Hello!
Animal, Plant & Stone Course will take you beyond simply connecting with nature – you’ll learn to go beyond Human and truly grok the other-than-human People! This is a vital step in deepening your shamanic practice and taking your place in the Web of Life.
Here are the most common questions people ask about the course.
I hope you find this helpful.
To jump right to a specific question, simply click on it:
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
COURSE MATERIAL:

Why do this course?
For more experienced students…
This is a next steps course. If you are a more experienced student with us and have done some of our further steps courses, please be aware that the division between next steps and further steps is only intended as a helpful guideline. It’s really there because students who have just completed the first steps with us sometimes ask, “What’s the best course to do next?” So, we suggested a few next steps courses.
In reality, though, learning shamanism is not a linear process; it’s much more organic than that. It involves leaping back over previous topics and seeing them in a completely new light. In fact, many of our most experienced students have gone back and done the first steps over again and gained a huge amount from doing that. Some of our most experienced students have repeated the first steps several times, and each time they do it, they get more out of it. So please don’t let the label “next steps course” put you off from participating. If you are an experienced student and haven’t done this course already, you will gain a great deal from it. It will greatly deepen your practice and help you become much more connected with the lower world, as well as understand the animal people, the plant people, and the stone people in much more depth. More about that here: link
If you are relatively new to Shamanism…
If you haven’t done many courses with us yet, and particularly if you have only completed the first steps so far, this course is absolutely an ideal one to take next. You’ll find it invaluable for giving your practice much stronger, deeper, and more solid roots.
Ongoing access
Ongoing access to the course
When you sign up for the courses, you have access to the recordings and the other teacher materials for life – life, of course, meaning for the life of the college. So as long as there’s a college running, and as long as the internet exists, you’ll have access to the recordings. So you can take as long as you want to work your way through a course, and you can come back to it and revise any bits of it as often as you want. It’s sort of like buying a book – once you bought the materials, you know, they’re yours and for as long as you want.
Transcripts are available!
For those whose first language isn’t English and have concerns about understanding, transcripts are available. Vimeo automatically generates transcripts for our hosted videos, and Zoom provides transcripts for live sessions, though they’re AI-generated and may not be perfect. Nevertheless, they offer sufficient assistance for comprehension.
Payment in three instalments
In terms of payment, we utilise PayPal, and you may be aware that PayPal offers a “Pay Later” option. When you book for the course, you will likely see a PayPal “Pay Later” option, allowing you to spread the payments in three interest-free instalments of £50 each. However, occasionally you may not see this button, as the option is not available in all countries worldwide, and for reasons that appear somewhat arbitrary, PayPal may not offer it to certain individuals. If you wish to pay in instalments but cannot find the “Pay Later” button, please contact me, and I will arrange to send you three monthly invoices instead, enabling you to pay in instalments that way.
A respite after more challenging courses
Usually, people find this process to be incredibly joyful, nourishing, grounding, and healing. Some of our courses are more challenging. I mean, some of you have just completed the Inner Tribe course, which looks at our trauma and where that came from in terms of our middle-world lives. Courses like that can be quite difficult at times.
This course, though, is like spending joyous time deeply immersed in the lower world and nature. Most people find it incredibly refreshing, renewing, and invigorating. This isn’t a heavy course at all, but that doesn’t mean it’s superficial—not in the slightest. As I said, it will immensely deepen your shamanic practice.
curriculum
Meeting true Lower-World Animals, Plants and Stones is not a given!
Obviously, the course involves looking at how to work with the Animal, Plant, and Stone people. You might be thinking, “What’s so hard about that? Why would I need to do a course on that when I can just journey to meet Animals, Plants, and Stones?”
Well, let me tell you – it comes down to the enormous amount of stories and baggage we unconsciously bring with us when working with other animals, plants, and stones.
Shamanic journeying is a co-created process
Remember, the shamanic journey is a co-created process. The shamanic visions, in their raw form, are completely unintelligible to us, and to make sense of them, we have to fashion them using imagery, symbolism, and metaphors. We bring that to the process when we journey. What we experience is a co-creation between what is objectively there and the things we bring to it in order to make sense of it.
Now, what we bring to it is often quite unconscious.
Think back to your first steps course and how I kept stressing the importance of learning to differentiate between the realms and to notice when middle-world stuff – the kind of stuff we’re familiar with in everyday life – starts to diffuse or bleed into the lower-world journey. Without knowing the importance of doing that, people just start bringing lots of middle-world things into the lower world—things that simply don’t belong.
