The Wheel of Life Course – Q&A

Wheel of Life video – Edited Transscript

Hi there!

In case you are curious about the Wheel of Life course, but aren’t sure whether it’s right for you. I wanted to just do a short video to say a bit more about it and so hopefully help you make up your mind.

Why do the Wheel of Life course?

The Wheel of Life is very much about connecting back to nature. Now of course, this is fundamental to shamanism, or at least it should be, and it’s certainly fundamental to animism, but a lot of shamanism in the modern era has become separated off from its animist roots. And one of the things were very keen about doing in this college is to try to re-establish shamanism as essentially an animist practice. Now, animism is fundamentally nature based. So, in terms of how to develop personally, spiritually and so on, the primary answer in animism is to turn back to nature.

working with the original instructions

Remember the story about how the Animal, Plant and Stone People got their healing gifts a story I tell right at the beginning of the trainings in the First Steps courses. Just to briefly remind you, basically the Animal People became angry with us, the Human People, because of the way we’re disrespecting Mother Earth. And so, they decided they would get together and wipe us out. However, the Plant People and the Stone people, who are older and wiser, heard about this, so, they called a great council of all the Peoples. And at that council, the Plant People and the Stone People said to the Animal People, “Look, we understand your feeling and it’s in your nature to be like that, because that’s what being Animal is about, having feelings like that. However, what you’re planning to do to the Humans is not in accordance with Spirit. Basically, the Humans are children who have lost their way and they need our guidance. They need our help in our teaching and our support. And so, at the Council, every single individual species of Animal, of Plant, and every different kind of Stone, took on a portion of what’s called the Original Instructions – the teachings that show us how to live in right relationship with each other in the great “wheel of life”. And each Animal person, Plant Person and Stone Person agreed they would give this healing gift to any Human who asked for it.

Now, on a surface level, people often think of that as a nice story about how each particular species of Animal, Plant and so on got its particular healing qualities. And on one level, yes, that’s true. On another level, though, there’s a much deeper meaning to the story. Essentially, what that story is trying to say to us is that we are children. We’re not the cleverest. We’re not the wisest. We’re not the top of some pyramid of evolution.

We are children, and are prone to losing our way as well, and doing damage when we do. And so, when we lose our way, the people we need to turn to are not other human beings, human spiritual teachers, and certainly not our human invented and made-up gods and goddesses. What we need to do is turn back to nature itself, back to the beings who are wiser than us – the other Animals, the Plant People and the Stone People.

Now, being connected to nature and to the other-than-human People, was fundamental to original animist practice because, apart from anything else, being connected to the changing seasons and the cycles of the year was essential in hunter-gatherer times if you were going to survive as a human. But it was more than that. It was about living in right relationship with the bigger web of life; with what’s sometimes called the “Wheel of Life”. In some cultures, this is also referred to as the Medicine Wheel, the knowledge of the seasons and cycles of life, and how these relate to not only to us, but also to the other-than-human People too.

HEALING POWER LOSS

These days, of course, we’ve largely cut ourselves off from nature, certainly compared to our hunter-gatherer animist ancestors. We live in artificial environments and so on, and often live out of touch with the seasons and cycles of the year as well. Doing that, though, isn’t healthy for us, and it leads to what shamans call Power loss. Now remember, Power loss and soul loss are the two fundamental ways we get ill, from a shamanic perspective. Soul loss, of course, is where we lose parts of ourselves. And Power loss is when we become disconnected from nature Both soul loss and Power loss weaken us. They also leave holes in us. They leave us vulnerable for other things to enter us, things that aren’t healthy for us – negative thoughts, even getting possessed by unhelpful spirits, and so on.

