Meditation and Shamanic Journey · How They Differ and Where They Meet

Meditation and shamanic journey are both inward practices, usually done with the body still and the eyes closed or covered. Meditation rests the attention on one focus, or on the present moment, and brings it back when it wanders. A shamanic journey, usually carried by a steady drumbeat, travels inward with an intention and meets what it finds there.

This page is the Global Spiritual Studies reference on how meditation and shamanic journey compare. It is drawn from primary sources (the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health on meditation, Mircea Eliade's study of shamanism, Michael Harner and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies on core shamanism, the 2014 PLoS One drumming study by Gingras, Pohler and Fitch, and the pathworking literature of the Western Mystery Tradition), and where those sources disagree each view is shown and credited. Global Spiritual Studies teaches flower essences as a contemplative practice and makes no health claims. This page compares the two practices; the stages of a drum journey and the speed of the drum are set out in What Is a Shamanic Drum Journey?

Two inward practices

Both words are used loosely. “Meditation” can mean almost any quiet inner practice, from a breathing exercise to a long silent retreat, and “journey” is sometimes used for any inner imagery at all, including a scripted visualization read aloud by a teacher. A clear comparison needs narrower senses, so this page uses the two that the main sources give.

Meditation here means what the US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health describes: a variety of practices that focus on mind and body integration, many of which keep the attention on one thing, such as the breath, a sound, an image or a mantra, while others keep attention or awareness on the present moment without judging it. A shamanic journey here means the practice taught by the anthropologist Michael Harner and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies: an inward journey, usually to steady drumming, in which the journeyer travels with a clear intention to meet helping spirits and is then called back.

Set side by side, the two share a great deal. Both turn the attention inward. Both are usually done sitting or lying down, with the eyes closed or covered. Both are practices, repeated over months and years, rather than single events. What changes is what you do once you are inward. Meditation stays and rests; a journey moves and meets. A third family of practices, guided visualization and the pathworking of the Western Mystery Tradition, sits between them, and it has its own section further down.

What meditation asks of you

Meditation is not one technique. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health notes that meditation has a history that goes back thousands of years and that many meditative techniques began in Eastern traditions. It is now taught both within religious traditions and in secular settings.

Across that variety, the Center's earlier fact sheet on meditation named four elements that most forms share: a quiet location with as few distractions as possible; a specific, comfortable posture, which may be sitting, lying down, walking or another position; a focus of attention, such as a word, an object or the breath; and an open attitude, letting distractions come and go without judging them. Two moves follow from those elements and recur in almost every form. You choose where the attention rests. When it wanders, you notice and bring it back, gently, again and again.

What meditation does not usually ask for is a destination. The meditator is not trying to get anywhere or to meet anyone. Even in forms that use an image, such as a visualized color or a single card held in the mind's eye, the task is to stay with that image rather than follow it somewhere. If you have tried a guided body scan, a breath practice or a chakra meditation, you already know this side of the comparison. The same contemplative move appears in Tarot meditation, where the focus is one card, held and returned to.

Meditation teachers differ on almost everything else: how long to sit, whether to count breaths, whether to sit with the eyes open or closed, whether to use a teacher's voice or silence. Those differences are real, but they are differences inside one family. The shamanic journey belongs to another.

What a shamanic journey is

Shamanic practices belong to many cultures, and their journeys are not all alike. The scholarly frame most writers start from is the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, whose Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l'extase (Paris, 1951; English edition Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1964) defined shamanism as a technique of ecstasy. Eliade's shaman is a specialist who leaves ordinary awareness to travel, ascending to the sky or descending to the underworld, and in his account of Central and North Asian practice the drum is one of the shaman's main means of making that journey. His survey shaped the field for decades, and it has also been criticized: the historian Ronald Hutton, among others, argues that Eliade oversimplified the variety of Siberian cosmology and practice and gave divination too small a place in it.

What most people in Europe and North America mean today by “a shamanic journey” comes from a narrower source. The anthropologist Michael Harner (1929 to 2018) set out a simplified, cross-cultural method in The Way of the Shaman (1980) and called it core shamanism. He founded the Center for Shamanic Studies in 1979; the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, established in 1985, took over the Center's work in 1987. The Foundation defines core shamanism as the universal, near-universal and common features of shamanism, together with journeys to other worlds, which it calls a distinguishing feature of shamanism. The 2014 PLoS One study by Gingras, Pohler and Fitch describes Harner's technique as probably the best-known shamanistic method in Western practice.

