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About Steve Wagner

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Steve J. Wagner is an author, retired shamanic practitioner, rune reader, and the founder of Integrated Shaman. For more than two decades, his work has moved through shamanic practice, energy medicine, comparative religion, metaphysics, anomalous phenomena, and the lived relationship among mind, body, and spirit.

 

His writing traces a deliberate, unyielding arc: beginning with a search to reconcile ancient wisdom and modern science, passing through the brutal rupture of inherited spiritual promises, and arriving at the difficult, necessary task of building an authentic life after false scaffolding burns to the ground.

 

Early Path, Lineage, and Practice

Steve’s path began as a profound internal calling that developed through formal study, intensive apprenticeship, direct practice, and lived experience. He earned dual business degrees from the University of Central Arkansas (summa cum laude) and studied World Religions through the UCA Honors College—a period that renewed his examination of sacred traditions and led to formal apprenticeship in shamanic disciplines.

 

During that training, Steve served as Fireman, or Keeper of the Fire, for Lakota inipi (sweat lodge) ceremonies and vision quests. This work instilled a deep, lasting respect for indigenous traditions, disciplined practice, and the heavy responsibility required when holding space for human transformation. His continuing education across the healing arts eventually included certification in energy medicine, training as a Reiki Master, hypnotherapy, personal training, and past-life regression, alongside ordination as a multi-faith minister.

 

Steve’s early work also confronted the unseen through direct investigation, exploring the boundary where conventional explanations fail. Two near-death experiences further shaped his understanding of the traditional shamanic-death threshold: a disruptive passage in which former identity, orientation, and ordinary assumptions about reality no longer hold. These passages, along with years of client work, deepened his focus on trauma, altered states, spiritual rupture, and the recovery of coherence after life-altering events.

 

Evolution of the Work: From Reconciliation to Integration

In 2015, Steve established the Journey Circle and Earth Medicine Chakra Workshops at the Academy of Holistic Arts in Little Rock. As his practice matured, he recognized that many traditional spiritual interventions relied heavily on symbolic performance rather than structural resolution.

 

In 2020, he introduced Structural Consciousness Integration (SCI). Built as a trauma-informed energetic framework, SCI addresses fragmentation, dissociation, identity collapse, and the conditions historically described as "soul loss". Rooted in the core logic of Soul Retrieval while moving beyond symbolic performance, SCI focuses on restoring coherence, reclaiming localized aspects of consciousness, and supporting functional wholeness after trauma, religious rupture, and existential shock.

 

The Literary Arc

Steve’s written output directly reflects the evolution of his inner inquiry and professional practice.

 

1. The Reconciliation Period

Steve’s initial books grew from an effort to find congruence among spirituality, ancient wisdom, modern physics, and energetic practice.

 

  • SIMPATICO and An Essential Supplement to SIMPATICO explored whether the apparent divide among spiritual traditions, consciousness studies, and modern thought could be understood as parts of a larger, workable whole.

     

  • The Essential Tarot Series: The Major Arcana carried this inquiry into practical archetypal territory through an unapologetically non-conventional voice.

     

  • Celestial Currents: The Unscripted Soul stands as Steve’s work of metaphysical fiction. Operating on the central premise that reincarnation is not a contract, but a curriculum of contingencies, the novel follows Alice through embodiment, queer identity, family friction, love with Sarah, and shamanic healing under Elias. It explores how the luminous blueprint shapes the currents of life without dictating its exact form: Alice received the wholeness she planned for, just through unscripted circumstances she never could have anticipated.

     

2. The Rupture and The Deconstruction Library

Reconciliation eventually met a hard truth: many inherited spiritual narratives, institutional doctrines, marketable ascension promises, and curated identities collapse when tested against raw lived experience, structural contradiction, and severe trauma.

 

The result was not an abandonment of spiritual inquiry, but a critical pivot—from trying to reconcile broken models to systematically dismantling them.

 

Formally emerging from a profound personal and intellectual pivot, The Deconstruction Library investigates the promises, myths, authority systems, and metaphysical fallacies shaping modern spiritual consumerism.

 

Key foundational texts within this body of work include:

 

The Empty Mirror: Reconstruction and Present Work

Now retired from active client practice, Steve writes from the accumulated weight of his years as a shamanic practitioner, teacher, investigator, and author.

 

The dismantling of old beliefs leaves the seeker in what Steve calls The Empty Mirror: the open, unvarnished clearing that remains after familiar identities, inherited roles, spiritual explanations, and false structures of belonging have burned away, but before a new life architecture has been built.

 

This condition forms the endpoint of his literary arc in The Empty Mirror: Life After Deconstruction—Identity, Tribe, and Structure in the Objective Matrix. The Empty Mirror is not a mystical reward or a final "enlightenment"—it is the sober pause after collapse where genuine reconstruction can finally begin.

 

Today, Steve’s work holds practice and critique in equal measure. He honors the core shamanic frameworks that shaped him while refusing the commercial gloss and spiritual bypassing that conceal real suffering. Through his writing, archive, and the Oracle of the Self Rune Reading, his focus remains singularly aligned: helping people confront what has fractured, discard what was never true, and build a deliberate, resilient life that can withstand reality.

 

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