you.
Then jump your awareness back to your full-size self, looking down. Then back to the tiny self. Then jump your tiny self to your other hand. Then hold both perspectives simultaneously — the tiny self looking up, and the full-size self looking down — at the same time.
What this develops: Deliberate bilocation. The ability to project consciousness to another location and perceive from there. This is directly related to the kind of consciousness we work with in Shamanic journeying, soul retrieval, and healing work with clients — where we are simultaneously present in ordinary reality and in the spirit realm.
Over the years, I have found that students tend to already feel comfortable with one area of these exercises, and deeply challenged by others. Students who have an existing meditation or embodiment practice often feel very confident sensing the layers of the body, or the space around them. But many students feel challenged when asked to “jump” their awareness back and forth between their hands, feel into multiple directions simultaneously, or to shift their consciousness into their tiny selves. I have seen many students experience initial frustration (especially at the bilocation and projecting consciousness exercises), only to go practice for two weeks and happily report a newfound confidence and capacity.
The Connection to Shamanic Journeying
Everything in these three exercises is preparation for Shamanic journeying and Shamanic healing work.
In Shamanic journeying, you deliberately enter an altered state of consciousness — a trance-like state — in which you can access the spirit realm, connect with guides and teachers, and receive information and healing. This state is accessed through exactly the same capacities these exercises develop: the ability to extend your consciousness beyond your ordinary perception, to hold awareness in multiple realms simultaneously, to shift perspective, and to project and direct your attention with intention.
The altered state is not exotic or inaccessible. Many people enter it naturally — in dreams, in deep meditation, in moments of lucid waking, in flow states. The difference that these practices create is that you can enter it deliberately, safely, and skillfully — with a clear beginning and end, so that you're in collaborative, skilled relationship with the energy and the realms, rather than being at the whims of whatever happens to arise.
This is the difference between energy happening to you and being in conscious, collaborative relationship with energy.
How to Practice: Practical Suggestions
Daily practice: Even ten minutes a day with one of these exercises is excellent. Everything is cumulative and builds on itself. Use the exercises as a practical devotion — not something you do perfectly, but something you do consistently.
Work with nature: These practices come alive outdoors. Stand in front of a tree and extend your sensing into its energy body. Feel the layers — bark, sap, rings, heartwood. Project your tiny self up into a branch. Stand in a forest or a field and extend your awareness in all directions, feeling the energy of everything around you.
Journal: After each practice, take a few minutes to write down what you noticed. Over time, your journal becomes a record of your development — and a body of evidence that your perception is real, specific, and trustworthy.
Be patient with the doubt: The question "am I making this up?" is not a sign that something is wrong. It's a sign that you're doing something real enough to challenge your ordinary sense of what is possible. Stay with the practice. The trust comes.
Ready to Go Deeper?
Consciousness practices are just the base of the pyramid of energetic mastery. In the Foundations of Shamanism course, we move through all six layers of Energetic Mastery — consciousness, clearing, grounding, centering, cultivation, and protection — and you learn how to Shamanic journey, work with spirit guides, develop energetic safety and mastery, and build a grounded, meaningful personal practice over eleven weeks of live online classes.
If you're looking for personalized support in developing your Shamanic senses, Shamanic Mentorship offers a 1:1 container for exactly that kind of deep, sustained development.
And if you're just beginning, my free guide, Activate Your Shamanic Gifts, is the perfect starting point. It's free, and it will help you take your first real steps.
