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:
IS THIS COURSE FOR ME?
THE COURSE ITSELF:
- Journeying to the past and healing our younger selves
- What are ancestral burdens?
- Personal and collective ancestral burdens
- Where do the stories we tell about ourselves come from?
- Do I need to know my family history?
- Will I be working on my family members?
- Will this stir things up?
- What will I actually do?
- Time travelling: interview with Paul Francis
PRACTICAL DETAILS:
Is this course for me?
Can we really change the past?
No. We can’t change what happened. Thinking we can is magical thinking.
What we can change is the story we took from it, how much charge it still carries, and what it’s still doing to us now. Our choices, our relationships, our bodies, how we react when someone says a certain thing in a certain tone, and so on.
When something happens to us, especially as children, we don’t just store the facts. We take a story from it too. Say a child’s father leaves when they’re six. The fact is, he left. But the child’s story might be “I wasn’t worth staying for”, “people always leave”, or “it was my fault”. That story runs on for years, often a lifetime, underneath everything, choosing for us, long after anyone remembers where it came from.
We can’t change the fact that he left. We can change the story that child took from it.
Most of the damage isn’t in what happened, but in what’s still happening: parts of us still stuck back there, stories still running, the body still braced. All of those can change.
Do that, and you’ll start living the present more lightly. That I can guarantee.
Why do I keep repeating the same patterns?
Because the past doesn’t let go easily. Our past stories, our own and the family and ancestral ones, can take on a life of their own. They become persistent and drive our choices. It’s why we keep repeating the same patterns, making the same mistakes, choosing the same kinds of partners even though they’re bad for us.
One way of seeing this is as a tentacle. In a journey, it looks like a tentacle emerging from a fog of the past. It enters the back of the body, directly opposite the belly button, and comes out through it.
Almost like a tongue, it tastes all the possible multiverses, all the possible futures, finds one familiar enough, hooks on, and drags us forward into it. Then our minds rationalise it: “Oh, I made that choice.” But it was made largely unconsciously. Sometimes it wasn’t really a choice at all.
And what feels familiar? Very often, the family we grew up in. Which is why people so often recreate their family.
There’s a practice for detaching it. It isn’t something you deal with once, though. It’s like Japanese knotweed, times a million. It keeps growing back, and you keep hacking it back, and eventually it weakens and grows back slower and weaker. And there’s no substitute for turning round and fully facing the past issues behind it, owning and resolving them.
Do I have to forgive my parents?
No. It’s an idea that comes up again and again, taught by many religions and much of the New Age: to heal, you have to forgive. Usually your parents.
Healing doesn’t depend on forgiveness. It depends on truth, on welcoming back the hurt parts of us, and on the feelings being allowed and felt.
Never, ever ask a child part to forgive. If it was hurt by someone and we ask it to forgive them, we abandon it all over again, and shame it for what it feels.
Healing the past isn’t going back to right wrongs, or to punish or blame people, either. That’s really easy to slip into. When we’re hurt, part of us wants the people who hurt us to see it, say sorry, and then all will be put right. Actually, that just keeps us hooked in.
Nor is it creating an entirely different childhood story for yourself, one where your parents were lovely and you were loved and safe. The body never lies. It knows that didn’t happen.
So, going back and healing ourselves, so the past can be acknowledged, owned, resolved and put down.
Why do I end up playing the same role everywhere?
Because a part of you got cast in it, very young. Every family has roles. A few are spoken, most aren’t.
The hero: the high achiever who makes the family look good, and is under a lot of pressure to keep doing it. The scapegoat: the one who gets blamed, so nobody has to look at the family itself. The lost child: the one who fades into the background, keeps out of the way, and asks for nothing. And plenty of others too. The joker, the peacemaker, the good boy or good girl, the rebel, the martyr.
Each is a strategy, a child working out how to survive in that family. In our language, a fort-holder, the part that stayed and soldiered on. And alongside each one are the parts that had to leave, or be sent away, for that role to work. A hero might have had to send away their vulnerability. A lost child, their needs. A joker, their sadness.
A role isn’t who you are. It’s a part of you that got cast, and very often it stays in role long after you’ve left home. The hero at work, burning out. The scapegoat in every group they join. The lost child who never asks for anything, from anyone.
The ecopsychologist Bill Plotkin has an image for this that I use in my books too: the loyal soldier who doesn’t know the war is over. Still at his post decades on, because nobody came to say it was safe to stand down. And telling him the war is over doesn’t change much. He won’t stand down until someone he trusts turns up to take over. So much of this work is growing our true Adult self, so there’s someone to hand over to.
I don’t have children. Why does it still matter to break the link?
Because what we don’t heal gets passed on. What doesn’t get dealt with doesn’t go away. It’s got to go somewhere until it’s resolved. Unspoken grief, shame, rage, fear, and the ways of coping with them, all handed down, mostly without anyone meaning to.
