Hello!
I recently sat down with Wisdom Rising Podcast’s host Isabel Wells for an in-depth conversation about my personal journey, the evolution of therapeutic shamanism, and how these practices can help us reconnect with nature and ourselves.
I hope you enjoy it!
… or if you prefer to listen to a specific question, simply click on the question:
- How did you begin your journey with shamanism?
- From anthropology to therapeutic shamanism.
- Soul-loss & modern challenges of soul-retrieval
- How do shamanic techniques help us reclaim ourselves?
- Bridging the gap: aligning mental health and soul health through shamanism
- On cultural appropriation
- Shamanic practice in everyday lives
- Modern human-centredness
- What is Animism?
- Shaman or shamanic practitioner?
- Last piece of advice
- Start your shamanic journey
PAUL'S JOURNEY
How Did You Begin Your Journey with Shamanism?
I had a lot of experiences in childhood that, in hindsight, were very shamanic. At the time, though, I had no idea what was happening. I was raised in a Church of England household, and my background was Christianity, so when I felt connections with animals or plants, I had no one to talk to about it.
I then went to university and, as part of the course structure, I had to choose two additional subjects in the first year. I signed up for anthropology, and I honestly don’t know why – I didn’t even know what it meant! But now, looking back, I realise it was one of those moments where my soul was calling to me. After I graduated, I had no idea what to do with an anthropology degree, but in the long run, it shaped everything for me.
I became a psychotherapist in my twenties while exploring shamanism on the side, but there were aspects of the shamanic world that didn’t sit right with me, such as ethics. Eventually, I moved away from it, though it never completely left me. In my psychotherapy practice, I got into body-centred work, and I started noticing that the experiences my clients were having were quite shamanic – using metaphor, imagery, and altered states of consciousness.
In my mid-thirties, after a series of traumatic events, I had a severe breakdown and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. That was when shamanism came crashing back into my life, and I’ve never looked back since. I never intended to be a teacher, but my guides kept nudging me, and in 2007, I finally founded the Three Ravens College of Therapeutic Shamanism.
FROM ANTHROPOLOGY TO THERAPEUTIC SHAMANISM
What inspired your shift from anthropology to psychotherapy, and how did you integrate shamanism into your therapeutic approach?
I was trying to heal myself. I had a difficult childhood, and psychotherapy felt like a way to understand my experiences. Shortly after university, my girlfriend at the time invited me to a psychotherapy weekend, and I said yes, not really knowing what to expect. I remember sitting there in the first hour, watching people listen to each other with empathy and kindness. It felt like I was a fish being put back in water – I knew I had found my place. Psychotherapy became a second passion for me.
A lot of people say shamanism is an ancient form of psychotherapy, and I believe that’s true. There is a significant overlap, though they have important differences, too. I love both equally and believe each can learn from the other.
Psychotherapy, in particular, could learn from shamanism the importance of connecting with the other-than-human.
Psychotherapy tends to happen in a very human-centered environment—two people sitting in a room. While ecotherapy is emerging, it’s still in its infancy. Shamanism emphasizes that our psychological, emotional, and spiritual health depends on a healthy connection with the other-than-human, too.
If psychotherapy ignores this, it risks perpetuating the problem. Much of our distress comes from a broken connection with the other-than-human. If therapy only focuses on human issues, it becomes like the “opium of the people,” offering comfort without addressing this really fundamental issue.
Psychology can help shamanism adapt to modern times
Psychotherapy can also teach shamanism, despite being relatively new—only about 100 years old. It arose to deal with the severe mental health issues we’ve faced over the last few thousand years since the rise of civilization. We’re no longer wired in the same way that we were as indigenous people, so traditional shamanic techniques don’t always work as effectively today, they don’t last as well, and they don’t take root. It’s because they didn’t evolve. Psychotherapy understands modern mental and emotional issues, and can help adapt traditional shamanic techniques to be more effective for today’s world.
One of the things I love about shamanism is it’s incredibly pragmatic.
There’s a saying, “Does it grow corn?” meaning, does it work? What shamans have always done is take this really really ancient body of knowledge and practices and then adapt it to make it useful to the particular times they’re living in. We need to do the same and psychotherapy’s insights from the last century can help with this adaptation. My passion is to merge these two disciplines without diminishing either, so the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
SOUL LOSS & MODERN CHALLENGES OF SOUL RETRIEVAL
You had mentioned soul retrieval as one of the practices that you tend to find doesn't stick as well in modern day practices. Can you share a little bit more about what your perspective on that is and how you're adapting it to find it to be more effective?
