Printed in the Spring 2026 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard "Aquarian Shaman: An Interview with Linda Star Wolf" Quest 114:2, pg 14-20
By Richard Smoley
Linda Star Wolf has been a visionary teacher and shamanic guide to thousands of people over the last thirty-five years. Starting out as a therapist in the mental health and addiction fields in the 1980s, she is a nationally certified alcohol and drug counselor who draws from her personal experience of recovery from addiction.
The author of several books, she is the creator of Shamanic Breathwork, the cocreator of the Shamanic Healing Initiatory Process (SHIP), the founder of Venus Rising Association for Transformation, and the founder and president of Venus Rising University for Shamanic Psychospiritual Studies. She is also the cofounder of the Shamanic Mystery Tours and takes spiritual seekers all over world to explore sacred shamanic sites.
Her latest book, The Aquarian Shaman: Walking the Spiral Path of Transformation, was published in 2024 by Inner Traditions International. This interview was conducted via Zoom.
Richard Smoley: Many people have heard the word shaman but may not know what it means. Why don’t you begin by explaining what a shaman is from your point of view?
Linda Star Wolf: When people think of a shaman, they might think of Siberia, since the word is derived from a Siberian language. The word means “excited energy.” For me, a shaman is a walker between the worlds. Traditionally a shaman was a medicine person, a medicine man, woman, or even transgender. They were medicine people, meaning that they carried some excited or high-frequency energy. They used different tools, but they were channeling and working with energy in the elemental world and power that they had developed within themselves. They had often been injured or sick beforehand, and in their own healing, they learned how to work with healing spirits or energies.
We know that it worked. Shamans were able to heal people of mental and physical maladies and terminal illnesses. They were even said to raise the dead: they brought people back from the other world.
Richard Smoley: We’ve covered one half of your book title, so let’s cover the other half. It’s Aquarian Shaman, so it obviously has to do with the age of Aquarius. Just about everybody has heard of this but may understand it even less well than the word shaman. What do you mean when you’re talking about the age of Aquarius?
Star Wolf: About forty years ago, I started working with medicine teachers. I had already been a therapist and counselor. I went to the University of Kentucky to become a social worker and an addiction specialist. So I was already kind of a healer in that way. When I got to healing at its deepest roots, I found esoteric teachers and shamans.
When the song “Aquarius” came out, people were marching in the streets. We were marching in the streets at the University of Kentucky. We were the hippies of that era, and a lot of people said we were the children of Aquarius.
As I went on in my life, I began to think back on that time and what was going on then, asking, what do the adult Aquarians look like?
I believe that human beings have the ability to become grown-ups of God instead of children of God. I think that God, or Goddess, is tired of us being children and would like it if we grew up to be adults of God. What would it look like if human beings really grew up and took their place in the universe, like the redwoods, oceans, the elemental world, and all the other creatures? What if we grew up into our own nobility? What if we grew up into our own higher levels of consciousness?
I started seeking for a word that spoke to this possibility. The song “Aquarius” came to me: “Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding.” To me, this meant walking in a certain way, with visions at a higher level of consciousness.
As I said, I have worked in mental health. I’ve worked with the chronically mentally ill. I worked with addiction, my own and others’. I started thinking that instead of telling people they had an illness, what if we called the people who are going through these radical shifts, who learn how to heal and recover and then help others, with another name? It popped into my mind during meditation that these were the children that had grown up as Aquarians, and that these Aquarians were the modern-day healers, teachers, philosophers, way showers.
Our higher power is looking to us now and saying, “I’ve given you the keys to the kingdom, to the queendom. Is it safe to let you drive the car and be back at 10 p.m.?”
I’m seventy-two now, and I’ve been on this path for fifty years. I’ve been in the healing profession since I was twenty. If I say I’m an Aquarian shaman, what have I learned? What is my gift? How can I offer that gift to the world?
Now, at a time when I thought I would wind down some, I feel I’m just getting started again, because so many people are vibing to this frequency.
Smoley: That’s fascinating. My own personal theory is that the watershed between the Piscean and Aquarian ages was the world wars. This would jibe with what you’re saying, because that generation was beginning to be born during the Second World War and later, into the baby boom generation.
You mentioned the lyrics of the song, which speak of “harmony and understanding.” It seems to me that we are definitely in the age of Aquarius now, but it’s not quite the hippie paradise that we were expecting. Could you comment on that?
Star Wolf: Being a woman and having given birth to children, I know that the hardest part of birth is about one minute before the baby is born.
When my daughter-in-law was giving birth to her second child, I was there. She was having a hard time. She got up and got out of bed. I said, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going home.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not doing this.”