But it doesn’t have to keep going. Someone has to do it, though. A link-breaker: someone who works on what was passed to them, so it isn’t passed on any further. The buck stops here.
And it’s never just for you. Heal your bit, and that can have a knock-on effect. On your family, on any children you have, on the wider human community.
Even without children. We’re all part of the human Oversoul, so what we carry can pass sideways too, from one person to the people around them. From a teacher to schoolchildren, for example. So the buck doesn’t stop with the childless. Everyone is someone’s ancestor.
Michael Dahl, an Anishinaabe elder on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, puts it as a question: what kind of an ancestor do you want to be? The question makes us ancestors already. Not someday, and not depending on how we’re remembered. In the way we live, every day, we’re already passing something on.
There are two halves to it: what you put down, and what you pass on. Not everything that comes down a family line is a burden.
The course itself
Journeying to the past and healing our younger selves
This course really comes from my own life.
As a child I had a very, very strong sense of being looked after. Some being, or beings, looking after me and looking out for me. I also had a sense I could talk to my future self. Deep down I knew I’d be okay, though I had no reason at all then to think or feel that. It was a terrible childhood. Yet there it was, this knowing, underneath everything.
In my thirties especially, doing lots of journeys back to my past, it dawned on me. I was that person. I’d been looking after me as a child. I was the future self my child self had been talking to.
Time is a function of the middle-world. The Lower-World and Upper-World are, to all intents and purposes, outside space-time. That’s why a wound from forty years ago isn’t out of reach.
With our Power Animal and Guides, we go back to the parts of us still caught up in what happened. The fort-holders, who stayed and soldiered on, and the orphans, the parts that left or were sent away. We let those younger selves know they’re not alone, give them the help and protection they needed, and bring home the parts that were lost.
And because we live in a multiverse, going back and changing something doesn’t destroy the present. It creates new timelines.
Can we really understand how it works? Who knows? But does it grow corn? Yes. It really works. And it builds on itself. The more you go back for healing, the faster healing in the present goes. Like a snowball going downhill.
What are ancestral burdens?
An issue from somewhere back in your ancestral line that has been passed down the generations, and is now something you are carrying. Or that someone else in the family is carrying.
Some of the issues we have, things like lack of confidence, anxiety, anger, or wonky stories like “we mustn’t answer back”, are just personal to us. Very often they have their origins in our own childhood. Sometimes, though, it’s clear the same issue runs through a whole family, and gets passed down the generations.
Not only wounds come down the line. Gifts and strengths do too. But it’s the wounds that need healing.
Crucial: it’s not “this isn’t mine, it’s ancestral”. It’s yours and ancestral. Yours and bigger than you. Used as a way out, it’s a form of spiritual bypassing, and what you’re not aware of, you can’t change and heal.
Things travel down the line by three routes: culturally, which is most of it; physically, through epigenetics; and by routes that are simply mysterious. We’ll look at where the epigenetics evidence honestly stands, too.
And in my experience, the ancestral half is the easier half. The fort-holder and orphan work is the complicated part. Healing what came down the line is much more straightforward. It simply works.
Personal and collective ancestral burdens
Burdens sit on a spectrum, from the very personal to the whole culture.
At one end, our own fort-holder strategies and particular family wounds. Then whole family lineages carrying a burden.
Here’s my own example. When I got into therapy, one of the things I needed to deal with was a lot of shame. My childhood role in the family was the outcast and the scapegoat, so I could see the childhood origins of it. But the longer I worked on it, the more I had a sense that some of it just didn’t feel like it was all mine. My father had a deep sense of shame that he never worked through, and he passed that on to me and my two brothers. And on my father’s side, for hundreds of years, we were part of the Border Reiver families of the English–Scottish border country. Raiders, causing havoc in that area for generation after generation. So, a deep and long ancestral lineage of shame, and the need to atone.
Further along, burdens carried by a whole people, a class or a place. War, invasion, occupation, colonisation, famine, people driven off their land. Go back a few hundred years and the number of our ancestors runs into the millions. At that level, all human history is our ancestry.
And at the far end, the biggest burden any of us carries. It isn’t from one family, or even one people. It’s the culture we were all born into. Six thousand years of it since the Fall, and several thousand more of domestication before that. And it’s very hard to put down something you can’t see. Like the water you’ve been swimming in all your life.
Where do the stories we tell about ourselves come from?
Very often, from our families, long before we could question them.
Shamans say things are as they are because of the stories they’re telling themselves. An oak tree is an oak tree because it’s telling itself the story, from its Oversoul in the Lower-World, of what it is to be an oak tree.
Humans are a bit different. We’re a restless, curious species, and we make up our own stories. And we’re exceptionally good at it. We can tell stories so entrancing that, however preposterous they are, and whatever the evidence against them, we still believe them. Spells.
