Hello!
I recently sat down with The Shaman Stories Podcast‘s host Jeremy Chenvert for an in-depth conversation about the key elements of therapeutic shamanism, including its unique approach to journeying, the challenges of modern soul retrieval, and how we can move forward on a path of direct experience.
I hope you enjoy it!
… or if you prefer to listen to a specific question, simply click on the question:
- My childhood and first shamanic experiences
- Why Humans Fell Away from Shamanism?
- Shamanic journeying for modern times
- It’s important where you journey to!
- Shamanism as therapy
- Challenges of modern soul retrieval
- A path of direct experience
- Finding a way forward?
- How do courses work?
- Join the First Steps Course
PAUL'S JOURNEY
Can you tell people a little bit about what life was like for you growing up, and eventually, how you found shamanism and started working with it?
Childhood Struggles and Early Shamanic Experiences
Oh, childhood was pretty awful. I think that’s true for a lot of people you have on the podcast. I was very much the scapegoat, the outsider, the outcast in my family. It was a pretty miserable, lonely childhood.
That said, I did have a lot of shamanic experiences as a child, though I had absolutely no idea what they were at the time. And I had no one to talk to about them—not that talking was something that really happened in my family. My dad was a Church of England vicar, so I was supposedly being raised in a Christian life, but I had no idea how to make sense of these experiences or how to process them.
It wasn’t until I went to university that I started coming across shamanism a bit more consciously—although back then, in the ’70s, we were still calling it “primitive religions.” I don’t actually remember when I first heard the word “shamanism” being used. I started taking classes in my early 20s, and it all kind of flowed from there.
I did step away from it for quite a long time, though. By then, I was also a psychotherapist, and I was really disturbed by the lack of ethics in the wider shamanic community. From a psychotherapy point of view, a lot of what was happening in the shamanic world seemed pretty dodgy. But eventually, I was dragged back to it—I had a profound breakdown in my 30s, complex post-traumatic stress, and it was shamanism that saved me, really.
But yes, a lot of shamanic stuff in childhood. If I share just one of them:
Shamanic Initiation by the Pear Tree
When I was 12, I used to spend a lot of time outside. We lived in this huge vicarage with a ridiculously large, completely overgrown garden—it had been left wild for about 30 years. It was idyllic. I spent as much time out of the house as possible, hiding from my family.
There was this old pear tree, totally overgrown, and I used to climb it. One day, I climbed way too high. I was in a pretty bad state back then—I think I was testing how far I could go, really—and I fell. I remember falling headfirst, that strange experience where time slows down. I felt like I was falling forever, but I couldn’t turn myself around. Some weird things happened on the way down that I won’t go into here, but when I hit the ground, I bumped my head. And thank “God” for that bump, because as I lay there, with the grass right up in my face, everything just burst into life. I was profoundly aware of the soil, the plants—everything was alive. It’s hard to put into words, but it felt like I was seeing the world as it truly was.
A few days later, I went to church and saw my dad at the front in his robe, mumbling the words he’d been told to say to his dead God in this cold stone tomb of a building, full of miserable people. The contrast couldn’t have been starker. The Christianity I was being raised in felt completely dead, full of dead people. And yet I’d just had this experience of pure, vibrant life.
That pear tree—it’s obvious to me now that it was a shamanic initiation of sorts. At the time, I had no framework for it, no one to explain what had happened. But it changed my life. I spent years trying to understand it, but I couldn’t find any answers in Christianity.
From University to Shamanic Teacher
It wasn’t until university that things started clicking into place. I remember signing up for classes—I don’t even recall what my original degree was meant to be, sociology or something—but the university required you to pick two other subjects in the first year. I was wandering around the registration hall, looking at different departments, and I saw “Anthropology of Religion.” I had no idea what anthropology even was, but I just knew—that was it. So I signed up.
I ended up spending three years essentially studying shamanic and animist cultures, though I didn’t fully realise it at the time. When I finished, I thought, “Well, that was fascinating, but completely useless. Now I have to get a real job.” I assumed I’d never revisit anthropology again. But, of course, I did—and eventually, I became a shamanic teacher. Long story.
