I'm a Shaman, and This Is What I Did

A shaman on what finally shifted after 30 years, and the one level that made it possible to feel again.

Domenic Weber

8/4/202616 min read

Everyone Could Feel It Except Me

I spent two days at an Awakening the Third Eye retreat, and everyone there could sense something. See colors, feel movement, get impressions. Every single person.

Except me.

One woman told me she could see my hara line, though she had no idea what a hara was and was simply describing what was in front of her. Another couldn't close her hands over my heart chakra, saying the energy coming off me was too strong. A third felt a laser beam of energy pouring out of me directly into her third eye.

And I said, "That's nice."

Because I felt nothing, not even a flicker, while people across the room reported they could feel me from the other side of it.

Like many of you, I've done a lot of work on myself, so this lack of feeling was not a beginner's problem. By that point I had cleared my father-wound, run hundreds of hours of shadow work, and sat an hour a day in meditation, and I was facilitating sessions where other people had genuine breakthroughs and told me so. By any honest accounting I had done the work.

I could explain my patterns to you in detail, name my defense structure, my attachment style, the exact adaptation I built as a kid and why I built it. I had the map.

And I was still frozen.

The Loop I Could Explain But Not Stop

If you have been at this a while, you may know the version of this that lives in your own life. Mine ran like this. Enter a system. Master it quickly. Outgrow it. Feel trapped. Leave. Do it again somewhere else.

I ran that loop for thirty years, through jobs, roles, and relationships, and I could describe it perfectly and tell you exactly where it came from. Understanding it never once stopped it from running.

Insight is not change. You can know exactly what your pattern is, where it came from, and what it costs you, and still watch it fire on schedule.

In Neo-Shamanism we follow four specific paths. They are layers rather than stages, running at the same time, and a pattern can be anchored in any one of them. The shaman's job is to determine what is best to work on next.

Personal Physiology. The body. Energy, sleep, food, movement. Whether the vessel can hold what you're asking it to hold.

Personal Psychology. The mind and the emotions. Conditioning, limiting beliefs, trauma, mother and father wounds, attachment. This is where most people live and where nearly all therapy operates.

Energetic Psychology. The field. Chakras, meridians, the circuitry underneath the psychology. Where the wounds and defenses are actually stored, and why psychological insight so often fails to shift them.

Soul Psychology. Consciousness itself. Ancestral, past-life, and soul-level karma. The root causes recorded beneath everything above.

So I went at it from the level I knew best.

Psychology. Shadow work, in the Jungian sense: the material you carry that you cannot see, running your perception and your reactions from underneath. This is the level most people mean when they say they are working on themselves, and the level almost every therapist operates at. It is a massively important level, and it is where the pattern is actually lived.

I Cleared My Father Wound and Still Felt Nothing

I did a lot of it. I cleared the father-wound and watched the Warrior I had built dissolve, reparented myself, ran Ho'oponopono on everyone I could think of, hunted down loyalty contracts and vows and cleared them, ran imprinted program clearings and polarity integrations. The results were real: my triggers went quiet, and thoughts that used to arrive daily simply stopped arriving.

I could access past lives by then. I would go in, the memory would be right there, and I could see the whole story.

With no feeling attached to any of it.

I taught the exact technique to my wife in a session and she went straight into full emotional recall, same method, same room, and she felt all of it. I watched my own execution like footage of a stranger.

So the psychology was working, and it was not reaching the thing.

Naming My Own Defense Pattern Didn't Move It

Next level down. Energetics.

This is the layer most people never touch, and where I now do the bulk of my work with clients: the field, the chakras, the meridians, the actual circuitry that psychology runs on top of. I went at this one hard, an hour a day, every day, running field clearing, field expansion, and field coherence, and training constantly with other practitioners, which meant I was also on the table getting worked on regularly.

I got a clean read on myself. The Rigid defense I had run most of my life had built a very strong third level of the field, the mental body, the layer that holds thought, belief, and structure, and mine was excellent. It ran on an overactive third chakra: personal power, will, competence.

