Dr. Helena Soholm

Helena Soholm is a Korean shaman, or mudang, and a transpersonal psychologist based in Bellingham, Washington. Born in South Korea, she moved to the United States as a child and spent her twenties and thirties studying religion and psychology: a first degree at Smith College, theology at Harvard Divinity School, where she first met shamanism as a subject of study, existential-phenomenological psychology at Seattle University and a doctorate at Saybrook University under Stanley Krippner. In 2018 she finished that doctorate and, in the same year, was initiated into Muism, the indigenous spiritual tradition of Korea.

Her shamanic work centres on the ancestors. She leads ceremonies and rituals in the Korean tradition, often with drumming, music and dance, and offers long one-to-one sessions in person or by Zoom on ancestral connection, past lives and relationships. She teaches workshops on soul and ancestral initiation at Omega and in London, has taken groups to Korea and Denmark for her Illuminate retreats, and writes about decolonising spiritual practice so that people of every heritage can recover the ways of their forebears. Alongside this she keeps a psychotherapy practice for people on a spiritual path.