Sandra Ingerman

Sandra Ingerman (b. 1953) is an American shamanic teacher, licensed marriage and family therapist, and the most prominent popularizer of soul retrieval in the modern West.

A leading student and longtime collaborator of Michael Harner at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, she built on his core-shamanism method and brought it into explicit dialogue with psychotherapy.

Her widely read Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self (1991) reframed an old cross-cultural shamanic concept — that trauma causes parts of the soul or vital essence to “flee,” leaving a person diminished — as a healing modality that a journeying practitioner can perform: traveling to non-ordinary reality, locating the lost soul-part, and “returning” it to restore wholeness.

Later books such as Medicine for the Earth extended her work toward transmutation of personal and environmental “poisons” through consciousness and intention. For the mind-power lineage, Ingerman is a key bridge between altered-state shamanic practice and the language of inner healing, wholeness, and intention that saturates contemporary self-development.

Her model treats consciousness and imagery as the operative medium of healing — the practitioner’s directed attention in non-ordinary reality produces real psychological change — which aligns closely with mind-power’s core claim that inner states shape lived reality.

Through her emphasis on retrieving lost vitality, transmuting negative states, and the power of focused intention and “spiritual light” to alter one’s condition, she helped fuse neo-shamanism with the inner-child, trauma-healing, and energy-medicine currents of the New Age, and trained large numbers of practitioners who now carry that synthesis forward.