The cost shows up on either side of it. Second chakra weak, fourth chakra weak, feeling and connection both underpowered and both starved to keep the thinking layer running.

That is a circuit rather than a character flaw. Build a mind strong enough and you will not need to feel anything, which is exactly what I had done, and exactly why it worked so well for so long.

Over the course of this work the Rigid did dissolve, and I came out the other side into secure attachment with an Enduring overlay. There is a name for that combination and it is a good one: False Equanimity. Calm on the outside, and underneath, a system that had shut down its own life force early because that was the only way through.

Real movement. Years of it. And still frozen in the exact place that mattered.

Sixth level of the field reading cloudy, second reading black, my connection to Celestial love and emotion almost non-existent. This shows up in the Energetics and manifests in the Personal Psychology above.

I knew what it was. I had named it correctly. I still could not shift it.

The Number That Proved the Work Was Working

At one point I found something encasing my heart, so I ran a Diamond Density clearing on myself, then had another practitioner, thank you Annette, clear my heart directly. I felt nothing during it and nothing after.

Two levels in. Both of them working. Neither one reaching it.

Except something did happen, and I simply could not perceive it.

I have tracked my biometrics for years, and one of the numbers I watch is heart rate variability. HRV is a decent proxy for how much capacity your nervous system has, how well it recovers, and how much it can absorb before it locks up.

Before I ever found this work, mine sat at 12 overnight. Low. The number of a man running a very tight system.

By the time of the heart clearing I had brought it to 16, and then, weeks after the clearing I had felt nothing during, it moved to 24.

I felt nothing, and my nervous system did something it had never done in my adult life.

The work was landing. It was producing a measurable physiological change in my body, and the only thing not happening was my ability to feel it happening.

Which reframes the entire two years. Nothing had failed. My instrument was offline.

It also points at what this article is actually about. That HRV number is a physiology reading, the clearing was energetic, the freeze it was working on was psychological, and the reason it existed at all was deeper than any of the three.

One event. Four levels. They are one system rather than separate departments, and you cannot work one of them without touching all of them, whether or not you notice.

Which brings me to the level nobody wants to hear about.

Twenty Years in the Gym Bought Me One Thing: Admission

I have been serious about my body for twenty years. I grew up a fat kid, took the weight off with P90X back in the 2000s, and have been refining ever since. These days it is unremarkable: I eat in a six to eight hour window, work out about twenty minutes three or four times a week, and stay in good shape, which is less effort than people assume when they look at me.

I do not do it to look like anything. I do it so I can function, not the body on its own or the mind on its own, but the whole thing.

To reach something this deep I needed a powerful ceremony, because maximum effort yields maximum results, so I began the prep for my second Root Initiation. Weeks of light fasting. Caffeine out. Alcohol out. Everything out. Anyone who has done this ceremony will tell you it is the most physically demanding thing they have ever been through, and they are not exaggerating.

None of that fixed anything.

Twenty years of physical work did not thaw me, and neither did the fast. My HRV was better, my body was strong, and I was exactly as frozen as I had been at that retreat.

What it did was buy admission.

The ceremony that finally reached this took everything I had physically. I may have come close to a record for how much I took, it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my body, and I purged through every opening I have. Had I not prepared, had the vessel not been ready, I could not have gone deep enough to reach what was down there. I would have gotten a hard night and a small result, come home, and told people it did not work for me.

That is what physiology is for. It is the container rather than the cure, and the depth you can reach is limited by what your body can hold while you reach it.

What I found down there was not from this lifetime.

What I Found When I Stopped Explaining and Started Speaking

I had been purging for hours, the heat rolling through me for six of them, wave after wave, my body dumping something out that I could not name.

Then Christof told me what I had done.

I held a position of real trust once, genuine authority given to me by people who had reason to give it, over something I had sworn to protect. Then the pressure came, and I did what I have always been best at. I made a case. I framed the compromise so it sounded reasonable. I used my eloquence to talk the people around me into something that could not be justified, and I was good enough at it that they went along.

