Initiations:
A Life of Ritual
Skills for Making Medicine from Life's Hardship
TUESDAYS
BEGINNING JUNE 3
12pm Vancouver | 3pm New York | 20:00 London
About the Course
Initiation isn’t just a concept—it’s a necessity. If you wish you’d had rites of passage, mentors, or a different kind of parenting—if you’ve felt alone through life’s major transitions—this course draws on global traditions of ritual arts and developmental psychology to give you tools and guidance to reclaim the wisdom that has always existed in the bones of the world.
This course won’t give you the rites of passage you were denied—that would take a community, a lineage, a lifetime. But, through live teachings, pre-recorded lessons, guided ritual practice, and peer connection, this course does offer a way to start to metabolize life’s challenges into greater strength, compassion, and wisdom.
Our character is forged through a lifetime of moments that call for sacred containers, dedicated practice, and space for reflection.
— Daniel Foor
Course Overview
Something essential was lost.
For thousands of years, cultures across the world have known that life’s transitions require ritual, community witnessing, and initiatory moments—sacred experiences that help us step fully into each new stage of life. These rites of passage were once considered essential to a healthy, mature, and fulfilled existence.
But in modern society, most of us never received these rites. We entered adulthood without true initiation. We faced grief, heartbreak, and aging without communal support. We longed for elders to guide us, for rituals to mark our growth, for a sense of belonging that extended beyond the self.
Instead, many of us feel stuck—caught in old patterns, questioning our purpose, yearning for something we can’t quite name. Without initiatory moments, we drift. Without ritual containers, our experiences go unmetabolized, lingering as unresolved tension in the psyche, body, and soul.
This course exists to patch that cultural gap.
Gain ritual skills to navigate life’s transitions
Reclaim the initiatory experiences that modern society often overlooks
Acquire tools to cultivate resilience, belonging, and purpose
Deepen your capacity for transformation
This course offers...
- A Map of Life’s Thresholds: Learn how ancient and contemporary traditions mark the great transitions of life—from childhood to elderhood, birth to death, and beyond.
- Ritual Skills for Transformation: Gain practical, grounded ritual tools to help you navigate life’s big shifts with intention and wisdom.
- Healing Stuckness & Feeling Met: If you’ve ever felt like you skipped an essential milestone—this course will help you name, reclaim, and integrate it.
- A Path Toward Eldership: Learn what it means to live well and die well, embracing the responsibilities of maturity and legacy.
Over 12 weeks, we will explore the sacred art of initiation—how cultures around the world have understood life’s great thresholds and how we can reclaim this wisdom in modern times. Through teachings on ritual, life stages, and rites of passage, this course provides tools to help you process your past, integrate unacknowledged experience, and step fully into your next chapter.
12 live calls with AM Ritual Director, Shannon Willis
18 hours of recorded lessons with AM Founder, Daniel Foor
24+ opportunities for substantive guided ritual practice
20+ carefully curated resources to accompany lessons
Lifetime access to all course materials
Access to a dedicated community discussion space
Course Curriculum
Lesson One: Infancy, Voice, and Invocation
- Explore sacred aspects of conception, birth, and early childhood
- Consider the role of language and culture in early development
- Focus on the ritual skills of prayer, song, appeal, and invocation
- Learn tangible ways to utilize and strengthen invocation practices
- Enjoy resources on stages of consciousness and early childhood
Topic of the live call: Explore ways to dissolve blocks to authentic expression
Lesson Two: Childhood, Boundaries, and Safety
- Explore key developmental milestones and challenges of childhood
- Gently reflect on your early life in light of your personal boundaries today
- Affirm connections between physical, psychological, and spiritual safety
- Learn effective practices for establishing ritual safety and boundaries
- Enjoy resources on animism, childhood, and ritual for young people
Topic of the live call: Expanding into spiritual sources of felt safety in your life
Lesson Three: Embodiment, Pleasure, and Being Whole
- Explore the mysteries of incarnation and embodiment over a lifespan
- Affirm body, sex, and pleasure positivity in support of embodiment
- Reflect on remedies for the fragmentation of soul, power, and psyche
- Engage in practices to welcome back and celebrate aspects of self
- Enjoy resources on non-duality, embodiment, and cultivating presence
Topic of the live call: Practice extending gratitude to undervalued aspects of self
Lesson Four: Adolescence, Courage, and Calling
- Consider youth rites of passage connected to the ability to call in new life
- Explore connections between accountability and accessing guidance
- Reflect on experiences with authority and connection to authentic power
- Practice ways to directly access reliable spiritual guidance and support
- Enjoy resources on youth rites of passage and ethical development
Topic of the live call: Learn to ritually clarify and call on your council of support
Lesson Five: Early Adulthood, Devotion, and Feeding Life
- Explore love and devotion as foundational to spiritual development
- Learn ways to intentionally cultivate heart courage and tenderness
- Reflect on the healing power of relationships, human and otherwise
- Enact love and devotion by learning tangible, ritual offering practices
- Enjoy poetry, art, and other resources on devotion and the sacred
Topic of the live call: Revisit and amplify personal experiences of devotional love
Lesson Six: Assisting Older Lineage Ancestors
- Consider how little we control and the sacred functions of pain and limitation
- Explore impacts of personal loss and tragedy on soul-level development
- Reflect on the courage required to choose compassion over resentment
- Practice ritual skills to receive, regulate, and metabolize grief and sorrow
- Enjoy resources on lament, heartache, and love in response to suffering
Topic of the live call: Invite spirit-level support for transforming pain into tenderness
Lesson Seven: Midlife, Destiny, and Cleaning House
