Introduction
Joseph Callender was born in Great Britain but now works from Melbourne, where he guides people through deep energetic transformation. As the founder of Ascension Shamanism, Joseph helps clients and students reconnect with their spirit, clear energetic blocks, and heal their ancestral lines.
Joseph has decades of training in Qigong, shamanism, hypnotherapy, constellation work, and more. He combines ancient techniques with grounded, practical insight. He’s known for his safe presence, deep integrity, and the ability to shift energy on multiple levels. From the Spirit Weaver Programme to his one-on-one Soul Cleanse sessions, his work is ideal for those who feel weighed down, lost, or disconnected. In this interview, Joseph explores how his journey began, what drives his vision today, and why so many people walk away from his work feeling more like themselves than ever before.
Q1. Joseph, every journey into shamanism begins with a personal awakening. Can you take us back to the pivotal moment or experience that first cracked open the path of Shamanism for you?
Joseph Callender: Many people talk about awakening like a bolt of lightning or a profound realisation, glamouring some aha experience or a kundalini rush. Indeed, I have had many of those, and some of my earlier experiences happened in 2007 when I had my first few plant medicine Journeys.
This sacrament gave me a more complete and direct experience of a state of profound connection, which I had already appreciated, to a lesser extent, almost 20 years prior in meditation retreats. I first experienced meditation at 19, which itself provided a delightfully serene stillness.
However, even further back than that, I used to walk home at night as a teenager and talk to God, and I served as an altar server in a Catholic Church from the age of 7, which at that time served as an appropriate proxy for my connection with divinity. I guess I have always sought that connection.
I have had a number of incredible sacred plant experiences, which, for me, made real the experiences that my philosophical studies hinted towards. I was seeking a profound connection to all that is, and have since realised I was seeking the validation you get from a deep and profound connection to oneself.
The more experiences I have had that showed me my place in the universe, the more I’ve recognised that what was outside of me was being witnessed by the very same thing inside of me.
Also, there were instances when I observed people getting possessed in plant medicine ceremonies, which led me to want to find teachers to help de-possess these ceremony participants. I once got possessed myself in a session. It felt like the most incredible experience I had, but it was really a trickster spirit influencing me, and I woke up with people on top of me trying to prevent me from cracking my head open on the floor. This was a major driver in my quest to find ways to rid people of possessing spirits. I had seen ghosts when I was a child, so I already believed in the spirit world.
So I guess the spirit world has always been accessible to me, and I have spent many years demystifying it and trying to understand what is really going on outside of normal reality.
Q2. Much of modern spirituality tends to either romanticize or dilute ancient traditions. How do you ensure that your work honors the sacred roots of shamanic practice while evolving it for a modern global audience?
Joseph Callender: One of the principles learnt in my early twenties was to never accept or reject anything until you had validated it as true with your own experience, which is a really grounding and practical approach to spirituality, see if it works before you accept or reject it. This helped me stay very grounded and practical with my studies.
I also noticed that in many traditions, participants would subjugate themselves to the ideas or leaders of the tradition and seemed to put them on a pedestal. This meant that they would create an artificial limit that the participant would use as a kind of false ceiling, and not go beyond.
So a senior teacher or guru would be put on a pedestal, and that person would be held in awe, and no one would strive to go beyond that person. It was like the Guru set an ideal and everyone had to try to be like them, they were seen as amazing and people would bask in their brilliance, but would not strive to carry the work forward and use the work to bring out their own brilliance.
That is not to say that one should disrespect the elders and way showers of a tradition. We honour their integrity, the authority of the position they hold, the profoundness of the work they have done, and the depth of perception and insight they have achieved, but we also understand that all of us are capable of such progress.
This insight into the artificial ceiling that people create for themselves has also been seen in the corporate world and other Taoist traditions I have encountered. So I learned to see the difference between the office, the work, and the person, which has given me quite a sober perspective on spirituality.