WHAT IS SOUL LOSS?
Fundamental to shamanism is the concept of soul loss. It’s the idea that parts of us can leave our body, and we actually do that all the time, like when we’re daydreaming. You know, we can find ourselves on a tropical beach or somewhere, and then we come back to our body. It also happens when we dream at night. So, there’s nothing strange about leaving your body; the key is that you should come back.
Soul loss occurs when part of us leaves, gets traumatised, but doesn’t return. It leaves a hole in us, and from a shamanic perspective, that’s dangerous. It makes us vulnerable, like having a weakened immune system. Things can get into us that shouldn’t be there, and so retrieval has always been a vital part of shamanism. It’s the ability of a shaman to leave their own body on behalf of someone, find that person’s lost soul part, and bring it back.
What are the main causes of Soul loss?
Now, soul loss can happen for many reasons, like bereavement. Indigenous people obviously suffer bereavements, and they go into grief, experiencing soul loss. We say when someone dies, it feels like they’ve taken a part of us with them, or the light has gone out. So, indigenous people would suffer soul loss, and they would be happy for a shaman to perform a soul retrieval and bring that part back.
Main reason, though, is domestication of ourselves.
One of the main reasons we experience soul loss today is because of how we’ve lived for the past few thousand years. We’re often proud of how clever we think we are, especially when it comes to domesticating other species – animals, plants – to serve our needs.
But there’s probably nothing on the planet we’ve domesticated and diminished as much as ourselves to fit into modern culture.
Think about doing a nine-to-five job you hate or sitting still at school for years. People are living lives that don’t make them happy, with no choice because of economics and other pressures. So, to fit into this dysfunctional culture, we send parts of ourselves away.
If you were raised in a dysfunctional family where it wasn’t safe to be vulnerable, you send your vulnerability away. Or, if it wasn’t safe to be playful, you send that part of you away too. So, as adults, when people read about soul loss, they think, “I have this real sense something’s missing. Why wouldn’t I want that part back?”
Modern Obstacles of Soul Retrieval
The problem is, if they sent that part away, they’ll have resistance to bringing it back. While one part of them may say, “Yes, I want the soul retrieval,” the parts that sent that soul away are resistant. What if you bring back your vulnerability – does that feel safe? Or your assertiveness, anger, or whatever it was you sent away? That wasn’t an issue for indigenous cultures because they were psychologically healthier than we are today. They had no problem with bringing things back because their soul parts left for other reasons.
Nowadays, what I used to find is when people would ask for a soul retrieval, if I performed a traditional retrieval, it often wouldn’t stick. Sometimes it would, but maybe only one time in ten would it create the significant change it should. Much of the time, the change was partial or didn’t last because the parts that sent the soul part away would just send it away again. People don’t want to change because they’re frightened of the consequences. So unless you address that, they’re not ready for a soul retrieval. You need to negotiate with the parts that are worried or resistant. For example, what if we brought your anger back – how would you feel about that? Or your vulnerability?
Until you’ve worked with those parts, a lot of psychotherapy is about understanding that we have different parts of ourselves we need to dialogue with. Once you’ve done that work, you can do the soul retrieval, and it’ll stick. It’s not a huge task, but it makes all the difference.
POWER LOSS
So that’s one example of the shamanic practices that doesn’t stick as well in modern days as they once did. Another just quick example is Power Loss. As well as soul loss, the other way we get seriously from a shamanic perspective is what’s called Power Loss, and that what this means is disconnection from the greater than human world, from nature.
With indigenous people, that wasn’t an issue. They lived in and were part of nature, not apart from it, and so they never developed any techniques around this, whereas now, obviously, when people come in off the street for a shamanic work, they usually live in lives that are completely disconnected from nature, and so we need a whole other set of techniques to address that issues as well, that, again, just aren’t there in indigenous shamanism.
There are a lot of examples I could share, but ultimately, it comes down to how something works – or doesn’t – in the present day, and how we can make adjustments to ensure it does.
