Shamanic Psychedelic Facilitator Training & Mentorship

3 Partially
Sponsored

2 Fully
Sponsored

Two Paths
Training & Mentorship

Not everyone needs the same container. One path offers a complete group training over six months. The other offers one-on-one guidance tailored to you. Both prepare you to facilitate psychedelic space with integrity, ethics, and shamanic skill.

Training

A complete 6-month group programme. 22 modules, practical journey work, supervised practice, and a small cohort of peers. Best for those who want a structured foundation.

One-on-one guidance tailored to your needs. Case supervision, shadow work, or preparation for holding space. Best for experienced facilitators or graduates of other trainings.

Mentorship

The difference between Training & Mentorships

Training

A complete 6-month group programme covering 22 modules of theory, practical journey work, and supervised practice. You receive 173 hours of curriculum, practical journey work in every shamanic module, peer feedback, and a certificate of completion.

Mentorship

One-on-one guidance tailored to your specific needs. Your sessions are shaped around case review, personal journey work, transference clearing, or preparation for holding space.

Training

What Makes This Training Valuable and Unique

While there are currently no official legal accreditations in South Africa, the work is being done. For those being called, the need exists to learn safe, rooted skills to hold, guide, and track clients through deep transformative initiations. This training answers that need.

South African Specific

This training is situated in the South African sociocultural and spiritual landscape. We address local dynamics, including ukutwasa (sangoma calling), Khoi and San healing traditions, and the reality of broken lineage awakenings. A central question we hold throughout the training is this: how do you find your own path with depth, without impostor syndrome or appropriation? How do you connect to and root your work in authentic teachings and the deeper current running beneath them? We also explore what to do when ancestors show up in ceremony and expect certain rituals. You learn to hold these questions without pretending to have easy answers. You learn where you can stand, when to step forward, and when to refer to someone whose lineage it is.

Diversity, Power & Privilege

Multicultural awareness is woven throughout the training. You will examine your own positionality, understand how systemic power shapes the facilitator-client relationship, and learn to facilitate across differences without replicating harm. This includes recognising when a client needs a facilitator from their own cultural background and how to refer respectfully.

Western Psychology Meets Shamanic Practice

The framework is trauma-informed and grounded in HPCSA-aligned ethics and psychology. At the same time, it delves deep into shamanic practices and energy work. You learn to track a client's luminous field, work with entities, retrieve soul parts, and navigate ceremonial space with drums, chanting, and allies. Neither dimension is watered down.

Practical Journey Work in Every Module

This is not a theory-only course. You will drum, rattle, track, extract, and co-journey. Every shamanic module includes supervised practical work with peer feedback. You leave having done the work, not just read about it.

Support, Accountability & Community

Participants gain access to a peer reflection pod during and after the training. You are not learning alone. On completion, you are listed on the Psychedelic Society of South Africa's approved practitioners directory, connecting you to a growing network of ethical facilitators. You also receive discounted rates for ongoing private mentorship.

Guided by an Experienced Practitioner

The training is led by a shamanic therapist with HPCSA alignment and years of facilitation experience. Guest speakers include clinical psychologists, traditional healers, and emergency medicine professionals. You are learning from people who hold space every day.

Training Modules:
What We Cover

The training is organised into six clusters, moving from foundational skills to advanced shamanic practice. Each cluster builds on the last.

Ethics, intake, boundaries, and core counselling skills.

You begin with the container itself. How do you take an intake that screens for spiritual emergency proneness, dissociative disorders, and destabilising personality structures? How do you maintain informed consent as a living process, including re-consenting when a client becomes non-verbal? You learn HPCSA-aligned ethical decision-making tools for real-time dilemmas, and how to document sessions, manage liability, and build an emergency referral network before you need it.

Boundaries are taught in three dimensions: relational, energetic, and spiritual. You learn to manage transference, idealisation, and client attraction post-session. You also learn to sense when a client's energetic field tries to merge with yours mid-journey, and how to restore spiritual boundaries without rupturing the container.

Core counselling skills are adapted to non-ordinary states: active listening, empathic reflection, knowing when to guide versus when to stay silent, and how to ask questions that open rather than lead. You learn immediacy - talking about what is happening between you and the client in the present moment - and how to help a client come to their own conclusions, not yours.

Energetic hygiene, shadow work, trauma, and threat responses.
Empathy fatigue, energetic leaching, projection, and spiritual crossover are real hazards in this work. You learn how to prepare your biofield before client work, avoid taking on your client's material, and perform post-session energetic hygiene rituals. You also learn to recognise signs of spiritual bypass in yourself - using psychedelic experiences to avoid your own healing.
Shadow work is not optional. The most dangerous facilitator is one who believes they have no shadow. You identify your own triggers, blind spots, and rescue patterns. You learn about transpersonal countertransference: when a client's material activates your own unhealed wounds. Peer debrief protocols give you a structure for accountability.
Trauma work focuses on what to do when a client's nervous system floods. You learn somatic anchoring - using your own regulated body as a biofeedback tool to ground a dysregulated client. You also learn threat responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, collapse) and facilitator protocols for each. When to ground, when to move, when to use silence, when to end the session, and what not to do.

