Hello!
I’m thrilled to witness the growing excitement around the upcoming First-Steps Introductory Course – big thanks to all who have already joined. With the increasing interest, there have been quite a few questions about the course, so here’s my attempt to address them.
I hope this proves helpful.
To jump right to a specific question, simply click on it:
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
COURSE MATERIAL:
- Watch the Intro Talk: “What is Shamanism?”
- Questions answered in the talk: what shamanism and animism are, how old shamanism is, journeying, the three realms, soul loss, Therapeutic Shamanism and more
- Shamanic Guides – who are they and how do we meet them?
- Are shamanic realms real? Mythos and logos.
- Hollowing out from the stories we tell ourselves.
Sneak a Peek at the Intro Video Now!
WHAT IS SHAMANISM?
I received a lot of requests to provide more information about the format of the theory modules. As Carl Rogers says, experience is the highest authority. Therefore, I am sharing the first teaching video of the course.
Watch now and get started:
In this talk
Questions Answered in the Talk
What is shamanism, and where does the word come from?
The word shaman comes from the Evenki people of the Siberia–Mongolia region. It means one who knows, or one who can see in the dark: someone who sees what other people can’t see, or don’t even want to see. These days we use it for a type of indigenous spiritual practice found, in different forms, all over the world.
Is shamanism a religion? Do I need to believe anything?
No. Animism, and shamanism with it, is a spiritual practice, not a religion. It isn’t based on faith or belief – no leap of faith is required. There are no priests, temples or sacred texts, and nobody standing between you and spirit. It is based on direct, personal experience, and that experience is everybody’s birthright.
What is animism, and how does it relate to shamanism?
Animism is the experience that everything is alive – not only animals and plants, but mountains, rivers, rocks and even the wind – and that it can be communicated with. Shamanism is part of animism. Shamans experience all of this too, and they can also travel the shamanic realms to communicate with the other-than-human: for healing, for the survival of the tribe, and for knowledge and wisdom.
Where is shamanism from? Doesn’t it belong to one culture?
Before agriculture, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers, and every hunter-gatherer culture we know anything about practised animism and shamanism. So no one culture can claim it; it is universal to human experience. The anthropologist Michael Harner found the same core experiences and practices underneath the local differences, and called them core shamanism.
How old is shamanism?
Cave paintings in Europe that most people agree depict shamanic practices go back to around 33,000 BC. Finds in the Blombos Cave in South Africa may take it back 77,000, or even 100,000 years. Ask shamans, though, and they find it a strange question: to them, it is as old as being human. Around 99% of the generations of your ancestors experienced the world this way.
What is shamanic journeying, and where do we journey to?
In a shamanic journey we temporarily unhook ourselves from this physical reality and step fully into shamanic reality, where everything is interconnected. There we can experience what it is like to be something else – an animal, a tree, even a stone – and communicate with it. Journeys are usually done to a steady drum or rattle, which quickly brings on a deep, meditative state. Most people learn to journey within a few hours.
What are the three shamanic realms?
The Upper-World, the Lower-World and the middle-world. The Upper-World is what most people think of as spiritual. The Lower-World is the realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt nature, and a place of help, healing and teaching. The middle-world is where we live, and it can be unsettling and even unsafe to journey in, which is why I teach people to start in the Lower-World and root themselves there first, like a plant.
What is soul loss?
Soul loss is when part of us leaves and doesn’t come back – through abuse, fear, grief, shame, pain or addiction. The biggest cause I see in the West is fitting into our tamed, domesticated lives: we send away our playfulness, our spontaneity, our assertiveness, our laughter, our vulnerability. Soul retrieval is the practice of finding those parts and persuading them to return.
What is power loss?
Power loss has the same symptoms as soul loss, but its cause is disconnection from nature and the more-than-human: from Mother Earth, from Father Sky, from the web of life. It is a bit like unplugging your phone from the national grid and running on its little battery.
What is shamanism for?
Healing, and personal and spiritual development – but it is never a purely personal path. Shamanism is a path of service: shamans go off on their journeys to bring the gifts back to their community. It is an embodied path of heart, compassion and right relationship.
What is Therapeutic Shamanism?
Modern life has changed the way we experience the world, in ways traditional shamans never had to treat. Psychotherapy grew up to repair exactly that kind of damage. Soul retrieval, for instance, now often needs a negotiation with the part of us that sent a soul part away in the first place. Shamanism and psychotherapy have a great deal to learn from each other, and together they are much more effective – hence Therapeutic Shamanism.