IMPORTANCE OF RITES OF PASSAGE
One of the first things we learn in modern life is how to deny ourselves, to step away from who we are. Like you said, we pull away our vulnerability or assertiveness, or the parts of us we learn to see as less than, not enough, or even dangerous.The process of being open to yourself again is an aspect of shamanic techniques that, as you mentioned, wasn't part of the original teachings. It’s very much a modern perspective and experience. Having techniques like shamanism, and working through core limiting beliefs, allows us to process those moments when we were taught that who we are wasn’t enough, wasn’t safe, or whatever the story might have been.Shamanic techniques change our neural pathways. Current studies show that a shamanic journey helps rewire the brain, similar to how psychotherapy, or EMDR for trauma processing, resets those pathways. This helps shamanic work go even deeper because the subconscious mind has created space for it.
We don’t live in a culture that supports us in doing this. It’s difficult and quite heroic to undertake this work in today’s world.
Indigenous cultures just weren’t like that.
I once read that in original Inuit cultures, if you didn’t get on with your birth family as a child, you had the right to go into any other igloo, and those people had to adopt you. It was recognised that the community, not necessarily your birth parents, was responsible for raising a child, and the community would decide who was best suited for that role. In Hawaii, when a child was born, the kahuna, or shaman, would appoint an elder to watch that child for the first year. On the child’s birthday, the entire community would gather, and the elder would share what they observed about the child’s soul potential, and who in the community could best help that child blossom into their full potential.
RITES OF PASSAGE
Indigenous cultures were designed to help people grow emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. All indigenous cultures had rites of passage during adolescence, which were initiations into adulthood. This was about becoming what we’d call in psychotherapy a fully functioning person, or as Maslow put it, a self-actualized person. These cultures were structured to help people blossom and grow. Since we no longer live in those cultures, we have to find new ways of achieving this, and shamanism can play a huge role in that.
In childhood, we experiment, trying out strategies designed to help us cope with the environment we find ourselves in—usually the family, school, and so on. It depends on which psychological theory you believe, but around the age of six, seven, or eight, we tend to settle on strategies and then simply play these out for the rest of our adult life. Often, what brings people to therapy is that these strategies no longer work for them, but they don’t understand why.
The Need for New Strategies
So they have to uncover their strategies, dismantle them, and develop healthier ones. Indigenous cultures understood this too. They recognised that childhood was about forming strategies, but they also knew that, by adolescence, you needed to shift from childhood constructs to being an adult, and this transition was hardwired into those cultures. They really understood the importance of this. Their cultures were centred around helping people make this transition into adulthood.
We don’t have that anymore. So, during the teenage years, people experiment with different identities, but there’s no guidance. As a result, most don’t individuate in a healthy way—they simply muddle through, and it often hits them again in middle age, because they’ve never truly found themselves.
Most people, in this culture, are stuck in childhood, tangled in a web of adaptive strategies and flawed concepts about who they are. These are not a reflection of their true self at all.
Rediscovering the True Self
In Shamanism, we differentiate between what we call the middle-world self, which is the day-to-day reality self, and the true Soul, which is something else entirely. Your true Soul is the real blueprint of what you were meant to be.
But the truth is, most people today will live and die never truly knowing who they are. They just live out a set of beliefs about who they are and how they should behave.
It sounds awful to say, but it’s true. It’s catastrophically awful, but nonetheless, true. What a terrible waste of human life the last few thousand years have been.
BRIDGING THE GAP: ALIGNING MENTAL HEALTH AND SOUL HEALTH THROUGH SHAMANISM
We've made great strides in mental health care, but do you think we've focused so much on healing the mind that we've lost sight of soul health and spiritual alignment? How do you see shamanism bridging this gap?
Over the last century, we’ve made incredible advancements in psychotherapy and our understanding of mental health. But it’s no coincidence that, during this same period, there’s been a growing interest in shamanism. This resurgence is part of our collective attempt to reclaim a deeper sense of sanity.
While addressing mental health at a psychological level is crucial, it only scratches the surface. True healing requires something much deeper, something rooted in the soul. Psychotherapy often misses this vital piece. It offers valuable tools for understanding and managing the mind, but it doesn’t address the deeper, fertile ground that the soul provides for growth and transformation.
Imagine what our conversations about mental health might look like in fifty years. I believe we’ll see a significant shift by then, one where soul healing becomes an integral part of therapy. It’s a hopeful vision, even though I likely won’t be around to witness it. Still, it’s fascinating to think about how much more we can integrate these practices and deepen our understanding of what it means to truly heal.
