About Steve J. Wagner
Steve J. Wagner is an author, retired shamanic practitioner and healer, rune reader, and the founder of Integrated Shaman. For more than two decades, his work has moved across spirituality, trauma, metaphysics, symbolic systems, anomalous experience, and the difficult work of finding meaning without surrendering discernment.
His path began at the crossroads of mysticism, ancient wisdom, Indigenous lineage, comparative religion, and science. A period of study in World Religions through the University of Central Arkansas Honors College renewed his examination of that lineage and led to formal apprenticeship work in shamanic traditions. During that training, Steve served as Fireman and Keeper of the Fire for Lakota inipi ceremonies and vision quests—experiences that shaped his long engagement with shamanic practice, ritual, altered states, and the practical realities of spiritual work.
Steve’s background also includes dual business degrees from the University of Central Arkansas, earned summa cum laude; ordination as a multi-faith minister; certification in energy medicine; Reiki Master training; hypnotherapy; personal training; past-life regression; and paranormal investigation. In 2015, he established the Journey Circle and Earth Medicine Chakra Workshops at the Academy of Holistic Arts in Little Rock.
Two near-death experiences also shaped Steve’s understanding of the traditional shamanic-death threshold: a disruptive passage in which the former identity, orientation, and ordinary assumptions about reality no longer hold. Those experiences deepened his work with trauma, altered states, spiritual rupture, and the recovery of coherence after life-altering events.
In 2020, Steve introduced Structural Consciousness Integration, or SCI: a trauma-informed energetic treatment developed to address fragmentation, dissociation, identity collapse, and the conditions historically described in shamanic traditions as soul loss. Rooted in the logic of Soul Retrieval while moving beyond symbolic performance, SCI focuses on restoring coherence, reclaiming dissociated aspects of consciousness, and supporting functional wholeness after trauma, religious rupture, and life-altering thresholds.
As an author, Steve’s work has evolved alongside his practice. SIMPATICO: Reconciling the Disparity of Spirituality, Ancient Wisdom, and Modern Science examines points of correspondence among spiritual inquiry, sacred symbolism, lived experience, and modern scientific language. An Essential Supplement to SIMPATICO expands selected source material and supporting frameworks from that inquiry. The Major Arcana approaches Tarot through archetype, resonance, and an unapologetically non-conventional voice. Celestial Currents: The Unscripted Soul carries related questions into metaphysical fiction.
His later writing turns more sharply toward spiritual deconstruction. The Illusion of Linear Time: The Root of Modern Spiritual Fallacies and The Botched “Divine” Experiment: Bungle in the Jungle examine the assumptions beneath reincarnation, karma, ascension, spiritual authority, religious control, suffering, and the human search for a coherent account of reality. His essays—including The Dark Side of Ascension: Not Rapture, But Rupture; Modern Spirituality Will Never Bring Awakening or Ascension; and The Three Traps of Modern Seeking—carry that inquiry into contemporary spiritual culture, identity, trauma, performance, false tribe, and the systems that profit when people remain permanently in search of repair.The Empty Mirror: Life After Deconstruction—Identity, Tribe, and Structure in the Objective Matrix brings that movement to its reconstruction-oriented conclusion, examining what can be built after inherited identities, roles, and explanatory structures no longer hold.
Steve’s current work holds practice and critique together. He honors the shamanic traditions that shaped him while refusing the gloss, performance, and inherited spiritual narratives that obscure real suffering or prevent genuine integration. His writing, Structural Consciousness Integration work, and Oracle of the Self Rune Reading share a common concern: helping people confront what has fractured, recover what has been displaced, and build a more deliberate life after false structures fail.
This site is the author archive and home base for Steve’s books, essays, blog articles, commentary, The Deconstruction Library, and the Oracle of the Self Rune Reading. For earlier practice-based writing, public archive material, and information about Integrated Shaman, visit www.IntegratedShaman.com.
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