What Does it Take to Walk a Shamanic Path?

I had a friend ask me this recently and since then I have been feeling into this question - “What does it take to walk a Shamanic Path?”

My first thought was - am I a Shaman?

I started to ponder the meaning of the word Shaman, which led me to revisit it's origins. In her writings about Siberian Shamanism, Virlana Tkacz writes:

“During the mid-to-late 17th century, Russian-Cossack explorers and conquerors

heard and recorded the word ‘saman’ from the Evanki tribe, a Tungus-speaking

people of Siberian Russia. For those mountain-dwelling hunters and reindeer

herders, ‘saman’ was an action word.