About 37,000 years ago, humans entered western Eurasia (now known as Europe) through a hunting corridor bounded by glaciers, a perfect climatic sweet spot for their lifestyle. Like other hunter-gatherers around the world, they likely practiced shamanism.

At the same time, all across northern Eurasia — stretching to far eastern Siberia — shamanic cultures honored a “first shaman” who was female. The oldest shaman grave found to date was discovered near Dolni Vestonice, the center of this area.

Dolni was an elder who created and fired pottery figurines, 12,000 years before anyone else was known to create pottery vessels. She practiced the shamanic ways of her ancestors and passed them down through the millennia to others who walked between the worlds to help their people.

Her people, as well as all of our collective ancestors, were creative, resilient, and resourceful. They didn’t just survive, they thrived, and we can access their wisdom and powers for support now.

You’ll discover:

• The “First Shaman’s Fire,” a virtual, collective altar to work in during and between course sessions
• The ways of people during the last Ice Age
• An ancestral shaman in your own ancestry
• How to tap into the supportive energies of your ancestral shaman for guidance and power
• How to create a pristine collective field of energy to do effective group work and uplift the collective energies throughout the world

The climate changes we face are not unprecedented. Our ancestors experienced tremendous climatic shifts at the end of the last Ice Age. Sea levels rose over 200 feet and weather patterns changed all over the globe.

To adapt to the changes in your own life, it’s important to identify and heal the fears that may be limiting your creativity and resourcefulness. When you can do this, you become more grounded and able to think more clearly, and can innovate better solutions to life’s challenges. You step into a place of true power.

You’ll learn ways to uncover your subconscious fears and to experience healing. You’ll also meet an elder who thrived during the last great climate changes and who holds a wisdom story for us all.

You’ll discover:

• The great changes of climate and culture the ancestors experienced
• How to activate the resourcefulness and resilience of our ancestors, which live within you
• The nature of your subconscious fears — and experience a healing of those fears
• How earth energies are experienced inside and around you
• The power and endurance of ancestral stories

The Norse creation story contends that a great emptiness existed before anything else, and that opposites — Ultimate Cold and Ultimate Fire — collided to spark the first vibrations and the creation of Ymir, who represents undifferentiated matter and the building blocks of our reality.

Ymir was later dismembered to become the ordered elements of our familiar world. However, there were still unordered, wild, and anarchic aspects of Ymir that remained.

You’ll learn how oppositional energies, such as order and chaos, the known and the unknown, the familiar and foreign, need to be present for life to be continually renewed.

You’ll:

• Explore sacred stillness
• Experience the Norse moment of creation, when Ice and Fire collided to create vibration
• Discover how creation is continually happening inside your own body
• Why your linear mind’s urges to create order cannot — nor should it try to — eradicate or partition off that which is wild, chaotic, or unfamiliar
• Discover how trying to use force, or macht, to control your life prevents you from fully entering its rich flow

Our cultures — and our environment — need healthy feminine and masculine energies to be in harmony, so we can take our next wise steps as a species. To achieve this, we need to cultivate a more balanced experience of the feminine.

The Divine Feminine teaches us the “art of being” and how we can help transform our outer world by dropping into our own feminine power within. This is how we can become a healing presence in the world.

We’ll meet Freyja, a Norse Earth Goddess of the stone age, who is also representative of the “first shaman.” She’s known as the Goddess of sex, beauty, gold, war, prophesy, and death, and encompasses both Innangard (order, civilization) and Útangard (chaos, wildness). She is also a priestess who makes offerings, a practice used in shamanic cultures to help keep an energetic balance.

As a representative of the first shaman, Freyja can support us to open to the power of the Divine Feminine.

You’ll discover:

• Ways you may be limiting your soul expression
• The possibilities inherent in learning to embody the Divine Feminine
• How the natural elements can be your allies, teaching you about “going with the flow” versus striving for control
• How the Divine Feminine exists in all humans and all of nature
• How to use ceremony to cultivate harmony and release impediments to feminine energy

The Aesir are a hierarchy, ruled by the “sky father,” Óðinn, and are archetypal representatives of the newcomers from the East. They maintain control of the nine worlds by exerting power over others, with particular attention to partitioning off the forces of Utangard. Only Asgard and Midgard (home of the human world) are considered to be Innangard (or civilized).

Óðinn is a wanderer and seeker, who makes forays into the Utangard. He epitomizes the desire to understand all that is mysterious or challenging. In that way, he is the personification of the human shaman. He isn’t a born shaman like Freyja; instead, he has to learn how to be one, just like us.

