Corine Sombrun grew up in Africa and returned to France to study musicology, piano and composition. She settled in London in 1999 as a musician but also undertook projects for the BBC World Service.
One of those reports took her to Mongolia, where a highly respected local Dahrad shaman recognized her as having unique shamanistic capabilities. She was invited to spent several months a year at the border with Siberia to undertake the rigorous and intense training to become a Shaman. After eight years she thus became the first Western woman fully trained in the Mongolian shamanic tradition.
Her unique experience in the practice of shamanic trance and her ability to self-induce it have been a topic of interest for scientists. She has been collaborating with researchers since 2006, in order to show that this shamanic trance indeed modifies the circuits of cerebral functioning: Flor-Henry et al. 2017