Shamanic Practitioners' Training 
Committed study and hands-on healing practice

 This is an ongoing apprenticeship opportunity to learn shamanic healing skills while also gaining hands-on experience doing healing work with clients. This is intensive study, packed with information, techniques, meditations songs, prayers and challenging ideas. ​I accept new participants into this training on an ongoing basis. To apply for this training, please scroll to the bottom of this page.

Email:   drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com

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Step up your healing practice. Learn new techniques and skills to deepen your current ones and and to add into your other healing modalities that you already practice. If you are relatively new to shamanic practice, but you are ready to take this step, this work can also serve your needs by exposing you to a wide range of ideas and practices. 

We spend a few class sessions focusing on specific techniques, skills, or tools. But a significant part of your learning comes from hands-on practice in the monthly healing clinic, and from the open conversation with the students in the class. So there is an important communal and "horizontal" aspect to the Intensive that combines with the "vertical" approach of a teacher disseminating knowledge and skills. I've found that the ongoing communal aspect is largely missing from shamanic training. So, all in all, you learn new skills in a trusted environment. Then, when you are ready, you try them out. This is truly the best way to refine your skills and your power as a healer.

People come into this group with a wide variety of past experiences, skills and knowledge. Right now the group is all women - some of whom have been in the group for less than a year, some for more than four years. I am committed to helping each person in the group move along in whatever way they need. That includes teaching specific skills and ideas to the whole group, and it also means offerring some mentoring individually outside of the formal meetings. All in all, it's a fluid kind of experience - it's a class but also a community; it's learning from me in formal presentations, and learning from one another through conversation, and learning from hands-on practice. All of these are powerful ways to learn, and this training tries to offer them all. 

Shamanic healing is rife with nuance, questions, and conundrums. This shamanic practitioners' training is designed to give you skills, put them safely into practice in the monthly healing clinic when you are ready, and get your specific questions, doubts, confusions and fears addressed through open discussion with trusted colleagues. I understand that some shamanic training programs offer certificates which can help as you try to build a practice. I don't offer certificates, but I'm always willing to find ways to help you build your practice when you are ready. 

We meet three times per month: two Thursday evenings and one other floating date - a monthly healing clinic in which, if you choose to participate, you will learn by doing hands-on shamanic healing work on clients (at the level for which you are ready, which is decided by me). Sometimes you'll work in pairs or groups, sometimes individually. Other, optional learning sessions are sometimes scheduled, for example overnights at a cabin, ceremonial work, or excursions into nature. You will be assigned a variety of homework, including reading, meditations and personal ceremonial work. Depending on your experience with shamanic work, I may assign you specific homework that applies only to you. 

I take new students into this group at any time that is right for the student and the group. If you feel this group is right for you, feel free to email me and inquire. 

This is not entry level study. In order to be admitted to this training, you'll need to have met me in some way - by taking a class or chatting with me in person. Other prerequisites for admission include:
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• ​Some familiarity with your own spirit helpers, guides or power animals.
• Some experience with shamanic journeying.
• Some familiarity with the Medicine Wheel.
• Some kind of ongoing prayer or meditation practice.
• Commitment, discipline, openness, desire to be a quality, ethically sound, grounded practitioner.
• Commitment to confidentiality with clients and other students and to being a healthy participant in a trusting learning community. 
• Understanding that I won't let you work on clients until I feel you are ready. You may observe for awhile, or partner with another student. Also you'll need to understand that I may assign you other work outside of our regular meetings to give you specific training. It doesn't happen often, but it's possible that you may incur costs outside of monthly fee. 

If this program speaks to you deeply and you feel you lack one or more of the prerequisites above, email me and we may be able to work out a way to get you the training you need. This program requires commitment, dedication and discipline. Please think carefully before applying. 

This work combines the three streams to learning shamanic healing:  

• Technique: This includes setting protection, structuring ceremony, working with material tools like the drum, rattle, feathers, bones, stones and altar, and practices like cleansing energies, soul retrieval, power songs and prayers, seeing the energy body, etc. 
• Ideas (concepts underlying the techniques): This includes learning cross-cultural mythology, metaphor and concepts, philosophy, anthropological studies and also includes working with non-material helpers like spiritual guides, the elements, the medicine wheel, the Fairies, the ancestors, etc.
• Building Inner Power: includes disciplined meditation and prayer work, character building, ethics and boundaries, shadow work, intention setting and manifesting. 

The May - December 2017 session will focus on these areas: ​

• June/July: Soul Retrieval and the direction South on the Medicine Wheel.
• August: Prayer and Power Songs for healing and protection.
• September/October: Extraction techniques, The Celtic Old Bone Mother and the direction West on the Medicine Wheel
• November/December: Building power, clearing and cleansing space like houses and land, and the North on the Medicine Wheel.
• Ongoing training includes:
  • Working with the Celtic Medicine Wheel (the "five directions”). 
  • Step by step structure of facilitating a healing ceremony. 
  • The Three Cauldrons of the Body and Soul (a Celtic way of working with the energy body.)
  • Songs of Power, Blessing and Healing in Spanish, English and Gaelic. You’ll learn several existing songs that you can use to bless and heal. More importantly, you'll learn how to "catch" songs from the spirits.
  • Personal meditations to build power.

If you have not read and worked with the book Transforming Your Dragons (Jose Luis Stevens), you will need to read it and work with its exercises at the beginning of your studies with me.

Cost: $150 per month. New students pay for two months in advance. Ideally you will commit to attending the months series listed above. There will be some minor additional costs associated for overnight ceremonies (examples include gas, food, and sharing of the rental fees for overnights). Other additional costs may be incurred for special ceremonial work, which is always optional. If you are ready for this kind of committed study, please send me an email to receive an application:  drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com

This program draws on my 30 years of shamanic study and practice that includes a great deal disciplined individual visioning and reading, drumming, prayer and building relationship with Spirit(s), many workshops with a variety of teachers in different traditions. 

• My two-year Celtic shamanism training program with Tom Cowan, as well as many other workshops and conversations with him over 15 years. From this stream I'll offer you ideas around the Celtic medicine wheel, and other ideas and practices rooted in Celtic shamanic practice. My learning experiences with Sandra Ingerman, Ailo Gaup and Martin Prechtel have also been highly influential on my practice. 
• Three years of study with Jose and Lena Stevens of The Power Path, including their advanced Practitioners' Training. Their eclectic background is grounded in Huichol and Shipibo practice as well as cross-cultural indigenous practice, psychology and other practices. My learning with them includes several journeys to Peru to work directly with Shipibo healers – this is the work I'm actively doing currently. From this stream I'll bring you the powerful tradition of singing healing prayers into the body, working with plant teachers and practices such as using rattles, bones and feathers as tools for prayer and healing. I'll also assign some of Jose's writing that weave shamanic practice and counselling psychology into a very useful practices for self-development.
• My Seminary training (I have and M.A. in Theology and the Arts from United Seminary of The Twin Cities). For me, this rigorous academic training has been a good antidote to being overtaken by Spiritual Woo-Woo. This stream offers rational, philosophical and historical power to your training.
• My many years as writer and theatre artist that has taught me to be boldly imaginative and to trust in uncertainty, process, doubt and difficulty, to revel in imagination as a blessing force and to "just do the work." 

Class times: 
Two Thursday evenings and one Sunday Mornign Healing Clinic. Click the calendar below for a complete schedule.  Look for the icons: