What is Therapeutic Shamanism?

What does ‘Therapeutic Shamanism’ mean? #

There is no agreed definition of shamanism. In its broad modern sense the word covers any practical application of animism, the experience that everything is alive and conscious (see What is shamanism? and What is animism?). Many approaches are practised today, and Therapeutic Shamanism is one of them, set out by Paul in a series of books beginning with The Shamanic Journey.

‘Therapeutic’ names the method, which is to bring shamanism and psychotherapy together, because neither alone can heal the damage done as humans turned away from animist ways of living. That break began with domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this in the Neolithic and accelerated with what Therapeutic Shamanism calls the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, the rise of the first city-states from around 4000 BCE (see What is the Fall?). “It is by bringing shamanism and psychotherapy together, and forging them into something new, that we can begin to find the antidote to the Fall.”¹ It is still shamanism first, a Spirit-led practice in which the Guides lead the work and do the healing, and “categorically not” a watered-down shamanism practised by psychotherapists.

Who created Therapeutic Shamanism? #

Paul, who is both a psychotherapist and a shamanic practitioner. It was born out of his experiences, study, practice and experimenting, and the teachings of his Spirit guides, and it was tested with students and clients on his courses before it was written down.² He offers it as one path amongst many, and most definitely not as the only right one.

How does Therapeutic Shamanism relate to core shamanism and Michael Harner? #

Core shamanism is the work of the anthropologist and shamanic practitioner Michael Harner. Studying shamanic cultures, Harner found that beneath each tribe’s cultural trappings lies a set of beliefs and practices common to shamanic cultures worldwide, and he taught these as core shamanism, most famously in The Way of the Shaman (1980).³

Therapeutic Shamanism takes core shamanism as its foundation and calls itself “a branch of Core Shamanism”.⁴ On that foundation it builds what Paul’s own Guides have taught him, an account of what domestication and the Fall have done to the human psyche, and the tools of psychotherapy.

Is Therapeutic Shamanism traditional shamanism? #

No. Modern shamanism is often dismissed as ‘plastic’ because it has no unbroken lineage. Therapeutic Shamanism answers that this confuses traditional with authentic. Tradition only means doing things the way they have always been done, whereas the test of a practice is whether it works, or, in the shamanic saying, “Does it grow corn?” A practice taught directly by Spirit needs no human lineage to be authentic.⁵ Even that test is not enough on its own, since plenty of practices work. “The next, and better, question is ‘What kind of corn does it grow? Animist corn, or fallen culture corn?’” Something can work well and still grow the people who practise it into Fallen-culture ways of thinking.

Three kinds of shamanism can also be distinguished. Pre-Fallen shamanism, practised by hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years, was free of hierarchy. Fallen shamanism has been changed by agriculture and hierarchy, bringing in things like animal sacrifice and spirit possession. Post-Fallen shamanism is the ethical, adaptable shamanism now emerging, which helps people recognise Taker thinking and heal from it.⁶ Virtually all surviving shamanic societies are agricultural or herding peoples, and so Fallen to some degree, which is why ‘traditional’ does not automatically mean healthy. This is no criticism of those peoples, to whom we owe “a truly incalculable debt” for keeping shamanic and animist knowledge alive. Therapeutic Shamanism looks instead to the principles of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer shamanism and translates them for the present, since nobody can go back to living as hunter-gatherers. The result is a neo-shamanism, a new shamanism built from core shamanism for the times we live in.

Why is Therapeutic Shamanism culturally neutral? #

Because core shamanism belongs to no single culture. All of our distant ancestors were animist hunter-gatherers, so shamanism as a whole is “the birth right of all human beings” and cannot be claimed by any one people.⁷ Therapeutic Shamanism borrows no particular culture’s ceremonies, regalia or gods; it is not Celtic, Norse, Druidic or Native American, and it is kept as ‘culture-lite’ as possible, with an inevitable Western European flavour. This keeps it clear of cultural appropriation, and lets anyone practise it anywhere with the plants, animals and land of where they live. Lower-World Guides teach “Shamanism, not shamanism that belongs to any one middle-world human culture. As such, this teaching from Human belongs to all humans.”⁸