ON CULTURAL APPROPRIATION
What are your thoughts on balancing cultural respect and adapting shamanic practices to modern times, especially in light of discussions around cultural appropriation?
Let’s be honest. As a white male of a certain age, I am aware of my privileges and try to stay conscious of them. I’m not perfect, but I do my best. In my shamanic work, I’ve made a concerted effort to focus on what’s known as core shamanism rather than drawing from any specific indigenous cultures.
CORE SHAMANISM
For those unfamiliar, the term “core shamanism” was developed by the anthropologist Michael Harner, who, after studying various shamanic cultures around the world, noticed a set of underlying principles, practices, and beliefs consistent across different cultures. He called this foundation “core shamanism,” and in 1980, he published his book The Way of the Shaman, which played a significant role in the modern revival of shamanism.
While there have been criticisms of Harner’s work, I believe we owe him a significant debt of gratitude. My approach has always been to draw from this core shamanism rather than any particular tradition. Partly, this is because I live in the UK, where there isn’t an original indigenous shamanic tradition to draw from. When I first began exploring shamanism in the early 2000s, we were often borrowing rituals and practices from other parts of the world. But it felt strange – sitting in a Victorian terraced house in industrial northwest England, chanting things from Mongolia, for example. It felt disconnected and, frankly, culturally inappropriate. So I stopped. I decided to focus on learning directly from my guides and stripped away any cultural specifics from my practice.
Shamanism, at its core, is everyone’s birthright.
Our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for about 200,000 years, and for at least 190,000 of those years, we lived through animism and shamanism. It’s how we understood and interacted with the world. This ancient wisdom belongs to all of us, and my interest lies in finding ways to apply it that are relevant to the cultures we live in today, rather than adhering to any specific modern-day indigenous versions. This approach is about honoring that universal human connection while remaining sensitive to the understandable pain people feel around cultural appropriation.
SHAMANS AS GUARDIANS OF CULTURE
I'm intrigued by your previous mention of the middle world and how shamanic work can occur both in trance-like states and in our daily lives. Could you elaborate on the concept of the middle world? I know you discuss it in your books, so I'd love to hear your insights on this.
We live in a world that often appears dominated by irrationality, a culture heavily influenced by left-brain thinking. Consequently, many dismiss practices like shamanism as mere woo-woo nonsense. Yet, when viewed through a broader lens, shamanism reveals itself as a vital aspect of our sanity. At its core lies animism—a way of life that emphasises living in a respectful relationship with all beings, both human and non-human. This animist perspective fosters a sense of connection, allowing us to engage in shamanic journeys and deepen our understanding of ourselves. Remarkably, this way of being has characterised the vast majority of human history – 95 percent, in fact.
The Insanity of Our Norms
Indigenous cultures often refer to modern society as “insane.” This assertion goes beyond metaphor; it reflects a profound truth about our current state. What we now consider normal – over-rationalisation and a stark disconnection from nature – is far from sane. One only needs to observe the disconnect in urban settings. A simple aerial view of a bustling city can evoke a sense of terror, highlighting the reality of millions living estranged from the natural world, trapped in unfulfilling jobs, and caught in a cycle of discontent.
This reality is what we refer to as the “middle world” – the everyday existence of modern humans. By any rational measure, this world is deeply unbalanced.
A Culture in Crisis
We find ourselves in the midst of a mental health crisis. The trajectory of anxiety and depression levels over recent years is alarming. Concurrently, we face staggering inequality; just eight individuals control more than half of the world’s wealth. Furthermore, our human activities have initiated an ecological crisis, often referred to as the Anthropocene extinction, where species are disappearing at rates 20 to 200 times higher than natural averages. We stand on the brink of losing up to 90 percent of the planet’s animal and plant species. Clearly, we do not inhabit a sane culture.
Seeking Solutions
Amid these crises, we need more than just temporary fixes. To find a true remedy, we must reflect on periods when human societies thrived. By examining the principles of animist cultures, we can identify templates for rebuilding our contemporary culture. These templates, often called the original instructions or songs, offer the wisdom that has kept humanity grounded for around 190,000 years.
The Role of the Shaman
The shaman’s role extends beyond healing practices, such as soul retrieval. The primary function of the shaman has always been to ensure the culture functions effectively. While most people accept cultural narratives at face value, a small number of individuals – often characterised by their lack of empathy, such as sociopaths or narcissists -manipulate these stories. In many animist cultures, shamans were tasked with safeguarding these narratives.
