Foundations of Ritual
Eight lessons on building a deep, lasting
relationship with the sacred
Beginning April 21, 3pm Vancouver | 6pm New York | April 22, 8am Sydney
About the Course
Ritual is both art and discipline; instinctual and learnable. Approaches to ritual are as diverse as life itself and the only “wrong” approach is that which is untethered from love, wisdom and relationship with life.
his course is for anyone seeking to strengthen their foundational skills in ritual arts. Our approach is kind, inclusive and non-dogmatic.
Ritual is the cultivation of personal intuition and the renewal of ancestral knowledge.
– Daniel Foor
Come away with clear approaches and frameworks for invocation, relational etiquette, and honoring limits.
Learn to build rituals that are safe, protected, boundaried, and well resourced.
Explore ritual theory alongside traditions, teachings, and practices from around the globe.
Develop new approaches to ritual-building that are discerning, protected, and bespoke to your own.
Course Overview
In this course, we take a clear-eyed look at what ritual truly is—not a performance, but a practice that shapes and is shaped by the rhythm of our lives. We do not assume a single path forward. This offering provides tools to shape a ritual practice that is both personal and enduring.
Together, we’ll consider intention, etiquette, protection, invocation, trance, prayer, offering practices, and a dozen other elements from the diverse history of global ritual arts traditions. The focus is on the living relationship at the heart of ritual—how we engage, how we listen, how we make meaning.
Course materials assume no prior knowledge: for those new to ritual, the course offers a grounded place to begin. For those already practicing, it may serve as an invitation to deepen and refine. Mental health professionals, spiritual care workers, priests, and educators may find it especially relevant in their work; as may parents, those seeking an off-ramp from the rites of organized religion, and baby witches of all varieties.
The approach is rooted in relationship—we are feminist, decolonizing, antiracist, class-aware, and Earth-honoring, and we hope you are, too.
8 live teaching calls led by Ancestral Medicine Ritual Director, Shannon Willis
12 hours of pre-recorded lessons from AM Founder, Daniel Foor
At least 8 opportunities to engage with substantive guided ritual practice
18+ carefully curated resources to accompany lessons
Lifetime access to all course materials
Access to a dedicated community discussion space
Course Curriculum
Lesson One: Introduction to Ritual in Theory and Practice
- Discuss different approaches to ritual, ceremony and spirit work
- Introduce an animist frame that emphasizes ritual as relationship
- Consider keys elements of ritual from a creative, artisan perspective
- Start to craft a basic personal ritual to explore key elements in practice
- Enjoy resources from diverse practitioners on the nature of ritual
Lesson Two: Boundaries, Protection, and Ritual Safety
- Discuss boundary practice with both living humans and spirit people
- Affirm the reality of dangerous forces and people, seen and unseen
- Learn different strategies and practices for increasing ritual safety
- Consider the role of fear in establishing safety in the seen and unseen
- Explore perspectives from different ritualists on boundaries and safety
Lesson Three: Invocation and Appealing to the Powers
- Notice parallels between invoking living humans and the spirits
- Reflect on your own ancestry for familiar styles of invocation
- Explore personal edges around voice, rejection and vulnerability
- Start to practice different styles of invocation with people in your life
- Consider examples of different styles of ritual invocation
Lesson Four: Trancework and Relational Etiquette
- Learn ways to navigate states of awareness conducive to trance
- Consider parallels with your ways of relating with the living
- Increase discernment on who is ritually helpful to relate with
- Explore what may unfold once in contact with the spirits
- Practice different, less cultivated modes of spirit contact
Lesson Five: Sustaining Intimacy and Regulating Intensity
- Learn ways to increase and nourish the level of connection
- Explore offering practices that are right for your specific life
- Identify ways to build and diminish trust with the powers
- Practice ways to ground, disengage, and decrease intensity as needed
- Consider ways that long-term relations with the powers can unfold
Lesson Six: Speech and Song, Intention and Prayer
- Deepen on the topic of clear ritual motivation and intent
- Practice skills for spontaneous, potent prayer for self and others
- Explore basics of song and vocalization in partnership with the spirits
- Consider implications and advantages of tending a basic altar/shrine
- Find ways that work for you to start to vocalize with the powers
Lesson Seven: Authenticity, Calling and Honoring Limits
- Explore the connection between spiritual power and honesty
- Learn one framework for destiny and personal soul-level gifts
- Consider strategies for getting clear on your specific destiny
- Beyond clarity, call in backing toward fulfillment of your calling
- Examine ways to know your personal place as well as your limits
Lesson Eight: Traditions, Teachers and Established Practices
- Consider pros and cons of work with teachers, traditions and practices
- Learn ways to increase good outcomes when risking involvement
- Assess for resonance with your ancestral and cultural inheritance
- Notice links between early life experiences and level of trust in teachers
- Identify next steps for deepening with your practice and learning
Register for Foundations of Ritual
3 and 6 month payment plans available at checkout at 0% interest.
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, March 16. Replies may take time due to high volume, but all replies will be sent by Tuesday, March 18.
