Animism & Earth Reconnection
The Theory and Practice of Reclaiming Relationship
TUESDAYS
BEGINNING JULY 21
5:00pm Vancouver | 8:00 pm New York| 12:00pm Auckland
About the Course
Previously titled Practical Animism, this course offers an experiential inquiry into how to live with more heart, humility, and connection. It blends animist or Earth-honoring ethics, ritual practice, and sharp cultural analysis. Together, we’ll explore reverence beyond belief, relationship beyond blood, and connection beyond the human. Drawing on diverse Earth-honoring lineages of practice as well as “new animist” teachings, this course examines the soul of kinship, the weight of loss, and the sacred possibilities still available in a world shaped by rupture, beauty, and responsibility.
This course does not offer doctrine or a set of fixed beliefs. It supports a reorientation of the self in a web of relationships—seen and unseen, human and other-than-human. It’s a course for those seeking heart-centered ritual, sacred accountability, and frameworks for connection rooted in care, complexity, and respect.
Animism is the opposite of human supremacy. Animist ethics and ritual call us back into conscious relationship with our greater family.
— Daniel Foor
Reorient your sense of self in a greater web of relations, seen and unseen, human and otherwise.
Transform unhelpful cultural assumptions about grief, gratitude, eating, boundaries, and place
Learn new skills for navigating long-term relationships with our many other-than-human kin.
Disrupt binary, colonialist logic with messy, ecological, life-affirming views and ritual.
Engage depth intellectual sources on animism in tandem with guided practice.
Course Overview
This twelve-week course is a structured inquiry into reverence, relationship, and responsibility in a world full of “people”—not all of them human, and not all of them visible in this dimension. Through a blend of Earth-honoring spiritual teachings, cultural critique, guided practice, and highlights from natural sciences you’ll relate with stones as allies to help remember purpose, explore gratitude for and with the other-than-human kin you eat, and develop a personal connection with a body of water near to you.
We’ll reflect on the responsibilities that come with living in ecosystems of reciprocity—beyond the language and limitations of environmental activism as saviorism or misanthropy. We’ll spend time wondering what it might take to undo the rigid split between human life, wilderness, and cultural expression.
Weekly sessions offer frameworks for relating with plants, animals, microbes, stones, weather, and spirits of place, while encouraging deep reflection on boundaries, consent, ancestral repair, and the lifelong work of cultural healing. We encourage you to read through the curriculum below—this offering is uniquely challenging to summarize in brief.
12 live teachings with small groups
12 pre-recorded lessons, each about 90min and with guided practices
Robust resources section with diverse animist voices
Long-term access to a community forum for peer connection
Responsive, skillful customer support for any questions
Unlimited access to all course materials so long as the internet lasts
Course Curriculum
Lesson One: Kinship, Intimacy, and Animist Lifeways
• Affirm a participant ethic of humility, heart, and self-responsibility
• Contextualize learning amidst injustice and ecological catastrophe
• Consider impacts of colonialism and ancestral wounding
• Invite new pathways of direct connection with other-than-human kin
• Enjoy resources from “new animists” in a wider cultural context
Topic of the live call in week one: Cultivating Gratitude
Lesson Two: Eating, Killing, and Giving Thanks
• Explore ethical implications of food plants, and animals as people
• Bring kind attention to the intimate killing that sustains our lives
• Ask the powers for ways to weave authentic gratitude into eating
• Dialogue with the spirit of at least one personal food, plant or animal
• Enjoy resources on domestication and rituals of food and harvest
Topic of the live call in week two: Embracing Interdependence
Lesson Three: Boundaries, Traditions, and the Dead
• Explore the importance of boundaries, consent, and limitation
• Learn ways to establish sacred space and encourage ritual safety
• Consider different types of ancestors, lineages, and living traditions
• Invite connection with wise and kind ancestral support from your lineages
