I started using shamanic drum journeying with clients in 2021. Before that, I couldn’t do Distance Body Clearings at all, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wasn’t certified yet. I spent 2020 into 2021 training under Mellissa Seaman to learn this skill properly, and what happened during that training changed how I understand this work entirely.

What I Didn’t Expect From My Own Training

During my very first journeys, while I was still a student, I learned things about the people I was journeying for that I had no way of knowing. Not impressions. Not guesses. Real, specific information about their lives and their history that I couldn’t have pieced together any other way.

And it didn’t stop at information. In that same training period, I ended up performing soul retrievals for two different people I was journeying for as part of my own certification process. A soul retrieval is exactly what it sounds like: retrieving parts of a person’s soul that have been looping, often tied to past-life trauma still quietly affecting them in this life, and extracting energetic blocks that show up as real, physical symptoms.

I want to be honest about something here: I was still learning. This wasn’t me arriving already skilled. It was the drum itself, and the state it drops you into, doing work I hadn’t fully trained for yet, because the tool is that direct.

Why the Drum Works (The Part Backed by Actual Research)

Here’s the science side of this, because I don’t think it should stay purely mystical when there’s real research behind it.

Drumming creates entrainment: the human nervous system is inherently rhythmic, and a steady external rhythm gives a dysregulated nervous system something to physiologically latch onto and slow down around. It also engages mirror neurons, creating a shared, non-verbal experience of safety between two nervous systems without requiring any conscious cognitive processing. And because it works through the body, not through talking or thinking, it reaches people and states that top-down, cognitive approaches simply can’t access. A peer-reviewed polyvagal-theory framework backs this directly, and a controlled study on ten weeks of group drumming showed measurable reductions in anxiety and depression, along with a shift in participants’ immune markers toward an anti-inflammatory profile.

This isn’t a belief system. It’s a nervous system responding to rhythm exactly the way it’s built to.

The Training That Made This Possible

Mellissa trained me alongside a small group of highly educated, intelligent women across 2020 and 2021, and the training itself included several formal initiations, not just technique. That structure gave me something I still rely on: an actual framework for accessing the information I need to help a client heal, rather than hoping something useful shows up.

Here’s the part that still surprises me a little: I received healing during that training too, alongside my clients, without either of us fully realizing it at the time. The research that would have explained what was happening simply didn’t exist yet. It’s only come out recently.

This past year, I went through an upgraded version of that training: a series of twelve audio-guided journeys that walk you through the same initiations while building real skill for journeying, both for yourself and for others. That course is available through Mellissa’s Leadership Mentorship program for anyone who feels pulled toward this kind of work themselves.

What Clients Actually Experience

Client journeys are consistently confirming. People notice real shifts, and it’s genuinely exciting to get that feedback and then watch how someone integrates a Clearing over the following days and weeks. It’s rarely immediate, even though clients usually walk away with a lot right from the session itself. Integration tends to unfold over time, not all at once.

One thing clients have mentioned to me more than once, unprompted: they can feel when I’m actually in their energy field. That’s not something I ask them to notice. They just do.

Where This Fits Into Journey Inward

The drum is part of what makes the Distance Body Clearing inside Journey Inward what it is: a way of accessing real information and doing real energetic work, not guessing, not following a generic script. It’s the same tool, the same training, the same depth I described above, just applied consistently, session after session.

Not Everything Needs an Explanation First

If any part of this resonated, the idea of something being retrieved rather than fixed, or a block being cleared rather than managed, that’s worth sitting with. Not everything that helps you heal needs to be explainable in advance. Sometimes it just needs to work, and then the research catches up later.