“What do you mean? You’re minutes away!”
“I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can.”
“You don’t know.”
“Honey, who do you think you’re married to?”
I will never forget that moment. Right before birth is when the pain is the most difficult. It’s off the Richter scale.
Working in the field of addictions, I’ve never seen somebody get sober because they got their first ticket or had a hangover. They’ve often been in jail; they’ve often lost their families; they may be losing their health; they may have been forced into treatment. They’ve had heartbreak. Sometimes they’re living on the streets, whether they’ve been a Park Avenue attorney or a hillbilly in the mountains of Kentucky. They hit a bottom, and it’s bad.
At that moment of exquisite pain, when you cannot take it anymore, your old self says, “I’m willing to die.” In that moment of awakening, where you have to say, “Help!” to something outside of ourselves, bigger than ourselves, all of a sudden, you receive the power, the transmission. Some people call it the Holy Spirit. In shamanism, we speak of helping guides: spirit guides, helpers, animal powers, ancestors, whatever it might be. As it’s said, God will come when we need her or him or it. In that moment of our greatest doubt, loss, and brokenness, we break open so that something can come into us. We’re possessed by enthusiasm; we become inspirited. We’re possessed by something bigger than our little human ego consciousness, and we become more evolved.
T.S. Eliot wrote: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” To hope would be hope for the wrong thing, because we often hope for the pain to hurry up and be over. Sometimes there has not yet been enough pain for something new to be born.
It seems that these are the cosmic laws on this planet. My Wolf Clan grandmother, Twylah Nitsche of the Seneca nation, said, “Don’t ask me why we made it this way, or why we decided to come here to this planet. They do it different in other galaxies, but for some reason this is a coveted place for souls to come to, because the deeper you can go, the strongest bottom you can hit, you can do the opposite. You can know the opposites clearly and see their purpose for transformation.”
Smoley: I’m reminded of Jung’s motto: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit: “Whether called or not, God will be there.” Much of what you’ve just said sounds very much like shamanic initiation. Maybe you could go into a bit more detail about shamanic initiation.
Star Wolf: I have been called to the shamanic path for a long time, even before I completely knew what it was. Ever since childhood, the elemental world has called to me and what you said—“called or uncalled, God comes just the same”—has long been a prayer in my heart. May I have the good sense to call upon what’s greater than me and surrender more quickly. May I have less tolerance for pain and suffering. May I choose to say, “Ouch! OK, I’m ready to change instead of being dragged across the coals.”
It seems to me that human beings have to grow up enough, to have some autonomy and develop their wills, because it’s the only gift we can give back to the great mystery of God. God has everything else but our will. God wants for us not to be puppets but to become vessels of the Holy Spirit, or the shamanic spirit. The pineal gland opens up and begins to drop the nectar in. We become multidimensional, as the shamans do, and we can see the whole story. Suffering begins to decrease, regardless of what we’re going through.
Richard, you and I have lived long enough to have experienced a lot of heartbreak and loss in our lives. There’s a way not to get jaded or immune, but to reach an acceptance of the process of the cycles of change, of life, and of what birth, death, and rebirth look like. I think anybody over the age of sixty is already a shaman at some level, whether they recognize it or not.
I think this is a beautiful time for us to use the archetype of the shaman. Everything that’s happening around the world, all the horrible unjust wars, all the bombs that are being dropped, all the swings of energy in our political world, all these things that are still so outrageous—all of these are wake-up calls for human beings to step up and say, “It’s not about an oligarchy. It’s not about a king or a queen or a president, male or female. It’s about people.” The only way governments can rise and fall is by people supporting them or not. This is a time, I believe, when people will experience extreme consciousness, so in its own way, Aquarius is playing its way out.
Smoley: You’ve mentioned that it’s time to grow up—childhood’s end, as Arthur C. Clarke would put it. Yet I notice that American adults seem to have become more infantilized, more kid-like in recent decades. It even comes down to dress, because sneakers and blue jeans were what kids wore when I was a kid. Now everybody wears them.
Fast food and junk food were basically kid food. My father went to McDonald’s for me every Saturday, but my parents didn’t eat McDonald’s. Dress, fast food, as well as certain types of immature personal behavior, make it seem as if we’re doing the opposite of becoming adults. Americans today often seem less mature than they did fifty years ago. I’m wondering if you could comment on that.
Star Wolf: We do lots of trainings for facilitators of shamanic breathwork. I believe storytelling is one of the best ways to transmit wisdom. The Bible has done that. Religious books all around the world have done that to tell the story of what has been. It’s like handing off the baton to the next generation so they can take it and build on it with their lives.
As much as these people love me and my books and want to be trained as breathwork facilitators and shamanic ministers, when I tell my stories, I can see the eyes of many of them glaze over. There’s almost a bit of disassociation. After twenty or thirty minutes of my teaching, I can see that they’re not paying as close attention. They seem to think my stories are rather ho-hum.
But these stories are sacred to me. They are the wisdom teachings that have been passed down to me by my teachers, such as Jacqueline Small, Stan Grof, Leonard Orr (who was a friend of mine), and Grandmother Twylah, the Seneca Wolf Clan grandmother, who was ninety-four when she passed these wisdom teachings on to me. Some were only available through verbal transmission, because they didn’t write certain things down.
Today people want it quick. Instead of sitting down with an encyclopedia, they go to Google or WhatsApp or AI. We have this technology, and we’re inevitably going to use it. That’s OK, but it can dumb people down if it’s automatically done for them and they don’t have to use certain parts of their brain to know how to seek, to hunger, for wisdom, to have a holy longing to understand the cosmos.
It’s like the caterpillar. It has to struggle inside of the cocoon to develop and break out and build strong wings. Otherwise there’s a failure to launch, a failure to rise to higher heights.
Sometimes I talk to people and share these medicine stories. When I heard them, I used to hang on every word so I could get the transmission. Today I see young people looking off when I tell them. I pray and I hope that I’m able to share with these teachings with younger people, and that they learn to hurry up and slow down.
When I send people out on medicine walks, I send them out the way Grandma sent me. I’ll say, “Don’t come back until you’ve had a personal conversation with an insect and it’s downloaded its wisdom to you. When that has happened, write it down—do not record it—and then come, read it to me, and share that story.”
Smoley: That’s wonderful. It leads very naturally into the next question: could you talk a little bit more about shamanic breathwork? There’s Stan Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork and various other antecedents; you’re obviously familiar with those. Tell me specifically about shamanic breathwork.
Star Wolf: I always believe in honoring my elders and my lineages. My first lineage is Holotropic Breathwork.
I was always a meditator, from the sixties, and back then, sometimes I had substances that helped me meditate, but I myself am in recovery, for forty-three years now. Very early on in my sobriety, I learned how to meditate, do yoga, and do guided imagery with Shakti Gawain. In my early sobriety, I went to a Holotropic Breathwork session. I had no idea what it was, but my AA sponsor took me. I was just twenty-something.
We went to Nashville, Tennessee, which was about three hours from the town where I lived in Kentucky. We went to a Red Roof Inn, which had a conference room. In that huge room, close to 300 people were sitting on the floor in a big circle. I had no idea of what I was getting into. I thought we were just going to meditate, but it turned out to be Holotropic Breathwork.
I did that work. It was very profound. In that one session, I had a major rebirth and a healing of issues that had plagued me for my whole life. When I came out of the session and we got into small groups, I looked out at the group. They said, “What do you want to share? You’ve got a minute.”
“I’m going to do this.”
“That’s good,” they said, “but what else do you want to share?”
“I’m going to do this.”
That was all I could say. It was like falling in love with someone immediately, whether it’s a mate, a friend, or a dog. It’s like, “You’re mine. I know I’m going to fall in love with you.”
I knew I was going to fall in love with breathwork. I’ve been a counselor ever since I was twenty, working in the psychiatric unit and with the chronic mentally ill. I knew there had to be better ways to work with people for healing than drugging them up, setting them in a corner, or hospitalizing them. People were doing the best they could for these folks, but I knew there was something more.
So I began to dive into breathwork. I was already acquainted with Jacqueline Small when she and Stan and Christina Grof were working together with breathwork, and I fell in love with Jacqueline. But then, as often, there was a parting of the ways between her and the Grofs, and Jacqueline went on to create the Eupsychia Institute. I had to decide whether I was going to study Holotropic or go with Jackie with her integrative breathwork.
I chose to go with Jacqueline because she was a huge advocate of Theosophy. She would teach about Rudolf Steiner, Annie Besant, and Paramahansa Yogananda.
All the greats came to her workshops, like Ram Dass; Jeremy Abrams, who came to teach about the shadow; and Marion Woodman, who came to teach about the beloved. They would come and have a segment, and then we sat with these people and have breathwork experiences. I felt as if I had died and gone to heaven. I was a little girl from Kentucky, and I was in with these world leaders. It rocked my world.
