Devin Ryback
Shaman & Spiritual Teacher
My work is centered on spiritual healing, spiritual development, and helping people restore a deeper relationship with themselves, Spirit, and Life.
I work with people who are healing, questioning, awakening, integrating profound experiences, or simply sensing that something deeper in their life is asking for attention.
Some come to me through Shamanic Healing. Some are looking for sustained spiritual development through Spiritual Mentorship. Others need focused Spiritual Guidance at a crossroads, or support preparing for and integrating psychedelic and plant medicine experiences through Plant Medicine & Psychedelic Integration.
The form changes.
The deeper work is relationship: learning to meet yourself, your experiences, Spirit, and Life with greater clarity, reverence, responsibility, and discernment.
The Path That Brought Me Here
My intentional spiritual path began in 2012 during a profound dark night of the soul and a life-altering initiation into shamanic healing.
Part of that threshold involved my own relationship with sacred plant medicines and a destabilizing nonordinary experience that I could not simply think my way through. I needed healing. I needed guidance. I needed to learn how to understand what had happened and how to live differently because of it.
That period changed the direction of my life.
I began working closely with teachers and entered years of spiritual practice, healing, study, and integration. What began as a crisis gradually became a path.
Mindfulness and contemplative practice became foundational. They taught me how to become still enough to notice what was actually happening, how to return to presence when I became lost in thought or fear, and how to develop a more honest relationship with my own experience.
At the same time, my shamanic training deepened my relationship with spiritual healing, energy, prayer, nonordinary experience, and Spirit.
Over the years, these were no longer separate interests.
They became different parts of one life devoted to healing, learning, practice, and service.
Becoming a Shaman
I did not begin this path with the goal of calling myself a Shaman.
For many years, I practiced, learned, healed, served, and continued working with my teachers without feeling a need to claim the title publicly.
Eventually, my teachers instructed me that it was time to accept it.
So I did.
I use the title Shaman because it names a role I have been trained and instructed to carry. For me, that role involves spiritual healing, relationship with Spirit, work with the energetic and spiritual dimensions of human experience, and the responsibility to approach those dimensions with reverence and discernment.
The title does not mean that I possess all spiritual truth or represent every shamanic culture or tradition.
I remain accountable to my teachers, my practice, my experience, the people I serve, and the quality of relationship I maintain with the work itself.
Being a Shaman is something I practice.
It is also something I continue to learn how to become.
Training, Practice & Experience Since 2012
Since 2012, I have continued studying, practicing, teaching, healing, and deepening my relationship with the spiritual path.
My education has taken more than one form.
Formal academic and professional study has given me useful frameworks for understanding the mind, behavior, inner experience, and the processes through which people change. Spiritual training has taught me through direct practice, relationship with teachers, healing work, nonordinary experience, prayer, discernment, and Life itself.
My background includes:
a B.A. in Integrative Psychology from SUNY Empire State University
professional training in clinical hypnotherapy and past life regression therapy through the Hypnotherapy Academy of America
years of ongoing spiritual training, practice, and experience beginning with my initiation in 2012
continued spiritual education through my own study and practice and through ongoing work with my teachers
In addition to these, I will soon be pursuing a master’s degree in mental health counseling.
I continue learning because I do not believe a teacher reaches a point where learning is finished.
How I Understand Healing
My work is grounded in the understanding that human beings have spiritual and energetic dimensions as well as embodied, mental, and emotional lives.
For me, Spirit is real.
So is the body.
So is the mind.
So are the ordinary circumstances of a human life.
Good spiritual work has to remain capable of meeting all of them.
Healing may involve clearing something spiritually or energetically. It may involve recognizing a pattern, accepting a truth, repairing a relationship, grieving, changing a behavior, developing a spiritual practice, or learning to listen to yourself differently.
Sometimes people need direct healing.
Sometimes they need teaching.
Sometimes they need guidance.