This course provides an excellent foundation in safe, effective and respectful ritual. I appreciated both the theory and the practical application examples that were given. I am a minister and have done ritual before. That said, I gained a new perspective from this class. It has helped me to expand my view of ritual from something only done in spiritual practice to a way of interacting with life itself
– Joseph G., Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Course Schedule
Main teaching calls
– Guided by Shannon Willis
– 8 live weekly calls for 90 min each
– April 21 through June 9 at 3pm Vancouver | 6pm New York
– April 22 through June 10 at 8am Sydney
All 8 calls will be recorded and will be available alongside the pre-recorded lessons with no expiry date.
CLASS STRUCTURE
– Weekly live calls are 60 min of live teaching followed by 30 min of time for guided practice and Q&A
– In addition to the live calls there are eight pre-recorded lessons. Lessons 1-4 will become accesible one week before the first live call, then lessons 5-8 one week before the fifth live call.
About the Instructors
Shannon Willis
Shannon is a dedicated ritualist working at the intersection of dream midwifery, psychopomp, ancestral and oracular practices. She holds a Masters in Leadership and Professional Counseling and has more than four decades of experience leading individuals, groups, and organizations through consultation and ritual. She is an initiate of Ọbàtálá and Ọ̀ṣun in the lineage of Olúwo Fálolú Adésànyà Awoyadé, a devoted student of Jhankri shamanism through the 27th generational lineage of Bhola Nath Banstola, and Ancestral Medicine’s Ritual Director. She is a descendant of settler-colonists from the British Isles, Belgium, France, freed peoples of West Africa, and indigenous Cherokee and Kaskaskia/Illini nations.
Daniel Foor
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 one week before the course begins, on March 13.
- Lessons 5-8 will be available after Main Call #4.
- Lessons 9-12 will be available after Main Call #8.
Main Teaching Calls are 90 minutes on Thursdays for 12 weeks at 2:00pm New York / 8:00pm Madrid. (See your local time.)
- March 20 with Daniel
- March 27 with Shannon
- April 3 with Amber
- April 10 with Amber
- April 17 with Shannon
- April 24 with Amber
- May 1 with Amber
- May 8 with Shannon
- May 15 with Amber
- May 22 with Shannon
- May 29 with Shannon
- June 5 with Daniel
Practice and Ritual Skills Calls are supplementary calls for additional practice, connection, and Q&A. These are 60 minutes on Tuesdays for 11 weeks at 8:30pm US Eastern with Chi Young Kim.
- March 25
- April 1
- April 8
- April 15
- April 22
- April 29
- May 6
- May 13
- May 20
- May 27
- June 3
All calls are recorded and can be viewed approximately 24-48 hours later.
All live teaching calls will be recorded. And all recordings will be made available within the course portal to watch and listen to at your leisure, with access in perpetuity.
These calls focus on the core content of the course and will generally reference the most recent lessons released. The Practice and Ritual Support calls guided by Shannon Willis offer time for specific questions and support and will also be recorded.
This is a 12-week course. Each pre-recorded lesson requires approximately 90 minutes per week and live weekly teaching calls are an additional 60-90 minutes. We also offer additional optional practice and ritual skills calls for one hour. Lessons are sequenced in an intentional way, so it’s recommended to create time for yourself to follow the lessons in order.
That said, the emphasis of this course is ritual skill building to support your daily life and practice well beyond these 12 weeks. So don’t let the feeling of “falling behind” keep you from joining the calls or enjoying the community, course material, and resources. There aren’t goals to hit within this course, and there’s no test; the lineage repair process simply needs space and time to unfold.
You’ll have access to course materials indefinitely, and all live calls will be recorded and placed into your course dashboard in the days following each call. So every moment of every teaching, including practice calls, can be returned to later.
In early 2023 we made significant updates to the structure of Ancestral Lineage Healing. If you took Ancestral Lineage Healing before, we think you’ll enjoy the updated focus on skill-building. The heart of the material is the same, but the outcomes and learning objectives are more clear. Some of the changes enabled us to offer this course at a lower cost, which makes it more accessible overall, which is a core value.
Support for these two groups include private discussion forums and 30-minute small group breakout spaces after the main teaching calls each week. Experienced course supporters who are familiar with the curriculum of Ancestral Lineage Healing and also identify with that affinity group will anchor these spaces. Details on affinity spaces, their intentions, and criteria for participation can be found here.
We ask folks to mindfully self-select for participation in these spaces, as best meets your identities and the communities within which you wish to be supported during this course. You’re welcome to participate as often or as little as you wish. There’s also no pressure to opt in.
We recognize there are many other affinity space interests. We encourage participants to self-organize through the private course connection space if interested in forming groups beyond the four available. In the event that there is not sufficient interest or we are missing a course supporter, it’s possible not all of these spaces will be available.
While the course and the lineage repair process are designed with ritual safety and self-paced practice in mind, this tender journey with your ancestors can bring up challenging emotions. If at any point in this course you feel overwhelmed, consider starting with participation in the Practice and Ritual Skills call.
If additional support is useful, you’re also welcome to reach out to someone in the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network for one-on-one sessions. This additional service is not included in the course, but many practitioners offer low-cost personal sessions to support financial accessibility and most are available for remote/online work.
Returning participants to the Ancestral Lineage Healing online course will receive an email with a special discount. If you do not receive this email by March 1, please email info@ancestralmedicine.org to request the link to register at this discounted price.
All of our lesson videos have 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.
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.
We’d be happy to help with any additional questions! Reach out to info@ancestralmedicine.org with your question and someone from our team will be in touch usually within two business days.
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