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THE CURRICULUM
HOW THE TRAINING UNFOLDS
THE SACRED HEALING SCHOOL OF ANCESTRAL MEDICINE
A real apprenticeship in the craft of holding sacred space, walked week by week over roughly a year, with real supervised ceremonies, personal mentorship, and a lineage that holds you for life.
WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT
Most facilitator trainings are studied online, teach facilitation as information, and hand out a certificate at the end. This is something else.
Here you actually apprentice. You receive the medicine, you serve beside Danny, and you lead your own ceremonies under a mentor's eye before you ever go out on your own. What follows is the whole path, laid out honestly, so you can see exactly what you would be walking into.
BEYOND ANY OTHER PROGRAM
EIGHT PROMISES, NOT EIGHT FEATURES
Having looked closely at how the leading programs are built, here is what sets this school apart. These are not selling points. They are commitments.
01
A REAL APPRENTICESHIP
Almost no other program can let a student serve real medicine to real people. Here you do. You receive, you co-serve beside Danny, and you lead under a mentor's eye, before you ever go out on your own.
04
THE SAFE AND ETHICAL SCHOOL
This field has a real shadow. We are openly, rigorously honest about consent, boundaries, power, and accountability, with living structures, not a single ethics lecture. In a world with trust problems, we are the trustworthy.
07
VOCATION, NOT JUST KNOWLEDGE
We teach you how to actually live this: build your own container, carry yourself as a public servant of medicine, and stand on your own. The Sacred Ministry Set-Up is part of this arc.
02
INTEGRATION MASTERY
Most programs teach the ceremony and skimp the part that decides whether a life actually changes. We make integration a signature strength: the long arc, the hard cases, and telling spiritual emergence from emergency.
05
TRUE LINEAGE AND RECIPROCITY
Real elders and tradition-keepers, genuine transmission, and a practice of giving back to the source communities. Authenticity that cannot be faked.
08
HELD FOR LIFE
Others sell a certificate and end the relationship. You join a living lineage with lifelong supervision, a place to keep serving, and a circle that holds you for good.
03
THE FACILITATOR AS INSTRUMENT
Because the circle is only six to eight, you are mentored personally and do real work on your own nervous system, shadow, and presence. In the 2027 circle you apprentice directly under Danny himself.
06
THE LIVING TOOLKIT
You graduate with the actual operating system of a safe practice: screening and consent frameworks, integration protocols, music and ceremony templates, and emergency plans. You do not start from scratch.
And two commitments that hold all of it: the credential is earned by demonstrated skill, not by attendance.
And admission is by calling, not by who can pay.
THE WEEKLY RHYTHM
THE SAME FOUR PARTS, EVERY WEEK
Every week moves through the same shape, roughly four hours, so the rhythm becomes familiar and livable.
01
GUIDED STUDY
About 90 minutes, on your own time. A recorded teaching, reading, or listening, released at the start of the week.
04
REFLECTION
About 20 minutes. A short written or recorded integration, kept in your living portfolio.
02
THE WEDNESDAY CIRCLE
Two hours, live, 5:00 to 7:00 PM Pacific, always recorded. The heartbeat of the school: teaching, discussion, demonstration, and live practice together.
03
PRACTICE OR EMBODIMENT
About 30 to 45 minutes. A hands-on exercise that puts the week's teaching into the body.
Personal mentorship. From week one you are mentored one to one, with regular personal check-ins all the way through. In the founding circle, that mentor is Danny himself. As the school grows, graduates who reach the Servant of the Medicine tier become mentors for the cohorts that follow.
The living toolkit. Each module hands you real, usable tools, forms, scripts, protocols, and templates, that you keep and carry into your own practice.
Integration weeks. Every third or fourth week is an integration week: rest, a peer pod, and time for the learning to land. Integration is where the craft takes root, so it is built into the calendar, not squeezed around it.
THE JOURNEY
THREE PHASES, ONE PATH
You begin with a shared foundation, choose the medicine you are called to serve, and, for those called to carry the lineage, go on to mastery.
PHASE ONE · just under 6 months
FOUNDATIONS
Earns: Ceremonial Steward
The shared core everyone completes first, medicine-agnostic, is the craft of the container itself. Twenty-four live weeks, equinox to equinox, closing with an in-person intensive at the Sacred Desert Sanctuary.
PHASE TWO · ABOUT 6 TO 8 MONTHS
YOUR SPECIALTY TRACK
Earns: Sacred Healing Facilitator
You choose the medicine you are called to serve and walk the living progression: receive, co-facilitate, facilitate. Real ceremonies, real people, real feedback, paced to the sanctuary's calendar.