We start off, remember, by learning to notice when middle-world objects appear in our journeys: we learn to notice things that shouldn’t be there, like human-made metal objects, modern clothing and fabrics, domesticated animals, and farming roads. As you know, learning to be clear about which realm you’re in doesn’t stop there.
The next thing we start to notice are the other middle-world issues we bring with us, like our own drives, stories, and agendas. That’s a long process—learning to stalk ourselves and be aware of that stuff. Of course, this process doesn’t stop with the first steps course; it continues for the rest of our lives in terms of our shamanic work.
a process of recovering from modern-day culture
To delve deeper into shamanism is to begin to realize more and more the degree to which we unconsciously bring our beliefs, stories, and attitudes with us, as well as the extent to which some of these are profoundly un-animist stories, beliefs, and attitudes that we need to shed if we are ever to truly understand animism and reclaim our authentic animist nature and way of being.
The deeper you go into shamanism, the more it becomes a process of recovering from modern-day culture—a culture, of course, that has shaped our thinking since birth and that we have been steeped in for most of our adult lives. It’s the water we swim in without realizing it.
To learn original animism, rather than some distorted cultural version of it, means a long process – a lifetime process, really – of slowly decolonizing our thinking, becoming aware of the extent to which we have unconsciously held onto warped cultural or animist thoughts, bringing these into our awareness and replacing them with healthier animist thinking instead, the original instructions, as Carl Jung says, suggest that we do not reach enlightenment by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious – by bringing our unconscious into consciousness so that we can then examine it and deal with things more appropriately.
This particular course, the Animal, Plant, and Stone People Course, is very much about this process.
The baggage we bring to the process - a proces of unlearning and relearning
Today’s relationship with nature is very different from that of our ancestors.
Separation from nature
Think about it: even if we share our lives with animals—maybe we live with dogs, cats, horses, or so on—if we have a garden or if we go walking in the countryside, most of us live lives that are much more separated from nature and the other-than-human people than our animist hunter-gatherer ancestors. Our animist ancestors lived from birth to death in an intimate connection with the other-than-human.
Domestication of animals
Most of the animals we have contact with these days tend to be domesticated ones. Our gardens are human-created spaces, not wilderness. Even when we seek out wilderness, there’s precious little left. Most of the nature we access today has been heavily shaped and tamed by human hands. In fact, human domesticated mammals account for 62% of mammal biomass in the world. Humans account for 34%, while truly wild animals make up just 4%.
In hunter-gatherer times, 100% of mammals and all plants were wild, including us humans. We live in very different times, and our relationship with animals, plants, and stones is extremely altered.
Stories of human supremacy
It goes even deeper still. We are raised in stories of human supremacy—that we are the cleverest, the most conscious, and the most aware of all species. This even extends to a lot of contemporary spiritual thinking. Many contemporary spiritual practices, even those that teach kindness and compassion towards other animals, still see animals as less evolved than humans, as if there’s some kind of spiritual hierarchy among the animal, plant, and stone kingdoms. And again, this is profoundly unanimist.
If we are going to truly learn animism and not some kind of modern, diluted, and domesticated version of it, and if we’re going to genuinely understand what shamanism truly is—not some tame, domesticated, upper-world, heavy, human-centric version of it—this involves a process of unlearning and relearning in terms of our relationship to the other peoples: the animal, plant, and stone people.
Living in healthy relationship - a story
Let me remind you of one of the stories that animists tell to illustrate what our healthy relationship with animals, plants, and stones should really be. This story has many different versions throughout the world, but its essence is found in a lot of animist cultures.
Here is one version:
The animal people became furious with us, the human people, because of the way we were living and the disrespect we were showing to the animal, plant, and stone peoples and to Mother Earth herself. They decided to get together and wipe us out. However, the plant people and the stone people, who are older and wiser than the animals, got to hear about this. They called a council of all the peoples: all the animal people, all the plant people, and all the stone people.
At this council, the plant people and the stone people said to the animal people, “Look, we understand how angry and upset you are with humans, but remember, humans are just children who have lost their way. They need our help, our healing, our teaching, and our guidance. What you are planning to do—wiping them out—is forbidden. It is simply not in accordance with Spirit.”
So, instead, at this council, every single different type of animal, every single different type of plant, and every single different type of stone agreed to take on some aspect of animist teaching. They would give this teaching to any human who came to ask for it free of charge because they decided to try to help heal any humans willing to come and ask for help. That is how, of course, the animal people, the plant people, and the stone people got their healing gifts and teachings.
