Shaman Healer Apprenticeship Training

Our Healer Apprenticeship Training programme is specifically designed for those people who wish to follow their calling to train in the healing arts in service to the spirits.

This calling to the path of the shaman comes from a deep need to reconnect with the earth, trees, mountains, and seas, and with each other. It is a primal calling, bringing us home to the truth of ourselves.

The Three-Year Training offers you an intense initiation into becoming the ‘hollow bone’ so that spirit may talk and breath through you. You will explore many aspects of your being; the light and the dark that exist in us all. We undertake a transformative journey to bring these aspects into balance and harmony.

The apprenticeship experience ensures that there is someone to support and nurture, but also challenge you in areas of your life that inhibit you from becoming the powerful healer you were meant to be, and to help you be comfortable within yourself so that you may fulfil your soul purpose.

Year One – The Four Elements

The Four Elements is where we strip ourselves back element by element to find a truer sense of what gifts we have to share. The medicine wheel is a map of the world which has many levels of teaching and wisdom. You will experience all the emotions of human existence, suffering, death, rebirth and ecstasy, through ceremony and ritual you will learn and experience a colourful tapestry in the role of the Shaman.

At the beginning of our initiation, and on every meeting, we open up the Medicine Wheel and the Four Elements.

Fire – East

Our Dreaming starts in the East and the Element of Fire. This is the place of our Birth, the place of the child. We will participate in creating a ceremonial fire, a powerful shamanic practice that is at the core of many rituals in medicine traditions. The Fire Ceremony also encourages us to remember our ancestral past, where the sacred fires burnt on our lands through many generations. Fire allows us to rekindle our understanding of our own personal inner fire, at the same time as helping us release old belief patterns into the fire’s consuming flames.

Earth- South

Our Dreaming continues in the South and the Element of Earth. This is our home, our collective womb: nurturing, nourishing and fertile; the realm of our sacred sexuality and the very heart of life. Earth is solid and resistant, everything that gives us form.  Earth comprises us as we are part of Earth. The healing of one is dependent upon the healing of the other: To heal the earth element we can heal our human bodies by listening to the plants, the trees and the rocks.  We take part in a plant quest –  an opportunity to spend extended time in nature to seek clarity, healing and inspiration.
The plants that we use will affect our dreaming bodies in very subtle ways to shift our consciousness from our ordinary reality to a wider viewpoint, enabling us to see and perceive ourselves in new ways, We ground ourselves, so we can navigate the chaos of life with both feet planted in the earth.

Water – West

Our Dreaming continues in the West and the Element of Water. Water feeds the soul of the earth. Water can be as gentle as a pure spring or as wild as a waterfall. This element brings purification, intuition, mysteries of the self, compassion and is associated with family. The healing and cleansing power of water can bring forth spiritual regeneration. Water is the place of release, and with its wisdom we can learn to relinquish the restrictions, barriers, broken dreams and fears with which we often shape, and limit, our days. We can learn to let go of our dysfunctional relationship with ourselves and with those around us.

We share in a sacred sauna. The hot steam of the lodge assists in purification and release of toxins deep in our body. We connect with Spirit through prayer and song. In our prayers we send out our deepest wishes to find healing and we give thanks for all that we have. This weekend allows us to reflect and gain clarity on how to flow more gently with and through life.

Air – North

Our Dreaming continues in the North and the Element of Air. This is the place of the breath that connects us with the sky. The breath is the magical tool to connect with everything through the dreaming body. Motion, darkness, communication and imagination are manifestations of the Air. The magical winds teach us to fly as a bird, gliding over the warm belly of the earth; the eagle’s eye to see all that happens below.

This is the direction of initiation, an opportunity to experience an extended time in the darkness. The ceremony of the sacred burial is an ancient shamanic tradition that has been used for centuries for Healing and Initiations. This is an authentic ritual of surrender, stillness and deep communion – Dreaming with the spirits, seeking visions and gifts for the initiation of the shaman within. As we finish our journey around the medicine wheel a new beginning beckons as we allow the space for our new dreams to be birthed from the darkness and fly free.