Stan’s breathwork was fabulous, and it was very experiential, but Jacqueline believed in doing in-depth art projects around your symbols, like Carl Jung. She was a huge devotee of Jung’s work, so she immersed us in Jungian psychology and working with our shadow. She believed that if you don’t work with the shadow and the inner child, all of the spiritual work you do is kind of insignificant. As a lifelong therapist, I agree with that, so she really fit the bill for me.
During that time, I began to be introduced to shamans, and that really caught my heart.
The three biggest things in my life are sobriety, breathwork, and shamanism. The Native American path deeply touched something inside of me. I now believe that what it was touching inside of me is my own lineage back to Scotland and Ireland, where my families came from: the shamanism is very similar in many ways.
Smoley: One common theme in shamanism is power animals or animal spirit guides. Perhaps you could talk a little bit about this subject.
Star Wolf: I’m a big animal lover, and I grew up on the farm with my grandparents while my young parents went out to work every day. They raised all their food. My grandmother canned all of our vegetables, and we had chickens. I went barefoot from the time school let out until the time school started again. I could practically walk on glass at the end of the year. It was wonderful, and I loved all my animals: rabbits, chickens, the mule that pulled the plow, the dogs, the cats, the birds, the snakes. The first thing we did every day was go out into nature. I was a huge lover of nature, and that influenced me deeply.
I was immersed in my grandparents’ earth-connected existence. When I was in grade school, I read a book called Heidi, about a girl who goes up to be with her grandfather in the mountains. That’s what I felt like, and it was a very happy time.
While my grandfather was plowing, my grandmother would be putting the seeds into the earth behind him, praying to the earth to grow our food and thanking it. She didn’t say, “Mother Earth”; she just said, “Thank you.” I knew she was talking to the earth.
When planting was done, we would sit out under the night sky in the swing, and my grandmother would pray to Jesus and the spirits and the fairies all at the same time. She’d say, “See that star up there? You watch it; it’ll move in a little while.” And it did (at least in my imagination), and she’d say, “Ask them for help.” She was talking to the aliens. She completely believed in the aliens.
My mother would say to me, “Now, Linda Kay, your mammy has a very overactive imagination.” Later on, as I started growing up, people told me I had an overactive imagination. I’m so grateful that I inherited my overactive imagination from my Mammy Jones. I give her credit for introducing me to the shamanic world before I had heard the word shaman, so that as I grew older, I knew what to look for.
She passed when I was twelve, and it left a huge, gaping hole in my life for a long time. The year after she passed, I started doing drugs and alcohol. That was my substitute for an altered state. I had to find it in another way until I could realize that it was inside me as well. Later, when I read about shamans, I immediately knew that that’s what my grandparents were. They were calling on forces to help them from the elemental world. They were calling on spirit guides and deities, and they were working closely with the earth. They had a relationship with the earth that was interactive and respectful and loving.
To me, that’s shamanism at its heart. I have my rattle and my drum and my feathers, but that doesn’t make you a shaman. What makes you a shaman is your heartfelt connection to the elemental world and your deep respect for the interconnection of everything. In that interconnection, there’s a way you begin to heal, and you can pass that healing on to others.
Smoley: You said that they do things differently in other galaxies, and you also mention the aliens. From the shamanism that you practice, what impressions do you have of these beings who may be up in the sky, or maybe galaxies away?
Star Wolf: I think we have spirit guides and helpers in all realms and all dimensions. We’re so close to the other world when we’re born. For those first few years, the veils are open, and the crown in your skull isn’t fully closed yet. There’s a natural relationship to the other worlds and the other life forms throughout the cosmos.
But here on this earth, I think it’s intentional that the crown begins to close, so that we can begin to relate to the earth beings and elementals.
One of the first things that Grandmother Twylah did was to say to me, “Go find a rock person.” I went out on the reservation and walked all day until I found my rock person. Then she had me sit out all night long, alone, by a little fire out back and wait for that rock person to talk to me and give me its wisdom if it would. She told me to do ceremonies and make offerings to it so that it became a part of my medicine. And you asked that elder for wisdom.
This multidimensional world doesn’t just start in outer space. It’s on the earth, with insects. I wrote a book some years ago about the insect healers and teachers and their medicine. Look at how a caterpillar changes itself from a creature that can only crawl a couple of inches to one that can fly from the United States to Australia.
I’m not going to call them aliens, but these supernatural creatures exist in all realms. Why would they only be found on this planet? It would make no sense whatsoever for us to be so special that this is the only place in all the cosmos where there is anything alive. Maybe it’s because it feels a little too scary for people to imagine what’s beyond here, but personally, I get excited about it.