• Enjoy resources on ancestor reverence and spirited eco-activism
Topic of the live call in week three: Honoring and Asserting Boundaries
Lesson Four: Celebrating Diverse Bodies and Wisdoms
• Engage with older, more generous views of other-than-human kin
• Expand your vocabulary for sacred diversity and difference
• Foreground friendship as foundational to deeper modes of relating
• Seek to connect with a local wild plant, fungus, or animal relation
• Enjoy resources on the wisdom and complexity of our Earth kin
Topic of the live call in week four: Valuing Diversity and Difference
Lesson Five: Sorrow, Extinction, and Honoring the Waters
• Explore water-related themes like grieving, cleansing, and healing
• Learn ritual skills for embracing potent sorrow, loss, and heartache
• Engage traditional teachings and lore on relating with the spirits of water
• Invite direct engagement with the specific waters near to your home
• Enjoy resources on grief rituals and ritual work with watery kin
Topic of the live call in week five: Grieving While in Connection
Lesson Six: Living the Blessings and Burdens of Place
• Consider complex human histories of places in light of belonging
• Learn ways to think about and be invited into the qualities of places
• Explore outdoor solitude practices and relevant adaptations
• Apply etiquette and intuition to locate a ‘sit spot’ near to your home
• Enjoy resources on place-focused teachings and ritual traditions
Topic of the live call in week six: Living Your Specific Medicine
Lesson Seven: Stone, Memory, and Earth as Deity
• Identify projection of personal pain and gender norms on the Earth
• Learn foundational practices of making offerings and tending an altar
• Invite help from the stones for remembering destiny and purpose
• Ritually greet, thank, and feed the divinity who is this Earth
• Enjoy resources on ways of relating with the Earth as an elder deity
Topic of the live call in week seven: Reparenting and Deep Healing
Lesson Eight: Fire, Plasma, and Bridging the Worlds
• Explore diverse approaches to the elements in theory and practice
• Deepen with elemental fire as magma, flame, lightning, and stars
• Uproot problematic human/nature and nature/culture dichotomies
• Invite direct communion with helpful expressions of elemental fire
• Enjoy resources on elemental ritual and deities of fire and transformation
Topic of the live call in week eight: Embodying Cultural Authenticity
Lesson Nine: Climate, Cosmos, and the Empty Center
• Extend animist perspectives to wind, weather, and celestial bodies
• Further interrupt extreme individualism and inner/outer binaries
• Reflect on Earth as an open system and our place in wider context
• Invite direct perspective from the elders powers on climate change
• Enjoy resources on wind, weather, astronomy, and great sci-fi
Topic of the live call in week nine: Becoming a Home for the Sacred
Lesson Ten: Microorganisms, Agency, and Cultural Healing
• Consider the personhood and potent influence of microorganisms
• Explore agency, causation, and who tells the stories we’re made of
• Reflect on language and culture as sentient and more-than-human
• Greet and thank the trillions of others in, on, and around your body
• Enjoy resources on animist storytelling and microanimism
Topic of the live call in week ten: Accepting Greater Responsibility
Lesson Eleven: Spirits, Deities, and Incarnation
• Expand animist and ecological frames to include the gods and the unseen
• Reflect on what we’re doing here and why on Earth we keep coming back
• Learn practical etiquette for relating with deities, spirits, and elder forces
• Consider ways the land and the others already shape and guide our lives
• Enjoy resources on spirit possession and the curious state of incarnation
Topic of the live call in week eleven: When Two Worlds Become One
Lesson Twelve: Animist Ethics and the Life of Objects
• Extend animist sensibilities to objects, things, and those forgotten
• Ground coursework in animist ethics, science, law, and education
• Assess for congruence of personal values with identity and choices
• Invite integration of teachings with personal practice and path
• Enjoy resources on animist trends and policies in diverse disciplines
Topic of the live call in week twelve: Deepening Commitment to Self and Others
Waitlist for Animism & Earth Reconnection
Our waitlist will be opening soon. Stay tuned for details on how to reserve your spot and be the first to know when registration becomes available.