You’ll discover:

• The energy of the Divine Masculine that epitomizes truth, courage, inner strength, and right action
• How shamanic journeying can help you expand your ability to hold contrasting energies
• How Óðinn sought his own path of initiation
• How experiencing the wild energies of nature can help open your shamanic vision
• Why ordinary perception and ego need to be surrendered if we are to have a new vision of ourselves and the future

In the beginning of the Norse creation myths, there were the giants (or jötnar), primordial beings “more powerful than the Gods.” They include the Norns, the 3-sister jötnar who brings matter into form and dissolves it again.

Urð is the eldest sister, Verðandi the middle sister, and Skuld the youngest, but they may actually be just one Urð, representative of the Divine Mind manifesting physical existence in the moment when Spirit comes into form.

While Freyja held sway over the sky, land, nature, and the world of men, illustrated in the cycles of life, the Norns were responsible for larger patterns that influenced the lives of the Gods — the cycles of change that lie beyond the range of human memory or calculations.

You’ll discover:

• The role that the Norns play in creation
• How limiting beliefs can restrain your ability to intentionally shape your reality
• What role expanding consciousness has on creation
• How emulating Freyja’s embodiment of the “indwelling light of consciousness” can support you in the creation of new ways of being
• The interplay between infinite vibration (Ørlög) and the active role of consciousness that shapes vibration (Wyrd)

In the Norse stories, we are confronted by the end of all worlds AND the potential for rebirth and renewal…

After the final catastrophe, or Ragnarök, the World Tree, Yggdrasil, remains as a framework for a New World. So does the Goddess Freyja, who continues to attend to the harmony of the people and land through the offering of ceremonies.

Two new humans, the woman and man, Lif and Lifthrasir (representative of balanced feminine and masculine energies), also survive by taking refuge inside the World Tree.

As our world faces a Ragnarök of our own making, it’s important to make the necessary changes in ourselves to stop replicating a reality that no longer serves us.

Shamans know that the entire cosmos is a hologram. That means each part of it — you, me, and everyone — is a reflection of and is reflected in, the whole. It is through the power of inherent, a shift in our consciousness, that we can effect positive change for the entirety of creation.

How we think, feel, and interact with others, and with nature, can harmonize Innangard (order) and Utangard (chaos). To do this, we must release old, dysfunctional paradigms we may still be subconsciously aligned with.

We are radiant beings living in a physical world that we want to preserve and renew for future generations.

You’ll discover:

• The power of repetitive dismemberments to release remnants of divisive, oppressive paradigms that may be living in our subconscious
• Your power to transform the outer world by focusing on your own life
• How to embrace your ability to affect the whole through the way you are in the world
• A path for moving forward with purpose
• How to close the course circle, yet also keep this unseen sacred space open for continued personal and collective work

Our collective human ancestors likely experienced expanded consciousness states every night by the fire. Fire flickers at same rate as the theta brain wave. This brain wave supports visionary experiences. Expanded-consciousness journeying is a natural human ability. Regular journeying provides you with enhanced creativity and imagination, and better problem-solving and troubleshooting abilities. It also fuels your capacity to innovate, heightens your intuition, makes it easier for you to implement changes, enhances your ability to learn, improves memory retention, supports integration of new ideas, and relieves stress!

Fire flickers at the same rhythm and speed as shamanic journey drumming. This video of a dancing fire combined with the sounds of drumming, offers you a unique, eyes-open method for shamanic journeying. In addition, this visual method for attaining shamanic trance is especially useful for those with hearing impairments. Includes the PDF, Using a Fire for Shamanic Journeying, to deepen your learning.

This guided dismemberment/rememberment is designed to refresh and renew your body, mind, and spirit by entering the “Field of Infinite Vibrations” that creates and recreates matter. This consciousness-altering track may be used weekly as part of your ongoing renewal. Features spoken word by Evelyn C. Rysdyk with music from the Hypnotica album by Christopher Lloyd Clarke. Licensed by Enlightened Audio.

In Norse myths, Ragnarök was angered by the foolish actions of warring gods — and all the worlds were destroyed by a series of disasters. Join Evelyn as she shares her belief that we’re now facing a similar cataclysm on a global scale. However, because shamans have always worked to weave life-giving harmony, there is hope. Through the shamanic path of transforming ourselves and engaging the collective, we have the power to step away from the brink and turn our hearts toward renewal. During this uplifting session, you’ll discover how myths foretold that shamanic practice can help birth a renewal and that YOU have the power to support a positive turn in the trajectory of our human collective. You’ll also be led in a guided journey of our world transformed — a step toward bringing it into reality.