We are lost children
One of the things I find people sometimes miss about this story is that it teaches us that humans are not the cleverest at all. We are actually lost children, and the other peoples are wiser than us, particularly the plants and stones, who are the wisest elders. This understanding is fundamental to indigenous animist cultures. It is, of course, the opposite of a culture-centric perspective, which sees humans as the cleverest, wisest, and most superior of all the peoples.
Different levels of working with Animal, Plant and Stone People
In our shamanic practice, we work with Animals, Plants and Stones in different ways:
Helpers in Our Journeys
During a journey, you can encounter various Animals, Plants, and Stones, all of which can assist you with tasks such as extractions, de-possessions, disentanglements, burials, and burnings. This isn’t overly complicated; it’s something most people can begin to explore early in their shamanic journey.
Creating a Medicine Bundle
As we learn from the teachings of these beings, we discover valuable lessons. The courage of the lion, the quick-wittedness of the fox, the balance and patience of the heron, the steadfastness of the turtle, and the vision of the eagle – all contribute to what is often referred to in shamanism as our medicine bag or medicine bundle. These are the Animals, Plants, and Stones we come to know and work with in our shamanic practice, helping as our teachers and guides.
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Understanding Our Humanity
Unfortunately, many people find that their shamanic practice remains limited to the level of working with People in journeys, which is merely scratching the surface of what the Animal, Plant, and Stone peoples can truly offer. To access this vast reservoir of deeper teachings, we must move beyond our human-centred perspectives and our tendency to anthropomorphise. It’s essential to shed the un-animist beliefs and stories we unconsciously carry into our practice. By doing so, we begin to experience these other beings as they truly are, allowing us to tap into their profound teachings, wisdom, and healing gifts. This deeper understanding can guide us in remembering who we are meant to be as human beings, addressing our questions about our true nature, purpose, and place in the larger tapestry of life. As the poet Mary Oliver beautifully puts it, this is about living our “one wild and precious life.”
Re-establishing Right Relationship
Perhaps most importantly, this journey allows us to live in right relationship with the other-than-human People once again. Cultivating this relationship is at the very heart of what it means to be animist.
What Animal, Plant and Stone People really are
On the course, we will start unlearning the often wonky stories our modern culture have about People. The process then involves about learning who Animal, Plant and Stone People really are:
Working with Animals
We are Human and we are also Animal. Knowing what Animal is like and how it differs from Plant and Stone helps us to know what to step away from, and what we need to step into, when it comes to understanding and working with the non-Animal Peoples. Animal People are dynamic, driven, and highly social beings. Unlike plants, animals must actively seek out food, which creates a predator-prey dynamic at the heart of their existence. They are expressive, forming deep bonds, communicating through complex language and behaviours, and displaying a wide range of emotions—from fear and rage to joy and affection. Their restlessness and need to adapt make them curious, inventive, and ever-moving, shaping the energetic, busy nature they bring into shamanic journeys.
Working with Plants
We will look at Plants and Standing People (trees). Amongst other things, Plant teaches us how healthy beings are deeply rooted, and shows us the value of slowing down and being less aggressive and more content with what we have. They operate at a much slower pace than animals. To really understand Plant medicine, to get inside them and grok them, you need to slow right down. To do that, we will look into their kind of consciousness – collective consciousness.
read more
Working with Stone People
The Stone People are the closest thing to Mother Earth herself, they are Mother Earth manifest and made physical. In turn, the Stone People go on to form everything else in the physical universe, including the stars, the planets, the Plant People, the Animal People, and us Humans. Stone People embody stillness and patience, moving at a pace almost incomprehensible to humans. Unlike the restless Animal or the growing Plant, they follow the rhythms of the Earth, unhurried and timeless. Their existence is marked by structure, order, and predictability, grounded in the laws of physics rather than emotions or agendas. Detachment is their gift, offering a calm, steady presence that helps us step back from human concerns and see the bigger picture. They remind us that in the grand scheme of things, many of our worries fade into insignificance.
I hope to see you on the course!
The course last ran as a time-limited ‘live’ course, in November 2024. Due to popular demand, we are now offering it as a self-paced course, with no specific dates, allowing you to study in your own time and at your own pace.
The course consists of six pre-recorded theory modules. These are all ‘unlocked’ and available immediately to you as soon as you register for the course. Together, the modules are around 14 hours of teaching.
The course comes with accompanying resources – handouts, journey suggestions, and other resources.
The course also has an accompanying website forum and an (optional) Signal discussion group. Through these, if you wish, you can ask questions and get answers, discuss topics, share experiences and additional resources, and get support, encouragement and a sense of community to help you with your study.
Blessings,
Paul Francis