But looking back, you can see the moments when your soul was calling you. That fall from the pear tree was definitely one of them.
STARTING A SHAMANIC PATH
At what point did you discover journeying? You were reading about all these things at university, but when did you actually start journeying and following that path?
A Life-Changing Experience at Lauriston Hall
When I left university, I had no idea what to do with my life. One of my friends told me about this amazing place I had to visit, called Lauriston Hall. It was basically a hippie commune—a group of people had bought this huge house in Scotland in the ’60s—and they ran these incredible week-long events called healing weeks. My friend insisted I had to go, so I ended up at one.
It was all very chaotic and anarchic. On the first evening, about 50 or 60 of us were in this huge room, and someone laid out a big sheet of lining paper on the floor to use as a timetable. People were just calling out, offering workshops they could run—‘I can do this,’ ‘I can do that.’ There was a guy there, known as ‘Mr Alternative’ in Lancaster, where I was living at the time. I honestly thought he was an idiot. But he was very dominant and basically said, ‘I want to run a workshop, but it’ll take two days, so I need the first two days for myself, and no one else can schedule anything then.’
So the next morning, I woke up thinking, either I spend two days on my own, or I go to this guy’s workshop. I went, but I was in a terrible mood. And my worst fears were confirmed—I walked in, and he was playing whale music and burning incense. I was a young punk at the time, very sceptical, and I thought, Oh God, this is awful.
The Introduction to Shamanic Journeying
Then he told us, ‘Close your eyes and sense who in the room you feel drawn to work with.’ I was rolling my eyes but went along with it. There were two women standing beside me, so I half-heartedly gestured toward them. They immediately said, ‘Great!’ took my hands, and all three of us just collapsed onto the floor.
It felt like an electric shock. I was completely freaked out. The guy running the workshop came over and reassured us, saying, ‘It’s okay, just go with it. Close your eyes.’ And suddenly, I was plunged into a shamanic journey. I started seeing all these extraordinary things—I had no idea what was happening. What really unnerved me was that, after about 20 minutes, when we came to and started talking, the three of us had had an almost identical experience. We’d seen very similar places. It completely blew my mind. I was this very rational, intellectual young anarchist at the time, and I just couldn’t make sense of it.
Over the next few months, I kept in touch with those two women, and one of them had some experience with shamanic journeying, so we started teaching each other. At that time, there weren’t many people teaching it in the UK, so we flew a few of the big names over from America to run workshops. That was a mixed bag, to be honest. I kept going back to Lauriston, though, and had these extraordinary shamanic experiences.
I was pretty disillusioned with the shamanic teachers I met back then—most of them were just using their positions to sleep with women, really. So I drifted away from it for a while. But in my 30s, it came back with a vengeance.
I finished university in ’79, so this would have been the early ’80s when I was spending a lot of time at Lauriston and doing all of this.
The Influence of Michael Harner
I think Michael Harner’s book The Way of the Shaman came out in 1980—actually, I’m pretty sure it was a couple of years before I got hold of a copy. When I finally read it, everything started to make a lot more sense.
Honestly, we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation if it weren’t for Michael Harner. He really saved shamanism, I think.
I mean, before that, I’d read about shamanism academically. A lot of the cultures we were studying had shamanic elements, but they’d been heavily impacted by Western colonialism and were really in decline by then.
The only other thing available at the time, aside from a few academic books, was Carlos Castaneda. But whether his work is actually shamanic is debatable—it’s more like drug-induced sorcery, really.
So for me, Michael Harner was a game-changer. He came up with this incredibly simple method that allows most people to journey, and that was the real breakthrough. Absolute genius.
WHY HUMANS FELL AWAY FROM SHAMANISM
You mentioned “the fall,” which is something you talk about a lot in your classes—about civilisation before the fall and the practices that existed then compared to now. Can you explain a little bit about what that means for people?