The symptoms of Power loss are pretty much the same as the symptoms of soul loss, but with the added dimension of being disconnection from nature too. But let’s just remind ourselves quickly about what these symptoms are. In lists of symptoms of soul loss, you will see things like: a feeling that something is missing, like a spark is missing from our lives. You’ll see things like numbness or flatness, kind of just going through the motions and feeling lost, indecisive and aimless, and lacking a real sense of purpose. You’ll see things like feeling disconnected from life and what’s going on around you. A sense of as if you’re living in a bit of a dream or a bubble. Procrastination. Time wasting. Finding it hard to sustain focus or effort. A lack of self-confidence and self-belief. Depression from mild to moderate to severe. Phobias, anxieties, fearfulness. Repeating patterns that you know aren’t good for you, but you can’t seem to get out of. Making the same mistake in life choices over and over again. Addictions. Feeling like you’ve never really recovered from a past event despite your efforts to do so. Feelings of grief, fear, anger, anxiety that you can’t seem to shake off, and just generally a lack of joy and enthusiasm.

That list is pretty much a description of many people today in Western culture, of course, because we live in a culture where soul loss is endemic. But as I was saying, all these are also symptoms of Power loss. Power loss is all these things with the added thing of being been disconnected from nature too. Now, in shamanic circles these days, most people tend to focus on soul loss. If people feel those symptoms I have just gone through, they feel the answer is to get some soul retrieval. However, these days they very often a result of Power loss too because of how disconnected we are from nature and from the seasons and cycles of life. In that case, if Power loss is actually the cause, then no amount of soul retrieval on its own is ever going to heal them. Soul retrieval will always feel like it’s falling short and never quite hitting the spot because the underlying problem – the Power loss, the disconnection from nature and from the cycles of life – isn’t being addressed. And this is where the Wheel of Life teachings really come into play, in addressing this disconnection.

Power loss also means that we start to lose our way because, as we become disconnected from nature and from the teachings of the other-than-human people, we lose sight of the Original Instructions and how to live in right relationship not only with the other-than-human People, but with each other, and with ourselves too. And the Wheel of Life teachings are a fundamental part of the Original Instructions and addressing this. People often think of the Wheel of Life in terms of the seasons of the year, and it is partly to do with that. But it’s way more than that as well. As we shall see on the course, the Wheel of Life is packed full of wisdom and teaching. It’s a roadmap for life. Its connection to the seasons of the year is only one tiny aspect of it. It is much bigger than that. And central to it is an understanding of the five elements…

THE FIVE ELEMENTS OF ETHER, AIR, FIRE, WATER AND EARTH

Now, some of you may already be familiar with the Chinese element system used in acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, based on the elements of wood, fire, earth, metal and water. On this course, though, just to be clear, we’re not going to be looking at the Chinese element system. We’re going to be looking at the much older, original, indigenous animist element system instead. These are the elements of ether, air, fire, water and earth. Whilst every single animist culture would have had their own take on this indigenous element system, an understanding of it was nevertheless fundamental to original animist practice. In other words, understanding how to work with ether, air, fire, water and earth is one of the primary building blocks of original animist knowledge, and so learning it is one of the essential building blocks in developing a fully rounded and comprehensive animist (and so, shamanic) practice as well.

We do touch on the element system in the Next Steps course Exploring the Lower-World (which some of you have done or are currently doing), when we look at what are called the “transformation practices” and how they relate to the elements. We look at burials and how they relate to the earth element, dissolvings and how they relate to the water element, burnings and how they relate to fire, and so on. The Wheel of Life, though, is one of only two courses where we go into the element system in full detail, the other being the Tree of Life course. The Tree of Life course isn’t running at the moment (at the time of my recording this in January 2026, it won’t be repeated until probably 2027 at the very earliest, and possibly not till 2028), so the Wheel of Life is your opportunity to learn the five element system now, this vital, eye-opening and incredibly useful aspect of animist teaching.

THE ELEMENTAL CYCLE AND WHERE WE GET STUCK

So, to give you a bit more of a taste of what we’ll be exploring on the Wheel of Life, essentially, the elements move in a cycle. The first thing that happens is the ether element creates a kind of “space” for the other elements to emerge into. Then the other elements, air, fire, water, and earth, form a cycle which flows, from air to fire to water to earth, then back again to air again, like the seasons of the year. And in fact, the elements do relate to the seasons of the year (with air being spring – fresh starts, new beginnings – fire being the summer, water being autumn or the fall, and earth being the winter).

