A Conversation with Mayumi Beckers on Healing, Andean Wisdom, and Returning to the Heart

Mayumi Beckers is a Shamanic Practitioner based in the Netherlands, devoted to supporting individuals on their path of healing, transformation, and empowerment. Rooted in Andean shamanic energy medicine and earth-based healing traditions, her work focuses on helping people to reconnect with the deeper currents of life that bring them meaning, vitality, joy, and purpose through restoring their natural alignment, inner essence, and relationship with nature, aspects often forgotten, suppressed, or fragmented through trauma, conditioning, grief, and modern life experiences.

Through one-on-one healing sessions, offered both in person and remotely, Mayumi facilitates ceremonial healing work that may include energetic clearing, ancestral healing, soul retrieval, spiritual guidance, and ongoing integration practices for daily living. Her holistic approach supports healing across the physical, emotional, mental, energetic, and spiritual dimensions of life. In addition to private sessions, she also offers group workshops, sacred travel journeys, and ceremonial experiences rooted in reverence, transformation, and connection.

Mayumi’s path has been shaped by studies with lineage-based teachers, particularly within the Andean mystical traditions, alongside broader studies in psychosocial foundations, Jungian psychology, and phytotherapy (herbal or botanical medicine). She is also the Co-Founder of Shamans Directory, a global nonprofit platform guided by the vision One Fire, One Medicine, dedicated to making authentic shamanic earth-based services, wisdom, and healing traditions more accessible worldwide. She believes healing is ultimately an act of remembrance, returning home to oneself, to spirit, and to the living wisdom of the Earth.

Mayumi Beckers, Shamanic Practitioner, Shamans Directory Cofounder

What does “coming home” mean to you?

Coming home begins, not in the mind, but in the heart. When something deeply resonates, it is often not the intellect deciding. It is the body, the spirit, and the heart remembering. For me, coming home is the journey of awakening to who you truly are, why you are here, and what you are uniquely meant to share.

In our modern world, many of us have been taught to live primarily through the mind. We build identities around achievement, expectation, status, and survival. Slowly, we are moving away from our center, away from the deeper truth within us. Coming home is the process of returning to that center.

It is remembering that beneath our conditioning, wounds, fears, and stories, there is an essence that has never been broken. A quiet place of truth, love, and inner knowing. And for many of us, this path is not linear. It asks us to move beyond comfort, to trust ourselves deeply, and to walk toward what our spirit is calling us to become.

Can you share a little about your own journey of awakening?

My own journey of coming home unfolded through both personal crisis and spiritual remembrance. I was born in the Netherlands to a Dutch father and Japanese mother, both Buddhist practitioners. My name, Mayumi, means “bow of truth.” Yet growing up, I did not always feel connected to my name.

Like many people, I was drawn toward external values, career, appearance, success, recognition. This led me into a 16-year career in branding and communications, living in places like Tokyo and London. Life eventually brought deep turning points, experiences of grief, illness within my family, stress, unhealthy patterns, and growing disillusionment with the imbalance I saw in both my own life and the wider world. Something within me knew change was needed.

Because of my Buddhist upbringing, I had a spiritual foundation to return to. Through prayer, reflection, and deep questioning, Who am I? Why am I here? What is true?, I was led back to my childhood fascination with ancient civilizations, sacred wisdom, and ultimately, shamanic traditions.

Years later, during a profound shamanic healing and soul retrieval, I remember the practitioner saying: “Come home. Come home to yourself.” Those words stayed with me. That healing became a doorway into deeper remembrance, that healing is not always about becoming someone new, but often about reclaiming what has been forgotten, fragmented, or lost.

What I came to understand is that healing is not always about fixing something that is broken. Healing is the gentle return to parts of ourselves that have been disconnected through trauma, grief, conditioning, or life experience. When I found my way into shamanism, it felt like returning home. Home to spirit. Home to ancient wisdom. Home to nature. Home to myself.

What does it mean to answer a deeper calling?

For a long time, I saw myself simply as a seeker. Someone learning. Someone healing. Someone trying to understand life more deeply. Yet after several profound initiatory experiences, the call became undeniable. At a time when it was not easy to find shamanic earth-based teachers, I began searching with deep determination.

Eventually, I found teachers and traditions that resonated profoundly. That path led me into the Andean mystical traditions, where I have studied, for close to a decade, with medicine people, Paqos, and lineage-based teachers whose wisdom continues to shape my understanding of healing, reciprocity, ceremony, and sacred relationship.

I made a life-changing decision: I left my sixteen-year career in branding and communication to become a full-time student of shamanic energy medicine. It was not a rejection of my previous life. It was an expansion of it. The communication path taught me how a story can transform people. The healing path taught me how spirit can transform us from within.

How can we reconnect with the path of the heart and our inner light?

Much of what I have learned has been shaped by earth-based traditions, especially the Andean cosmovision. One of the beautiful teachings in this path is the understanding of four sacred inner essences: Yachay – sacred wisdom and intelligence of the mind, Munay – sacred love and wisdom of the heart, Llankay – sacred work, action, and creation through the belly, Kausay – life-force energy moving through all of life. These qualities already live within us. The invitation is not to seek something outside ourselves, but to refine, balance, and embody them to the very best of our ability.