Most people’s view of history only stretches back a few centuries or, at most, a few thousand years. We tend to think of “ancient history” as the Greeks and Romans, but that was only two or three thousand years ago. As modern Homo sapiens, we’re around 200,000 years old, and for at least 190,000 of those years, we lived as hunter-gatherers, immersed in animism—and, I would argue, shamanism as well. That’s disputed by some, but for the vast majority of human history, that was our reality.
Animism isn’t a belief system—it’s a lived experience. It’s the direct perception that everything around us is alive and conscious. Animists don’t “believe” this; it’s simply how they experience the world. For them, a shaman is an animist who has the additional ability to leave their body at will, travel the shamanic realms, communicate with the other-than-human, and bring back teachings and healing for their people.
Animism is profoundly non-hierarchical. It’s often described as a “spiritual round table” where all beings—the animal people, plant people, and stone people—are equals. Unlike most contemporary spiritual systems, which place humans at the top of some divine pyramid, animism sees humans as the youngest of all beings, not the wisest. If you ask an animist who the oldest and wisest people are, they won’t say humans—they’ll say the plant people and the stone people. Animism teaches humility, recognising that when we get lost, we need to return to the wisdom of these beings.
The Shift from Animism to Agriculture
It was only when we adopted what Daniel Quinn calls “totalitarian agriculture”—essentially clearing land and growing monocultures—that we moved away from original animism and shamanism. This shift, often called the Neolithic Revolution, brought a profound change in our thinking.
But with agriculture, everything changed. Agriculture is about deciding who lives and who dies. Before agriculture, animists didn’t “own” land; they saw themselves as part of an ecosystem. But agriculture introduced the idea of land ownership and control: “Goats, you’re allowed here. Lions and hyenas, if we see you, you’re dead. Wheat, you can grow here. Any other plant, you’re gone.” It set humans up as gods, imposing a hierarchy over the natural world.
This shift is what Derek Jensen calls the “myth of human supremacy.” Modern culture takes it for granted that humans are superior to other animals, that plants aren’t sentient, and that stone people aren’t alive. We see everything around us as something to use. This way of thinking is at the root of everything that has gone wrong.
The Consequences of the ‘Myth of Human Supremacy’
We’re living in what scientists call the Anthropocene extinction—the human-created extinction era. Depending on whose research you read, extinction rates are anywhere from 20 to 200 times higher than normal. That’s on us. We’re destroying the world around us, and likely ourselves in the process. That’s not the mark of an intelligent species.
This all stems from our broken relationship with the other-than-human. That’s what animism is at its core—a recognition of that relationship. Many contemporary indigenous cultures have managed to keep animist teachings alive, and we owe them a huge debt. But even they have been deeply impacted by hierarchical thinking, what Daniel Quinn calls “Taker Culture”—a culture that takes everything for itself. In contrast, earlier animist cultures were “Leaver Cultures.” They took what they needed and deliberately left the rest for others.
So, when we talk about “the fall,” we’re talking about that shift—the loss of a way of being that kept us in balance with the world, and the adoption of a mindset that has led us to where we are now.
SHAMANIC JOURNEYING FOR MODERN TIMES
One of the key aspects of your teaching is how you approach journey work. Can you walk us through the core principles of how you teach journeying and why it's different from other approaches?
The Three Shamanic Realms
A fundamental idea in shamanism across the world is that the shamanic reality is broadly divided into three realms: the Upper World, the Middle World, and the Lower World. Some traditions divide them further, but these three are the key ones. The Upper World is often perceived as ethereal, floaty—imagine pastel colours and distant harp music. Christianity borrowed this concept and called it heaven. The Lower World, on the other hand, was labelled as hell, but that was more about severing people from nature and Mother Earth. Then there’s the Middle World, which is essentially the reality we’re in right now.
I had a strong shamanic practice in my 20s—journeying was central to my life. But in my mid-30s, I hit a crisis. I became profoundly suicidal, and it shook me. I kept wondering: if I had such a strong shamanic practice and these incredible guides, how had I ended up there? Around the same time, I went back into therapy with a psychoanalytic therapist who was very focused on childhood experiences. But I’d already been through years of therapy, and I felt there had to be more to it than just my early life.
BEYOND MIDDLE-WORLD
That’s when I started looking beyond just my parents to my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and even further back. I began journeying down ancestral timelines, exploring hundreds and eventually thousands of years into the past. Then, one day, I found myself emerging into a world that felt profoundly peaceful—it was the first time I had truly reached the shamanic Lower World.
Many people think they’ve reached the Lower World, but in reality, they’re still journeying in the human Middle World. They might see space rockets, helicopters, or spiritual imagery that’s only existed for a few thousand years. Contemporary shamanic practice often isn’t clear about the distinctions between the realms. In hunter-gatherer societies, that lack of clarity wouldn’t have mattered as much, but in the modern world—where we’re cut off from nature, obsessed with our own cleverness, and dealing with anxiety, depression, oppression, and patriarchy—our Middle World has become a kind of hell on earth. That seeps into our journeys.
If people aren’t carefully guided, they default to journeying in the human-made Middle World because that’s what they know. In my own practice, I realised that for my entire 20s, I hadn’t actually been in the Lower World at all.
My power animal at the time was a domesticated animal, and my guides were still tied to the human world. Once I finally accessed the true Lower World—one untouched by modern humanity—it changed everything. I let go of all my old guides, even ones I’d worked with for 10–15 years, and made sure my new guides were genuinely from the Lower World. That shift transformed my practice.
teaching shamanism
At first, I never planned to teach. My shamanic work was deeply personal. But after another decade or so, my guides started nudging me, saying, “Paul, you need to teach this.” I resisted for a long time, but eventually, I gave in. When I started teaching, I noticed that many people had trained elsewhere but had never truly distinguished between the realms. Once they learned how to step away from the modern human world and enter a realm as a hunter-gatherer might have known it—completely wild, undomesticated—their journeys became deeper, clearer, and more powerful.
At the college, we’re very intentional about this. We guide people to strip away the human-created world as much as possible so they can experience the shamanic realms as our ancestors did. The Lower World should be pure nature—no farmyards, no hedgerows, just wilderness. When you’re rooted in that, then you can move into the Upper World or return to the Middle World with a clearer, healthier perspective. You’re no longer caught up in the human-made illusion—you can see it for what it is. That’s the foundation of how we teach journeying.
CLEAR DISTINCTION OF REALMS
One of the key things you emphasise in journey work is avoiding modern elements—no metal swords, no stone buildings, no torches. Instead, it’s about the hunter-gatherer stage, where you might see leather hides and perhaps a bone knife, but certainly not an Excalibur-style sword. Can you explain why that distinction is so important?
If you think about how humans lived for most of our history—as hunter-gatherers—when they journeyed, there were no metal swords, no cauldrons, no domesticated animals. Those things simply didn’t exist. And yet, for the past six, seven, eight thousand years, we’ve been practising this human-centric, hierarchical way of thinking, separating ourselves from how we used to be. And it’s a disaster. Yes, it’s given us certain things, but the costs are mounting, and they’re becoming life-destroying.
we are storytellers
Original animist cultures understood this. They recognised that humans tend to get lost because we have this incredible gift of thought and mind—but that also means we can just make things up and believe them. Hunter-gatherers knew this about themselves, which is why every tribe had a shaman. They understood that when humans get lost, other humans can’t necessarily lead them out of it. It’s the other-than-human—the spirits of the land, the animals, the ancestors—who guide us back to the right way of being. That was the role of the shaman: to keep the tribe on track.
the rise of human-centredness
When we lose shamans, we lose our way completely. Instead of looking to the other-than-human for guidance, we start looking to other humans—gurus, politicians, religious leaders—and that just reinforces the disconnect. Animism, on the other hand, is about returning to that deep relationship with the other-than-human world.
original instructions
That’s the foundation of what we teach at the college. Animist cultures spoke of the “original instructions,” or the “original songs,” “original patterns,” “original dances”—the fundamental ways of living in right relationship with the world. And as soon as we lose those, we lose our way. Those original instructions were non-hierarchical, not rooted in human supremacy, and profoundly different from the past 10,000 years of so-called civilisation, which has been built on hierarchy and domination.
