Animist Psychology
Earth, Ancestors, and Mental Health
12 Tuesdays beginning April 28
11:30am Vancouver | 2:30pm New York | 20:30 Berlin
About the Course
This course brings together two distinct bodies of knowledge and practice: psychology and ritual arts. We consider what’s best about both systems in a way that charts a vision for the potential marriage of these disciplines, especially for the field of psychology. It’s for mental health professionals and anyone deep in their own therapy, wondering: Where are the gaps in this modality? Likewise, it’s for ritual-oriented people who’d like to be stronger at incorporating what’s good and beneficial about the teachings of psychology.
Animist psychology arises at the intersection of
ritual arts, psychology, cultural healing, and love of the Earth.
– Daniel Foor
Practice inviting a decolonial ethic in your mental health work by including the principles of Earth-honoring traditions.
Gain a new framework for how issues like trauma, attachment, psychosis and more take new shape when considered with an Animist sensibility.
Unpack colonialist legacy and reductionist approaches to the human psyche common in Western psychology.
Course Overview
In this eight-session course, we hold a decolonial ethic as we explore the field of psychology to reconsider how our understanding of main themes might shift when we incorporate the principles of animism. Is there room to include ritual arts, spirituality, and Earth-honoring tradition? When we do, what changes?
- Does our understanding of trauma differ when we include the impact of millennia of generations?
- How does our understanding of relational healing shift when we include the sensibilities of Earth-honoring ritual traditions?
- Might we think about psychosis or possession states differently when we incorporate influences beyond the self?
Have a look at the curriculum below to see what sorts of terrain the course traverses.
This course is an offering for mental health professionals, ritualists of diverse traditions, and anyone interested in the intersections of Earth, culture, and psyche. As we move deeper into troubling times and global upheaval, the field of psychology continues to grapple with colonialist legacies and reductionist approaches to the human psyche. The teachings in this course are one step toward addressing this.
12 live teaching calls led by Daniel Foor
18 hours of pre-recorded lessons you’ll have access to forever
12 additional live support calls
Small breakout groups anchored by trained ritualists
More than 24 substantive guided experiential practices
24+ carefully curated resources to accompany lessons
Access to a dedicated community discussion space
Course Curriculum
Lesson One: Animism, Colonialism, and Earth-Honoring Psychologies
- Identify alignments and tensions between psychology and animist values
- Explore animist epistemologies as key to a more relational psychology
- Situate psychology amidst ongoing legacies of European supremacies
- Practice honoring your deep, innate knowing about psyche and relationships
- Enjoy resources from Indigenous and other animist clinicians
Live Call Theme: Culturally Reclaiming Psychological Theory and Practice
Lesson Two: Individualism, Parts Work, and Contours of the Self
- Consider the impacts of extreme individualism, including in psychology
- Examine the promise and limitations of popular “parts work” approaches
- Practice reframing individual challenges as ancestral, cultural, and ecological
- Reflect on implications of and alternatives to individualism in psychotherapy
- Enjoy resources on liberatory psychology without extreme individualism
Live Call Theme: Alternatives to Individualism in Psychotherapy
Lesson Three: Ancestral Healing, Trauma, and Resilience
- Learn ways to work with the ancestral and lineage aspects of trauma
- Identify cross-cultural strategies for transforming trauma into resilience
- Reflect on acquired resilience and how animist values can support healing
- Practice inviting ancestral support in framing trauma as systemic, societal
- Enjoy resources on healing justice from somatic-oriented therapists
Live Call Theme: Calling on Ancestral Support for Psychological Healing
Lesson Four: Attachment Theory, Intimacy, and Loving the Earth
- Explore parallels in relational dynamics with humans and the others
- Consider attachment theory in light of bonds with land and the Sacred
- Discuss strategies for loving deeply amidst ongoing ecological catastrophe
- Engage in a practice of valuing and tending to bonds with our extended kin
- Enjoy resources on the intersections of attachment/bonding and the Earth
Live Call Theme: Community and Land, Exile and Belonging
Lesson Five: Personality, Ego Inflation, and Possession States
- Distinguish personality from disorder, healthy ego from inflation
- Clarify helpful/intentional from harmful/undesired possession states
- Explore psychological vulnerabilities as openings to archetypal forces
- Practice identifying and uncoupling from a source of possession
- Enjoy resources on archetypal possession and spiritual emergency
Live Call Theme: Working with Possession States in Psychotherapy
Lesson Six: Spirit Contact, Psychosis, and Consensus Reality
- Explore seemingly incompatible versions of consensus reality
- Cultivate nuance and humility on the subject of psychosis and spirits
- Extend prayer and respect to those already lost to the deep waters
- Practice honoring limits to our nervous system and cognitive function
- Enjoy resources from spirited clinicians on acute mental illness
Live Call Theme: Revisiting Psychosis in Light of Extreme Individualism
Lesson Seven: Initiation, Spiritual Emergence, and Rites of Passage
- Consider the cultural importance of initiation and rites of passage
- Explore ways people are meeting these needs outside of psychology circles