In modern Western life, many people have highly developed Yachay, intellect, analysis, knowledge. These are valuable, but often we disconnect from the body, the heart, and presence.

When wisdom is disconnected from love, life can become imbalanced. When these essences begin to harmonise, transformation naturally happens. Our thoughts are guided by wisdom, our actions by love, and our energy flows with greater alignment.

Reconnecting with the heart often begins simply: slowing down, listening deeply, returning to the body, reconnecting with nature, and asking what truly feels aligned. In many ways, coming home means returning to inner balance.

How do we work with challenge, duality, and inner conflict?

One of the deepest teachings I have received is that healing is not about rejecting difficulty. It is about learning how to transform it. In the Andean traditions, there is the sacred principle of Ayni, reciprocity and right relationship. Life is a continual exchange of giving and receiving, not only with people, but with nature, spirit, and life itself.

When we fall out of balance, we often feel disconnected. When this happens we might ask: Am I in right relationship with myself? With others? With life? Another profound Andean teaching is the principle of Sacred Complementary Energies. These are often described as masculine and feminine, light and shadow, stillness and movement, receiving and giving. They are not opposites in conflict. They are partners.

Healing often happens when we stop rejecting parts of ourselves that are expressed through fear, grief, shame, anger, and loss. These are sacred experiences, they are not failures, and when met with awareness and compassion, they can become our greatest teachers, revealing the gold, the gifts, and the medicine within. The shadow is not something to fear, it is often something asking to be seen, loved, and integrated. Through this process, we begin to accept ourselves more deeply, and we grow in compassion, resilience, humility, and self-love.

What is our role during these changing times?

I believe we are living through a profound threshold of transformation. Many people feel uncertainty, disconnection, grief, and inner emptiness. I believe this time is also an invitation. An invitation to awaken consciously and to remember that we are not separate from one another, nor from nature.

In Andean traditions, there is deep awareness that all of life is relational. Everything is interconnected, the Earth, sky, and waters, the ancestors, the spirit world, and community. So perhaps our role at this time is not to become something new, but to remember what has always been true. We are not here to become something new, we are here to become the fullest expression of who we have always been.

This means: living with humility, cultivating love, walking in service, remembering our gifts, choosing conscious action, and bringing greater harmony where we can. Even small acts of integrity can become medicine for the collective.

What can ancient earth-based wisdom teach us in a modern world of disconnection?

One of the deepest teachings I have received from Andean wisdom is that healing is relational.

In the West, many people live disconnected from nature, ritual, and inner stillness. We are mentally overstimulated, yet spiritually undernourished. Earth-based traditions remind us of reciprocity, humility, prayer, gratitude, and the intelligence of the natural world. They invite us to slow down and listen. This does not mean escaping modern life. It means learning how to live within it with greater presence, balance, and awareness.

How do we create a new reality for ourselves?

A new reality begins within. It begins through awareness. Through remembering that healing is a lifelong path. The Andean teachings often remind us that there is no final destination. Life is a great learning journey. As we integrate lessons, transform patterns, and live with greater consciousness, our experience of the external world begins to shift.

We change how we relate: to ourselves, to our relationships, to our purpose, to nature, to our communities, and to the world around us. This is how inner healing becomes collective healing. Each day becomes an opportunity to choose more love, clarity, wisdom, and alignment. Not perfection, but conscious embodiment.

How does ceremony create space for healing and transformation?

Today, I offer one-on-one ceremonial healing sessions, both in person and remotely. I call them ceremonial because I believe that life itself is a ceremony, a sacred relationship between ourselves, Pachamama Mother Earth, our ancestors, spirit allies, and the unseen forces that support healing.

My work is rooted in the Andean lineage-based traditions and informed by prayer, spiritual connection, intuitive healing, and energetic awareness. Each session is deeply personalized.

The work may include energy clearing, ancestral healing, releasing heavy patterns, ceremonial prayer, soul retrieval, sacred offerings, integration practices, and guidance for deeper personal transformation.

A key healing practice within the Andean traditions is animo wahay, soul retrieval, the gentle return of disconnected parts of one’s essence after grief, trauma, or energetic fragmentation. What I have learned is that healing unfolds in layers. Sometimes it is profound. Sometimes subtle. Sometimes emotional. Sometimes deeply quiet. Often, it begins simply by helping someone feel safe enough to return to themselves.

Can you share about your work at Shamans Directory?

Shamans Directory is deeply close to my heart, a labor of love, service, and vision. As Co-Founder, I have been with the Directory since its inception, and have helped to create what is now a vibrant and growing global nonprofit platform dedicated to making authentic shamanic earth-based wisdom, healing, and lineage-based traditions more accessible around the world.

Our vision is guided by: One Fire, One Medicine. We bring together original medicine holders and modern-day lineage-trained practitioners from around the world together as colleagues in a respectful and inclusive way. Through healings, teachings, live events, online courses, and community offerings, we hope to support healing, empowerment, and reconnection with timeless traditional wisdom.

The heart of this work is about relationship, with Earth, Spirit, and with each other. I truly believe healing is an act of remembrance. A journey of coming home. Home to ourselves. Home to love. Home to service. Home to the living wisdom that has always been here, waiting for us to remember.

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