Of course, we can’t go back to being hunter-gatherers—our population densities make that impossible. But what we can do is return to those original instructions and, as animists have always done, adapt them to the world we live in now. That’s the work of the college and the books—looking at what the original animist stories and right relationships were and figuring out how to build a modern culture around those instead of the destructive stories of hierarchy and human supremacy.
SHAMANISM AS THERAPY
When you started learning to journey more deeply, you were still working as a psychotherapist. Did you try to incorporate journey work into your psychotherapy practice, or did you always keep them separate?
I thought I was keeping them separate. Like I’ve said before, I stepped away from shamanism for a time because I was disturbed by the lack of ethics in some of it. But looking back with hindsight… well, my primary background is in body-centred psychotherapy rather than traditional talking therapy. So, a lot of the time, you’re already working with clients in altered states of consciousness, using imagery and metaphor. You might say, Focus on that sensation in your shoulder—does an image come to mind that describes it?
When I came back to shamanism in my 30s, I realised that much of what I’d been doing in psychotherapy was very shamanic. It involved working with imagery, metaphor, and often with animals. So, in many ways, the two were never really separate for me.
That said, there are clear differences between shamanism and psychotherapy, but I also think they have a great deal to offer each other. Open-minded shamans could learn a lot from psychotherapy, and open-minded psychotherapists could learn a lot from shamanism. They’re like two pieces of a puzzle that fit together.
CHALLENGES OF SOUL RETRIEVAL IN MODERN TIMES
I remember taking your soul retrieval class, and you brought in a lot of parts work, which I found really beneficial. When a part of you leaves, there’s also the work of incorporating and integrating that part back, which I haven’t seen in many other places. Often, people approach it in a very simplistic way, like "Oh, I'll just do a quick soul retrieval for you, and that’s it." But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? Without integration, that part may just leave again.
The Domestication of Ourselves
This goes back to the huge shift we experienced as humans, particularly since the fall, and what it did to us. People often think we’re clever because we’ve tamed and domesticated so many animals and plants, but the animal we’ve domesticated most of all is ourselves. We’re massively tamed and diminished compared to what we once were.
A brilliant writer, James C. Scott, who wrote Thinking Like a State and Against the Grain, talks about how domestication literally dumbed down our brains and our senses. If you read accounts of original hunter-gatherers, whether from anthropologists or missionaries, they describe these people as incredibly alive—vibrantly so. Their senses were heightened, and they were full of life. In contrast, domestication has dulled us.
soul loss
In our modern culture, we’ve sent parts of ourselves away to fit in—whether it’s to survive childhood, endure schooling, or get through soul-crushing jobs. Soul loss can happen through many things—loss of a loved one, illness, or significant life events, as traditional shamanism teaches. But in my experience as a shamanic practitioner for over 20 years, the most common cause of soul loss is people sending parts of themselves away in order to survive, like losing their assertiveness because it wasn’t safe to be assertive as a child.
modern challenGes of soul retrieval
In traditional shamanic cultures, when someone experienced soul loss due to a death or trauma, there would be no part of them that would resist wanting that soul part back. But today, if someone has sent parts of themselves away—maybe their assertiveness or their vulnerability—it’s more complicated. If someone comes for soul retrieval, asking for their assertiveness to be returned, it’s not just a case of bringing it back and blowing it into them. They often don’t realise how it might affect their relationships with their partner, children, or work colleagues.
