In today’s MysticMag interview, we sit down with Christine Weeber, a shamanic practitioner and healer, to explore her fascinating journey into shamanism, how her work connects to cultural anthropology, and her approach to soul healing. Christine also shares her experiences in building healthy homes and her creative pursuits as an author and poet, offering a glimpse into her multi-faceted healing practices and the wisdom she’s cultivated over the years.
What were your beginnings with the shamanic path like, and how did you get into this line of work?
My initial foray into “shamanism” came through studying non-Western cultural practices around healing as a master’s student in cultural anthropology in the early 2000s. The Ju|’hoansi in Southern Africa, in particular, captured my imagination. Some Ju|’hoansi healers enter a deep trance state to meet with ancestors and bring healing to community members who gather in song and dance. Despite being across the world in a distinct place, the Ju|’hoansi’s trance-dance healing approach felt familiar.
I grew up White in a mixed-race urban area in the U.S. Midwest—a Gen Xer who came of age in the 1980s, wrapped in cynicism, banality, and questions. But I was also a Christian whose family are second- and third-generation immigrants from the Netherlands and Germany. While part of a large extended family, I felt on the fringe. I moved between the social worlds of a secular, diverse school; a mostly White, conservative religious community and extended family; and a single-parent household. Meanwhile, I often had mysterious, vivid, and comforting dreams and visions.
I also experienced ill-defined illnesses at times and suffered from chronic back pain. I had little awareness of how emotional, psychological, physical, spiritual, and other layers spoke to one another to shape how we feel in our bodies.
Starting in 2003, nearly a decade after moving to the western U.S., a severely debilitating chronic illness brought me to rock bottom, stripping me of layers of assumptions and beliefs. I experienced being homeless for a while and lost most of my belongings.
Then in 2006, my mom was diagnosed with the blood cancer multiple myeloma, and she moved from New Mexico to be closer to me. Our time together on this cancer journey was an intense roller coaster across seven and a half years.
Broken open by my own illness and the “boot camp” of being with my mom as her “wing mate,” I stopped looking in at shamanism as a scholarly outsider and dove into the river for myself. The power of those early shamanic journeys terrified and exalted me. I knew my life would never be the same.
My formal shamanic training—apart from the initiations of illness and caregiving—began in 2012 with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies through my teachers Robbie Staufer and Amanda Foulger. For the past nine years, I have been offering shamanic healing and divination (knowledge-seeking) to clients and community members. I also facilitate a bi-monthly shamanic healing circle that brings these healing powers to loved ones, including nonhuman animals.
What is Soul Healing, and how does it work?
From a shamanic perspective, I view soul healing as restoring and revitalizing one’s life force—which mysteriously also includes a deep sense of beingness and individuation, memories, past lives, and so on. One’s Soul activates one’s Self.
I’ve learned how a soul can be injured or disempowered through abuse, trauma, toxicity, illness, intrusions, possession, soul loss, a lack of belonging, and more.
As a practitioner, I work with clients (human and nonhuman animals) to remove intrusions, compassionately de-possess, do soul retrievals, make connections to their power animals and helping spirits, provide divination, and more. I aim to help clients be free in their wild and sacred life—to experience embodiment, wholeness, and expansiveness.
Soul healing also, of course, can happen through visual art, music, dance, poetry, and other arts.
How does a person build a healthy home, and what can you tell me about that part of your work?
The chronic illness I experienced came in large part from living in homes that had toxic mold, pesticides, and room deodorizers. I had what’s now called chronic inflammatory response syndrome/mold illness (a.k.a. multiple chemical sensitivity or environmental illness). I claimed a healing path by building a healthy home in the mountains with my then-partner. This meant using nontoxic materials, ensuring building systems would not lead to mold growth, testing and vetting all building products, and more.
I share expertise and knowledge with those going through a similar journey who aim to build a healthy home to recover and thrive in. Currently, I am co-authoring a book of case studies on how to construct a healthy house and the deeper lessons learned from our experiences.
As an author, what works have you written, and what are they about?
I recently published Medicine for the Dance: Wisdom for the 21st Century, Book 1: 2021–2022. You can access it for free on my website: www.homewisdomhearth.com/books.html.
And I have started a series of companion videos, which you can find on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M6VOR_4jt0
From the Preface:
I offer this book of letters to share wisdom from five decades of crafting my own medicine for the dance: Letters because I sought the honesty and emotional intimacy of this form. Written to my younger self because, among the global upheavals and challenges of 2020–2022, I needed to remember and entrust what I had learned. Remember because I felt the spirals and chaos, as most of us did, distracting me from my path and my center. Words because through them I can shape my direct experiences into a form that can be shared.
In my heart, I know we as a species can find our way to healthy, sustainable, and vibrant futures in relationship with all other beings on this dynamic, beautiful planet. But doing so amid the ongoing chaos requires us to cultivate and share our wisdom with one another.
So, these words are not to be held to my chest. They need to travel and find readers. I hope they encourage and inspire you in your own dance.
I also am seeking a publisher for my first book-length collection of poetry. My poems consider experiences and insights in place and environment. In my case, my healthy home is on a forested mountainside at 9,000 feet in elevation in Colorado, where I have been for 20 years.
My poems root and wind. I aim to convey the vibration of lightning, creek, hummingbird wings. I witness wildfires, death, disarticulation, ancestors, and healing. I offer iceberg poems to step on across the tumult. From my work as an editor at the digital SAPIENS Anthropology Magazine, I have a long view of our evolutionary history and a global view of our diverse cultural expressions. In these poems, I ask, What future for our species? I answer in the shedding of a caddisfly’s pupal shuck.
I have published two poetry chapbooks: In the Understory of Her Being (Finishing Line Press; love poems in English and Spanish: www.finishinglinepress.com/product/in-the-understory-of-her-being-by-christine-weeber) and Sastrugi (self-published).
In addition, I have published stories, poems, artwork, and essays. You can find more on my website that features my creative work: www.christineweeber.com/publications.html
What other services do you offer?
I also offer psychopomp, space clearing, communication between spirits and living people, and healing for animals.
In sessions and as a follow-up protocol, I often incorporate flower essences. And I sometimes chant, sing, or share wisdom words for empowerment and guidance during healing sessions.
I also see my work as a poet as embodying belonging to the world in ways that are healthy, ethical, joyful, and attentive to the web of life.
What’s unique about your healing services?
I bring a depth of knowledge, keen sensitivity, and vital awareness to my healing work from my extensive direct experiences with my compassionate and helping spirits. I have wrestled, argued with, and tested them (and they me). I have spent time in wild desert and mountain places to listen and learn. Through trial after trial, I have been, and continue to be, directly trained by a variety of spirits in a range of healing approaches. Now I have 100 percent trust in my spirits, in myself, and in my work with them. Blessings.
To learn more about Christine’s work, you can visit www.homewisdomhearth.com and her Facebook page