To fulfil this role, shamans underwent a unique training process involving deliberate de-socialisation. For months, apprentice shamans experienced practices that defied societal norms: sitting when others stood, walking backwards, and even speaking in unconventional ways. These experiences were designed to disrupt their social conditioning, allowing them to grasp the essence of how cultures operate – recognising that they are fundamentally composed of stories that people accept as truth.
Ultimately, the shaman serves as a guardian of sanity, ensuring cultural narratives align with the original healthy instructions. As we have drifted from this understanding and marginalised our shamans over the past 6,000 years, we must confront the consequences of this neglect – a chaotic and fragmented existence that demands urgent re-examination.
MODERN HUMAN-CENTREDNESS
Something that I find fascinating about that process too, of the shaman being almost like the truth keeper for a culture or a tribe, is they were doing it in counsel, with their guides and with spirit. There was not this leaning on human understanding that we see today, and I think so much of that is where we're finding that disparity now.
That’s such a good point, absolutely. The true shaman, the power of a true shaman, doesn’t come from the human and their own ego and things. Some of that has a role, you know, to the learning stuff and things, but it comes from the guides. Essentially, what a shaman was was an intermediary between the human world and the human. And so the role of the shaman was to know the teachings from the other than human, the teaching from mountain, other than human, the teaching from mountain, the teaching from bear, the teaching from wolf, the teaching from springtime, you know, the teaching from autumn, and so on and so on, and to bring these teachings to the community essentially, and also to say look, you know, the other than human is upset with us doing this, we need to make an end, and so on.
Understanding Our Place in the Ecosystem
This role is deeply rooted in the understanding that humans are but a minute part of the broader ecosystem. In contemporary society, we often fall prey to what Derek Jensen calls the myth of human supremacy, believing ourselves to be the pinnacle of evolution and the cleverest of every species. And if you talk to indigenous people and say you know who are the wisest of the people, they’ll usually say the Stone people. Now, we don’t even think of the stone people as being alive, but to the animists they absolutely are. They are the oldest and the wisest of all people. And then they’ll say then the next oldest of the Plant people. In the last 10, 20 years, scientists even start to recognize that plants are sentient, and the stuff that’s now coming out now about plant sentience is mind-boggling to a lot of people. Animists have known this all the time. And then the next most intelligent, wise people are the other Animal people. The least wise are the Humans. We’re the children. That’s why we need all this guidance and teaching from the other-than-human People.
A Lesson from the Council of people
There’s this lovely story that basically goes that the animal people became really furious with us humans because of how we’re living and disrespecting the world, so they decided they’re going to get together and kill us all. They could absolutely do that, but the Plant people and the Stone people heard about this, so they called a great council of all the peoples and at the council, the stone people and the Slant people said to the Animal people look, we understand your anger and what you’re feeling about the humans, but what you’re planning to do is not in accordance with Great Spirit. It’s forbidden. Instead, the Humans are just children who have lost their way and they need our help and guidance. Children who have lost their way and they need our help and guidance. So at that council, every single different type of plant and every single different kind of animal and every single different kind of stone people took on a healing gift and teaching that they would give freely to any human who asked for it.
And that’s the point of traveling to what’s called the Lower-World in shamanism. It’s the place where we can receive the healing, teaching and gifts from the much wiser than us other than human people, and that’s how we lived sanely for nearly 200,000 years until we went mad and started to believe that we’re the best.
WHAT IS ANIMISM?
I find it really interesting that you can even see that in threads of different practices in humanity. You know, like, the difference between herbalism and now modern medicine where you know, we still have some of the plant in there, but it's not about the plant anymore, and even just that transition is so symbolic of this switch that has been made. But I'm curious if you could and perhaps we should have done this at the beginning but I'm curious if you could give us your definition of animism, because we've talked about it so much in this conversation.
I’m glad you asked, actually. I mean, shamanism is the kind of buzzword that brings people in these days, and lots of people now have heard of shamanism, but not as many people have heard of animism. Really, the problem with that is you get a lot of people learning shamanic techniques, but they’re practicing these as modern-day humans, not as animists, and that’s a completely different thing.
Original shamans were all animists.
