Hello!
I recently sat down with Chris from the wonderful charity Seen & Heard, for a wide-ranging conversation about soul, adulthood, and the path back to authentic, grounded shamanic practice. We spoke about my life story and how it led to my writing my books, how therapeutic shamanism differs from other modern-day spiritual paths, and why truly growing up – becoming an actual adult emotionally and spiritually – is essential not just for our personal healing, but for the world around us too.
Hope you enjoy the episode.
… or if you prefer to listen to a specific question, simply click on the question:
- My Early Life: how nature and kindness shaped a path my through childhood neglect
- The Lasting Impact of Neglect: how our unmet childhood needs shape adulthood, until we heal them
- When Life Falls Apart: mental health, ancestral pain, and the slow path to healing
- What Is Therapeutic Shamanism? from Michael Harner’s core model to modern misuse of shamanism – and what truly helps
- Shamanism Is Not a Religion: it’s a way of being, and of living in “right relationship” with all life
- Sanity in a Burning World: how Therapeutic Shamanism reconnects us with the “Original Instructions” – ancient, grounded ways of living that helped humans thrive for millennia
- Soul Loss and Power Loss: illness as disconnection, and what it takes to truly heal
- What a Healthy Adult Looks Like: ancient templates for maturity in an immature world
- Becoming an Adult Means Meeting Your Soul: how Paul’s books offer a path to reconnection and real growth
- Start Your Shamanic Journey: an introductory course to therapeutic shamanism and animism
My Early Life and Influences
How nature and kindness shaped a path through childhood neglect
My childhood was deeply miserable – something I share in common with many people who end up becoming psychotherapists. You rarely choose this path if you’ve had a happy childhood!
There were a lot of mental health struggles in my family. We were six of us in total – my mum, dad, and four children. We were all very much isolated in our own bubbles, just trying to survive. Nobody was emotionally available for anyone else. Everyone was lonely and dealing with their own pain.
In dysfunctional families, it’s common for someone to be made the scapegoat. The scapegoat role was put on me. Right from birth, it was made clear to me that I wasn’t welcome. Every attempt I made to join in was shut down. There was little physical abuse, no sexual abuse, but plenty of emotional abuse – mostly, when it came to me, profound neglect, both emotional and physical. That was home life: severe loneliness and isolation.
School was pretty much more of the same, with a few exceptions. We moved a lot – I think seven times in my childhood – and I attended six or seven different schools. Some were tiny village schools, others were rough inner-city comprehensives, and the worst was a posh grammar school run on truly brutal and authoritarian lines. Teachers kept canes on their desks (apart from the woodwork teacher who’d been banned from caning as he’d drawn blood one too many times), disputes were settled in a boxing ring, and if you dropped house points was announced in front of the entire school to publicly to shame you. It was emotionally harsh and completely lacking in compassion.
Despite all that, two things saved me:
The first was meeting two exceptional teachers. When I was nine, I started at a small village school, and Mrs Hibbert literally sat me on her knee for the first few days. She cuddled me, listened to me, read me stories and got me to read to her. It was the first real human contact I’d had. Even now, sixty years later, I get emotional thinking about it. Her kindness saved me. Within a year, from being behind academically, I went to being a year ahead – a clear sign of how compassion can help someone blossom.
Later, at a comprehensive school, my Religious Studies teacher, John Nettleship, was another lifeline. I bombarded him with the kind of questions that annoyed my other teachers, but he always took time to research answers and bring them back. His kindness and infinite patience kept my curiosity alive when I needed it most.
The other thing that saved me was nature. When I was nine, we moved to the countryside, and I spent as much time as possible outside amongst the trees. I didn’t know how to connect with nature “spiritually” then, but I studied animal tracks and owl pellets, watched birds and mice, and found quiet and steadiness in the woods that brought me peace.
So yes, my childhood was awful in many ways. But those moments of kindness and the embrace of nature were what kept me going.