In the method Harner taught, the journeyer alters their awareness through what the Foundation calls sonic driving, especially repetitive drumming, and travels in what Harner called nonordinary reality. The destinations are the Upper World and the Lower World, with the Middle World as a third, and the purpose is to meet compassionate helping spirits, among them the animal spirits that core shamanism calls power animals. The journey ends with a change in the drumming. The Foundation's own recordings close with a fast callback rhythm that brings the journeyer back to ordinary reality.

Two cautions belong in any neutral account. First, core shamanism is a deliberately general method. The Foundation says its principles are not bound to any specific cultural group, which also means it is not the tradition of any Indigenous people and should not be presented as one. Second, the method has critics. The scholar of religion Daniel C. Noel, in The Soul of Shamanism (1997), reads Western neo-shamanism, Harner's included, as resting on cultural appropriation and Western fantasy, while the archaeologist Robert J. Wallis, in Shamans/Neo-Shamans (2003), examines the same controversy over neo-shamans' use of Indigenous practice in a more mixed light. A reader who takes up the practice inherits that debate along with it.

Where the two practices overlap

Four things are shared closely enough that a person who meditates already has a real head start on journeying.

Attention

Both practices train where the attention goes. Meditation names this directly as the focus of attention. A journey asks for the same skill in a different form: the Foundation for Shamanic Studies tells journeyers to be very clear about their intention before they begin, and holding an intention through fifteen or thirty minutes of drumming is itself an act of sustained attention. In both, the attention drifts, and in both the practice is the return to what you set out to do.

Posture and setting

The setting instructions are close to identical. The NCCIH fact sheet asks for a quiet location and a comfortable posture. The Foundation's drumming page asks the journeyer to sit or lie down in a quiet, dimly lit or dark room and to cover the eyes with a bandanna or other cloth to block out light. Gingras and colleagues report that Harner recommended a specific position for journeying: lying on the back with the left hand covering the eyes. In each case the outer world is dimmed so that the inner one has room.

Inward focus

Neither practice is about the room. Both close the eyes, or cover them, and both regard what happens inside as the place where the work is done. This is why the two are so often mentioned together, and why people who come to journeying from meditation tend to find the first stage, settling, already familiar.

A return

Both end with a deliberate return. A meditation session closes with a bell, a timer, a teacher's voice or simply opening the eyes. A journey closes with the callback, a change in the drumming that marks the way back to ordinary reality. The return is part of the practice in both cases, not an afterthought, and in both the person is expected to come back to the ordinary day.

Where they differ

The differences are as clear as the overlaps. Four of them carry most of the weight.

Intention

Meditation usually has a focus but no destination. A journey has both. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies asks the journeyer to be clear about the intention and about where they are going, and to use a departure point fixed in advance. The intention gives the journey its reason: a question to ask, a place to visit, a helper to meet.

The drumming research gives the intention a central place too. In the Gingras, Pohler and Fitch study, 39 participants, none of them experienced in shamanic journeying, listened for fifteen minutes to either repetitive drumming or instrumental meditation music, with either shamanic journeying instructions or relaxation instructions. Those who heard drumming with the shamanic instructions reported a sense of heaviness and dreamlike experiences significantly more often than those who heard the same drumming with relaxation instructions. In that study, the same sound was reported differently depending on what the listener had been asked to do.

Movement

In meditation you stay. The attention rests, and when it moves you bring it back. In a journey you travel. Harner's own language is spatial throughout: worlds above and below, an entrance, a path, a return. A meditator who finds the mind wandering off into a landscape has, by the standards of most meditation teaching, drifted. A journeyer who finds the same landscape has arrived.

Encounter

What you meet differs too. In meditation, what you meet is your own breath, body and mind, observed without judging. In core shamanism, the purpose of the journey is to meet compassionate helping spirits, often in animal form, and to ask them questions and listen. Whether those spirits are understood as real beings, as images arising from the journeyer's own depths, or as something between, varies by teacher and by journeyer. The method itself does not require an answer to that question.

Sound

Most meditation is practiced in silence, or with a chosen focus such as the breath, a bell or a mantra, and some forms use quiet music. A shamanic journey is carried by a steady, rapid, repetitive beat on a drum, or sometimes a rattle. Published figures for the drum's speed run from about 220 to about 300 beats a minute, with a wider range of 4 to 7 beats a second reported for contemporary practice; the figures, and who gives each one, are set out in the drum journey guide.