Why does Therapeutic Shamanism focus on the more-than-human? #

Because it sees disconnection from the rest of nature as a root of modern suffering. Much of the pain we feel is, in fact, caused by our disconnection from the more-than-human, and from nature.⁹ Most psychotherapy is done indoors and attends almost entirely to human relationships, so on its own it cannot reach this wound. In animism the Animal, Plant and Stone People are kin, not resources, and humans are one strand in the web of life. Healing it means going beyond the human: to regain empathy, “we have to go beyond the human. We have to reconnect with the more-than-human world too.”¹⁰ That work starts in the Lower-World, the realm of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this and nature, because a practice, like a seed, puts down roots before it reaches up to Spirit or branches out into the middle-world.

How does Therapeutic Shamanism relate to psychotherapy? #

The two share the labour, and neither is better than the other. Shamanism is designed for soul loss and Power-loss. Deep psychotherapy is designed for the under-world, the personal and collective unconscious, which has grown “a thousand-fold or more” since domestication as people repressed parts of themselves to fit in. Hunter-gatherer shamans never faced an under-worldUnder-world. The realm of our repressed and disowned psychic energies, personal and collective: Jung’s Shadow and the unconscious, mapped shamanically. A part of the middle-world, created by the Fall, not the Lower-World, and psychotherapy’s proper territory rather than shamanism’s. Read the full answer of that size, so traditional shamanism never developed the skills to work with it.¹¹ The under-world is still a part of the human middle-world, though, and the Lower-World and the Soul lie beyond it, outside the territory psychotherapy was built for. Psychotherapy “is good at creating healthy souls, but rarely will it help us find our Soul.”¹² Both are needed, because each does what the other cannot.

Each also has something to learn from the other. Psychotherapy tends to reduce everything to the human, treating spirits as sub-personalities and journeys as imagination. Shamanism can no longer assume every ‘spirit’ is real, because since the Fall some are disowned parts of the person: “There are demons, and then there are ‘demons’.” From psychotherapy, Therapeutic Shamanism also takes its understanding of power, so healing work always aims to empower the other person and never to disempower them. In the same way it takes the person-centred approach of Carl Rogers, who held that the locus of evaluation should be with the client and not with the therapist. So the real and deepest meaning of a journey is “what it means to the person whose journey it is.”¹³

How is psychotherapy built into the animist model itself? #

Therapeutic Shamanism goes beyond a division of labour between the two disciplines and builds Carl Rogers’s core conditions into the animist model of the five elements. Earth is groundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this, with clear boundaries, safety and stability; Air is unconditional positive regard, meaning non-judgement; Fire is congruence; Water is empathy; and Ether is presence, which emerges as a fifth when the other four are in place. That last step builds on Rogers’s late writing, where he describes presence as a further quality that came “when I am at my best”, rather than a technique to be practised. Rogers named three core conditions, and Therapeutic Shamanism thinks in terms of five “because it fits in with the element system”, so the count is a deliberate choice of this approach and not something found in Rogers. Grounding, the first of them, includes being grounded in sane beliefs as well as calm and centred, which is part of why this approach deliberately keeps a grounded manner.

Empathy, the Water condition, is a matter of feeling, not of working something out. Rogers described it as sensing another person’s inner world as if it were your own, without ever losing the ‘as if’ quality.¹⁴ Empathy is “an embodied, emotional and visceral thing”, and “Psychopaths aside, it is a learnable thing for most people. It can even be taught.”¹⁵

What role does direct experience play in Therapeutic Shamanism? #

It is the final authority. Practising shamanism “does not require you to follow any beliefs or take anything on faith”; the teachings are suggestions and exercises to try, so that people find out for themselves whether they work. The principle comes from the psychotherapist Carl Rogers: “Experience is, for me, the highest authority.” Rogers adds that experience is authoritative not because it is infallible, but because it can always be checked again.¹⁶ The principle applies to Paul’s own teaching too: shamanism requires no blindly accepting what anyone else says, including him.