PHASE THREE · OPTIONAL, 12 TO 24 MONTH
MASTERY
Earns: Servant of the Medicine
For those called to serve independently and carry the lineage. A second specialty, ongoing mentorship hours, and a real teaching contribution to the next cohort. Where a graduate becomes a mentor.
PHASE ONE, IN FULL
FOUNDATIONS, WEEK BY WEEK
Eight modules, taught across twenty four live weeks from one equinox to the next, then gathered into the body at the in-person intensive. This is the shared craft that lives beneath every medicine.
01
Orientation and Right Relationship
Week 1 · Entering the Circle
The school's covenant, and what "servant of the medicine" actually asks of you. The cohort forms, you meet your mentor, and the living portfolio begins. You write your Calling Statement, which you will re-read unedited at the first gate and again at the intensive.
Week 2 · What Shamanism Is, Whose It Is, and What It Is Not
Precision of language, and the discrimination among myth, metaphor, direct experience, belief, and documented fact. The Indigenous and ancestral roots this stands on, honoring a lineage versus appropriating it, and an honest account of what you were and were not given. A live teaching from a guest elder or tradition-keeper. This is transmission, not a lecture.
Week 3 · Ethics, Power, and the Sacred Covenant
The signed covenant, the power differential, scope as an ethical principle, and the accountability structure that will hold you for life. Every module after this one is taught inside a covenant you have already entered, rather than one you meet on the way out. Toolkit · Code of Ethics + Accountability Agreement
02
The Inner Instrument
Week 4 · Grounding, Protection, and the Discipline of Opening and Closing
Ground, Orient, Open, Close, as a portable daily sequence you will use in every experiential module that follows. Protection reframed as attention, boundary, intention, and closure, rather than as fear management. Your mentor helps you set the personal practice you carry for the year.
Week 5 · Discernment
The four columns: observation, interpretation, uncertainty, action. Telling intuition from impulse, anxiety, projection, wishful thinking, and pattern-making, and testing reliability over time rather than by how vivid something felt. This is the most reused tool in the whole program, applied later to a place, a sensation, a journey, a guide, your own shadow, and finally to whether a real person is ready for a real ceremony.
Week 6 · The Regulated Body · first check-in
Your own nervous system as the instrument: regulation, co-regulation, activation and shutdown, and the felt sense. You can only hold others as steadily as you can hold yourself. A somatic practice you will use before every ceremony you ever hold.
03
The Living World
Week 7 · Animism and Relationship with the Living World
Observation before interpretation, practiced outdoors. Reciprocity as behavior rather than feeling. Asking permission and accepting a no. The four postures: object, resource, symbol, being. This is the lowest-stakes experiential practice in the program, and that is deliberate. It trains the core discipline in conditions where being wrong is free.
Week 8
Week 8 · Energy, Awareness, and the Body
The seven layers hiding inside the word energy, and the permitted-language ladder that keeps you honest about which one you mean. Felt sense, and the four tests for telling your own state from the room's. You are about to generate a great deal of subjective experience, so the vocabulary for reporting it honestly has to exist before the flood, not after.
Week 9 · Cleansing, Clearing, and Sacred Hygiene
The seven layers hiding inside the word energy, and the permitted-language ladder that keeps you honest about which one you mean. Felt sense, and the four tests for telling your own state from the room's. You are about to generate a great deal of subjective experience, so the vocabulary for reporting it honestly has to exist before the flood, not after.
04
The Journey
Week 10 · The Shamanic Journey and the Three Worlds
Journeying itself, with the three worlds taught as a map rather than a doctrine. The journey record kept in four parts: experience, interpretation, questions, integration. Contraindications, and the reasons to stop. This is the program's threshold, and everything before it was preparation for it.
Week 11 · Tobacco
The master plant of the lineage, taught as its own discipline: its role, its relationship to the dieta, and an honest account of its cardiovascular and dependence risk.
Week 12 · Allies, Ancestors, Teachers, and Guides, and the Second Check-In
Relationship without surrendering your own agency. The red flags in guidance: flattery, urgency, isolation, grandiosity, fear, and any instruction to harm. Grief and complex family history, handled with care. This week also carries your second checkpoint, placed immediately before the winter break so that nobody goes into the holidays alone with what surfaced in their first journey.