The Lasting Impact of Neglect: How Unmet Childhood Needs Shape Adulthood
When speaking of childhood traumans, we often hear about abuse, but the quieter impact of neglect or abandonment - the ongoing experience of unmet needs is just as profound and long-lasting. Could you share what you carried from those experiences into adulthood, and how they shaped your life?
When I entered adulthood, I carried the heavy weight of complex PTSD, though I didn’t realise it at the time. On the outside, I could be lively, bold, even the life and soul of the party, but beneath that was a deep loneliness. In my inner life, I battled a harsh inner critic and constant self-judgement.
Then, at 21, something remarkable happened. Just after finishing university, my girlfriend at the time invited me to an experiential psychotherapy weekend. I knew nothing about therapy then, but I agreed to go. What I found there amazed me – people openly sharing their feelings and, crucially, other people truly listening. It was the first time in my life I’d seen that level of honesty and connection in a group of people.
It felt like being a fish put back into water. I knew immediately that this was the path for me. That weekend marked the start of many years of therapy for me – a journey that not only saved me but became my way of life. For some, therapy is a short-term fix; for me, it’s been a lifelong commitment; a way of being. I’ve been both a client and a therapist, a supervisor and a teacher, and now I write about therapy too. This was where my healing truly began.
I was about 27 when I started formal psychotherapy training. Leading up to that, there were a few key influences, one of which was a place called Lauriston Hall. It was a large, run-down house in southwest Scotland, bought in the 1960s by a group of hippies who formed a commune there. Although it’s now a closed community, for many years they ran residential courses there, including one called “Healing Week” that attracted around 50 or 60 people.
The “Healing Week” courses had a profound effect on me me and I attended them for many years. This was during the 1980s, at the height of the radical therapy movement – red therapy, critically aware therapy, and so on. It was an incredible, experimental, and vibrant melting pot where people ran workshops on holotropic breathwork, rebirthing, primal screaming, co-counselling, Reichian bodywork – just about everything you can imagine. It’s also where I first encountered shamanism. I immersed myself fully in all that was on offer; in the discussions about therapy and politics, the experimental community living, the meetings and conflict resolution. We danced naked for hours, shared saunas and sweat lodges, screamed and laughed – it was such an alive and dynamic time.
Alongside that, there was another influence – Daniel Quinn, the author of several books that have profoundly shaped my life and teaching. One of his main books, Ishmael, is a conversation with a sentient gorilla who offers a critique of humanity. It’s not the best-written book, but it is the ideas in it that are so are powerful; animist ideas. Another of his books, Providence, is his autobiography. In it, he talks about how it is only as you get older that you can look back over your life and see the times when your soul was calling to you, and also see the times when you strayed from your path. That’s been very true for me.
One of those moments I can see now that my soul was calling to me was at university. I went to university to study sociology, but in the first year, you had to choose two additional subjects. During the registration process, looking at the stalls each of the university departments had set out, I came across Religious Studies and a course on the Anthropology of Religion. At the time, I had no idea what anthropology was, but something drew me in, so I signed up for it. The course was a study of the spiritual practices of indigenous and animist cultures. I felt it speak to me deeply, though I didn’t understand why at the time. I loved it, but on graduating three years later I thought I’d never use it again, but it turned out to have a lasting impact on me – it had planted a seed of animist and shamanic thinking in me. It took about a decade before I began to truly understood the impact of that though.
In my mid-30s, I had a complete breakdown. I wasn’t psychotic, but suffered the worst suicidal depression imaginable. For nearly two years, there were days I could only promise to carry on living for the next five minutes, then another five, then on a good day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes even for four hours. It was completely broken, dismantled; I felt like I’d been reduced to nothing but dust and ash by a nuclear bomb. I nearly didn’t survive.
