Today we’d like to introduce you to Henrietta Andersen.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
It all started with a terrible, debilitating head injury.
What initially felt like a devastating disruption in my life became, in time, a profound calling. I came to understand the injury as the “call” Spirit used to bring me onto the path I am walking today.
I had always been spiritually sensitive. Since childhood, I experienced an expanded awareness and a profound, sacred connection with Nature—experiences I often felt I could tell no one about except my diaries. After my injury, however, these experiences became even more heightened and frequent.
In my relentless search for healing, I saw more than 70 doctors, both conventional and holistic. Although I experienced improvements after a few years, I did not find complete relief. At the same time, I wanted to understand the unusual experiences and deeper dimensions of what was happening to me.
I began cultivating a personal relationship with Spirit, and that relationship became an increasingly important aspect of my life.
Over the years, I continued with a long-term physical therapy maintenance program, along with intermittent vision and vestibular therapy. Meanwhile, my nighttime dreams, daytime experiences, and synchronicities continued to guide me toward a path I did not yet have a name for. I read and researched, searching for an understanding of what I was experiencing.
Eventually, Spirit clearly led me to Shamanism, an ancient universal spiritual practice found across cultures throughout the Earth and dating back tens of thousands of years. It was on this path that I found answers to some of my most pressing questions about the experiences I had been having throughout my life, and especially since the injury.
Learning the Shamanic Journey felt completely natural to me. Through formal study with different shamanic schools, as well as private mentorship, it became a regular and central practice in my life. I learned the core shamanic method of receiving direct revelation by entering an altered state of consciousness through sonic driving with the drum and consulting my compassionate helping spirits for guidance, healing, and wisdom.
It felt like returning home.
The practice empowered me in ways I had previously experienced only in the presence of Nature—among mountains, trees, oceans, and other places that held a deep sense of sacredness for me. Yet now there was an added dimension: the empowering guidance and compassionate wisdom of helping spirits, which I could turn to with the questions and challenges I was bringing forward in my quest for healing.
I eventually realized that what I had been seeking was not just healing, but transformation.
As I continued my studies, I also received healing sessions from experienced shamanic practitioners. I experienced firsthand modalities including shamanic extraction, soul retrieval, body part soul retrieval, and power animal retrieval.
The grace I experienced through soul retrieval touched me in ways that are difficult to put into words. Aspects of my soul that had been dormant and fragmented gradually returned and were reintegrated, intact and beautiful. Extraction healing brought me significant shifts in my physical well-being, while power animal retrieval empowered me physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
It was a sacred journey of transformation.
Eventually, my helping spirits called me to embark on this path as a practitioner—to facilitate for others the same kind of healing transformation I had experienced myself.
Today, the modalities I offer in my practice include shamanic extraction, soul retrieval and empowerment, body part soul retrieval, power animal retrieval, and shamanic divination.
Shamanic extraction involves the clearing of what is understood in shamanic traditions as spiritual intrusions and heavy, dense energetic imprints that do not serve us. Once these are cleared from the energy field, the process may help remove energetic blockages to healing and allow one’s vital life force to flow more freely once again.
Soul retrieval supports the reintegration of aspects of our soul essences that may have fragmented or dissociated during periods of overwhelming stress, as a protective mechanism. Body part soul retrieval can be particularly meaningful following chronic illness, surgery, injury, or amputation. Power animal retrieval offers additional pathways for reconnecting with inner strength, guidance, and personal power, while shamanic divination provides a way of seeking spiritual guidance around questions and circumstances in one’s life, so that one can move forward with more clarity.
As a spiritual, holistic modality, shamanic healing addresses the underlying spiritual and energetic aspects of imbalance and injury. It is intended to complement appropriate medical or psychological care.
If you feel called to a sacred journey of healing transformation, this work may support you. Whether you are navigating physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual challenges, moving through a period of transition, or seeking to transform self-defeating patterns that have been holding you back from living as your most vibrant self, this work supports you in reconnecting with your truest essence and restoring your personal power.
Visit https://sunlightshaman.com for more information and to book a free initial consultation.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No, it has definitely not been a smooth road.
The physical aftermath of my head injury was an extremely difficult and prolonged chapter of my life. Before the injury, my formal training was in Fine Arts. I hold a B.F.A. and had begun pursuing an M.F.A., with the hope of eventually also earning a graduate degree in Art Therapy. The injury interrupted those plans, and years of rehabilitation made it impossible to continue along the path I had envisioned for myself at that time.
Living with the long-term physical symptoms was incredibly challenging. I spent years searching for healing. There were improvements along the way, but also setbacks, unanswered questions, and many moments of uncertainty. I had to learn patience and perseverance in ways I never anticipated.
There was another struggle that was less visible: I had no real cultural framework for understanding what was happening spiritually.
We live in a contemporary Western culture that does not generally provide a language or framework for understanding a spiritual calling to the shamanic path. My dreams, synchronicities, and daytime experiences were very real to me, but I did not yet understand in what context they belonged. Although the answers came over time, I searched for them through reading and research, and often felt that I was trying to find my way without a map.