So, basically, animism is not a belief system; it’s not a religion. It’s literally a way of experiencing the world around you. What animists experience is that everything around us is alive and conscious. We live in a world of different Peoples, only some of whom are human, and that’s really not just a belief. When I’m teaching students, it starts off as a belief to kind of understand intellectually that it could be true, but as you do the practice, you start to experience that this is actually true, as you start to regain your sanity, really. Animists live in a very reciprocal and respectful awareness of the world around them.
The Non-Hierarchical Nature of Animism
The other thing that’s key to animism is that it’s completely non-hierarchical. One of the things I’ve found in teachers, and I found it in myself as well, is how astonishingly deeply ingrained hierarchical thinking is. I mean, we use phrases like “high vibration” or “raising your vibration levels” or “higher states of consciousness,” or, you know, “ascending” as opposed to, you know, the depth, and so on. Our language is full of hierarchical value judgments, and we think hierarchically. The myth of human supremacy is all part of that.
Animism is sometimes described as a spiritual round table where all the different peoples are equal. Essentially, there is no hierarchy whatsoever.
In animism, humans are absolutely not special. We are a tiny, tiny part of a huge ecosystem, and we live with the awareness that everything is alive, everything is conscious, and everything is sacred. That’s how we should live, and that’s just a very, very different fundamental story to base a culture on compared to modern-day culture.
So, what a shaman is, is an animist who also has the ability to leave their body at will, travel the shamanic realms, communicate with the other-than-human, and then bring back the gifts of healing and teaching from the other-than-human world.
SHAMAN or SHAMANIC PRACTITIONER?
Before we hit record, we had touched on our thoughts on the word shaman versus shamanic teacher. I'm curious if you could speak to that.
When discussing the practice of shamanism, it’s important to recognise the distinction between practitioners and shamans. Harner, in developing core shamanism, made a clear point about this distinction. He insisted that we refer to ourselves as shamanic practitioners, not shamans, out of respect for the tradition.
The Role of a Shaman
An actual shaman is someone who has typically had their gifts recognised from an early age—if not from birth. They have been raised, often twenty-four hours a day, in an environment that nurtures and develops these gifts. Most of us in the West come to shamanism in our twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, or even seventies. As students, we are unlikely to become actual shamans; we can only consider ourselves shamanic practitioners.
This distinction is akin to Buddhism. Imagine if everyone practising Buddhism claimed to be enlightened—like a Buddha. It’s absurd. The difference between a shaman and a shamanic practitioner mirrors that between being a Buddha and being a Buddhist. Personally, I have never referred to myself as a shaman; I identify as a shamanic practitioner.
Acknowledging Our Roots
While it is crucial to have an awareness of our current times and adapt to modern situations, it is equally important to recognise our ancestors, our roots, and the practices that should remain sacred. These practices are dedicated to the specific cultures from which they originated and should be respectfully preserved within their original contexts. It is essential to maintain this respect for those traditions.
LAST PIECE OF ADVICE
I always like to leave with one last question - If you could give someone just starting this journey, a piece of advice, what advice would you give them?
You will find the wider shamanic community, like most human communities in modern-day cultures, is a bit of a mess. It’s a mixed bag, a hodgepodge of all sorts of things. Find your way around it and discover a version that works for you. If you want to find out if this approach resonates with you, have a look at my first book, and perhaps read some other books on the subject.
The biggest thing is that you will encounter many people trying to impose rules. They might say you aren’t a “real” shaman unless you follow a particular lineage or adhere to specific practices. Honestly, just trust yourself. Follow your instincts and listen to your feelings.
Don’t let others discourage you. This is your birthright. Don’t let anyone get in the way of that. It’s beautiful.
Start your shamanic journey
THE FIRST-STEPS INTRODUCTORY COURSE – November 2023
If you ever wanted to learn shamanism and see if this grounded and practical spirituality is for you, this is a perfect chance.
Learn:
- What shamanism is (and what is not)
- The history of shamanism and animism
- The key concepts of the shamanic universe
- How to do a shamanic journey (step-by-step process)
How to do a Power Animal retrieval journey and find your own Power Animal - The fascinating and potentially life-changing story of why we nearly lost shamanism, why we need it back and how psychotherapy fits in the process
- The basics of how to do shamanic healing for other people
The course consists of a mixture of videos, live sessions, theory talks, question-and-answer sessions, group discussion, experiential exercises, and practice. It includes continuous access and free repeats!