Moreover, parts of them may not want that soul part back. So, if a traditional soul retrieval is performed, it may work temporarily, but over time, the part may simply leave again. If people haven’t done the necessary inner work, they might not know how to integrate those parts of themselves back into their current life, which they’ve built around the way they are now.
making soul retrieval effective FOR modern times
Soul retrieval today involves a lot of dialogue with these parts of self to get them on board. It’s a process of change, and people need to be prepared for it. This is where shamanism and psychotherapy can really complement each other. Traditional shamanic practices were designed for pre-fallen, non-domesticated cultures, and we’ve changed so much since then. Psychotherapy is very adept at understanding the effects of these changes, and it can offer invaluable insights. Shamans need to understand these changes too and adapt their work accordingly, because we’re no longer the original hunter-gatherers we once were.
It goes back to the fall, of course. Original hunter-gatherers were much more in touch with the lower world and their souls, because our souls come from the lower world. Their lives in the middle world—who they were in the world—were deeply connected to that bond with their soul. But today, we’re completely cut off from the lower world, completely disconnected from our soul. There’s very little true understanding of what the soul actually is in our culture anymore.
As a result, we live middle-world lives that are essentially just constructed, artificial constructs. In order to maintain this disconnection, we’ve had to send many parts of ourselves away. If we’re going to bring those parts back, it’s not an easy task. We have to be ready for change, and not everyone is prepared for that. If we try to reintegrate these parts of ourselves, there will inevitably be consequences to the life we’ve built in the middle world.
A PATH OF DIRECT EXPERIENCE
Shamanism is often described as path of direct experience.
One of the things I love about shamanism is that, unlike religion, which is based on belief and faith—believing in what others tell you—shamanism is rooted in direct experience. There are initial instructions, like how to perform a journey, but after that, it’s about your personal encounters and experiences. You’re not relying on belief because you’ve read about something or been told it; you’re experiencing it yourself. As a teacher, I introduce students to the basics of journeying, but after that, it’s all about what they experience. And what’s fascinating is that over and over again, students have the same experiences, using the same techniques and discovering similar things about trees, or nature, for example.
CORE SHAMANISM
When Michael Harner published The Way of the Shaman, he was talking about core shamanism—a universal set of practices and experiences that span cultures and time. It created a stir in the anthropology world because people said, “It’s impossible to have a universal belief system that spans continents and thousands of years.” But Harner, being a research anthropologist, had evidence. Shamans across the world, from Peru to Australia, may use different imagery, but they’re tapping into the same core principles. They’re all talking to the same ancestors, the same non-human beings, regardless of where they are in the world. Those core practices are ancient, vast, and cross-cultural.
In fact, some of the oldest shamanic tools are believed to be around 35,000 years old, which is mind-blowing when you think about it. Because these objects were made from materials like wood and hide, they haven’t lasted as long as metal tools. But they’re finding bowls and cave paintings depicting journey work that’s over 30,000 years old. There’s even an object found in Blombos Cave, dated to around 77,000 years old. What’s even more fascinating is that anthropologists are now re-examining Neanderthal objects and thinking that these, too, may have been shamanic tools. We used to assume that only Homo sapiens were capable of these practices, but now we’re realising that Neanderthals were likely practicing forms of animism. There’s even a documentary called Cave of Bones, which explores ancient hominids, about 250,000 years old, and their reverence for the dead. It suggests that they, too, were practicing animism.
everything around you is alive and conscious
When you understand animism, it’s about recognising that everything around you is alive and conscious—though their consciousness may be very different from ours. The only creatures that aren’t animists, in my view, are modern humans. Cats are animists; they live their lives in an entirely animistic way. Trees and stones are animists, too. It’s humans who’ve become disconnected from this reciprocal relationship with the world around them.
FINDING A WAY FORWARD
We can’t go back to grass huts and the like – that’s just not feasible at this time. So, how can we do better at taking care of what’s around us? That’s not a question we can come up with an answer to today, but it’s something we, as a species, really need to figure out. Hopefully, we’ll get there before we wipe everything out.