Looking back, I can now see it as a kind of shamanic initiation. In many indigenous cultures, shamans undergo a “death” before a rebirth, and that’s what happened to me. Only through that ordeal could I begin to understand animism and shamanism deeply enough and start to see how they might connect with my psychotherapy work. Prior to that, although I was very intrigued by shamanism, I’d kept it at a bit of a distance because of the frankly unethical practices and abuses of power I’d witnessed in the shamanic community and in most of the shamanic teachers I’d encountered too. After surviving my “shamanic death” though, I discovered how to practice shamanism in a way that felt authentic to me, and ethical too, and it was then that shamanism became the very bedrock of my life.
When Life Falls Apart: Finding Healing One Inch at a Time
How a failing mental health system, shamanic practice, and ancestral history revealed a deeper truth - that our struggles aren’t just personal, but cultural, generational, and rooted in the loss of the original instructions.
After my breakdown, I lost my livelihood and desperately needed therapy. I found myself reliant on NHS services, which, in hindsight, were pretty poor.
For a couple of years, I worked with a psychodynamic therapist. While it was good to have someone to talk to each week, honestly, she wasn’t very helpful. She was completely fixated on my childhood. I kept telling her, “I’ve spent years in therapy, and I’ve already gone over all this.” Her answer was essentially: “Yes, but you haven’t done it with me yet. I will fix you.”
By this point, I had learned to do shamanic journeys – essentially out-of-body experiences where you travel through what are called the shamanic realms. Through these journeys, I began to realise that my struggles weren’t just personal. I saw many of the same patterns in my parents too.
I don’t know much about my grandparents – they died before I was born – but from the little I could learn about them, they carried the same issues too. So I started exploring this deeper. It gradually dawned on me how much of what I was struggling with was generational trauma that I was carrying, not just “mine” but ancestral burdens that probably went back many generations.
My biological family comes from the border region between England and Scotland. You might find it interesting that the word “bereaved” actually comes from “the Reivers” – brigands paid by both the Scots and English to create havoc on the borders and keep the area unstable. To be “bereaved” originally meant you’d been attacked by the Reivers – raped, your family killed, and so on. That’s my ancestry. A brutal ancestral history – a weight of grief, guilt and trauma, passed down through the generations. My immediate family’s troubles were rooted in this history. Realising this made so much sense to me and, thankfully, in shamanism, I found the knowledge and practices to begin heling these kinds of ancestral wounds.
Over time, I started to look even further back, and began a deep dive into the more distant past. In doing this, I came across a book called The Fall by Steve Taylor. It was my first introduction to realising that what we call “civilisation” – the last 6,000 years or so of city-state cultures – far from civilised, has largely been a history of brutal oppression, bloodshed, and misery. I began to see that what we are usually told about our Palaeolithic ancestors (and indigenous people too), that they were “primitive” and “savage”, is also wrong. That often quoted line from Hobbes’s Leviathan, that the life of our palaeolithic ancestors was “nasty, brutish and short”, is a lie told by the victors. It’s a colonial myth about indigenous people.
Around 97% of our generations of ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. All hunter-gatherer cultures were animist cultures. We know this as in regions all over the world, pockets of hunter-gather tribes managed to survive into modern times, only really disappearing in the last 50 years or so, and we have detailed accounts of these tribes animist beliefs and practices.
And what do these accounts say? Let’s be clear, these people weren’t perfect; Rousseau’s myth of the “noble savage” is as untrue as the Hobbesian myth that they lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short. As we have stripped both these myths away though, the picture that has begun to emerge is that, for all their faults, many of these original, animist, hunter-gather cultures were better than us in many ways too. They were far more egalitarian, more equal, more tolerant of things like peoples sexual preferences, were far kinder to their children, had far better mental health than us, and lived in sustainable “right relationship” with their environment, to name just a few things. For nearly 200,000 years, these produced what were, by any sane measure of a culture, the sanest cultures we have ever produced. What underpinned all this, the thinking behind it, was animist thinking.
