The Transformational Magic of Shamanic Energy Healing

The key to my healing ended up being dismissing all conventional wisdom.

Narrating one my personal experiences with shamanic energy work:
healing my eating disorder

I struggled with an eating disorder for about 13 years (14 to 27 y/o). It was something that was often in the background of my life through both good and difficult periods. At times it was more intense, at other times quieter, but it consistently showed up in the form of an obsessive focus on calories, control, and food.

In an attempt to find relief from this obsession, I worked with almost every type of professional I could access - from psychologists to dieticians - hoping someone could help me break free from the mental loops around kcal, restriction, and self-worth.

What I found, however, was that most of the support I received stayed within a mental and behaviour-based framework: new strategies, new rules, new ways of thinking about food and changing my actions. But that helped me 0%.

The difficulty was never that I didn’t understand what was ‘right’ or what I was ‘supposed to do.’ I could grasp the guidance intellectually, even agree with it, but I couldn’t consistently translate it into lived experience when the patterns took over. Something deeper was happening that wasn’t resolved by better behaviour plans. These felt mechanical to me, as they relied on rigid, fixed rules and step-by-step behavioural adjustments that bypassed emotional reality entirely. If I don’t want to do X in the moment, I simply won’t do X. A plan telling me otherwise changes nothing in that moment. The issue, then, was that these plans reflected someone’s theoretical idea on paper of how a ‘proper’ way of acting should look, rather than a lived process of transformation that shifts identity, thoughts, and emotions.

That gap - between knowing what’s good for me and being able to act differently - became impossible to ignore, and it eventually reshaped how I began to understand healing and support.

Then I stumbled on a shaman in a completely synchronistic way (a story for another day), that eventually trained me in shamanic energy healing as well. We did 7 sessions (one per month) during which there was no analysis of my past or my problems, just free sharing, real connection and, of course, energy work. What a RELIEF it was not having to waste time endlessly analyzing things and coming up with mental strategies on how to get it ‘right’.

In the beginning everything became worse. The ‘controller’ in me vanished, and suddenly I could not control my body and my emotions anymore. This led to a lot of challenges: I suddenly was flooded with huge waves of emotion that I (knowingly and unknowingly) had ignored or suppressed. I did not know I was capable of going so low on the emotional scale. When I say I felt low - I mean LOW. I can definitely say that I do not understand how I managed to wake up and go to work and do all kinds of normal things during that period. I stopped drinking alcohol and partying during that time, which I traded for lying on the couch and binge-reading.

The shamanic healing had triggered what felt like a turbo-purge of an immense emotional backlog, and suddenly I was facing everything at an overwhelming intensity. It taught me to surrender to the waves of pain, even when there was no clear sense of when they would end. This sounds very enlightened, but the only reason I surrendered to it is because there was simply nothing else to do. It was a surrender out of necessity, definitely not out of wisdom. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to fight; I just didn’t know how to fight something invisible. You can try to numb it, of course, but the intensity was too great to fully escape from. Because of that, my other strategies for avoidance remained unutilized (thankfully).

I remember being incredibly annoyed with meditation teachers during that period who said things like ‘Emotions and thoughts are just visitors that come and go like clouds in the sky.’ It felt like such a silly, childish, airy-fairy way to describe the inner war that was going on. And my thoughts and emotions were definitely clingy guests, taking around 10 months to fully leave in the end. So that was the absolute worst advice for me during that period. For that reason, if you are on a serious healing journey I recommend to stay away from too light spirituality and read more dense stuff like everything Nietzsche, Dante’s Inferno, all material from ‘The Rooms’ (Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous etc.), Sartre, Campbell and Coelho. The latter two bringing both lightness and depth.

Apart from the emotional backlog I was confronted with, my body also took over the reins and, after years of inconsistent eating, its natural wisdom and appetite regulation had been disrupted. Because the controller was gone, I was suddenly hungry all the time, which led me to gain a considerable amount of weight - a death sentence for someone like me at the time. The process required me to place all my faith in the energy healing, because the results seemed completely opposite to what I wanted.

But what I didn’t consciously realize back then was that the energy healings were changing me slowly in the background, purging what kept me stuck in lower states and amplifying my patterns before ultimately releasing them. Contrary to the past when I was not supported by energy healing, every time I now fell back into restriction or overeating, I was actually in the process of healing. I was changing day by day, but so much needed to shift and surface for the pattern to dissolve that all I could do was move through it and endure it.