Like you say, we’ll never be able to go back to the past. The challenge is how we move forward and find a balance where we can still be stewards of the Earth, while living the way we do now. We can’t go back to grass huts and such, that’s just not feasible. But the question remains: how can we do better at taking care of what’s around us? It’s not a question we can answer immediately, but as a species, we really need to figure it out. Hopefully, we’ll find a way before we wipe everything out.
Shamanism’s Comeback
You also mentioned earlier how, back in the 1980s, hardly anyone had heard of shamanism, and now it’s everywhere. I never thought I’d live to see this. Back in the day, when I tried talking to people about shamanism, no one was interested; you could tell they just couldn’t quite grasp it. Now, people are soaking it up. There’s been a huge shift, and it’s becoming one of the fastest-growing forms of spirituality, according to recent surveys. I think we, as humans, clearly have extraordinary gifts – the ability to think critically, to work with maths and physics, all of these things. But the problem has been thinking that this makes us ‘better’ or ‘special’. It doesn’t. Every animal has its unique gifts, and our particular gifts, as remarkable as they are, come with great responsibility.
learning humility
Instead of seeing ourselves as ‘special’, we need to realise that we have to be particularly careful with how we use our power. We’ve made ourselves the stewards of the world, in a sense. We’ve made ourselves the gods of what lives or dies on this planet over the next hundred years. That’s going to come down to our decisions. For me, animism is about learning a profound humility. Animists understand that we are not the cleverest; we are, in fact, like children who are lost. And when we get lost, we need to turn to the other-than-human world for guidance. If we just keep doing that, we can find our way. It’s not about going back to hunter-gathering, but about finding right relationship with the other beings we share the planet with – and with each other as well.
LEARN SHAMANIC JOURNEYING
How do the courses work? One of the things I really appreciated about your school when I was looking for training was the approach. I just wanted to try it first – I didn’t want to commit to some lifelong journey and spend thousands of dollars before I knew what journey work was like. Often, you'll find courses that are priced at thousands of dollars just to "try" something, and that didn't sit right with me. Your model, though, is different. You start with something affordable, learn the basics, and then you can decide if you want to branch out and try different techniques.
The courses run in cycles, and after completing the First Steps course, students can move on to the other classes as they’re offered. The way we’re doing it now is that the classes have on-demand videos, and then we also offer live sessions, with recordings available afterwards. It’s a flexible system that allows people to learn at their own pace while still being part of a live community.
beginner’s mind
We used to let people skip the First Steps course, thinking it made sense for those with prior experience. We did this with dozens of people, but in every single case, it didn’t work out. What we teach is different, partly because of our clarity around the realms, but there are other factors too. I often tell people who have trained elsewhere that, when they come into our First Steps class, some of what I say might seem minor. But it’s a bit like having two compasses set slightly differently – you might start off thinking you’re heading in the same direction, but over time, you’ll begin to diverge. Without that foundational step, people trained elsewhere tend to end up somewhere different from where we expect them to be.
So now, we insist that everyone does the First Steps course. It’s very low-cost for what it offers, and honestly, even experienced practitioners – we’ve had people who’ve been shamanic practitioners for 20, 30 years, working with hundreds of clients – tell us that they still gain a lot from it. It clarifies things, takes them deeper, and really solidifies their practice. The course is only £80 for about 20 hours of teaching, so it’s a valuable investment for both beginners and seasoned practitioners alike.
Start your shamanic journey
THE FIRST-STEPS INTRODUCTORY COURSE – February 2nd 2025
If you ever wanted to learn shamanism and see if this grounded and practical spirituality is for you, this is a perfect chance.
Learn:
- What shamanism is (and what is not)
- The history of shamanism and animism
- The key concepts of the shamanic universe
- How to do a shamanic journey (step-by-step process)
How to do a Power Animal retrieval journey and find your own Power Animal - The fascinating and potentially life-changing story of why we nearly lost shamanism, why we need it back and how psychotherapy fits in the process
- The basics of how to do shamanic healing for other people
The course consists of a mixture of videos, live sessions, theory talks, question-and-answer sessions, group discussion, experiential exercises, and practice. It includes continuous access and free repeats!