Psychopathology, ukutwasa, diversity, power, sexuality, and the blocked journey.
You are not a clinician. But you need to know enough to recognise when something is beyond your scope. This cluster provides an introductory map of mood disorders, anxiety disorders, psychotic disorders, dissociative disorders, and personality structures that destabilise in non-ordinary states. You learn to distinguish spiritual emergency from clinical decompensation, and you leave with clear red flags and referral pathways.
In the South African context, some experiences that look like psychopathology are actually ukutwasa - the calling to become a sangoma or healer. You learn the signs of ancestral calling: dreams of ancestors, illness with no medical cause, synchronicities, resistance, somatic pressure. You learn to distinguish ukutwasa from psychosis or spiritual bypass, and when to refer a client to a traditional healer rather than attempting to hold that process yourself.
Diversity, power, and privilege are examined directly. You examine your own positionality: race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, culture. You learn to facilitate across difference, avoid cultural appropriation (especially as a non-Indigenous facilitator using Indigenous plant medicines), and create a container that does not replicate oppressive structures.
Sexuality and eros in psychedelic states are normalised and given practical protocols. Somatic arousal, erotic imagery, past trauma surfacing, and transference toward the facilitator are common and almost always mishandled. You learn pre-session preparation, in-session holding without shaming or collapsing, and post-session integration. You also learn to distinguish between a client processing material, acting from disinhibition, or attempting to engage you.
The blocked journey - when a client experiences nothing - is addressed directly. You learn to recognise energetic, psychological, and somatic blocking, differentiate between fear shutdown, medication interference, dissociation, and spiritual protection, and apply facilitator protocols for when to apply pressure, when to surrender, and when to end early.

Shamanic tools, the luminous energy field, extraction, soul retrieval, depossession, entities, parasites, portals, and traps.
Tools are not props; they are technology. You learn the drum for rhythmic entrainment, journey initiation, and grounding. The rattle for clearing space and breaking energetic loops. Chanting and toning for holding frequency and calling in allies. Burning (mapacho, palo santo, sage) for energetic cleansing, opening portals, and entity removal support. You also learn to work with your own spirit allies, track a client's power animals, and call in the four elements to balance a ceremonial container.
Drawing from Alberto Villoldo and Sandra Ingerman, you learn to work with the client's luminous energy field: seeing holes, leaks, cords, and dense formations. Extraction removes crystallised fear and foreign energy. Soul retrieval involves tracking lost soul parts, negotiating their return, and integrating them back into the client's field. Depossession helps a client release an attached spirit that does not belong.
In non-ordinary states, clients may encounter beings that are not ancestral guides or power animals. You learn to distinguish between benign visitors, attached entities requiring removal, energetic parasites, and trap-like structures. Shamanic protocols include diagnostic tracking, negotiation, removal, and post-removal field repair.

Energetic tracking, co-journeying, music, space, and ceremonial containment.
While a client journeys, can you sense where they are? Stuck in a loop, approaching a breakthrough, fleeing from a presence, or dissociating? Energetic tracking is the skill of reading the client's field in real time without disturbing their process. You learn to track stagnation, looping, fear, and openings. You also learn what to bring into the space - a rattle, a song, a word, silence - to help them move through difficulty.
Co-journeying is the most advanced module. Historically, some shamans journeyed on behalf of others, using plant medicines to track, hunt, and navigate for a client who could not journey themselves. You learn the cultural lineages (Shuar, Quechua, Bugis traditions), three models of facilitator medicine use (sober, microdosing, co-journeying), and specific protocols for co-journeying. Sober baseline competency is required before any medicine-assisted facilitation.
The ceremonial container is not just physical. It is sonic, elemental, and energetic. You learn to create a container using directional energies, elemental balancing, and altar work. Music is taught as a shamanic tool: mapping musical arcs to journey phases, recognising contraindicated frequencies, and using live vocal toning or chanting during sessions. You also learn client preparation sessions - teaching surrender, breath, and fear orientation before medicine day.

Integration & Sustainability

Integration, group facilitation, crisis planning, and facilitator self-care.
The journey is not the healing; integration is. You learn immediate re-entry protocols: orienting, grounding, and closing the energetic field. Integration mapping for symbolic and somatic material. Working with difficult experiences - "bad trips" as shadow material, not pathology. Relapse prevention: what to do when a client's profound insights do not translate into lasting behaviour change.
Holding group medicine circles requires different skills than one-on-one work. You learn to manage collective field contagion, triangulation between participants, and spillover effects. Dyad rupture and repair during medicine states - what to do when the relationship between you and a client cracks open mid-journey. Working with couples or close relations: codynamics, enmeshment risks, and separate holding.
Crisis planning prepares you for worst-case scenarios. Differentiating psychological crisis from spiritual emergency. Suicidal ideation during or after a journey: assessment and first response. Acute psychosis: recognition, containment, and when to end the session. Prolonged dissociation: grounding protocols and when to seek help. Calling emergency services: legal considerations, what to tell them, and how to protect the client's dignity.

Facilitator self-care is not about bubble baths. You learn a 5-minute self-debrief protocol after every session. Recognising early signs of empathy fatigue and spiritual burnout. Forming or joining a confidential peer reflection pod for mutual case support. You also learn post-crisis debrief for yourself. The most common reason skilled facilitators leave this work is burnout and unplanned crises. You leave with systems for both.