Should I call myself a shaman?
An indigenous shaman has usually been trained full-time since childhood. Michael Harner felt it was disrespectful for Westerners to claim the title, and came up with “shamanic practitioner” instead: everybody can practise Buddhism, but not everybody becomes a Buddha. What you call yourself is up to you, but I would never call myself a shaman.
All chapters of the talk
Ongoing access and free course repeats
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.
Free revisions
When we (re)run any course that you have done previously, you can sign up for the new version for free!
Payment in three instalments
Money, of course, can be a challenge. We try to keep the courses as low-cost as we possibly can, and all of us involved in the college live quite modestly. Remember that in terms of signing up for the courses, our website gives you the option of paying for courses in three monthly instalments at no extra interest. For the First-Steps course, for instance, you can pay £80 upfront, or in three monthly instalments of £26.67. I hope that helps.
What if I cannot join the live sessions?
You do not have to be able to attend the live sessions to sign up for the course, and to get a huge amount out of doing it. At the moment, probably around 50% of our students don’t attend live at all and of the 50% that do, probably half of those only attend some of the live sessions, so you do not have to attend the live sessions, to sign up for the course.
Having said that, obviously, the live sessions add even more and the people that do attend them tend to really value them and love them, which is why we keep doing, offering them really the live sessions. The feedback we get is that people love the experience of journeying together. They love the sharing of journeys. they learn a huge amount from listening to other people’s journeys, but more than anything, they value the discussion time and the sense of community and support and things that come with that. So the live sessions are great and they do add a lot. On the other hand, we have loads of people who don’t attend the live sessions and still keep booking on our courses, and still, we get fantastic feedback from them too. So don’t let not being able to attend the live sessions put you off.
The Curriculum
The exact content of each module will vary, as tutors will tailor it to the needs and wishes of the participants. However, the basic structure is as follows, plus bonus Q&A recordings →
Module 1 (live, and recorded): EXPERIENCE A SHAMANIC JOURNEY
An experiential, step-by-step guide to shamanic journeying, including the common obstacles people meet and how to get past them. Then a guided shamanic journey to the Lower-World. N.B. Modules 1 and 2 are delivered together in the first live session.
Module 2 (live, and recorded): POWER ANIMAL RETRIEVAL
Learn how to do a shamanic Power Animal retrieval journey. Or, for those who already have a Power Animal, a journey to receive shamanic healing.
Module 3 (video): DEEPENING CONNECTION
Exploring what a Power Animal is and how to work with them in much more depth.
Module 4 (video): THE GREAT FORGETTING & THE FALL
Our separation, domestication and “the Fall”. Why we nearly lost shamanism and animism, and why we need them back.
Module 5 (live, and recorded): HOLLOWING-OUT MEDITATION PRACTICES
How to develop a “hollowing-out” practice – how to make sure that your shamanic journeys are grounded, authentic and Spirit-led.
Module 6 (video): THE GREAT REMEMBERING
How we can reconnect to animism and shamanism, and in doing so, regain our sanity and heal our broken connection with the world. Includes a look at the similarities and the differences between shamanism and psychotherapy.
Module 7 (video): SHAMANIC JOURNEYS FOR OTHER PEOPLE
Learn the basics of doing shamanic healing for other people. Includes looking at interpersonal skills, healthy power-dynamics, and ethical considerations.
Module 8 (video): HOW AND WHY THIS APPROACH IS SO DIFFERENT
Much of the shamanism emerging today is, often unknowingly, mixed up with beliefs that are not shamanic at all, and sometimes even at odds with original animist thinking. This module looks at how and why our approach is different.
Module 9 (live, and recorded): GROUNDING PRACTICES
Practices that keep your journeys grounded and rooted: shapeshifting into an experience of being Tree, and the shamanic “transformation” practices.
🎁 FREE Audiobook Bonus!
Secure your spot, and we’ll gift you a complimentary audio version of my bestselling book, ‘The Shamanic Journey‘.
“This is the best book about Shamanism and shamanic journey that I have ever read. /…/ Book’s topics were well thought out and encouraged me to actually stop and do the exercises before reading on. Paul Francis’s writing is clear and sensible, and the exercises are clearly described. Truly, I cannot recommend this more highly.”