By contrast, since we abandoned animism and moved to city-states and agriculturally-based cultures – so called “civilisation” – many societies have destroyed themselves by destroying the environment they lived in. And look at what we’re doing to our environment now, on a global scale…
The more I studied this, the more it all fitted together. Indigenous and animist cultures speak of the “Original Instructions” or the “Original Songs” – stories that provided us with healthy templates for living in right relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the other-than-human world too. Shamans were the keepers of these Instructions, guiding their people to live by them.
When we abandoned the Original Instructions, embraced agriculture, started killing shamans – everything began to go wrong. We’re now living in the Anthropocene extinction – the sixth mass extinction age, and the first one caused by a single species: us.
Extinction rates are running 20 to 200 times higher than normal (and more recent calculations show much higher figures). We stand to lose 70 to 90 per cent of animal and plant species. Yet we tell ourselves this is evolution, a sign of progress.
Indigenous people often say we’re insane. Not as a figure of speech – they actually mean insane. From an animist perspective, and by any sane standards really, what we call civilisation is, quite literally, mass insanity.
It is said of course that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. For the last six thousand years of practicing what Daniel Quin calls “Taker culture” (culture that wants to consume everything and leave nothing), we have been slowly but surely heading towards falling off a cliff. The sane thing to do then is, surely to realise this and look at the times when we were doing better, and the stories and values that underpinned those times; the original, animist instructions.
WHAT IS THERAPEUTIC SHAMANISM?
From Harner’s discovery of core shamanism to the dangers of modern spiritual bypassing - how therapeutic shamanism weaves ancient animist wisdom with psychotherapy to meet the challenges of our time.
Michael Harner, the founder of “core shamanism” and an anthropologist active during the 1960s to 90s, discovered something remarkable. He found that if you took a shaman from, say, Peru and sat them down with a shaman from, say, Mongolia – with an interpreter – their cultural differences aside, they would deeply understand each other’s shamanic theory and knowledge.
What he realised was that animism and shamanism are worldwide, and there is an extraordinary degree of consistency to them. He published a book called The Way of the Shaman in 1980, where he explored this, and I remember it created a big stir in the anthropology community at the time. People said, “Well, this can’t be true. You can’t have cultures separated geographically and/or through vast periods of time, which share such a coherent body of knowledge.” But he said, “Here’s all the data – it’s true.” And it is true.
Shamanism (animism) is ancient knowledge. It’s our oldest and most coherent body of knowledge and as guiding principles, it kept us sane for around 200,000 years. His term for this was body of knowkledge was “core shamanism”, although “core animism” or “original animism” is probably a better term, as shamanism is but a part of animism.
Originally, of course, the people living according to original, core animist principles were living in nature; not apart from it, but part of it. The problem now is thatisn’t the case, and most people these days, compared to our animist ancestors, are hugely disconnected from nature. Consequently, when I eventually started trying to teach people animism and shamanism, I began to realise the problems this presented. There’s a mass of modern era issues you have to address first, or at least alongside learning, if you’re to really get what animism and shamanism really are and what they can offer us. This includes addressing our deep disconnection from nature, and the hierarchical, human-centric and deeply narcissistic thinking behind it – what the author and activist Derrick Jensen calls “The myth of Human Supremacy”. Without that, the shamanism we learn is just a modern-day, coloniser, human-centric, dumbed down, plastic version of it. A sanitised and stunted approximation of it, plucked out of the real animist experience and context that gives it its true authenticity and power.
Because animism is profoundly non-hierarchical. It’s often described as the spiritual “round table”. Humans are not “above” other things, but part of a much greater web of life; a healthy ecology of all beings.
This is not though how most people think these days. Instead, we have told ourselves that we are separate from nature, “special”, thinking that has led to the catastrophic destruction we are wreaking on the world around us. And much modern-day, hierarchical “spirituality” is part of this problem too. Think about when people talk about “raising our vibration”, as if higher is better than lower. In animism, that’s like saying the higher notes on a piano are “better” than the lower notes – its absurd. As is the idea that humans are “better” than animals. There are ways in which we are different, for sure, but these clearly don’t necessarily mean “better” (as Derrick Jensen pints out in his book The Myth of Human Supremacy, we like to think we are the cleverest species, but wilfully destroying the environment that we consciously know we depend on arguably makes us the most stupid species of all). We have to get over our human narcissism and arrogance, and regain some humility, if we’re ever going to regain our sanity and reclaim our healthy place in the web of life.