- Explore pragmatic frameworks for awakening and adult development
- Reflect on the process of clarifying, accepting, and living personal destiny
- Learn ways to identify and resolve blocks to more authentic expression
- Practice safely communing with and incorporating benevolent forces
- Enjoy resources on physical embodiment and communion with the powers
Topic of the live call: Practice further clarifying the prescriptions for your specific destiny
Lesson Eight: Early Elderhood, Warriorship, and Legacy
- Consider the myriad of challenges that follow from embracing destiny
- Learn about hazards, ritual protection, and the need to guard legacy
- Assess your current level of risk and willingness to address concerns
- Practice partnering with supportive powers to increase ritual protection
- Enjoy resources on evil, malice, self-defense, and sacred warriorship
Topic of the live call: Explore realistic views on leadership and staying in your power
Lesson Nine: Power, Reckoning, and Making Amends
- Reflect on meanings and right uses of both worldly and spiritual power
- Consider the benefits of courageously facing any unresolved wounding
- Learn ways to honestly assess your life and make any needed repairs
- Practice calling back personal power from past mistakes and traumas
- Enjoy resources on power, imperfection, and responsible leadership
Topic of the live call: Make space for honoring fears around holding greater responsibility
Lesson Ten: Elderhood, Humility, and Mending the World
- Consider elder rites of passage and pathways for ongoing cultivation
- Affirm the power and importance of joy, levity, play, and irreverence
- Learn to anchor identity to more stable ancestral and ecological sources
- Ritually turn toward and recommit to alleviating the suffering of the world
- Enjoy resources on elderhood rites of passage and responsibilities
Topic of the live call: Ritually explore your relationship with healthy elders and elderhood
Lesson Eleven: Eclipse, Dying, and Becoming Ancestor
- Explore death of the body as a rite of passage to becoming ancestor
- Learn ways to further support ego death before physical death
- Continue to soften unhelpful binaries and to access unitive states
- Practice steady communion with elder forces for more effective service
- Enjoy resources on the ancestralization process and post-death journey
Topic of the live call: Gently invite wisdom from the realities beyond your personal death
Lesson Twelve: Awakening, Wisdom, and Becoming What Is
- Explore teachings on consciousness after dying and becoming an ancestor
- Learn pragmatic ways to prioritize soul cultivation over the lifespan
- Reflect on your life through the long view of increasing love and wisdom
- Practice experiencing personal center as opening to the ground of being
- Enjoy resources on the far reaches of human development and potential
Topic of the live call: Practice resting in the present, both in stillness and in motion
Register for Initiations: A Life of Ritual
3 and 6 month payment plans available at checkout at 0% interest.
Early Registration | 19% Off
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Discount rate available until April 17 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 Wednesday, May 28. Replies will be sent by Friday, May 30.
Course Schedule
Live calls and Breakout Groups
- Calls are 90min total and guided by Shannon Willis
- 12 Tuesdays, June 3 through August 19 (12pm Vancouver, 3pm New York, 20:00 London)
- First 60min is teaching, practice and Q&A and the final 30min is small groups anchored by trained ritualists
PRE-RECORDED LESSONS
- 12 pre-recorded lessons of about 90 min by Daniel Foor. These will be released in batches of four throughout the course.
- We recommend watching the lessons before the live calls; however, the calls support the lessons, and the content is not duplicative. Still try to join live even if you’re not keeping pace.
All live calls will be recorded and will be also available alongside the pre-recorded lessons indefinitely.
About the Instructors
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.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Main Teaching Calls | 90 min | Tuesdays
12 Tuesdays for 90 min each, June 3 through August 19
12pm Vancouver | 3pm New York | 20:00 London
Call structure
– 60 min teachings with time for guided practice and Q&A
– Followed by 30 min of small breakout groups
– No break
Call 1: June 3
Call 2: June 10
Call 3: June 17
Call 4: June 24
Call 5: July 1
Call 6: July 8
Call 7: July 15
Call 8: July 22
Call 9: July 29
Call 10: August 5
Call 11: August 12
Call 12: August 19
Thanks to our international community of learners for your understanding around the challenges of time-zone inclusivity. The timing of the main calls for this course will favor participants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas; however, all who register get lifetime access to recordings, and you’re welcome to send in questions for our teaching team to answer during live calls or in written form.
Returning participants to Initiations: A Life of Ritual will receive an email with a special discount. If you do not receive this email by April 5, please email info@ancestralmedicine.org to request the link to register at this discounted price.
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. Resources included with each lesson favor ancestrally and geographically diverse voices. Additionally, the course will include ancestrally and culturally diverse call anchors and break-out group supporters with the option of being in a BIPOC- or LGBTQ-exclusive breakout.
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.
This course directly names and creates a welcoming space for exploration of vulnerable topics related to cultural loss and recovery and different forms of violence and harm in the world. The material may stir complicated emotions for some participants. In addition to the weekly live call, additional support may be important as the course is not a replacement for personal therapy or spiritual care.
Enrollment includes access to our Connection Space – an online discussion platform for students, supportive practitioners 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.
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 lesson videos have automatic closed captioning, as well additional downloadable audio-only versions. Pre-recorded lessons include transcripts. 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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