(form Amazon UK reviews)
How it works:
- Book the First-Steps course today!
- Receive an email with your exclusive Spotify link a day or two before the course kicks off on January 7th
- Dive into your FREE audiobook and supercharge your learning experience.
This offer is exclusively available on Spotify for both free and paid users. Limited to new students only.
Shamanic Guides - who are they and how do we meet them?
Working with Guides is important because it is not the shaman that does the healing, but their Guides working through them. In Therapeutic Shamanism, your first and foremost guide is your Power Animal. You are the apprentice, and your Power Animal is your principal teacher. Power Animal is not an individual but represents the entire species, embodying the oversoul of that animal. The reason for it being an animal is that it’s different enough to take you out of being human and connect you with nature and other beings. Once you establish this connection, you can develop other Guides, like hunter-gatherer Lower-World Human Guide or Upper-World Human Guide, work with a Tribe and other Animal, Plant and Stone People.
Are shamanic realms real? Mythos and logos.
It’s important to say that shamanic journeys are mythos, not logos; mythos meaning metaphorically true and logos meaning literally true. They are not to be taken as a literal, surface truth, but as something representing a deeper kind of truth.
Shamanic reality is as strange as quantum reality (in some ways, it is quantum reality). Our human brains simply are not equipped to be able to perceive it, understand it and process it as it really is. To make any kind of sense of what we are perceiving, we have to ‘clothe’ what we see in some kind of an image that we can make sense of.
We fashion shamanic reality into metaphors and symbols that we can relate to.
Shamanic journeys are like dreams. They are full of symbolic meanings, not literal truths. You cannot use them to find out ‘facts’. They are instead the realm of meanings, relationships and insights.
That being said – SHAMANIC REALMS ARE REAL, NOT IMAGINARY!
The rational, logical part of the brain may be more comfortable with thinking that the shamanic journey is simply imagination, somehow ‘made up’, a product of our neurological wiring; it is all just a subjective experience; all in the mind, hard-wired in.
But when people actually do journeying themselves, the more they do it, the more they experience that it goes way beyond any personal imagination.
Don’t take my words for granted!
As I have said, shamanism is about direct personal experience and not about an act of faith. So, whatever I say about my experiences, I only offer them as my experiences. I invite you to have your own experiences of journeying, and then you will find out for yourself whether shamanic reality for you is subjective or objective; real or imaginary.
Hollowing out from the stories we tell ourselves.
Only if we can step away from our attachments to our identity – the middle-world constructs we think we are – can we genuinely experience being something else, such as Yew Tree, or Panther, or one of the Stone People.
This is what shamans mean when they say that to become a shaman, ‘the past has to die’, or that we have to ‘die to the past’. The middle-world stories have to go. Or at least, we need to be able to step away from them when journeying.
We will do that by learning to hollow out. Hollowing-out means stepping aside from our day-to-day concerns as much as possible, and from our own agendas, drives, beliefs and preconceptions, so the healing Spirits can communicate and work through us without all that getting in the way. We need to hollow-out, or our journeys will be coloured, driven and distorted by our ego.
I hope to see you on the course!
The course runs between November 14th and December 19th 2026.
It is delivered via:
- Three live sessions on November 14th, November 28th and December 12th, led by Cat Anderson and me. The live sessions start at 2pm (UK time). The first is around three-and-a-half hours long (with tea breaks!) and covers the first two modules. The second and third live sessions are two hours long. All are recorded, for anyone who is not able to attend them live.
- An additional six pre-recorded modules, delivered by video and accompanying learning materials. These are released at roughly weekly intervals as the course progresses.
- A Signal group, where students can ask questions, discuss topics, share experiences and additional resources, and get support, encouragement, and a sense of community.
- Bonus Q&A recordings, answering students’ questions and offering additional teaching.
Flexible study. You get ongoing access to recordings, made of all the theory presentations, journey instructions, and Q&A discussions. Plus, once you have done a First-Steps course, you can do any subsequent ones as revision, free of charge.
Blessings,
Paul Francis
AFTER THE FIRST-STEPS – LEARN SHAMANISM AND ANIMISM IN MORE DEPTH
Open registration. Exploring the Lower-World. A Next-Steps course: Lower-World Human Guides, working with Air, Fire, Water and Stone, and the transformation practices.
Open registration. Animal, Plant, Stone. A Next-Steps course: how to be human, and how to work with the Other-Than-Human People.