If it is to help with this recovery, shamanism these days needs to understand that we’re in very different times now. Mentally, emotionally, spiritually, we are not the same people our animist ancestors were, and original shamanism on it’s own is not equipped to deal with these issues as it evolved in very different times and in healthy animist cultures. Modern-day psychotherapy has evolved to help us cope with these modern-era issues though. So, whist shamanism and psychotherapy are different, shamanism can usefully learn a lot from psychotherapy, in terms of how to address the modern-era thinking and mental health issues that get in the way of learning animism and the Original Instructions, and so, get people to a state where they can actually learn shamanism properly.
Similarly, I think psychotherapy needs to learn from shamanism too, because psychotherapy, for all its usefulness, tends to focus only on the human. There aren’t that many therapies that really look at how to reconnect to the other-than-human properly. There’s ecotherapy, but that’s a tiny percentage of therapy overall. And as long as psychotherapy remains in the human box, in the end, for all it’s good qualities, it nevertheless remains part of the problem too; yet another part of our human-centric thinking and narcissism. By learning from original, core shamanism and animism, psychotherapy can learn how to address this.
The two together – animism/shamanism and psychotherapy – are the two halves of the whole that we need. That’s why the approach I teach and writ e about, Therapeutic Shamanism and Core Animism, is about exploring ways to do this.
SHAMANISM IS NOT A RELIGION, BUT A WAY OF LIVING IN THE RIGHT RELATIONSHIP
A clear look at animism, its connection to shamanism, and how the shift from personhood to hierarchy changed our relationship with the world.
I have been talking about shamanism and animism, so it might be helpful to clarify what the relationship between them is. Shamanism is just a small part of something much larger – animism. At its core, animism is about the awareness that we live in a world full of persons – only some of whom are to be human, to paraphrase the author Graham Harvey.
The writer Robert Macfarlane has beautifully explored this idea in his recent book, Is A River Alive. As the title of the book suggests, he asks us to consider whether we think a river is alive or not. Many would say, “It’s just a river,”, just a thing, in other words, but he challenges us by asking: “Do you know when a river is dead?”. If you can recognise when a river is dead, and most people can, then, by definition, you can recognise when it is alive too!
Some people experience this aliveness directly – sensing that rivers and other elements in nature are living beings. Others don’t. What animism asks us though is “what if we lived as if they were?” What if we treated the world around us with recognition of personhood? That would lead to us having a much more respectful relationship with the world around us. That’s essentially what animism is: living in right relationship with everything around you, whether you consciously experience their aliveness or not.
Animism isn’t a belief system in the usual sense. It’s more a principle to live by. Unlike most religions, it doesn’t rely on faith, sacred texts, priesthoods, dogma, or notions of heresy. Instead, it poses a simple but profound question: what if you lived as if everything around you had personhood, and so, you treated them with respect? It’s a choice about how to live, and once you start, it changes you deeply, opening you to experience the world as alive.
In the modern world, much of this sense of aliveness has been lost. We live as if the world is dead – but animism shows us it isn’t. It’s our modern-day disconnection and isolation, living in our heads and our human-centric bubbles, that deadens us to the true aliveness of the world around us.
Animism offers a world-view that is profoundly different from most contemporary religions. Religions are built on belief systems and being told what to believe, whereas animism is grounded in direct personal experience.
Most religions are hierarchical: men are above women, humans are above animals, animals are above plants, and stones don’t even feature, and so on.
Religious stories often justify the domination of nature by placing animals, plants, and stones “beneath” humans. As we turned away from animism, this served (and still serves) the interests of cultures that sought to exploit and ravage the land – something no original animist culture ever did. To get people to exploit the land, the original animist story had to be abandoned, and people needed to be convinced instead that humans were “superior” and that nature existed solely for our human use. We can see this explicitly in the Bible, for example, where “God” supposedly gives all of creation to humanity, for us to use as we see fit.