Every family has them. The story a family tells about itself: “We’re a close family.” “We don’t make a fuss.” And the labels handed to each of us: the clever one, the difficult one, the sensitive one, the one who’ll never amount to anything. Said once in passing, or a hundred times.
Many aren’t said at all. A look, a tut, a slight withdrawal. Just as effective as being told off, and far harder to remember.
Naming your family’s spells comes down to two questions. What was said about you? And by whom?
Mostly, they were cast by people who were under the same spell themselves. And they hold so well because a child can’t afford to question them. A family is the whole world to a small child.
Many of us end up hearing those spells in the voice of our inner critic. So we ask whose voice it really is, and journey to meet it.
Do I need to know my family history?
No. Shamanic journeys are mythos, not logos.
Logos is what’s literally, factually true. Mythos is what’s true through metaphor, symbol, story and myth. The shamanic realms are the realm of mythos. What you see there are symbols representing something, not literal facts.
Sometimes people think they can travel back almost like detectives. Spy on their parents and find out what they were really saying. Find out what was in the box they never let you open. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t use journeying to uncover facts, and you can’t use it to research your family history.
What we do is map the family. A genogram: a family tree with the relationships, patterns and roles drawn in, going back at least three generations. You do the first version from memory, before asking anyone or looking anything up. And you include the dead.
Start your map now. Before any journeying, we map the family: the losses, the repetitions, the silences, and the strengths. Our free Map Your Family worksheet is the place to start.
Will I be working on my family members?
No. We only ever work with our own parts.
What we can change: our own responses, our meanings, our stories. What we can’t change: other people. Going back in a journey and making our parents loving is fantasy. And trying to change other people, or punish them, crosses a line, from shamanism to sorcery.
You don’t have the right to work on anyone shamanically without their permission. With anyone still living: never. Not in the present, not by going back into the past. This is the one place where Therapeutic Shamanism is completely categorical.
It’s also why I don’t use family constellations in the usual way. Over the years I witnessed and took part in many of them. Very often incredibly powerful, jaw-droppingly powerful at times. But the ethics never felt right to me. You have the client’s permission, but not true, informed consent from all the family members being represented. So one day I asked all the family members to step out, and brought in the client’s own parts instead: the parts that stayed to deal with the family situation, and the parts they’d had to send away. A constellation of the self. You make your own, in plasticine or clay.
Healing yourself may well have a knock-on effect on the people around you. It might not. That’s up to them. You can’t save other people. You can free yourself.
Will this stir things up?
It can. So we go gently, all the way through. Family stuff can stir up a lot, and some of what comes down a family line is heavy.
Love yourself as if your life depends on it. Be radically self-compassionate, with your parts of self too.
Don’t start with the big stuff. Pick small things to practise on first, and definitely don’t pick anything likely to retraumatise you. If you start freaking out, you’re going too fast. Stop, and give the resisting part your full attention, kindness and patience. Slower really is faster.
Shamanic work on the past works alongside psychotherapy, and complements it well. It does things psychotherapy can’t, and vice versa. If what’s coming up is big, please don’t do it alone. Get a good therapist alongside you.
And there’s no such thing as being behind. Work at your own pace, little and often, with something ordinary in between. Anything you’re struggling with, bring it to the Signal group. That’s what it’s there for.
What will I actually do?
Four or five practices in every module, building on each other. Your timeline and your genogram stay with you all the way through.
- Module 1: your life timeline; which part is here?; recapitulation with eye movements; the journey back as your future self; detaching the past–future tentacle.
- Module 2: your genogram; a constellation of the self; a journey to a Lower-World Mother; a journey to bring home a part that was sent away; a portal, a shield and a cloak for middle-world work.
- Module 3: naming your family’s spells; the hierarchy spell; a journey to meet your inner critic; a journey back to the moment a story was cast; recapitulating a story.
- Module 4: your ancestral patterns; a reconnaissance journey down an ancestral timeline; a healing journey to the origin of a burden; the tentacle, for its ancestral strands.
- Module 5: finding your griefs; the Healing Grief Bowl; telling the Lower-World from the under-world; a disentanglement journey.
- Module 6: listening to the parts that want to hang on; a journey to put a burden down; a middle-world ritual to release it; meeting your healthy ancestors; what do I want carried forward?
Time travelling: interview with Paul Francis
Practical details
Who can join?
To attend the Healing the Past course, you need to have completed our First-Steps course, and booked on at least one Next-Steps course with us (please note, there really are no exceptions to this). We have 2 Next-Steps courses available before this course starts on 15 November: Exploring the Lower-World and The Animal, Plant, Standing (Tree) and Stone People.
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.
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.
Are the live sessions worth adding?
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 don’t need them to do the course and get a huge amount out of it. Lots of our students never come to the live sessions, and we get fantastic feedback from them too.
Having said that, the live sessions add even more, and the people who come to them tend to really value them and love them. 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 that comes with that.
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. 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.
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.
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
