Hello!
I’m thrilled to witness the growing excitement around the upcoming Time Travel: Healing the Past course, and 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:
Changes to the course
In the past, we ran one course on Time Travel that covered both Healing the Past and Choosing the Future. Starting in 2026, I have decided to split this course into two new ones, one dedicated to the past, and another dedicated to the future, so the 6 modules now get expanded to 12. This allows me to go into much more depth and give all the topics the full detail and attention they deserve, as well as adding in a lot of brand-new material too. So the November course is now Healing the Past, and Choosing the Future will run as a separate course next year.
THE CURRICULUM
(MIGHT BE SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
THE FOUNDATION
- Time as a function of the middle-world, and why the Lower and Upper Worlds sit outside it.
- Time-travelling in journeys. Why going back and changing something creates a new timeline, rather than destroying the present.
- What memory actually is, and why it matters here. Memory is not a recording waiting to be replayed. It is rebuilt every time we recall it.
- Where the honest limits lie. Changing the meaning we took from an event is not the same as falsifying the event.
- The parts of self involved in time-healing, and how to stalk which part of you is asking.
- Your timeline: conception to now, decade by decade, marked with the turning points, the endings, and the points of soul loss.
THE FAMILY AS A SYSTEM
- Families have a pattern of energy, ‘soul’. The family as a single emotional unit rather than a collection of individuals.
- How unhealthy patterns can travel down family timelines, unless they are addressed and dissolved.
- Differentiation of self from family dynamics. The roles: scapegoat, hero, lost child. Parentification, family secrets, enmeshment, cut-off, and the family myth.
- Building your genogram: a map of your own family across three or more generations.
- The drama triangle, and how its roles rotate down the generations.
- Consent and ethics. Why we work with our own parts, and do not represent family members who have not agreed to it.
STORIES AS SPELLS
- Things are as they are because of the stories they tell themselves. We can change our responses, our meanings and our stories. We cannot change other people.
- Naming your family’s spells: what was said about you, and by whom.
- The inner critic as the voice of the oppressor, arriving through the family before we had any language to question it.
- Advertising, manufactured wants, and the Taker-culture stories that hold a hierarchy in place and make it look like the weather.
- The hard edge. Changing a story is not gaslighting ourselves. Healthy story-change means going back and understanding, never dismissing.
- Recapitulation techniques.
ANCESTRAL BURDENS
- What an ancestral burden actually is. Ours and ancestral. Ours and bigger than us. And the rule against bypassing that goes with it.
- How many ancestors we have, and why we are all related. Seven generations, and why that is roughly two hundred years.
- The three routes of transmission: cultural, physical, and simply mysterious. Where the epigenetics evidence honestly stands, and how a burden can travel down a line through care rather than through the genes.
- The journey down an ancestral timeline: clear intent, hollowing out, extra protection, reaching the origin event, asking permission, and cleansing afterwards.
- Mythos not logos. A witnessed battle or witch-burning is symbol, not genealogy. Journeys are not family-history detective work.
- The ethics of working on an ancestor.
COLLECTIVE TRAUMA
- Trauma that is neither personal nor familial, but carried by a people, a class, or a place.
- The Fall. Six thousand years of trauma, and the work as knitting the worlds back together.
- The under-world, and why much of what people call Lower-World journeying is really the personal and collective unconscious. How to tell the difference, and why the confusion matters.
- Types of grief, and grief as praise rather than a stage to be got through.
- The Healing Grief Bowl, working down the ancestral line until it peters out at around seven generations.
- Disentanglement.
PUTTING IT DOWN
- Taker and Leaver cultures. The Original Instructions. Hunter-gatherer life as the healthy baseline.
- How domestication actually changed us. Grain, storage, settlement and defensible wealth. And self-domestication, which we did to ourselves before anyone else did it to us.
- The state as something that had to be built, and that people repeatedly walked away from on purpose.
- Checking first whether parts of us are attached to the burden, since victimhood and useful anger will sabotage the work if they are not consulted.
- Putting the burden down. The journey, or a middle-world ritual: making a representation in clay, straw or writing, and burning it, burying it, or casting it into the sea.
- The living family. Boundaries and contact with the people who are still alive, which is the part of healing the past that is still in the room.
Ongoing access, and a discount if you did the course before
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.
If you did the course before
If you joined Healing the Past, Choosing the Future in 2024, this time the course isn’t a free repeat, as so much of the material is new. Instead, you can join with a £75 discount. To get your discount, or if you have any questions about the changes, message me on Signal or email me at paul@therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk.