It is only now that I can coherently explain what was happening. At the time, I thought I was simply going crazy and gaining weight. The only thing that kept me returning to the shaman was the mental stimulation this new world opened up for me. In contrast to the book-smart psychologists I was used to that lacked embodied wisdom or lived experience in resolving the issues I was facing, this form of healing felt alive, real, mysterious and because of that, promising.

After the 7 sessions in 7 months I had an integration period of 6 months. During that time, I travelled to see my father in Greece, and shortly after arriving, I quit my job. That’s another thing I learned about energy work. If you do a couple of these sessions, they shift you so profoundly that life begins to reorganise itself. As your ‘energetic makeup’ starts changing, you start wanting and attracting very different circumstances.

At some point during this period in Greece, I simply woke up one day with a sudden certainty that my issues around food were gone. I went to a bakery, bought a croissant without guilt for the first time ever, took a few bites, and then naturally stopped because I felt full. All those feelings were new to me: ànd no guilt, ànd stopping when feeling full, ànd no desire to control my food the rest of the day - wow, just wow! That was a completely new experience.

In the months that followed, I had no food rules. I ate intuitively. Some days that meant Ferrero Rocher for breakfast, cookies for lunch, and sushi for dinner, a completely ordinary day for me at the time. I only exercised when I felt like it, mostly taking long walks. I lost the weight I had gained (and more) in 6 months simply by eating according to my body’s signals, in both quality and quantity. By losing weight with ‘prohibited’ foods, and simply trusting my body to stop when it had enough, the fear around food and calories disappeared. The key to healing ended up being dismissing all conventional wisdom.

Does that mean I now look in the mirror and see myself at my fittest? No. Normal eating produces a normal body. If someone wants to achieve a highly defined physique, that usually requires a different level of structure, discipline, and trade-offs, often a more restricted and socially narrow lifestyle for a period of time. That may be something for the future, but if it were to happen now, it would come from a completely different place. One that, like in the past, would still be driven by vanity, but with the key difference that my relationship with food and my body would come from neutrality rather than fear, anger and obsession.

The issue that shamanic healing ‘took out of me’ are the obsessive thoughts about food and calories and everything related. At one point, around 99% of my thoughts revolved around food. What a mental prison to be freed from! Having acquired a new mental landscape, one free from all these thoughts, my identity shifted, and I was no longer saw myself as someone with an eating disorder. Interestingly enough, I became freer than nearly everyone around me concerning food and weight. At some level, almost everyone today has some degree of neurosis around food, but it exists on a spectrum.

If I can name one challenge that came with resolving the issue, it’s this: I remember thinking during my healing process that if this one thing ever cleared, I’d never have a bad day again. And while it’s true that my baseline happiness has steadily risen since then, I also realised that removing one issue simply revealed others that still needed my attention. 😅

That was when I understood that healing is a lifestyle. There is always something that asks to be resolved. However once a stable baseline is reached, whatever that means for each person, and there is no pressing issue to be resolved anymore, healing can become something closer to awakening. Instead of fixing problems, it becomes a process of dissolving ego-identification itself. But that is for another time.

If you are struggling with blocks, a stubborn pattern, an addiction, a disorder, or any other behaviour that troubles you, stop wasting time intellectualising your issue, endlessly blabbing about it, analysing it and going in circles about it. The issue is not willpower, and the solution is not a better plan. The issue is that something deeper is going on, that you don’t (yet) see or recognize.

You haven’t gone ‘deep’ enough with yourself to find (and feel) the root cause(s) and deal directly with them. The real shift happens when you stop circling the story of the problem and start engaging with what’s actually underneath it: the emotional roots, conditioning, and internal patterns that keep it in place. Conventional psychology discusses this too, but stops there. It doesn’t actually make you go a level deeper in experience, it just mentally acknowledges the idea that you should go deeper. Shamanic energy healing ‘pulls up’ everything that is buried to the surface without analysis, so it can be felt and released.

If you feel you’d like support with that process, you can reach out to me. I work as a shamanic energy healer and help people overcome deep patterns in a direct, experiential way.