Fundamental to this is understanding that health is based on the free, uninhibited, unblocked flow of energy through this natural cycle, and that one of the reasons we get ill is because we get stuck in a particular part of this cycle. Getting stuck can lead not only to mental and emotional issues, but physical problems as well, as we shall see on the course. So part of what the Wheel of Life teaching does is it shows us how energy should flow; how it moves, and the cycles and the stages it goes through as it does. This helps us work with the cycle in our own lives and not get stuck, and this understanding that the Wheel of Life provides can be applied to literally almost every aspect of our lives. It’s far more than just being about the seasons in terms of spring, summer, autumn and winter.

For example, say, you want to move house, or you want to change careers. Say you want to be a doctor, or to learn to be a baker and open a bakery, for example. In terms of the Wheel of Life, air is the phase of thinking and planning about all of this. Then, if we don’t get stuck in that initial planning phase and we move on to the next element, fire is about putting the plans into actual action. That’s what fire is about – doing things. Then, if we don’t lose momentum and “burn out” (notice the elemental language there – our language is full of elemental references), we then move to the persistence of the water element. Water just keeps going, and then, if we don’t get stuck in water, we will eventually complete things and arrive at the end result, the earth element.

However, as humans, often we get stuck in a particular phase of these cycles. So maybe you’re somebody who habitually gets stuck in the air element. You have lots of ideas and thoughts, things you’d like to do, but you rarely put these into action because you get paralyzed by the amount of options and choices, or maybe you lack the confidence and courage of fire that’s necessary to decide what to do and then act on your ideas. So airy people tend to get paralyzed with indecision and get lost in their heads and procrastinating, and get paralyzed by what if thoughts like “What if I make the wrong decision? What if it’s the wrong choice? What if it doesn’t work out?”, and so on. Maybe, though you are somebody who’s fiery and so you’re not going to get stuck in thoughts. Instead, you tend to just dive in and making things happen. But one problem with fire is it tends to burn out after a while. So maybe you’re somebody who starts things off with enthusiasm, but then loses focus and direction and never actually follows things through.

Or maybe you’re somebody who gets stuck in water. You do start things, but when it comes to actually finishing things, you’ve never actually complete. So, if you’re wanting to train to be a doctor or an accountant or whatever it is, you never actually submit the final essays or whatever it is you need to do to complete your training.

Or maybe you are somebody gets stuck in the earth element. You are fearful of changes. You want to stay with the comfortable and the familiar. But after a while that starts to feel stagnant and stuck, but you are fearful of moving on to the next phase in your life, which needs air (a breath of fresh air) to open things up and allow new beginnings, fresh starts, and so on.

That’s just a very simple and quick example of this cycle of elements and how we can apply it to almost every aspect of your life. Anything you get stuck in, anything you have problems with, you can think about it in terms of “Which element am I stuck in here? What needs to be happening next and why aren’t I doing that?”. What the Wheel of Life does is help us not only understand where we are stuck, it also shows us what to do about this, and particularly what shamanic practices we can use to help us become unstuck and move to the necessary next phase in the cycle.

Now, as human beings, we get stuck because we make elemental judgments. If you look around at nature, nothing else gets stuck. Everything flows through the cycle of life, without getting stuck, apart from us humans. As humans, we get stuck in overusing one or maybe two of the elements and avoiding the others for various reasons. Let’s just take one example here. Say in growing up, we see the fire element modelled badly. We see it being used as unhealthy anger or as violence, or to dominate and bully other people. If so, we may look at this when we’re growing up and think, “I don’t want anything to do with the fire element; the fire element looks awful”. So we try to avoid the fire element. Now the problem is we need to be whole, and we need all the elements to do so. We need to be able to flow through all of them. If we try to avoid the fire element, we’re also going to lose all the positive things about fire as well. We are never going to be able to step into our healthy fire, our confidence, our ability to make decisions and trust ourselves, our healthy power and so on. And because of that, we may get stuck in the previous element, the air element. Instead of kind of stepping into our lives and embracing them and seizing them, seizing the day and stepping into our power, we become stuck in our heads, stuck in our thoughts. We become paralyzed by indecision afraid to act on things and move forward and so on. We become anxious (excess air). Now, as we shall see on the course, doing this doesn’t just have mental and emotional consequences, it will have physical consequences as well. If we overuse a particular element or underuse another element, this will have physical problems associated with it. With excess air, we might see things like asthma, eczema, irritable bowel syndrome, kidney issues, for example. Or, if we are trying to avoid fire, the fire may build up in our body and cause things like migraines and so on. We’ll explore all of this on the course when we look at how the elements explain the links between mental/emotional issues and physical symptoms, including how even our actual body type itself will reflect our elemental choices and how we end up developing either airy, fiery, watery or earthy body types.