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 this course, for instance, you can pay £150 upfront or in three instalments of £50 each over the next three months. I hope that helps.
What if I cannot join the live sessions?
The 6 live journeying sessions are optional. You can book the course on its own for £150, or add all 6 live sessions for just £15 more (£165).
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.
When will the course run again?
Considering the number of courses available and the constraints of the number of weeks in a year, as well as the time and energy we have, courses are typically repeated, at best, on a two-year cycle.
Time Travel covers some unique areas of shamanic work that are not covered in the other courses, and it’s a course I don’t get to run very often, so it’s unlikely to be offered again for a long time (if at all) so, seriously, don’t miss this opportunity. Remember too, you don’t have to be able to attend the live sessions (all sessions are recorded anyway). Once enrolled, you can “bank” the course and do it in your own time and at your own pace if you wish.
Another thing to consider when signing up for it now is that I can’t guarantee it will run again. I mean, living with an awareness of death is a central theme in shamanism. Shamans are deeply connected to the cycle of nature, and death is an integral part of that. I’m not being morbid; it’s a reality. I’m not getting any younger, and I don’t know how long I’ll continue teaching. So, don’t assume the courses will be available indefinitely. Please seize the day and take the opportunity to sign up when the courses become available.
What are ancestral burdens?
An ancestral burden refers to the emotional, psychological, or cultural challenges and traumas that are believed to be passed down from one generation to the next within a family or community.
They can be just various fears, such as fear of betrayal, abandonment, or fear of being hurt. It could also be a sense of injustice, extending beyond personal history to ancestral lines. This phenomenon of transmission of trauma is part of a relatively new field of science called epigenetics, which explores how individuals carry trauma from their ancestral lines.
Personal vs. collective ancestral burdens
Ancestral burdens exist on a spectrum from more personal to more collective burdens. Personal burdens stem from individual histories, whereas collective burdens are shared by larger groups, including entire cultures.
Personal Burden: Fort-holder Strategies
As kids, we adapt to challenges by suppressing parts of ourselves, leading to strategies like staying quiet or playing the joker. These enduring aspects, called ‘fort holders,’ soldier on and shape our behavior. If unresolved, these strategies may pass through generations, creating ancestral burdens.
Generational Family Burden: Border Reavers
Both my partner Cat and I carried burdens from our families’ ancestral history in the English-Scottish border region, marked by centuries of instability known as the Border Reavers. These raiders, enlisted by the English and Scots, left a legacy of trauma. Despite the last incident being 300 years ago, the historical burden lingered in our families.
Cultural Collective Burden: Taker Culture
Our modern-day culture, spanning 6,000 traumatic years, collectively experiences post-traumatic stress. We carry ancestral burdens, extending back hundreds and even thousands of years, shaping our behavior in what has been a challenging period in human history.
The tentacle of the past
Many different shamanic traditions see the past as a tendril or a tentacle, moving in a spiral motion, entering our lower back from behind, just opposite our belly button. This tendril samples future possibilities, gravitating toward familiar scenarios based on past experiences. In the course, you’ll learn practical techniques to get to grips with this tentacle, ending the cycle of recreating the past and start to live more consciously.
Journeying to the past and healing past selves
By doing a shamanic journey to the past and supporting our younger selves, we create alternative timelines where we responded in healthier ways. This, in turn, lightens the burden of the past and allows us to make more conscious choices in the present.
This practice isn’t about altering the past but creating different timelines where healthier versions of yourself exist. As we engage in this process, we become more aware that there isn’t just one “I”; there are numerous versions in slightly different universes. Creating healthier versions of ourself can help move us to timelines where we live a more authentic, soulful and happy life.
Time traveling: interview with Paul Francis
I hope to see you on the course!
The Time Travel: Healing the Past course consists of 6 pre-recorded theory modules, released on Sundays: November 15th, 22nd and 29th, and December 6th, 13th and 20th, 2026. On each of these dates there is also an optional Live Shamanic Journeying session. They are 2 hours long and start at 2pm (UK time).
Course only: £150. Course + 6 live sessions: £165.
The closing date for enrolment is Saturday 14th of November. The course is highly unlikely to be repeated for a long time, so please do take this opportunity to book (remember, once booked, you can always work through the recordings at your own pace, and with no time limits).
Blessings,
Paul Francis