Meditation vs shamanic journey, side by side

The table sets the two practices next to each other, aspect by aspect. Each cell describes common practice and varies by teacher.

Sources: National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, “Meditation and Mindfulness” and its earlier “Meditation” fact sheet (posture, setting, focus); Foundation for Shamanic Studies, “Shamanic Drumming”, “Core Shamanism” and its Way of the Shaman workshop page; Gingras, Pohler and Fitch, PLoS One 2014 (Harner's posture). Both columns describe common practice and vary by teacher. Full references are listed at the end of this page.

Practicing them together

Because the overlaps are so close, some teachers put the two practices in sequence: a period of quiet meditation first, then the drum. The logic is simple. The settling that meditation trains is the same settling a journey needs before the drum begins, and a journey that starts from a quiet, steady attention has less to push through. Core shamanism already builds a small version of this into its instructions, since the Foundation asks the journeyer to fix the intention and the departure point before the drumming starts. The Global Spiritual Studies course Flower Essence Shamanism is built this way: each practice lesson is a guided meditation that opens into a drum journey with one flower.

The pathworking tradition, described below, does the same thing in its own vocabulary: a session opens with relaxing, centering and setting the intention, and only then does the imagery begin. Across all three families, preparation comes first and the journey, if there is one, comes second.

Guided visualization and pathworking

Between meditation and the drum journey sits a third family of inward practices: guided visualization. Here a voice or a written script leads the imagery step by step. You are asked to see a door, open it, walk down a path, notice what is there. Unlike most meditation, guided visualization has a destination and moves through a landscape. Unlike a drum journey, the route is supplied by the script rather than left open.

The best-documented Western form is pathworking. In the Western Mystery Tradition the term means a structured visualization in which the practitioner travels one of the paths that join two spheres, the sephirot, on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, usually entering through the Tarot card assigned to that path. The method comes from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was spread in the twentieth century by writers such as Dion Fortune (The Mystical Qabalah, 1935), Israel Regardie and Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, whose The Shining Paths (1983) gave a guided journey for each path. It is a Western esoteric practice, distinct from traditional Jewish Kabbalah.

A pathworking session has a recognizable shape: preparation (settling, centering, setting the intention), entry through a symbolic doorway, the journey along the path, a return by the same route, and a written record of what was seen. That shape is close to the drum journey's. Both set an intention, travel, return deliberately and write afterwards. Where they part is in what carries the traveler. In pathworking, the map is the Tree of Life and the guide is the script, so the symbols met along the way are expected ones. In a drum journey, the map is the three worlds of core shamanism and the guide is the drum, which says nothing; what is met is not scripted. Our guide to pathworking on the Tree of Life describes the method in full, path by path.

Seen together, the three practices form a rough line. Meditation stays with one focus. Guided visualization and pathworking travel along a route someone has drawn. A shamanic journey travels with an intention and lets the route appear. None is a lesser form of another; they ask different things of the attention, and many people practice more than one.

Before you begin

You can open your eyes at any time. If inward practices are difficult for you, talk with someone you trust first.

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says that meditation and mindfulness practices are usually considered to have few risks, and adds that few studies have examined them for possible harmful effects, so definite statements about their safety are not possible. The same caution is sensible for journeying, which has been studied far less.

No equipment is needed for either practice. A journey does not require a drum of your own, since recorded journey drumming is widely available, including the Foundation for Shamanic Studies' own recordings. A first journey may bring vivid images, only a feeling, or very little. None of those is a failure. Both meditation and journeying are practices, and the second and tenth attempts are rarely like the first.

Online course · Gina Kearney, RH (AHG) Flower Essence Shamanism · Meeting the Four Elemental Flowers Six recorded lessons. An introduction to a practice of meditation and journey held by a flower, then one guided meditation and drum journey for each of four flowers: Nicotiana for Earth, Trumpet Vine for Air, Cayenne for Fire and Fuchsia for Water. The drum is on the recordings; you need only a quiet place, a notebook and a pen. Explore the practice → What's included

• Six recorded lessonsover 2½ hours of teaching and practice
• Four guided journeysa meditation and drum journey for each flower
• PDF handouts and flower cardssix lesson handouts, four printable cards
• Two live sessions with Ginaa live Q&A and a fifth-flower practice, both recorded
• Final quiz and certificatea certificate of completion in your name
• Captions on every lessonEnglish now, translations coming soon

Frequently asked questions

One practice stays and listens; the other travels and meets. Both begin by turning inward.