Susan was a young woman who had recently become an aide in the psychiatric unit of a large hospital. She was feeling overwhelmed at the time I saw her, less by her work with patients, she said, than by her relationships with other staff members. In several months, she had made no friends among the staff. She felt her lack of training was glaring in the eyes of other staff members, and she was afraid that certain staff wanted to show her that she was incompetent. She described the problem, nonetheless, as primarily due to her own lack of self-confidence. She complained that her exaggerated deference to superiors, her stammering, excuse-making manner, as well as her interpersonal withdrawal from others were the main contributors to her problem. Yet she felt helpless to stop these behaviors.

I informed her that the shamanic diagnosis of her situation would be one of power loss, and that the remedy was the restoration of a guardian spirit in the form of a power animal that I would retrieve from the other world and blow into her.¹

The next time I saw Susan, she had performed a simple purification procedure of smudging herself with sage smoke and fasting lightly for 24 hours. I lay down on the ground next to her and put us both into an altered state of consciousness via a tape of drumming. I came back from my "journey" and blew the spirit of a mountain lion into Susan. She, in turn, reported that on her journey, she had simultaneously felt like a cat, and she was surprised at the coincidence. I then instructed Susan to go out into nature and dance her animal.²

Two weeks later, I saw her and she reported a remarkable change at work. People seemed to be acting friendly toward her, and she had joined a staff support group. Most importantly, she no longer felt afraid of people at work and felt confident enough to express her thoughts and feelings to them.

After our last meeting, she had gone to a local nature preserve to dance her newly acquired mountain lion spirit. She shook her rattle and leapt upon a rock. The moment she landed, she found herself staring into the eyes of a yellow mountain lion that inhabited the preserve. She was flabbergasted, but she froze on the spot and the lion locked eyes with her for two or three minutes. Susan said that she knew at once that this was a profound affirmation from her guardian, and, following that experience, she felt a surge of well-being which affected positively every area of her life, especially her work at the hospital.

1. For a description of restoring power through the technique of blowing power animals into an individual, see Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman (Harper and Row, 1980), pp. 76-85.
2. See Harner, Ibid., pp. 60-62, 65-68, on "dancing to metamorphose into animal forms" in order to restore power.