Stories shape culture, and culture shapes us. Animism offers stories that honour the world, while contemporary society embraces deeply unhealthy narratives. This includes the religions that emerge as we abandon animism, which position humans as “above” nature and closest to “God”, selling us hierarchical structures of belief that serve as tools of social control, enabling religions and the state to domesticate, dominate and control us.
RECLAIMING SANITY WHEN THE WORLD IS BURNING
Therapeutic shamanism reconnects us with the original instructions - ancient, grounded ways of living that helped humans thrive for millennia.
Firstly, it provides tools to help us navigate the damage caused by the culture we’ve grown up in – things like anxiety, depression, and emotional overwhelm. That’s more the psychotherapeutic side of it.
Secondly, of the most important things therapeutic shamanism offers is a connection to the original instructions.
Near the end of his book Providence, Daniel Quinn described giving a talk to a group of Jesuit priests – somewhat unexpectedly – where he challenged religions and their beliefs. Afterward, they approached him and said, “What you’re saying is completely true, but you’ve destroyed all we believed in. What do we put in its place?”
That moment made Quinn realise he actually didn’t know. For us to know, we needed to understand the original instructions more deeply. For that, we must look to the Indigenous cultures that have endured.
For me, almost every question in my life and work comes back to this: what would the hunter-gatherer answer be? Not in terms of their specific cultural choices, which suited their time, but in the fundamental principles that guided them – the original instructions.
Since we turned away from those healthy, Indigenous teachings, so much has gone wrong. Our task now is to adapt those principles to the world we live in today, but we can only do that by returning to their roots. There’s an old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We’ve had 6,000 years of hierarchical, sky-focused religions – and look where that’s brought us.
Before that, for nearly 200,000 years, human cultures thrived in balance and sanity, living by these original instructions. Therapeutic shamanism reminds us of that path – and offers a way back.
Soul & Power Loss: The Key to Real Healing
Shamanism sees illness as disconnection - from our own soul and from the wider-than-human world. Healing begins when we return what was lost and plug back into the living web around us.
Shamans say there are two fundamental ways we become ill: soul-loss and power-loss.
Soul-loss occurs when we lose parts of ourselves, or send parts of our true self away. This can happen in many ways. For example, in falling deeply in love, many people tend to entangle their identity with their lover. Consequently, if we do that, and then our lover subsequently dies or betrays us, it can feel as if a part of us dies too, or that part of us has been ripped away. People often say things like, “They’ve ripped my heart out,” or “There’s a hole left inside of me.”
Soul-loss can happen through bereavement, betrayal, trauma, or many difficult experiences – something Indigenous, animist cultures understood well. In those communities, soul-loss was immediately recognised as dangerous. The whole tribe would often respond, and the shaman would undertake work to find and return the lost soul parts.
Soul-loss was considered dangerous because it leaves holes within us, weakening our spirit and allowing other harmful things to take root. If you read the symptoms of soul-loss – things like depression, anxiety, apathy, procrastination, aimlessness, a persistant feeling of something missing in life – you could almost be reading a description of Western culture. As a result, we try to fill that emptiness with things like alcohol, drugs, consumerism, or other distractions.
I haven’t met a human these days who doesn’t suffer from profound soul-loss. It is endemic to modern-day culture. The holes it creates in us leaves us vulnerable to unhealthy influences that get into us: unhealthy stories, divisive politics, excessive consumption, and so on. Our modern society thrives by keeping us in this state of soul-loss. n fact, it feeds on it, because it means it can sell us things – consumer good, political and religious ideologies, and so on. Feeling empty, people are told to blame others or to buy products to feel whole again. If you’re unfamiliar with the animist term “Wetiko”, I highly recommend looking it up, as it explains so much.
