Elín Ellingsen on shamanic healing — and what it has to do with love

People sometimes ask me how I would describe what I do in a single sentence. I usually say: I help people remove what is in the way.

What is in the way is different for everyone. Sometimes it is a belief that arrived so early in life that it feels indistinguishable from truth. Sometimes it is grief that was never fully felt, stored in the body as tension or distance or a low hum of sadness that the person has come to accept as normal. Sometimes it is simply a version of themselves they have been performing for so long they have forgotten it is a performance.

The work of shamanic healing and of hypnotherapy, which I also practise, and which works at a similar depth through a different door, is to find what is in the way and create the conditions for it to move.

What surprises people, sometimes, is how often what is in the way turns out to be in the way of love.

What shamanic healing actually is

Let me start with what it is not. Shamanic healing is not mysterious in the way that word is sometimes used to mean unknowable or irrational. It is an ancient, cross-cultural practice with a coherent underlying understanding of how human beings carry and release experience. Every culture that has ever existed on earth has had some version of it. That universality is not coincidence.

The shamanic understanding is this: we are not purely physical beings having occasional emotional experiences. We are energetic and spiritual beings as well as physical ones, and events in our lives,  particularly events involving loss, fear, trauma or significant transition, leave imprints that exist at all of those levels simultaneously. Physical healing alone, or cognitive insight alone, is often not enough to move them. Something is needed that works at the level where the imprint actually lives.

The shamanic practitioner works in that deeper register. Through ceremony, through journeying, through energy work and through the particular quality of presence that 20 years of this practice has developed in me, I work with what the body is holding beneath the level of conscious thought.

We are not purely physical beings having occasional emotional experiences. We are more than that. And healing that reaches only the surface leaves the deeper thing untouched.

I trained with Dolores Cannon, one of the most respected practitioners of deep hypnosis and past-life regression in the world. I have studied across India, the Americas and Europe. I have 15 years of Buddhist practice behind me. And what all of those traditions share, beneath their very different forms and languages, is the understanding that human suffering is not random. It has roots. And those roots can be found and, with the right approach, transformed.

What this has to do with love

Here is what I have noticed in 20 years of working with people.

Most of what keeps people from loving well has nothing to do with the person in front of them.

It has to do with what they learned about love before they ever had a relationship. The models they inherited. The conclusions they drew from early experiences of closeness that went well, or didn’t. The decisions they made  often very young, often without words, about how safe it was to be fully known by another person.

These patterns operate below the level of choice. A person can be deeply committed to their partner, genuinely in love, wanting nothing more than to be close, and still find themselves pulling back at moments of real intimacy, or going quiet when they most want to speak, or feeling a distance they cannot explain and cannot close.

This is not failure. It is not weakness. It is the imprint of old experience operating in the present. And it is exactly the kind of thing that shamanic healing, done carefully and with love, can reach.

Most of what keeps people from loving well has nothing to do with the person in front of them. It has to do with what they learned about love long before they arrived.

I have sat with couples who love each other genuinely and are nonetheless separated by something neither of them can name. Not a conflict. Not a grievance. Just a space between them that has slowly widened and that neither of them knows how to close.

Often, when we go beneath the surface, what we find is not a relationship problem. It is a personal one. Something one or both partners is carrying from before. A wound from earlier that is now shaping how they receive love, or how they offer it, in ways they have never been able to see clearly enough to address.

The healing of that wound,  really healing it, not managing it or working around it but actually releasing the charge it carries, changes everything downstream. The couple who could not quite close the gap between them finds that the gap simply is no longer there. Not because they have worked harder at the relationship. Because something in each of them has become more available.

Why we created Wooom

There is something that happens when two people decide, together, to step outside the familiar and invest in what they have. When they choose to be seen, not just by each other, but by themselves. When they come somewhere extraordinary and say, for four days, this is the most important thing.

That intention creates an opening. And an opening is where healing becomes possible.

At Kleif Farm, I work with the group in the ways that feel right for where each person and each couple is. The fire ceremony is one of those ways, a structured, ancient, powerful act of release. But the healing is not confined to the ceremony. It happens in the conversations that go deep because we are somewhere safe enough for depth. It happens in the ecstatic dance, where the body releases what the mind has been managing. It happens at the dinner table, and in the particular quality of quiet that Kleif Farm has at night when the mountains are dark and the sky is full of stars.

An opening is where healing becomes possible. And love — when it is tended with courage and attention — creates the most powerful opening of all.

Iceland is the right place for this work. I am Icelandic. I know this land. I know what it does to people who arrive here from busy lives in cities that do not have this quality of silence, this scale, this refusal to be anything other than exactly what it is. Iceland does not perform. It simply is. And in the presence of something that simply is, people tend to stop performing too.

That is when the real work begins.

What I want people to know about shamanic healing

I want to say something directly to those of you who are curious but cautious. Who are drawn to this kind of work but are not sure whether it is for you, or whether you have to believe certain things to benefit from it.

You do not need to hold any particular spiritual beliefs. The work does not require your faith. It requires only your presence and your willingness to be honest, with yourself and with whatever is actually happening inside you. The rest is my job.

Shamanic healing is not performance. It is not theatre. It is not crystals and incense for their own sake, though sometimes those things have a place. It is a precise, disciplined practice that I have spent 20 years learning and refining, guided by teachers who carry lineages that go back centuries.

What it offers, at its best, is this: the possibility of putting down something you have been carrying for a very long time. Something that has been heavier than it needed to be, and that has made the path harder than it needed to be, and that has kept you slightly further from the people you love than you actually want to be.

Putting it down does not require understanding exactly what it is or where it came from. It requires only the willingness to let it go.

That willingness, genuine, felt, embodied, is the most courageous act I know. And in 20 years, I have never seen it go unrewarded.