the shamanistic way to health requires an encounter with the void!

Emotional and intellectual vitality could be radically increased through shamanistic practices. The means to do this is you must face the void of the soul, where there is an absence of meaningfulness. By means of encountering such an existential threat to ego, one can often see those aspects of the real self that one's conformity to others' expectations has rendered invisible to you. Real shamanism works on you at the level of an existential threat, forcing a deeper investigation of one's inner resources.

There are degrees and kinds of shamanism. Nietzsche's intellectual shamanism is relatively deep, just as his experience of an existential "abyss" is central to his work. All the same, if had experienced an even deeper sense of the void, he may not have been so keen to reinforce radical gender polarities along the lines he did. He would have seen the aspects of "femininity" that he condemned in women as being part and part of his own psyche.

Bataille, it seems, had much more of an intuitive sense of going further, by means of "excess" which would break the existing boundaries of bourgeois consciousness.

The problem with any contemporary "New Age" shamanism is that it seeks to increase vitality on the basis of a prior acceptance of bourgeois norms about identity. The need to make shamanism commercially viable, according to Capitalist and consumerist mores, leads to the kind of "product" of learning that is all too reassuring in terms of the things as they are.

An enemy of shamanistic knowledge is the pervasive bourgeois ideology that we cannot change our essential characteristics but only work to refine and improve the ones we have. (This bourgeois pessimism is very pronounced, for instance, in the work of Lacan. His work proclaims, perhaps truthfully, that we are all, in one way or another, pathological, under the force of civilization. Yet his approach also effectively closes the door against any non-civilized means for recovering one's sense of wholeness. There is no void in which one may discover one's identity, within psychoanalysis. Rather, there tends to be the muted authoritarianism of the analyst's couch.)

Such bourgeois pessimism is (of course) also found in writers like Freud. He views the state of discontent with civilization as such, as pathological. Nietzsche effectively reversed this valuation by holding that civilization was itself an illness caused by the propensity to suffer too much from consciousness, at the cost of "instinct".