Register for Animism & Earth Reconnection
3 and 6 month payment plans available at checkout at 0% interest.
Early Registration | 20% Off
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Discount rate available until May 1st or while spaces last
Supporter
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This rate helps us make our work accessible to those with modest means and applies if you have investments, a retirement plan, and/or access to economic abundance.
Standard
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Our standard rate allows us to sustain our work. This typically applies if you’re employed in the Global North, and you’re able to provide for your needs in a consistent way.
Reduced
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This rate applies if you’re relatively less economically advantaged in the ways listed under “standard rate” or that cost is simply out of reach for you financially.
If none of these rates are accessible to you and you’re called to this work, we offer a limited number of partial scholarships. Applications will close on Sunday, September 14. Replies will be sent by Tuesday, September 16.
Course Schedule
Pre-Recorded Lessons with Daniel
- 12 pre-recorded lessons, 90 min each, released in three batches
- We recommend watching each lesson before each live call.
Main Teaching Calls with Teagan & Guests
- 12 Tuesdays beginning July 21 through October 6
- 5:00pm Vancouver | 8:00 pm New York| 12:00pm Auckland
CLASS STRUCTURE
- 60 min teachings with time for guided practice and Q&A
- Followed by 30 min of small breakout groups
- No break between main call and small groups
All 12 calls (minus breakout groups) will be recorded and, along with all 12 pre-recorded lessons, available to you in perpetuity.
We also offer an extensive course resources section with each lesson with multicultural, international perspectives.
About the Instructors
Teagan West
Lead Teacher & Main Call Anchor
Teagan West (she/they) is a Ritualist, Astrologer, Writer & Drum Maker from Hodinöhsö:ni Land, home of the Seneca Nation. Her people are Irish, Syrian, Lebanese and Anishinaabeg. Through embodied relationship to Land + Sky, her work centers the restoration of Animist Lifeways as a form of Cultural Repair.
Teagan weaves together threads of Astrological Storytelling, Land Reconnection, Ancestral Healing and Community Ritual as a tapestry of culture work + animist remembrance. She is passionate about recovering our ancestral cosmologies as maps for the future, through remembering how to listen to the wisdom + stories of the more-than-human world.
Prof. Alfonso Peralta
Guest Teacher
Prof. Alfonso Peralta is an Indigenous leader of the Arawako Karibe (Taino) nation, traditional medicine and wisdom keeper, musician, artist, writer, actor, political scientist, linguist and Capoeira Angola practitioner from the island of Ayiti, Sibao region. He is the founder of the Centro de Saberes Ancestrales del Caribe, dedicated to the preservation of native island culture across the Caribbean and Abya Yala.
He has published two books on Indigenous Caribbean culture: Caribe Raíz and Karibe Ancestral, and released musical albums in Arawak language. He lives in the North Coast of Ayiti, protecting the territory, uniting and uplifting native communities across the Caribbean.
Asha Frost
Guest Teacher
Asha Frost is an Indigenous Medicine Woman, and the international best-selling author of You are the Medicine, The Sacred Medicine Oracle, and The Animal Elders Oracle. She has guided thousands of people through profound and lasting transformation as a healer, homeopath and ceremonial guide and has become a prominent speaker in the field of Indigenous healing, garnering recognition on both local and internation platforms.
Asha holds membership at Chippewas of Nawash First Nation and is a mama of two boys with whom she walks gently upon the earth. She loves sharing her Medicine in powerful ways through ceremonies, teachings, and speaking events. Through this work, she loves seeing people reclaim their roots, find their healing wisdom, and rise into their power.