What the Wheel of Life teaching does is help us to understand all of this; which elements we overuse and which we tend to avoid. It then shows us how to journey shamanically to resolve these imbalances and blockages, and learn how to work with the elements that we have been avoiding or afraid of, and so establish again the free flow of our energy through the Wheel of Life.

Let’s just take another quick example. In our childhoods, we might get stuck in overusing fire. This means we may tend to act without thinking and rush into things. And so, whilst we start things with a lot of enthusiasm, but we tend to then burn out or lose interest, or (with hindsight) realise we should have thought about things more. Or we may overuse fire in a way that means we end up being too dominant or pushy with other people, too quick to anger, to arrogant and unable to cooperate and listen to others. Now all of that will have evolved out of a childhood situation we were growing up in. But as we now move through our adult life it’s going to start to create problems. If so, the Wheel of Life can give us not only understanding into what’s going on, but practical tools to help us heal.

So, all of this will explore in detail over the year that the course runs, as well as things like how the Wheel of Life relates to the seasons of the year, to various types of animals (airy animals, fiery animals, watery animals, and earthy animals), to the different stages of life childhood, young adult, middle aged and eldership. To survival needs like fresh air, warmth, the fire element, clean water and physical safety (earth). And how it relates to our five senses in terms of sight and touch and taste and smell and so on, and to the five core conditions for healthy psychological and emotional growth, and much, much, much more. It is a huge model that you can apply it to so many things; to almost any aspect of your life. If you’re a therapist, it’ll help you understand your clients better. It will help you understand family members and family dynamics more, relationship issues, and much more besides.

PRACTICAL DETAILS

On a practical note, there are eight modules to the course, and these are spaced roughly six-week intervals through the year, on each of the main stages of the year, starting with Imbolc on February 1st, then six weeks later on the Spring Equinox, and so on. As usual, the modules will consist of a teaching recording that will be between 1 to 2.5 hours long. As usual, there’ll be a Signal discussion group, where you can ask questions, share your experiences, discuss and debate things, and so on. There is also the option of live journey sessions that you can add in at the bargain discounted price of just £20 for eight sessions. You can pay the course in three instalments, as usual. Once you sign up, you can work through the course materials at your own time and pace, so even if you don’t feel ready to start working through the modules at the moment, please do sign up for the course because it’s not going to run again for a number of years! Plus, you can, always come back to the teaching materials whenever you want because, as you’ve got an account with us, you have access to the teaching materials. So, I do hope you will join us!

The Wheel of Life It is a course I’ve run many times. I’ve probably taught it more than any other single course other than the First-Steps course, and I’ve was teaching it  before I even started this Three Ravens college. It’s usually hugely popular with students. People find it a really enjoyable course, and it’s not as “heavy” as some of the more psychological courses like the Embodied Shamanism or Inner Tribe courses, even though it has a lot of psychological depth as well. People usually find it fascinating and enormously useful because it does give insights into almost every aspect of your life. As such, students often find it gives them a framework, a meta-model that helps them bring all the different aspects of their shamanic practice together, and, of course, helps with healing The Power loss we all suffer from in Western culture.

So, like I say, it probably won’t be running again till 2029 at the earliest, so now’s your chance. Seize the day and book on it!

Bye for now.

Paul Francis