05
Shadow and Prayer
Week 13 · Shadow, Ego, and the Healer Archetype
Shadow work, countertransference and projection, and the seduction of the healer role. Where power quietly corrupts, and humility as a practice. A shadow inventory reviewed privately with your mentor, a named personal risk pattern, and a concrete accountability practice. It arrives here, not earlier, because by now you have real behavior of your own to examine.
Week 14 · Prayer, Intention, Offerings, and Reciprocity, and the Third Check-In
A thirty-day personal practice covenant. Opening and closing as devotional acts rather than technique, which offerings you have the right to make, and living the prayer through behavior. This week also carries your third checkpoint, the last one before you begin work involving other people. The honest answers here are ready, not yet, and paused.
06
Who You Serve
Week 15 · Reading Readiness: Contraindications and Screening
How the medicines move through body and mind, and the physical, psychological, medication-related, and situational contraindications, taught as safety and screening and never as medical treatment or diagnosis. The screening conversation, red and yellow flags, and the courage to say "not yet" when part of you wants to say yes. Toolkit · Screening and Intake Framework
Week 16 · Consent, Scope, and When to Refer
Genuine informed consent, the scope-of-practice statement, and the truth that a server of ceremony is not a doctor or a therapist. Documentation, confidentiality, escalation boundaries, and building a real referral network. Toolkit · Informed Consent + Scope-of-Practice Statement
07
Holding the Container
Week 17 · The Container and Presence
Designing the room before learning to be in it: set, setting, intention, physical space, access and privacy, staffing and roles. Then presence as the primary tool, the art of not fixing, following rather than leading, and knowing when to speak, when to stay silent, and when to get help. This is the keystone of the whole arc. Toolkit · Container Blueprint
Week 18 · Working with the Terrain: Voice, Touch, and Silence
Meeting fear, grief, rage, catharsis, bliss, silence, and uncertainty without steering or flinching, on trauma-informed foundations. Then the tools of intervention: the consent-for-touch protocol, the voice, music as support rather than performance, and silence as a deliberate act. Restraint is taught before technique, on purpose, because a student who learns technique first will use it. Toolkit · Music Framework + Consent-for-Touch Protocol
08
The Whole Arc of Care
Week 19 · Preparation and Integration as One Arc
The one-to-one preparation call, expectations, logistics, and the dieta and its purpose, taught together with where healing actually lands and the first seventy two hours afterward. Preparation largely decides what integration will have to work with, so they are taught as one arc rather than as bookends. Integration as behavioral change, not insight and not storytelling. Toolkit · Preparation Call Guide + Integration Session Framework
Week 20 · Integration II: The Long Arc and Spiritual Emergence
Integration over months rather than days. Difficult and extended cases, continuity of care, and telling spiritual emergence from spiritual emergency and knowing what each one needs. Recognizing when someone needs a therapist rather than a facilitator, and making that handoff with love.
Week 21 · Emergency Response, Accountability, and Readiness
Medical and psychological emergencies, de-escalation, team roles, escalation, documentation, aftercare, and incident review. Accountability after a mistake, which is the part most programs never teach. CPR and Basic Life Support certification is required and arranged around this week. It comes last on purpose: an emergency protocol is only safe in the hands of someone who can already tell an emergency from an intense but ordinary passage. Toolkit · Emergency Protocol + Escalation Plan
THE FOUNDATIONS INTENSIVE
Four to five days, in person at the Sacred Desert Sanctuary. Everything comes together in the body. You practice holding space, ceremony mechanics, and emergency drills in the real setting; sit your own guided journey and are held through your own integration; and are evaluated in person, hands on, by Danny and the teaching team.
MILESTONE: CEREMONIAL STEWARD, CONFERRED BY DEMONSTRATED COMPETENCY.
PHASE TWO THE SACRED PROGRESSION
RECEIVE, CO-FACILITATE, FACILITATE
You choose the medicine you are called to serve, and walk it through a living progression, in order. This is the part almost no other school can offer: real ceremonies, real people, real feedback. Your mentor and Wednesday circles continue throughout, now as supervision and case consultation.
I
Receive the Medicine
You journey with your chosen medicine yourself, at the sanctuary, and are held through your own integration. This is the ground of everything.
II
Co-facilitate
You serve alongside Danny across real ceremonies. First observing, then holding pieces of the container under direct supervision, with structured feedback after each one.
III
Facilitate Under Supervision
When you are ready, and only when you are ready, you lead ceremonies of your own with Danny present and evaluating, followed by a formal review. "Not yet" is a complete and loving answer.