I let in what I had been trusted to keep out. What I was responsible for failed. The people I had sworn to protect suffered.

He laid the whole thing out, and I sat there and thought: "so what?"

Nothing. The same nothing I had been living in for two years. Handed the answer I had been hunting for, and I could not feel a thing about it.

Then I started speaking.

Saying it, rather than being told it. Out loud, in my own mouth, in front of people. I named what I had done without softening it and without explaining it away, which took some doing, because explaining things away is precisely the crime. I renounced it. I revoked what I had agreed to. I redeemed it, and my lineage with it.

That is when everything changed.

The Freeze Was Never the Problem

The ice went while I was still speaking.

I have thought about the mechanism since, and it is not subtle. The gift I misused was my voice: the framing, the eloquence, the ability to make a thing make sense to someone who needs it to make sense. That is the same capacity that lets people sit in a room with me now and find their way to something they could not reach alone.

The gift never changed. Only the use of it did.

So the freeze was never going to break by being explained to me. It could only break through the exact channel that caused it, and I had to use the voice to undo what the voice had done.

My soul did not freeze because I was a bad person. It froze because it could not carry the weight of what I had done. The freeze was not a defect, nor weakness, nor spiritual failure, nor evidence that I had not worked hard enough. It was protection. Something in me judged, a long time ago, that the full weight of that shame would flatten whatever body was carrying it, and shut down the current instead.

And it worked. That is the part I keep returning to. It worked perfectly, and it kept me functional for a very long time.

It also cost me the ability to feel anything at all, because a system cannot shut down one channel selectively. Freeze the shame and you freeze the grief, the joy, the resonance with another person, the felt sense in your own body. Everything comes off the same line.

The freeze was intelligent. It had just outlived the conditions it was built for.

I did not fight it. I thanked it. And then it let go.

How Deep You Can Go Is Set by How Much Ground You've Laid

That ceremony reached something thirty years of work had not touched, and it would be easy to read this and conclude that the ceremony is the answer. It is not.

The ceremony reached the last stretch, and everything that made it possible was built beforehand, at the other three levels, over years.

The body could survive the depth because I had spent three decades on it. The psychology was clear enough that when the material surfaced I recognized what I was looking at instead of drowning in it. The energetic work had my field open enough that I could go where I needed to go. Every one of those years I thought was failing was construction.

Take the same ceremony and hand it to me at thirty, same medicine, same teacher, same room, and I get a hard night and nothing else. My body could not have held it, my psychology could not have received it, and my field would have shut the door before anything got near the floor.

How deep you can go is set by how much groundwork you have laid.

Not by intensity, not by finding the right modality or the right teacher or the right ceremony. The depth available to you at any moment is determined by what you have already built underneath, there is no way to shortcut it, and no one gets to hand it to you.

You do not get the breakthrough because you found the right room. You get it because you were ready to be in the room.

Then it started running back up the other way.

The Felt Sense Finally Came Online

The first thing to move was the level I had been grinding at for two years with almost nothing to show for it.

The felt sense came online, not as a technique I finally cracked but the way a limb you slept on comes back. The second chakra that had been reading black started warming. The sixth that had been cloudy cleared.

I can feel into a client's field now, and when something is off I know where before I confirm it.

Which brings me to the pendulum. The pendulum was how I did nearly everything. During a chelation I would wait for a hit on where to work, get something vague like "organs," then go to the pendulum to narrow it down. Is it the heart? No. The liver? Yes. That is no criticism of the tool, and I still use it, but I was using it as a substitute for a sense I did not have. It was a workaround, and workarounds become permanent if the thing they are working around never gets fixed.

Now the body answers first and the pendulum confirms.

Soul Streaming has become consistent, the practice of channeling directly from Source rather than reaching for it. That used to arrive occasionally, when conditions were right. Now it comes when I sit down for it.

And the sessions changed, without my learning anything new or acquiring a single technique. Sessions I used to run on container strength and intelligence now carry felt resonance underneath them, and I get to what is actually going on faster and more accurately, because I am no longer inferring my way toward it from the outside.