What is the purpose of Therapeutic Shamanism? #

Its central aim is to reconnect people with Spirit and the more-than-human world. It is used for healing body, mind, soul and spirit, for personal and spiritual growth, and for finding the deep Lower-World Soul, “the essence and blueprint of what you were meant to be”. The psychological work serves the same aim, since psychological wounds and blocks are what get in the way of connecting to Spirit, and a practitioner works towards the client becoming their own shamanic guide. Beyond the individual, Therapeutic Shamanism sees itself as part of humanity’s recovery from the Fall, alongside activism and real-world action.

What is the difference between a shaman and a shamanic practitioner? #

Following Harner, Therapeutic Shamanism reserves ‘shaman’, as a mark of respect, for people in indigenous cultures who lived and breathed shamanism and were given the title by their community. A Westerner who comes to shamanism later in life, usually part-time, is a ‘shamanic practitioner’; claiming to be a shaman is “a bit like claiming to be an enlightened being or guru”. See What is shamanism?.

What is Core Animism? #

Core AnimismCore Animism. The culture-neutral core of animism: the aspects of animist teaching that are (near-)universal rather than specific to any one culture: the Original Instructions, fierce egalitarianism, respectful right relationship with the other-than-human people, equal respect for the masculine and the feminine, treating all as sacred, living as a Leaver rather than a Taker. The parallel of Michael Harner’s ‘core shamanism’, and its necessary root: shamanism is a branch of animism, so a culture-neutral shamanism has to be grounded in a culture-neutral animism, with no borrowed regalia required. More about this stands to animism as Harner’s core shamanism stands to shamanism, as the culturally neutral core with no borrowed regalia. Shamanism is a branch of animism, so core shamanism has to be rooted in the parts of animist teaching that are near-universal, not specific to any one culture. These include the Original Instructions for living in right relationship (a phrase that comes from Indigenous North American peoples), fierce egalitarianism, respectful relationship with the other-than-human people, honouring the masculine and feminine equally, treating all as sacred, and being a Leaver rather than a Taker, in the writer Daniel Quinn’s terms. See What is animism?.

Is Therapeutic Shamanism New Age? #

No. It is grounded and non-religious, and critical of much New-Age spirituality. Much New-Age shamanism is top-heavy, putting so much weight on the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer at the expense of the Lower-World that it becomes ‘light’ and ‘fluffy’. Spiritual bypassing, using spiritual practice to avoid painful feelings and unhealed wounds, is another trap. And New Age beliefs are themselves products of Fallen societies, carrying Taker thinking that adding shamanism does not remove.

What is the Three Ravens College? #

The Three Ravens College of Therapeutic Shamanism and Core Animism teaches Therapeutic Shamanism. Paul founded it in 2007 with his partner, Cat Anderson, as the College of Therapeutic Shamanism, first in Lancaster and from 2014 in Llandudno, North Wales. Its name came from three ravens that kept appearing in journeys about the college, standing for Knowledge, Wisdom and Compassion. Since 2020 its courses, from First-Steps to practitioner training, have all been online.

Why is the college one of Therapeutic Shamanism and Core Animism? #

Because going as far as possible in healing today takes three things, and each does something the others cannot. Psychotherapy will not heal our lost connection to the Original InstructionsOriginal Instructions. The animist roadmap: the stories, principles and templates for living in right, reciprocal, non-hierarchical relationship with self, others and the more-than-human world. A template to be translated to the present, never commandments. More about this, because they are not what therapy is about; for that we need animism. Depth therapy, meaning the therapies that work at depth with unconscious material rather than the cognitive ones, is designed to navigate the under-world and, in Jung’s phrase, “make the darkness conscious”. Shamanism on its own cannot do that, because it evolved long before domestication created the vast modern under-world of personal and collective repressed material. One, or even two, of the three takes a person a certain way, and that is fine if it is far enough for them; to go as far as possible in the modern era, given the damage of the Fall and of domestication, all three are needed, as pieces of the same jigsaw. Trying to skip the psychotherapy by doing shamanic work is as much a form of spiritual bypassing as trying to skip it by meditating.