The medical establishment was not equipped to interpret these experiences through a spiritual lens, while many religious institutions are understandably grounded within their own particular systems of belief. As a result, someone experiencing a spiritual calling can find themselves walking a very solitary path, often hesitant to speak openly about what they are experiencing for fear of being misunderstood, dismissed, or judged.
That solitude ultimately became part of the gift.
Because I could not simply rely on an established framework around me, I was pushed to cultivate a direct and personal relationship with Spirit. I had to listen deeply, question, research, discern, and ultimately learn to trust my own experiences and rely on Spirit to understand that this calling belonged on the Shamanic path. What initially felt disorienting gradually became an invitation into profound self-discovery. After I learned the Shamanic Journey and began to practice it regularly, I began to experience the fruits of deeply personal and intimate relationships with my compassionate helping spirits—relationships that, over time, have proven to be grounded in mutual trust and love.
Finding Shamanism gave me a framework for experiences I had carried since childhood, which had intensified after my injury. It also brought big shifts in many of the physical symptoms I had lived with for over 18 years.
Looking back, I can see that some of my greatest struggles became the doorway to discovering a deeper sense of purpose. The road was certainly not easy, and I would never romanticize the suffering itself. But the crisis revealed capacities within me that I might never have discovered otherwise.
It taught me that sometimes the path we planned for ourselves is not the path we ultimately walk. And sometimes, when one path is interrupted, another begins to reveal itself—one that leads us closer to our own original essence.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My work today has grown out of two deeply connected paths: my lifelong relationship with art through painting, creative writing, and dance—I grew up training for and wanting to be a dance choreographer—and my spiritual path as a Shamanic practitioner.
Years after my injury, I returned to painting as a way of rediscovering the artist in me.
I work primarily in abstraction, and what fascinates me most is the freedom of not knowing where the creative process will take me. In many ways, painting mirrors life itself. I begin with a spontaneous loose intention, but then the unexpected enters the process and asks me to respond. I experiment with different mediums and materials—oil, acrylic, gouache, oil pastels, powder pigments, sand, metal filings, water, compressed air, and even scratching into the canvas with knives. I love the surprises that emerge through these encounters with the materials and the questions they bring: What now? What next? Where is this going?
That process has taught me that sometimes the most interesting discoveries happen when we stop trying to control the outcome.
One of the questions I return to again and again is: When is an abstract painting finished? Is it ever really finished?
I have taken paintings off my walls after they had been hanging there for two years, brought them back into the studio, and found myself completely immersed in them again. I might begin working on a canvas that I thought was finished, only to discover an entirely new process waiting underneath what I had previously created. Sometimes it feels like an excavation—digging back into the layers of the painting, uncovering something that was already there but that I could not yet see. The painting transforms, and so does my relationship to it. To me, art has become excavatory.
This has become a beautiful analogy for how I understand healing and transformation.
Is healing ever a final state of completion? Perhaps depending on the person’s goals—but most often, healing seems to happen in layers. As we move through and integrate one layer, another may emerge into our conscious awareness, asking to be seen, understood, and transformed. Eventually, we can discover that what we thought was simply a journey of healing is actually something much larger: a sacred journey of transformation and self-discovery, gradually peeling away the layers that have obscured our truest essence.
Painting has therefore become much more than a creative practice for me. It is a delightful, meditative exercise that allows me to experience these processes directly. It teaches me to be present, to listen, to respond rather than control, and to remain open to surprise.
That same sensibility informs my Shamanic practice. In both painting and Shamanic work, I enter into a process of relationship rather than imposing an outcome. I listen for what is emerging, remain curious about what I encounter, and allow the process to reveal something that I could not have known beforehand.
What is most meaningful to me is that I have been able to transform experiences that once felt like profound interruptions in my life into sources of creativity, meaning, and purpose. Rather than leaving those parts of my story behind, I have learned to allow them to inform the work I do today.
What sets my work apart, I believe, is this integration of the artistic, spiritual, and transformational. Both painting and Shamanic practice have taught me to honor the great mystery of the process.
Sometimes, we simply have to be willing to enter the canvas, enter the journey, and see what reveals itself.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
Something that might surprise people who know me primarily through my art or Shamanic work is that I have also always had a certain interest in words. In fact, I like to think through writing.
Even as a child, I enjoyed looking through thesauruses and dictionaries, as well as writing poetry and keeping diaries. It’s interesting to notice the nuances of language—how one word can have several meanings, and how a slightly different word can change the feeling or intention of a sentence.
While I was still in college, fellow artists were hiring me to write their bios, artist statements, and press releases for their upcoming exhibits. I also became a Portuguese interpreter, which has been my profession for many years, helping people communicate across languages and cultures.
In some ways, it feels like another expression of the same curiosity that has always guided me. Whether I am working with paint, exploring the meaning of a word, or engaging in Shamanic practice, I am drawn to what lies beneath the surface. I enjoy discovering the deeper layers of meaning, making connections, and finding what is waiting to reveal itself.
Pricing:
- $150 – 1 hour session, complimentary follow-up included
- Sessions can go up to 3 hours long. Sliding scale available. If cost is a barrier, reach out.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sunlightshaman.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sunlightshamanichealing
