Shamanic healing is an eastern religion that has sadly been heavily used by Charismatics for “inner healing.” The idea of inner healing or what Hindu call soul healing has been around since the whole Charismatic movement started. It has become a replacement for deliverance ministry.
The idea has been around since, at least, the time of Christ. It has some loose connections with Japanese ideals of Shinto. However, it made a serious revival of itself in the 1960’s (about the time inner healing was starting) through Carlos Castaneda. It became a development of a mixture of anthropology and spirituality.
The love movement (hippies) used it for magico-religious practices. People that were part of the neoshamanic movement converted to Christianity during the Jesus People movement in the early 1970’s with Lonnie Frisbee. The problem was they still wanted to keep their neopagan practices so some of them found theological “loop poles” to build what we know as inner healing today.
Much like the Hebrew Roots movement of today, they were guilty of cultural appropriation. People in modern America tried to develop cultural expectation from ancient Mongolia. They wanted understanding and knowledge apart of the Christian tradition that requires holiness. This is the reason some critics belief there is a desire to refer to sin as “struggles.”