Milestone: Sacred Healing Facilitator, in your chosen medicine. You have genuinely served, not simulated.
OUR STANDARD
A FLOOR, NOT A FINISH LINE
The numbers above are minimums, not targets, and never a maximum. Think of how a pilot earns their wings. The law sets a floor of forty flight hours, but almost no one is truly ready at forty. Most need sixty or seventy before they can land the plane at night, in a crosswind, when something goes wrong.
No honest instructor signs off a pilot who cannot land safely, no matter what the logbook says. We hold that same standard. You advance when you can hold the container safely and well, and not a moment before. The most intense medicines carry higher minimums, and we will never put someone in the seat of a ceremony who is not truly ready to hold it.
READINESS, NOT A NUMBER, IS ALWAYS THE FINAL WORD.
THE VOCATION AND LIVELIHOOD ARC
HOW TO ACTUALLY LIVE THIS
This is what nearly every other program leaves out entirely. Woven through the last stretch of Phase Two, running alongside your final ceremonies, is a set of teachings on standing on your own with integrity.
Building your own container. Setting up your space, your circle, and your rhythm.
Ethical livelihood. Pricing with integrity, holding money cleanly, and avoiding the traps of dependency and guru dynamics.
Finding and screening your own people. Carrying the screening and consent practices into your own work.
Operations and care. The real logistics of holding ceremony safely and responsibly.
The Sacred Ministry Set-Up. Hands-on support to prepare your own California religious filing and obtain your federal EIN, so you are set up properly from day one.
Going public with integrity. How to speak about this work honestly and safely.
Please note: We are not attorneys, and this is not legal advice. The Ministry Set-Up is administrative and educational support to help you prepare your own filing. A religious filing establishes an entity and the EIN is issued federally; it does not by itself grant legal permission to serve any particular medicine. For legal questions specific to your situation, work with a qualified attorney.
BEYOND GRADUATION
THE LIVING LINEAGE, FOR LIFE
Graduation is a beginning, not an ending. Every graduate is held, for good.
Lifelong supervision and case consultation. A place to bring the hard cases, always.
Keep serving at the sanctuary. Continue to co-serve real ceremonies to stay sharp and connected while you build your own path.
The accountability and peer-review circle. A living structure that keeps every one of us honest and safe, so the lineage stays trustworthy.
Continuing education and refreshers. The learning never closes.
Reciprocity. An ongoing practice of giving back to the source communities the medicines come from.
Community. A vetted circle of facilitators who carry this work with reverence, together.
Guided self-study
THE HOURS, COUNTED HONESTLY
ABOUT 300 TO 350 HOURS
A serious path, counted hour for hour. The live Wednesday circle is the through-line of the whole journey: it meets across both Foundations and your specialty track, roughly 40 to 45 meeting weeks over the year, which is where its 80 to 90 hours come from. It does not end when Foundations does.
ELEMENT
APPROX. HOURS
Live Wednesday circles both phases, ~40 to 45 weeks
80 to 90
Guided self-study
55 to 65
One-to-one mentorship
15 to 25
Peer pods and integration circles
25
In-person intensives and ceremony
80 to 100
Supervised practicum
40 to 50
Total
about 300 to 350
That places this training above what state-regulated facilitator programs require, and beyond the most respected non-regulated trainings, because ours includes real supervised serving, a named mentor, and a lifelong lineage that the others do not.
HOW THIS WORKS
EARNED BY SKILL. ADMITTED BY CALLING.
HOW YOU ARE ASSESSED
Progress is demonstrated, not just attended.
Skill. Direct supervised evaluation of your co-facilitation and your own ceremonies.
Knowledge. Module reflections and a written integration of the curriculum, depth over rote.
The living portfolio. Documented journeys, practicum hours, integration work, and feedback, a record you carry forward.
A credential can be withheld or paused. "Not yet" is a complete and loving answer.
ADMISSION, BY CALLING
Intimate cohorts of six to eight, admitted by calling and readiness, not by who can pay.
Prior ceremony experience is required.
A written application tells us your story and your why.
An interview is a real conversation, both ways.
References speak to your character and readiness.
Selectivity is not exclusion for its own sake. It is how a school becomes a lineage the community trusts.
DATES
WE INITIATE ON THE AUTUMN EQUINOX
September 22, 2026
The day light and dark stand in balance. Foundations opens online, with the first in-person intensive at the sanctuary in the season that follows. Founding seats are limited, and enrollment closes when they are filled.