Shamanic journeys provide you with the navigation skills you require in real life. You can accelerate prescribed change and arrive more easily and quickly at the insights you need to transcend your challenges.

The best approach to journeying is the same as the approach to living — to be a hollow bone and allow yourself to be filled with what you need to know.

In this opening module, you’ll learn how to enter the journey in the classic Celtic style — through a mist! Mist itself is a betwixt and between, and when the mist lifts, you know you’ve entered another realm. Everything changes, and you acquire new rules, new powers, and new helpers.

For the ancient seafarers, that mist was a seamist that caused unexpected things to happen. Once traversed, questions that had never before been asked came to mind, and curiosities and speculations that had long been asleep were awakened.

Jane will introduce you to the tale of Maelduin, who goes to sea seeking revenge for his father’s murder. However, at the journey’s end, he’s so transformed that he only desires peace with his father’s killers.

In this session, Jane will guide you on such a sea journey — called immrama — to unveil the magical islands that old Celtic sea-adventurers, like Maelduin, explored.

In Module 1, you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Use the betwixt and between aspects of nature to enhance and shape your journey experience
• Understand the role intention plays in strengthening and accelerating transformation
• Celebrate and share the stories of change you’ve already lived
• Allow yourself to unravel and shed what no longer serves you

As a result of the pandemic, most of us have been feeling the constriction of hibernation rather keenly this past year. However, periods of isolation are neither new nor unnecessary.

The ancients recognized the value of withdrawal from the outer world — from normal routine and demands — to regain a closer and new perspective of the self. Removal of the self from its normal context brings new information and insight, greater self-knowing, and the calm and clarity of sanctuary.

With the din of ongoing “ordinary” life, and the accompanying chaos, many people have a tendency to lose their sense of self.

Hibernation is a time of reflection and contemplation, integration and processing. It’s an opportunity to review the freneticism you’re withdrawing from and ask deep and relevant questions about the pace and complexion of your life. In the quiet comes insight, a distillation of ideas, renewed perspective, and vigor.

Periods of hibernation and detachment end when they’re meant to — no sooner, no later — and reemergence as a changed self into a changed world may feel daunting.

In this module, you’ll explore the tale of Mabon ap Modron, a man who was taken as a baby and held hostage in a mysterious, unreachable place — a betwixt and between space — where he cried out, awaiting rescue. Once rescued, he was unseasoned by the world, but his captivity had given him new wisdom and foresight, making him an invaluable member of King Arthur’s war band.

Similarly, your journey in this class will reveal the unique, necessary, and invaluable skills and insights you’re gaining during the pandemic, which will help you when you reemerge.

In this session, you’ll understand:

• How the soul speaks to you in times of quiet
• The connection between hibernation and creative ingenuity
• Why hibernation strengthens your relationship with yourself
• Ways to align yourself with divine timing

Sometimes conflict crashes into the seeming tranquility and balance of our lives quite unexpectedly.

It can take the form of a divorce, a lawsuit, a family feud, political upheaval, or dis-ease at work. It’s when things suddenly go topsy-turvy, and you’re left to grapple with all the possible implications of this new and uninvited regime.

The tension between wanting things to return to their former stasis and the pressing need for havoc to reign runs high until something breaks, and a boiling point is reached. And, although resolution brings new wisdom and perspective, we can also become cynical or lose our innocence.

The story of Emer, Cu Cuchulainn, and Fand is the backdrop for your exploration of conflict in this session, and shows you how the betwixt and between of trial and ordeal can alter you and your relationships forever.

The purpose of the journey is to find resolution and a way to release yourself from the loop of conflict.

In this module, Jane will help you:

• Distinguish what part of your crisis lies in the distant past
• Heal the old wounds that become magnified when there’s upheaval in your life
• Determine what’s required for you to free yourself from conflict
• Create a ceremony of resolution

As you mature and move through life, you’re conditioned by many things — your upbringing, education, socialization, family creed, trauma, disappointment, and loss.

These influences create an identity that may not reflect your authentic self, nor align with your soul’s purpose. The gap between the true self and the conditioned self is where struggle resides — and the wider the gap, the greater the struggle.

This gap is known as the divided self and is, in and of itself, a betwixt and between place.

Largely operating under illusion, the conditioned self keeps you captive in a long-term spell that can both prevent you from being seen for who you are, and prevent you from pursuing the original purpose that brought you into this life.

The girl who’s told she can’t sing or draw. The boy who’s told he’s clumsy and irresponsible. The child who’s not permitted to explore wonder, curiosity, imagination, or adventure. These are all examples of conditioning, and the kind of spell that discourages people from investigating their innate gifts and talents.

The stories you’ll look at in this class, the Children of Lir and the Wooing of Etain, explore the longtime captivity of characters whose jealous rivals have cast spells on them.

In this module, you’ll acquire:

• A way to unveil the illusions that hold you under their spell through a journey to the Otherworld
• A greater trust in yourself and a deeper awareness of the love and wisdom of the soul
• Forgiveness for the spell your conditioning has put you under and a sense of the insights you’ve gained from your struggle
• Compassion for the conditioned parts of yourself that hide and limit your true self
• A lost gift or talent that will help you remember and express a forgotten aspect of yourself

Spiritual and contemplative practice tells us that nothing is ever lost — a premise that’s difficult to believe or embody throughout our daily lives.