Power-loss is the other way we end up with holes in us. Power-loss means becoming disconnected from nature. A simple analogy is your phone battery: being unplugged from the national grid means it runs out quickly. We’ve unplugged ourselves from the wider, more-than-human community, retreating into narrow, human-centred bubbles. This disconnection profoundly weakens us.
Shamans understood that true health requires belonging to something greater – to an ecosystem, a community of life. Imagine an organ in your body declaring independence, like the liver saying, “I’m superior, so I am leaving the rest of the body”. Obviously, that wouldn’t end well! Yet that’s what humanity has done in declaring itself separate and superior. Our narcissistic, human-centric disconnection is making us weak and is leading to us destroying the environment on which we ourselves depend. It is why we are burning the world down around us.
Coming back to soul-loss, today it often comes not just from things like grief, but from us sending parts of ourselves away, to try and fit in and survive dysfunctional families, unhealthy schooling, jobs that drain us, and a deeply domesticated culture. We pride ourselves in having domesticated other animals and plants, seeing it as evidence of our “superiority”. Yet the species we have most domesticated is actually ourselves. We’ve dumbed ourselves down and diminished ourselves in order to fit in to a dysfunctional society, a prison of our own creation [I highly recommend reading James C. Scott’s brilliant books Against the Grain and Seeing Like a State, to anyone who wishes to explore this further].
Compare this to Indigenous cultures, which were designed to prevent soul-loss and, more than that, to help every individual’s soul flourish. In the Hawaiian Huna tradition, for instance, when a child was born, an elder would watch over them for a year. Afterwards, the whole tribe would gather as the elder shared insights about the child’s soul and how the community could support it that child’s soul to blossom.
Imagine living in such a culture, and then compare that to modern-day schooling.
WHAT A TRULY HEALTHY ADULT LOOKS LIKE
Discovering timeless qualities of emotional maturity and responsibility rooted in ancient cultures - and why our modern world desperately needs to relearn them.
Since dumbing ourselves down and domesticating ourselves, we live in a culture of childrean in adult bodies. From an animist perspective, actual, true adults are exceedingly rare these days. So, in my third book Finding Your Deep Soul, I list the (animist) qualities of a true adult. To explain where these are from…
Many assume that hunter-gatherer culture ended with the Neolithic Revolution, around 11,000 years ago, when agriculture began. But authentic hunter-gatherer societies – by which I mean groups reliant solely on hunting and gathering, rather than herding or farming – survived until quite recently.
One important thing to know about these cultures is that they changed very little over time. Those that existed in recent history likely maintained traditions stretching back tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. Thanks to accounts from anthropologists, missionaries, and others, we have a clear understanding of hunter-gatherer life. The accounts we have from very different parts of the world all paint a consistent picture.
The descriptions of adults in these societies are where these qualities listed in my third book come from.
What’s also fascinating is that when we look at humanistic psychotherapy and depth psychology – think Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Jung – the traits they describe in people who have truly committed to therapy and done the work (what Rogers calls a “fully-functioning person” and Maslow an “actualised person”) very much match the descriptions of healthy hunter-gatherer adults. The only major difference is that therapy doesn’t usually reconnect us with the other-than-human world. It usually falls short of that. Whereas for animists, to be fully adult (in fact, to be fully human) meant being deeply connected and in right relationship with the other-than-human world too.
What therapy (that is, any therapy that works at depth) shows though is that, if we put the work in, we can recover from the wounding from our dysfunctional culture and learn to be adult. Animism then heals our disconnection from the other-than-human too, and that way we can learn not only to be fully adult, but fully human too.
Among the qualities of healthy adulthood is emotional intelligence. Hunter-gatherers were emotionally fluent and comfortable with emotions: they were able to laugh heartily and grieve deeply, and be fully embodied and present in their bodies and experience. By contrast, most people today live very much in their heads, disconnected from their bodies.