Del Laverdure
Guest Teacher
Del Laverdure is an enrolled citizen of the Crow Nation, a member of the Ties the Bundle Clan, and a descendant of the Little Shell Band of Chippewa Indians. Del is an active participant in Indigenous and intergenerational ceremonies including sweat lodge, vision quest, smudging, giveaways, spiritual naming, public speaking, tobacco pipe, animal and plant medicine, honoring sacred sites, medicine wheel, spiritual offerings, four elements and four directions. As an Indigenous person, Del’s experience and work is born out of his lifelong relationships with Indigenous families and communities and healing from intergenerational trauma.
Daniel Foor
Lead Teacher & Pre-Recorded Lessons
Daniel is a doctor of psychology, experienced ritualist, and the author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing. He is an initiate in the Òrìṣà tradition of Yoruba-speaking West Africa and has learned from teachers of Mahayana Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and the older ways of his English and German ancestors.Daniel is passionate about training aspiring leaders and change makers in the intersections of cultural healing, animist ethics, and applied ritual arts. He lives with his wife and two daughters near Granada, Spain in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Frequently Asked Questions
Pre-recorded lessons are released in three batches:
- Lessons 1-4 will be released on July 14, one week before the course begins.
- Lessons 5-8 will be available after Main Call #3.
- Lessons 9-12 will be available after Main Call #7.
Main Teaching Calls | 90 min | Tuesdays
- 12 weeks from July 21 – October 6
- 5:00pm Vancouver | 8:00 pm New York| 12:00pm Auckland
- First 60 min – teaching with time for guided practice and Q&A
- Final 30 min – small breakout groups
Call 1: July 21
Call 2: July 28
Call 3: August 4
Call 4: August 11
Call 5: August 18
Call 6: August 25
Call 7: September 1
Call 8: September 8
Call 9: September 15
Call 10: September 22
Call 11: September 29 **
Call 12: October 6 **
**Beginning with Call 11 (of 12) (Sept. 29), Auckland will enter Daylight Savings Time. This means Auckland sessions will shift one hour ahead to 1:00pm local time.
New York and Vancouver times remain unchanged.
All our live calls are held via Zoom. Shortly after you register, you’ll receive a welcome email with instructions for locating this event – and its call information – in your Ancestral Medicine account. There’s no need to wait for that email, however. Registration automatically enrolls your Ancestral Medicine account in the event and places it in your Student Dashboard.
All live teaching calls will be recorded and made available 24-48 hours later in the course portal to watch and listen to at your leisure, with indefinite access.
Yes, indeed. We’re pleased to offer you a past participant rate of $180 which is 58% off the standard price. You’ll receive access to all 12 live main calls, which includes new guest teachers and perspectives. You should have received a coupon code via email to take advantage of this offer. If not, please email info@ancestralmedicine.org and explain that you took the course last year, and would like to request a past participant discount code to re-enroll.
To the very best of our ability, yes. All Ancestral Medicine offerings seek to embody an anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ-celebrating, decolonizing, and Earth-honoring ethic. They are also class-aware and internationally conscious. We offer a heartfelt, non-dogmatic approach that seeks to honor each participant’s unique life experiences and ancestral storylines. The resources included with each lesson favor ancestrally and geographically diverse voices. Additionally, the course will include ancestrally and culturally diverse guest teachers and break-out group supporters with the option of being in a BIPOC or LGBTQ small-group breakout.
Enrollment includes access to our Connection Space – a private forum for course participants, supporters, and staff. Sharing experiences, reflecting on practices, and making connections in this private online community can provide one form of support.
Please also consider reaching out to someone in the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network for one-on-one support and guidance. Most are available for private individualized sessions, and many are willing to provide low-cost sessions to support financial accessibility needs.
All of our prerecorded lessons have downloadable transcripts. All of our lesson videos have auto-generated English subtitles, as well as downloadable audio-only versions of the lessons. If you have needs not met here, please feel free to reach out to us with suggestions at info@ancestralmedicine.org.
Should you wish to withdraw from an online course or shift your registration to a future iteration, please contact us at info@ancestralmedicine.org to request a full refund within the refund window of that specific course. For our 12-week courses, you can request a refund up to 2 weeks after the course start date.
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