Shamanic Psychedelic Facilitator Training & Mentorship
Ethically Guided. Shamanically Rooted. Clinically Informed.
Hold space with deeper safety, sharper energetic skills, and a ceremonial container that serves both you and your clients.
This is a mentorship for facilitators who want to work with psychedelics without bypassing shamanic wisdom, ethics, shadow healing, energy work, or trauma awareness.
SHAMANIC THERAPY
PSYCHEDELIC SOCIETY
SOUTH AFRICA
Hosted and developed collaboratively with the Psychedelic Society of South Africa
This training is developed in active collaboration with the Psychedelic Society of South Africa. Their community insights, ethical frameworks, and commitment to safety shape the curriculum. The partnership has a shared goal: to raise the standard of psychedelic facilitation in South Africa. We centre shamanic praxis, create safety, and offer structures such as accountability and supervision. This is a collective effort to exchange knowledge and support a locally rooted, responsible facilitation community.
Recognition, certification & accountability
Certification
Graduates of the training receive a certificate of completion that demonstrates rigorous, practical preparation for holding space. While there is no formal government accreditation for psychedelic facilitation in South Africa, the certificate is recognised by the Psychedelic Society of South Africa as a trusted qualification.
Endorsement
Graduates are listed on the PSSA's practitioner directory with an endorsed badge that seekers can filter for, helping the public find facilitators who have completed this training and agreed to a code of ethics and accountability.
Accountability
Accountability for client safety. Graduates can offer clients access to PSSA harm reports, accountability processes, and restorative justice services. The benefit to clients is peace of mind in a field with no official oversight.
Peer Support
Peer support for facilitators. Graduates also gain access to confidential peer support groups and case consultation spaces. These are not just for learning; they are an additional layer of safety, helping facilitators catch blind spots before they cause harm.
Inclusive Structure
The psychedelic space in South Africa has barriers: cost, location, representation, and historical exclusion. Training only those who can pay full fees replicates the inequities the medicine asks us to heal.
We set aside 3 sponsored places and 2 free places for facilitators who would otherwise be excluded. This includes community health workers, traditional healer apprentices, people from marginalised backgrounds, and those working directly with underserved communities.
As part of their certification, graduates commit to facilitating a set number of sessions for people who cannot afford access. This is not charity. It is reciprocity. The training becomes a resource planted within the community, not a ladder out of it.
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 and group 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. Across every module, you will develop theory, shamanic skills, ethical frameworks, and practical business skills, and you will practise all of it through real medicine work with supervised practical sessions and 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.
Foundational Skills: Ethics, Intake, Boundaries, and Core Counselling
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The intake process: screening for spiritual emergency proneness, dissociative disorders, and destabilising personality structures
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Informed consent as a living process: maintaining consent throughout a session, including re-consenting when a client becomes non-verbal
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HPCSA-aligned ethical decision-making tools for real-time dilemmas
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Session documentation, liability management, and building an emergency referral network before you need it
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Boundaries in three dimensions: relational, energetic, and spiritual
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Managing transference, idealisation, and client attraction post-session
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Recognising when a client's energetic field is trying to merge with yours mid-journey, and how to restore spiritual boundaries without rupturing the container
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Core counselling skills adapted to non-ordinary states: active listening, empathic reflection, and knowing when to guide versus when to stay silent
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Asking questions that open rather than lead
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Immediacy: working with what is happening between you and the client in the present moment
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Helping a client arrive at their own conclusions rather than yours
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POPIA compliance: data privacy, storage, and confidentiality obligations for client records and session notes
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Confidentiality and its limits: when you are legally and ethically required to break it
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Mandatory reporting obligations in the South African context
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Fee-setting, cancellation policies, and managing payment boundaries without rupturing the therapeutic relationship
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Scope of practice: knowing what you are and are not qualified to offer, and how to communicate that clearly to clients
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Contra-indications: medications, psychiatric history, and physical health factors that affect suitability for medicine work
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Psychopharmacology basics for facilitators: what you need to know about SSRIs, SNRIs, mood stabilisers, antipsychotics, and benzodiazepines in relation to medicine work
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SSRI interactions: serotonin syndrome risk, blunted journeys, and washout period protocols
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Mood stabilisers and antipsychotics: when medicine work is contraindicated and when it requires additional precaution
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Tapering and washout: what to do when a client wants to come off medication to journey, and why this is never your decision to make alone
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When to require a psychiatric clearance letter before proceeding
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Ongoing medication monitoring: clients who journey while still medicated and what to track
Mentorship
What Makes This Mentorship Valuable
and Unique
The wounded healer is more than a metaphor. It's a lived reality that carries real ethical weight. Feeling called is not the same as being ready. You may be receiving downloads, feeling the pull of the work in your bones, and knowing with certainty that this is your path. And still, your inner landscape needs to be still enough to hold someone else's storm without being shaken by it. You need to be able to attune so deeply that your own noise does not become theirs. You need to know how to midwife a process without steering it, and how to steward the remembering without making it about you.
Mentorship can support you with:
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Navigating a spiritual calling: making sense of what is happening, discerning what it is asking, and finding your footing when the ground keeps shifting
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Separating ego from the work: recognising when your need to help, to be seen, or to be right is quietly shaping the session
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Deep protection work: learning to move into proximity with suffering and darkness without losing your own centre
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Allowing clients to resource through you without depletion: understanding the difference between being a conduit and being a source
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Clearing entanglements: recognising when you have taken something on, and developing the skill to release it cleanly
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Keeping your vessel empty when your own life feels full: showing up for others even in difficult seasons of your own
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Power dynamics and dependency: holding space in a way that returns people to their own authority rather than yours
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Working with your triggers: understanding what gets activated in session, where it comes from, and how to metabolise it outside the room rather than inside it
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Relational patterns and countertransference: recognising when a client is pulling on something unresolved in you
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Beliefs about worth and charging: unpacking the conditioning that makes it hard to receive, to charge well, and to hold your value without apology
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Building a practice that is financially sustainable and energetically honest: pricing, boundaries, capacity, and the stories we tell ourselves about all of it