From the accounts that we have, animist adults were also grounded in reality, pragmatic, practical, down-to-earth – definitely not ‘woo’. And one of the things I loive about animism is that, unlike many contemporary “spiritual” approaches, it definitely isn’t woo. It is a deeply grounded, practical and pragmatic path.
Animist adults used their power wisely, seeking to empower others rather than dominate. They took full responsibility for their actions, owned their mistakes, and lived ethically and honourably.
Hunter-gatherer societies valued community and diversity. Many recognised five or more genders and accepted different sexual preferences. They acted for the greater good, redistributing wealth and living with a strong sense of equality. Something that has led anthropologists to describe true hunter-gatherer cultures as being “fiercely egalitarian”.
Crucially, when making decisions, they always considered the impact on the seven generations to come – a concept we barely acknowledge today, even for our own children and grandchildren, as we continue to damage the planet.
Learning this ‘template’ of maturity – what a healthy adult really is – is part of what the animist Original Instructions are all about.
BECOMING AN ADULT IS ABOUT MEETING YOUR SOUL
Across your first three books - The Shamanic Journey, Rewilding Yourself, and Finding Your Deep Soul - you lay out a path that many people might recognise as a kind of initiation into true adulthood. Can you walk us through how these books build on one another, and how they help readers reconnect with their soul, emotional maturity, and their place in the wider web of life?
The first book is essentially an introduction to shamanic journeying – how to do it and how most people can learn it. For most people, learning this is not as difficult as it might first seem. The book also places shamanic journeying within the context of the Fall and our domestication, helping readers understand what we’re really trying to reclaim: the Original Instructions and authentic shamanic practices, not the strange modern versions that have emerged since the Fall.
The second book dives deeper into exploring the shamanic Lower-World. This is about deepening our connection to nature and the other-than-human world; to animals, plants.
In shamanism, there’s a distinction between Soul and Spirit. Spirit is linked to the Upper-World – think “heaven” – and embodies abstract, universal principles like compassion, empathy, and tolerance. These qualities are vital, of course, but your Soul is your unique self, your true individuality. The Upper-World speaks to oneness in an abstract way, while the Lower-World shows us oneness is ecological and based on reciprocity and healthy inter-dependence, and on each of us being willing to take our healthy and unique place in the web of life.
I recall reading Bill Plotkin’s wonderful book Soulcraft years ago. I was lying down whilst reading, but when I read this line – “The world cannot be whole until you take your place in it” – I literally sat bolt upright. because it struck how not truly growing up and taking our proper place in the world is harmful not just to us personally, it damages the world itself.
Animist wisdom recognises this: finding your Soul isn’t just about you; it’s about stepping into your place within the world and being of service to it; being the organ you were meant to be in the larger body.
So the second book is about that practice and the qualities it requires – essentially, what it means to be a true adult. Because we don’t live in a world of adults and now, more than ever, we need actual adults to step up and begin putting things right again.
The third book takes this further by exploring how healthy human cultures function and what the Original Instructions say about this – the underpinning stories that are necessary for cultures to be healthy. The book also explores what what it means to be a actual elder – something else that is all too rare, and sorely needed, today too.
That’s the core of the first three books. The fourth, coming soon hopefully, will explore the Upper-World and animist spirituality in more depth, and how it differs from most contemporary, Fallen culture “spirituality”.
Start your shamanic journey
THE FIRST-STEPS INTRODUCTORY COURSE – November 2025
If you ever wanted to learn shamanism and see if this life-changing and inspiring, yet grounded and practical spirituality is for you, this is a perfect chance.
You can learn:
- What shamanism really is (and, importantly, what it really isn’t)
- How to do shamanic journeys, so you can actually experience and explore the shamanic worlds for yourself
- How to do a basic shamainc healing others
- Why we practise “therapeutic shamanism” at this college, and how this makes shamanism relevant to the times we live in now, and to your life now.
- and much, much more!
The course consists of a mixture of videos, live sessions, theory talks, question-and-answer sessions, group discussion, experiential exercises and profound practices. It includes continuous access and free repeats!
