Kim Hermanson, PhD is an award-winning author, educator and shamanic guide. She was initiated to the shamanic path in her 20s when she was critically injured in a head-on collision on the highway and accessed otherworldly energies to heal her body. During the next 15 years she experienced a series of mystical experiences that culminated in 2007 with a profound awakening experience and formal call to shamanic work. Kim is known for her skill in quickly shifting people out of psychological difficulties into a place of profound beauty, healing and creative flow. Her life is dedicated to the transmission of energies from this stunningly beautiful and intelligent realm.
Kim currently serves as Adjunct Faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute where she teaches courses on The Power of Image and the Healing Power of Creativity. Her books include Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination and Sky’s the Limit: The Art of Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey, which received an Independent Publisher Book Award. She has also co-authored book chapters and articles with Anthony S. Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of The New York Times bestseller, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Csikszentmihalyi said this of Kim’s work: “Not since Carlos Castenada’s books 40 years ago have I had such a strong reaction. This is very powerful stuff.”
Kim has served as both adjunct and core faculty at Meridian University, Sophia Center at Holy Names University, University of California Berkeley Extension, Sofia University (formerly the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology) and the Esalen Institute. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago, where her doctoral research earned her an Outstanding Research Award from the American Educational Research Association. Kim worked as a corporate computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence before a series of shamanic awakening experiences changed the course of her life and launched her calling to expand our human ways of learning and knowing.
In her unique Doorway sessions and classes, Kim has guided hundreds of people into the creative field of Source Energy. These energies bring a transformative shift, catalyze breakthroughs, unleash a person’s creative powers and answer whatever one is going through on a wholly new level of creative expression and healing.
When I was 26 I worked as a corporate computer scientist for a large corporation in downtown Chicago. One weekend, I flew with my boyfriend to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to see the fall colors. Late at night as we cruised down the highway at 65 miles per hour, a car crossed the center line and hit us head-on. I did not lose consciousness, but I was critically injured—I had no feeling below the waist and knew my back was broken.
I was airlifted to the Mayo Clinic where doctors told me I’d broken T-12 and displaced my spinal cord by 40 degrees. They gave me less than 5% chance of walking again. I was scared, traumatized and in almost unbearable physical pain.
In the emergency room, a nurse walked in and whispered in my ear, “Imagine that you’re floating on a cloud.” So I closed my eyes and imagined myself on a light, soft cloud. Almost instantly, my body shifted into a place of peace and calm. Remarkably, despite the experts’ dire warnings, over the next several months my body regained full functioning. Today, no one would ever guess at the extent of my injuries.
This accident was my first experience of shamanic initiation. It was my first lesson from the Spirit world for how to unlock our human capacity to access otherworldly energies.
In the following years I had several other experiences of mystical awakening and two more shamanic initiations where I accessed otherworldly energies to heal myself and transform intolerable situations.
Then in 2007, I experienced a series of remarkable events followed by a visionary experience and formal call from Spirit to be a shamanic energy guide. This final call began with a job interview with Aftab Omer, the President of Meridian University. Aftab said, “Rather than try to fit you into our program, why don’t you tell me what you would like to teach?” Spirit spoke through me and said that I would be teaching a course on metaphor. Aftab promptly agreed and said, “Great! We’ll call it the Psychology of Metaphor.”
I was stunned. I knew nothing about metaphor as an academic subject.
As I conducted research for the course, Spirit led me to remarkable out-of-print resources and books that taken together, suggested there was a realm of deep beauty that lies under the surface of human consciousness. We humans can’t access this dimension through our ordinary ways of knowing and I developed a deep longing to see this compelling, yet imperceptible, place. I spent months gazing at the world around me, trying to find “the way in.”
After the course ended, in a nightdream, I found myself in the backyard of the home where I grew up. But nothing about this was ordinary. Everything around me——land, trees, flowers, creatures——was pulsing with exquisite, otherworldly beauty. I gazed in wonder at this stunning beauty, before being forcefully yanked into the air and pummeled through the sky toward distant mountains.
Spirit was speeding me toward the mountains at very high velocity, soon I would slam into them and die. But just at the last second before certain death, I was yanked into a train tunnel going through the mountain. I looked out the train windows and again saw the amazing, pulsing energy. At that moment of seeing the exquisite beauty, a voice said “third space” and I was bolted back into ordinary reality.
This was my third shamanic initiation experience and the message was undeniable. It was a call to open this realm for others.