- Learn ways that psychology can usefully support major spiritual openings
- Practice reflecting on your own life experiences and ongoing needs here
- Enjoy resources on contemporary rites of passage and spiritual emergence
Live Call Theme: Skills for Navigating Intense Spiritual Transformation
Lesson Eight: Sociopathy, Harmful Spirits, and Malevolence
- Reach for common language on harmful spirits, curses, and psychic attack
- Explore impacts of fear and cultural bias when addressing malevolence
- Consider systemic harm as a type of interference from troubled powers
- Kindly review your life in a way that respects the reality of malevolence
- Enjoy Indigenous and animist resources on danger and big trouble
Live Call Theme: Envision a Ritually Aware and Empowered Psychotherapy
Lesson Nine: Belonging, Ecopsychology, and Becoming a Place
- Consider the psycho-spiritual implications of home and belonging
- Explore the strengths and limits of eco-psychology as animist praxis
- Identify responsible ways for settlers to enjoy local Earth relationships
- Practice disrupting false human-nature and culture-nature dichotomies
- Enjoy resources on heart-aware decolonization and becoming a place
Live Call Theme: Composting Human Supremacy in Psychotherapy
Lesson Ten: Suffering, Rupture, and the Forging of Character
- Consider the process by which suffering becomes medicine and wisdom
- Explore useful parallels between therapists and traditional healers
- Envision a psychology that can minister to profound injustice and hardship
- Reflect in guided practice on your capacity and limitations with suffering
- Enjoy resources on resilience from those who have lived extreme hardship
Live Call Theme: Companioning the Sorrow of the World
Lesson Eleven: Prayer, Ritual, and Confronting Materialist Bias
- Examine biases in psychotherapy toward scientism and materialism
- Consider adverse impacts for clients from failing to address this bias
- Explore ways to utilize foundational practices without religious imposition
- Practice pouring love into the psychic void created by materialism
- Enjoy resources from Buddhist, Islamic, Pagan, etc. psychotherapists
Live Call Theme: Openly Speaking to Cultural Disconnect in Healing Arts
Lesson Twelve: Uprooting Supremacist Influences in Healing Arts
- Explore different frameworks for a long-term ethic of service and relatedness
- Celebrate the foundations of healthy psyche in your ancestral cultures of origin
- Recognize the need for courage to transformation institutional stuckness
- Practice identifying ways to deepen your path of personal cultivation
- Enjoy hopeful, inspiring resources from culturally encouraging clinicians
Live Call Theme: Psychology as Full Participant in Cultural Healing Work
Add Rituals for Healing Trauma
For a limited time, add this complementary four-part series to your purchase for 15% off.
In this course, teachings and practices will honor clinical understandings of post-traumatic stress in ways that are inclusive to the many forms of human suffering. The material supports any work that participants may be doing through psychotherapy, spiritual healing work, and advocacy for systemic change. It’s also designed to complement our Animist Psychology course. With courage and support, learning how to metabolize our wounds can lead to greater compassion, wholeness, and resiliencies forged from hardship.
Join our Waitlist
Register for Animist Psychology
3 and 6 month payment plans available at checkout at 0% interest.
Supporter
-
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
-
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
-
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 Thursday, February 19. Replies may take time due to high volume, but all replies will be sent by Friday, February 20.
Course Schedule
Pre-Recorded Lessons
- 12 pre-recorded lessons (90 min each) will be released in three batches
- Recorded lessons are taught by Daniel Foor
LIVE teaching calls
- 12 live weekly calls support the recorded lessons on Tuesdays, beginning April 28 through July 14
- Call times are: 11:30am Vancouver | 2:30pm New York | 20:30 Berlin, 90 min each
- Guided by Daniel Foor
Main teaching calls are live and support the pre-recorded lessons. They center around new, complementary course content (see the “live call theme” under Curriculum below). Each main call includes time for teaching, guided practice, and Q&A (the first 60 minutes) along with small group breakouts (the final 30 minutes). The first hour will be recorded and available within 48 hours alongside the pre-recorded lessons.
ADDITIONAL LIVE PRACTICE SUPPORT CALLS
- Guided by Catherine Dunne and Orson Morrison
These hour-long calls anchored by two experienced mental health professionals are especially for course participants who want to enjoy further teachings and discussion on ways to apply what you’re learning in your practice with others. All course participants are welcome to attend for what will largely be Q&A along with a bit of guided practice. These calls will also be recorded and available alongside the pre-recorded lessons and main teaching recordings.
About the Instructors
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.
Catherine Dunne
Practice Support Call Leader
Catherine Dunne, MA has over three decades of trauma-informed experience as a psychotherapist, supervisor and Movement Medicine teacher. Her passion and service in the world is rooted in embodied relationship – with ourselves, with other human folk, with our ancestors, and with the other-than-humans. Born and raised on traditional Lenape lands now known as Queens, New York, all eight of her great-grandparents are from Cork, Kerry, and Tipperary in southern Ireland, and for the last thirty years Catherine has been living on her ancestral lands in Cork.