I’ve been that weird kid who talked to aliens as a child, who believed in the star that Mammy taught me about: if I stood and watched it long enough, it would move, and I could talk to it. There was energy in the star itself, and I could tell it when I was sad or scared or was in trouble with my mom or dad. It was an ancestor, a grandmother, a grandfather that loved me, that would hold me, comfort me, and give me a message that would help me understand what I did wrong. For me, the star people were always there, and they still are.
Smoley: Maybe you could describe one notable healing experience that comes to your mind.
Star Wolf: I’ll go back to the day that I got sober. That’s such a long time ago—almost forty-three years—but it was the place where I began to believe in miracles again. As a child, I absolutely believed in the miraculous, but after my grandmother passed, I felt lost without her, and all heaven and hell broke loose. That’s when I started using substances to take care of my nervous system and my emotions and to not feel the pain. I was self-medicating, and those substances were readily available in the sixties. I was full-blown addicted (although I didn’t know it in those early teen years) while I managed to be on the honor roll and hide my addiction from people. (Hiding it is your first clue.)
Then I went away to the University of Kentucky, where everybody was drinking and using psychedelics. But I was the one who always got a little more intoxicated than most of the others, or I was the one who always did something wild.
I would say, “I’m going to stop.” I would even tell someone “I’m not going to do this,” but by nighttime I was doing it again. It was humiliating.
I hid it well for a long time, till the very end, when I hit bottom. I’m a very strong-willed person, and I was using my will as hard as I could, but I was absolutely unable to stop using alcohol. I had stopped all other drugs, but I justified the alcohol. I don’t think there’s anything wrong for people in using alcohol socially, but I can’t. That’s not the way I’m made. If one is good, ten is better. I think that’s why I’m a good addictions counselor. I don’t judge people for it. At the same time, I know the ups and downs, the ins and outs, and I know the path to wholeness.
Finally I hit bottom. I had consumed way too much alcohol, and I went into the bathroom and went to the holy throne and got on my knees in front of it. I got sick, and I lay there and wept. I was as low as you could go: hugging a toilet on the floor.
On this day I flat out said to the God of my understanding, to my higher power, “If you will take this away from me and remove this obsession from me, I promise you that from this day forward, my life belongs to you 100 percent. Wherever you show me to go, I will go. Whatever you show me to do, I will do. I will not argue, I will not debate, I will not make excuses. I will not turn the other way. I will not back off from what I’m afraid of. I will do whatever you would have me do.”
I cried for a few minutes and then I stumbled off to bed. I awakened about three hours later. Now you’re talking about a person who had an obsessive, compulsive, biological, chemical, spiritual addiction, who used every day, secretly, as much as possible in the evenings.
Later on that evening, when I normally would have started drinking, I didn’t even think about it; it was as if I had amnesia. All of a sudden, I thought, “I didn’t go for a drink,” and then I thought, “Well, I’ll pour one after a while.” But I didn’t, and I never did again. It wasn’t like fighting an urge. I wasn’t sweating. It was as if it had never been a problem. From that day on the toilet till now, forty-three years later, I’ve never touched an intoxicating substance of any kind.
From that day till now, my higher power and I have kept our commitment to each other. I’ve been through some hard things with loved ones who’ve died, some hard disappointments (like many of us who have lived to this point), yet I think I’m probably one of the happiest people I know.
Although I certainly feel my feelings—all of them—I’m a very happy, joyous, grateful person, and there is nothing I would rather do than share this medicine.
Smoley: That’s a beautiful account. Do you have anything you would like to add that we haven’t discussed?
Star Wolf: Jamie Sams, one of Grandmother Twylah's protégés, who’s now with her on the other side, created a deck called Medicine Cards, which includes all of Grandmother Twylah’s teachings, , which include all of Grandmother Twylah’s teachings, which she directly transmitted to Jamie.
I drew a card to see if Grandma wanted to be here with us today, and I drew the Eagle. Although the animals are all sacred and they all have medicine, the Eagle is considered to be the most powerful card in the deck because it’s the highest flyer. Therefore it has tremendous sight to see the bigger picture of why everything is happening and to have the wisdom to know right action.
I want to draw attention to one feature of my book: in the middle I have wonderful photos of Aquarian shamans. It’s a whole array of people, younger to older, different nationalities, different paths, who may have different lineages but who are all sharing the same kind of medicine with the world.
It’s time to awaken your own shaman within, because it’s the age of Aquarius. This is the time for all of us to download those energies and bring our wisdom to the world.
Smoley: Thank you so much. In regard to the Eagle, I’m willing to say that anyone who reads this interview will finish it on a higher level of consciousness than when they started.