Sometimes they need time, practice, or a different kind of professional support altogether.
Discernment is part of the work.
You Can Bring the Strange Stuff Here
People sometimes come to me with experiences they have been afraid to speak about openly.
Visions.
Synchronicities.
Energetic experiences.
Perceived spiritual presences.
Mystical or psychedelic experiences.
Dreams that seem to carry unusual weight.
A sense that something happened spiritually that they do not know how to understand.
You can talk about those things with me.
I take spiritual and nonordinary experience seriously.
I also take discernment seriously.
I will not ridicule an experience because it falls outside an ordinary framework, and I will not automatically tell you that one interpretation of it must be objectively true.
We can remain curious.
We can pay attention.
We can distinguish what you experienced from what we conclude about it.
And we can ask what kind of response actually serves you now.
How I Hold the Role of Teacher
I am a Spiritual Teacher, but I am not interested in becoming the unquestioned authority in someone else’s spiritual life.
A teacher can point.
A teacher can share what they have learned.
A teacher can challenge, encourage, warn, demonstrate, and help someone recognize what they could not yet see alone.
But each person still has to walk their own Path.
I can tell you what I have learned through direct experience.
I can tell you what my teachers have taught me.
I can tell you what I perceive.
I can tell you when I feel confident about something and when mystery remains.
What I will not ask you to do is surrender your discernment in order to learn from me.
Respect matters.
Receptivity matters.
So do questions.
My hope is that good spiritual teaching eventually helps you trust your own relationship with Spirit and Life more deeply, rather than making you increasingly dependent on the teacher.
Life itself remains the greatest teacher I know.
Responsibility Without Blame
One principle runs through much of my work:
Responsibility does not require blame.
You may not have chosen everything that happened to you.
You may have been shaped by experiences, relationships, conditioning, suffering, or circumstances that were never yours to ask for.
Healing still asks for participation.
There comes a point when the question becomes less about who should be condemned and more about what you are willing to do with the life that is here now.
Responsibility can include boundaries, grief, forgiveness, repair, practice, asking for help, changing a pattern, or admitting that something is no longer aligned.
It is possible to take your life seriously without turning yourself—or someone else—into the enemy.
Still a Student
The longer I walk this path, the less interested I become in pretending there is nothing left to learn.
I continue to study.
I continue to practice.
I continue to work with my teachers.
I continue my formal education.
I continue to let Life show me where my understanding is incomplete.
Some things I know through direct experience.
Some things I have learned from people whose guidance I trust.
Some things I am still wondering about.
I consider that distinction important.
Spiritual certainty can become another way of refusing to listen.
I would rather remain teachable.
Ways to Work With Me
Shamanic Healing
Shamanic Healing is direct spiritual and energetic healing for people seeking clearing, restoration, reconnection, and support with what feels spiritually unresolved.
Spiritual Mentorship
Spiritual Mentorship is a 101-day teacher-student relationship for people who feel called to deepen their spiritual practice, discernment, self-trust, and relationship with Spirit and Life. I also offer individual Spiritual Teaching sessions without the full 101-day commitment.
Spiritual Guidance
Spiritual Guidance is a focused one-hour session using the Runes as an oracle for clarity around decisions, relationships, patterns, crossroads, and life direction.
Plant Medicine & Psychedelic Integration
Plant Medicine & Psychedelic Integration offers spiritual preparation and integration support before and after profound psychedelic and plant medicine experiences.
If you are unsure which form of work is appropriate, we can begin with a conversation.
Healing. Remembering. Right Relationship.
I do not believe the spiritual path asks us to become less human.
My experience has been the opposite.
It has asked me to become more present to this life.
More honest.
More responsible.
More reverent.
More capable of listening.
More willing to love what is here without pretending that everything is easy or understood.
My work is an extension of that path.
To heal what is ready to heal.
To remember what is true.
And to live in better relationship with ourselves, with Spirit, and with Life.