Orson Morrison
Practice Support Call Leader
Orson Morrison, a psychologist, healer and mindfulness practitioner, brings gifts of a diverse ancestry and well-honed skills to help to create a safe container supporting clients in addressing the heart-level intentions they bring to ancestral lineage healing. Orson is supported by ancestors who hail from Southern-African indigenous populations, indentured workers brought to the South-African Cape from South-Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, Central-Africans, West-Africans brought to the Caribbean as slaves, indigenous populations from Guyana, European settlers, slave-owners and those who fled religious persecution. Orson lives on the land of the Council of the Three Fires near Chicago, IL.
Ashira Darwish
Guest Speaker
Ashira is a Palestinian motivational speaker and investigative journalist from East Jerusalem and creator of Ashira Active Meditation — a trauma integration modality rooted in embodied movement, ancestral wisdom, liberation psychology, and neuro-somatic healing. Her work serves as a lifeline for those navigating war, displacement, and intergenerational trauma, particularly among Palestinian communities, and her approach blends active meditation, Sufi practices, and trauma-informed movement into a culturally rooted, justice-centered modality. Through her initiative Catharsis Holistic Healing, Ashira has trained over 200 practitioners in the Arab world while offering free support to communities in crisis — from Gaza to refugee camps, classrooms to the frontlines of resistance.
Frequently Asked Questions
There’s no need for any experience with ritual arts, spiritual practice, or Earth-honoring traditions to benefit from this course. Course recordings and resources aim to be accessible and to make connections across disciplines and cultures. For example, if you’re connected to mental health professions but entirely new to Earth-honoring traditions or spirituality, the course should still be quite useful even if some “spiritual” concepts are quite new or there are moments where you aren’t following every nuance. The material aims to serve practitioners of ritual arts, mental health professionals, and anyone interested in the intersections of psychology, the sacred, and love of the Earth. Beyond that more general audience, it’s especially designed for folks with some background in mental health who want to learn important elements about Earth, psyche, and culture that the field of psychology often declines to engage with.
There’s no need for any psychological training or experience with psychotherapy to find benefit from the course. Course recordings and resources are generally quite accessible and make connections across disciplines and cultures. That said, there are moments where content will be more addressed to folks working in the fields of mental health. Also, terms and theory from Western psychology will sometimes be used as reference points from which to highlight more cross-cultural realities. So, no need to be a therapist, therapist-in-training, or therapy client; however, if you truly have no interest at all in psychology, those elements may not be a match.
Yeah, you can expect to learn new skills. For each of the twelve lessons there are over three hours of content (60 to 90min pre-recorded lesson, 60min main call plus small groups after, and a 60min practice support call). In each of the three elements (one lesson plus two calls) there will be experiential practice in some way as well as discussion of how theory and teachings are applied in all three. The main live call and the practice support call will both include time for Q&A along with the option to write-in questions. That said, it’s important to not mistake the course space as a substitute for professional supervision that really allows for full care and nuance.
No need to keep up in any way. You’ll have life-long access to the material and all of the live calls are recorded for future listening. The main advantage to “keeping up” is that there is a bit of positive group momentum, and it can feel connective to ask your questions live or to send them in during the time when the course is active.
If you want to get maximal benefit from the material during the time of the live course, allow for 2-2.5 hours to engage with the pre-recorded lesson and some of the adjacent resources, 90minutes to engage with the main live call, and another hour later in the week to attend the practice support call. In this scenario, you would spend about 4-5 hours a week with the course material, roughly half the time you might spend on a single university course per week.
This course is designed to explore mental health and ritual topics through an animist lens, and participants may find themselves reflecting on tender or vulnerable topics like trauma, bonding, psychosis, and belonging. The course is not a replacement for direct, living support and/or professional medical advice. As for in-course resources, enrollment does include access to our Community Forum—an online discussion group of students past and present, including supportive members from Ancestral Medicine’s Practitioner Network and Ancestral Medicine staff. Sharing experiences, reflecting on practices, and making connections in this private online community can provide one form of support and please honor your personal limits.
Ancestral Medicine offerings are rooted in feminist, decolonizing, anti-racist, LGBTQI-friendly, class-aware, international, Earth-honoring ethics and a heart-aware and non-dogmatic spirit that seeks to honor each participant’s unique life experiences and ancestral storylines. Resources included with each lesson favor ancestrally and geographically diverse voices both within and outside the field of psychology, and the course includes optional BIPOC and LGBTQ-only small break-out spaces. We do our very best to foster cultural inclusivity and this includes listening carefully to impact and suggestions when any participants feel we’re not achieving this goal.
All of our lesson videos have auto-generated closed captioning, as well as a full transcript and additional downloadable audio-only versions. If you have needs not met here, please feel free to reach out to us with suggestions at info@ancestralmedicine.org.
If you have general questions about our organization, offerings, or values, you may enjoy our Frequently Asked Questions page. If there’s something else, we’d be happy to help! Reach out to info@ancestralmedicine.org and someone from our team will be in touch, usually within 1-2 business days.
Have a question that’s not answered here?