Same practitioner. Same training. Same protocols. One channel restored.

Then it reached the psychology, and closed the loop I opened at the top of this piece.

The performance anxiety is gone.

I have run well over a hundred sessions, clients get results, tell me so, and come back, and underneath every one of those sessions was a low hum of fear that this would be the time I was not enough, that I would sit down, get nothing, and have nothing to give the person in front of me. I would push through it. I would endure it. That is what I do.

I sat down with a client a few weeks after the Root and realized halfway through that the hum was not there. I was not scanning myself. I was just working.

Why I Kept Repeating the Same Pattern for Thirty Years

Enter a system. Master it quickly. Outgrow it. Feel trapped. Leave. Repeat.

I always read that as restlessness, or high standards, or bad luck with organizations, and it was none of those. I have been trying to fix one error for thousands of years, and my method has been to rearrange everything around me until it comes out right. Enter the system, fix the system, fix it, leave, find another one. It was never about the jobs. It was a correction attempt, running on a loop, aimed at the wrong target.

The error was not out there. It was one thing I did, and the repair for it was owning what I did, making amends, and accepting the role I actually have, rather than fixing every structure I ever walked into.

Thirty years of that loop. It stopped when the thing underneath it was addressed, and not one minute before.

That is what I mean when I say insight is not change. I could have described that loop to you in detail at any point in the last decade, and describing it never once interrupted it.

Crying at Music, and Other New Problems

I cry now. For no particular reason. A piece of music, a thing my wife says, something I read. It arrives, moves through, and leaves. I spent most of my life unable to produce it under nearly any circumstance, and now it shows up unannounced over small things.

I have slowed down. I was already slower than I used to be, but there is a different quality to it now. Less monitoring. Less of the background process checking whether I am doing enough.

And the remembering. In the month after the Root I recovered more about myself, my past, and what I am here to do than in the previous two years of deliberately searching for it. I stopped searching and it just started arriving.

That is the circuit closing. It began as a body I was preparing, went down through psychology and energetics to something much older, and came back up through all three to land in the same body, changed.

Thirty years of work on the body bought depth, the depth reached the soul, the soul opened the energetics, the energetics resolved the psychology, and all of it came back down into the body it began in.

None of those levels moved on their own. They never do.

The Level You're Avoiding Is Usually the One Holding It

You have probably already done what I did.

You went to the level you know best. If you are a thinker, you read and analyzed and understood your pattern from every angle. If you are a body person, you trained and ate clean and slept right. If you found the energetic work, you cleared and expanded and cleared again. Whichever one it was, you went at it hard, and it worked.

It worked on everything except the one thing.

There is a pattern in your life you can describe perfectly and cannot stop. You know its origin, you could teach a class on it, and it still fires, on schedule, while you watch it happen from somewhere just behind your own eyes.

That is no failure of effort, and it is no evidence that you are broken. It usually means the pattern is anchored at a level you have not worked, and the level you have not worked is almost always the one you are least naturally drawn to. The thinker will not go into the body. The body person will not sit with the psychology. Nearly everyone skips the energetics, because it is the one nobody teaches and the one that sounds least respectable to say out loud.

The level you are avoiding is usually the level holding the thing.

I spent two years hammering the level I was best at and got real results everywhere except where it counted. The freeze was not anchored in my body, my psychology, or my energetics. It was anchored in my soul.

And I could not have reached it without working all three, simultaneously, messily, haphazardly. We each have our own path, and the only consistent thing is that every one of them is unique.

When it finally moved, it did not move because I understood it better. I understood it completely. It moved because I spoke it, out loud, from a body that had been prepared to survive saying it.

Understanding was never going to be enough. It was the map. At some point you have to get on the floor and play.

I was a fat kid who learned to work, then a Warrior who learned to win, then a thinker who learned to understand everything and feel none of it.

Every one of those was necessary. None of them were the destination.

What Carried Me Here Won't Carry Me Forward

What carried me here was effort.

What moves me forward is allowance.