Loss is eviscerating and real in a way that feels indisputable. Even where no physical death has actually occurred, the experience of any loss can feel like grieving a death.

Loss requires us to grieve — to enter and set up camp for an undetermined period of time in a world devoid of meaning or comfort. Though we often try to escape or shortcut grief, it can’t be avoided.

The Celtic people have long understood the process of mourning and all it requires. According to their tradition, losing something that largely defines and shapes us requires that we leave that identity and existence — just as a dying person does. We must grieve the self that once was, as much as we grieve the loss that took it away.

In this session, you’ll examine the story of Finn and Sadbh — two lovers pulled apart and lost to one another by a force greater than themselves.

In this session, you’ll:

• Have the opportunity to grieve with conscious intention and acceptance
• Honor the part of you that’s been lost
• Release with love whoever or whatever is gone
• Glimpse and shape the newly forming self that will emerge from this loss

Dismemberment is an archetypal shamanic journey experience in which you’re disassembled and reconfigured in a way that enables you to contend more effectively with ongoing or upcoming challenges.

Dismemberment can be a painful and disorienting betwixt and between process that occurs on this plane in real time. Severe illness, disability, aging, or rejection by one’s community, for example, are all experiences that can provoke the gruesome, disintegrating process of dismemberment.

The person you once were begins to fall apart. Former status, standing, reputation, and formidability diminish, and you may experience a vulnerable crumbling of your identity. The things you thought you could rely on prove flimsy and demand a new form and integrity moving forward.

In this class, Jane will lead you through the story of the Welsh hero Lleu, a misbegotten boy who gains all he has through trickery and deception — only to be betrayed by his wife and slain by a rival. He turns into an eagle and begins to disintegrate. Lleu’s uncle gathers the pieces and brings them to a magician, enabling him to heal in his own way in his own time.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• The importance of letting go of what you thought you knew and starting over with nothing
• A rich opportunity to develop greater self-reliance
• The freedom implied in casting away the masks you’ve always depended on
• A deeper trust in the soul’s constant movement toward wholeness

In this closing session, you’ll focus on the battles within you, rather than your struggles with the world around you.

Interior challenges can result in puzzling periods of overwhelm, anxiety, or depression that seem endless. Your “inner demons” seem to be engineered more by the unseen world, than the seen one, and whether or not you want to work with the unseen world, it lives around and within you, and must be acknowledged and heard.

Your own divine aspect speaks to you through the confounding battles deeply rooted within you.

Once you’ve battled enough and start your process of self-examination, your soul releases you, hoping you’ll go forward more mindfully. And, if you refuse to change, your inner demons will come calling again.

True triumph can’t happen until you’re brave enough to ask the questions you’ve never asked before, until you’re willing to accept the answers you’ve always been afraid to hear, until you have the courage to claim and stand firmly in your own sovereignty.

In this final class, you’ll learn about the Battle of Moytura, where the conflict between two storied races — the Tuatha Dé Danaan, who represent order and mastery, and the Fomorians, who represent chaos and destruction — exemplifies the theme of challenge and triumph.

In this session, you’ll cultivate:

• A greater understanding of the divided self
• Clarity about the longstanding war within you, and what keeps it going
• More strength and entitlement to live free of self-constraint and fear
• A better sense of the work you’re called to undertake in this life, and the ways you talk yourself out of it

Being Celtic
Video Dialogue With Jane Burns and Eimear Stassin

In this podcast episode with host and nature lover Eimear Stassin (also a trainer, coach, storyteller, and poet), Jane shares the ways in which the ancient Celtic peoples were shamanic, and how some of their approaches to perceiving and being in the world still exist. She focuses on the rich traditions of “marrying the land,” honoring the Celtic Wisdom Wheel, and Celtic death rites such as keening.

I Am Possible
Video Dialogue With Jane Burns and Mar Guerrero

Fully expressing your deepest soul is possible — and it’s your birthright. In this fascinating conversation, Jane and Mar Guerrero (language teacher, Shamanic Breathwork Facilitator, Reiki Master, and more) explore the role that soul loss plays when we become divorced from our own authenticity and our connection to our creativity. You’ll explore how the need to belong impacts our dreams and disconnects us from our life path. And Jane provides several methods for tracking down and identifying what those lost dreams are, so you can retrieve yours.

Divine Instruments: The Etiquette of Sovereignty
Video Dialogue With Jane Burns and Helena Grant

What is sovereignty from a Celtic Shamanism perspective? In this empowering conversation guided by Certified Existential Kink Coach Helena Grant (also a yoga teacher, intuitive healer, and expert storyteller), Jane shares how sovereignty is the elevated sacred center of the Celtic Wisdom Wheel. It’s thought of as a goddess — as the Divine Feminine. Discover how your sovereignty is based on your allegiance to the yearning of your soul, your alignment with the divine and eternal, and your connection to your true authenticity, rather than the conditioning you’ve received about the seeming limits on your capabilities. As you’ll come to understand, the acquisition of sovereignty is all about moving into the IS-ness of yourself.