I’ve seen behind the gurus and recognised that some people will not question what they have understood and will take at face value spiritual ideas as gospel, and would subjugate themselves to the purveyors of that perspective. When really we are being encouraged to use their insights and example to remove our own shackles and become more than we normally let ourselves become.
So I see my role as one of empowerment. Not to indoctrinate you to place a tradition or system above you, but use it as a stepping stone or tool to become more than you are letting yourself become.
The wisest notion that I received was when a self-realised man told us to take the ideas of the scripture and modify them to fit the culture and time in which you inhabit. We were encouraged not to try to become an Indian guru and later a shaman, etc., but to integrate the ancient knowledge to fit the time and context in which we exist.
I’ve seen Facebook Shamanism groups full of people attacking other people who dare to challenge their ideas of how to practice shamanism and crucifying anyone who dares to adapt any practice beyond what they consider traditional uses and use cases. It’s like saying that all other ways and practices are invalid unless they have been received as part of an apprenticeship for the appropriate amount of time, learning the ancient ways within the ‘correct’ culture. All of this is nonsense.
We have been given access to spiritual technology and can respectfully adapt that technology to suit our own modern needs and contexts. So when I consider honouring and respect for ancient traditions, I interpret that as respect for those who have paved the way and who hold the knowledge.
But more importantly, my students learn to treat their spirit team and the work with respect and right honouring, plus they learn to practice safely so they do no harm to themselves or others. That’s how you respect a tradition, do no harm with what you learn and improve upon it. Then, afterwards, our task is to work out what our Soul needs us to do with these newfound insights and skills.
Q3. Ascension Shamanism seems to blend energy work, ancestral wisdom, and cosmic consciousness. What core principles define your unique methodology, and how do they differ from other spiritual or healing systems today?
Joseph Callender: My methodology first addresses a fundamental requirement that we all have to gain access to more energy and vitality; no one has enough energy. This is important because Spirit work is surprisingly draining, requiring that we gain access to an abundance of energy just for its practice.
We also need energy to learn, grow, and evolve. We need energy and vitality to discharge our duties to do a full day’s work. We also need energy to process trauma. Plus, we need immense amounts of energy just to be nice and kind to people.
So, where do we get this energy, since our food these days is woefully bereft of sustenance?
Without knowledge, we parasite on everyone else, or just settle for not having enough and resign to always being tired.
However, there are abundant sources that we can tap into, which are all around us and are unlimited. We can learn to access this energy with shamanic techniques and through energy management disciplines like Qigong. Energy accumulation is therefore the first pillar of my work.
Many aspirants are starting to realise that we, as humans, are part of the metaphysical food chain. So they now understand that there are beings and entities that parasitise us and manipulate us to make choices that keep us in the same energy state that they are feeding off.
This is the next pillar: to understand the spirit world and learn to remove those beings and entities from yourself, and to recognise that spiritual hygiene and cleanliness go hand in hand with spiritual development. Those not wishing to learn how to do this for themselves, attend clinic sessions with me or my graduates to cleanse their energy fields.
After learning to power yourself with vitality and then removing all of the entities that are using one’s trauma as a source of food and sport, we then have to address our programming.
We are all programmed with habitual patterns that we learn from our parents’ behaviours that they modelled for us, plus we have all inherited energy patterns in our genes from our families. These are the dysfunctional behavioural and existential limits we inherit from our ancestors.
No one is immune to this inheritance, but some are more resourceful than others, so they can thrive despite these limitations. For the rest of us, the next pillar of my offerings uses therapeutic intervention to help rid you of those inherited dysfunctional energy patterns.
These patterns form the blueprints of our behaviour, personal outlook, and sphere of reference and influence, so they are fundamental and foundational and cause us to repeat and perpetuate dysfunctional cycles.
My third pillar, therefore, focuses on breaking these dysfunctional patterns and preventing further propagation down the lineage. This is achieved through ritual ceremony and therapeutic release.
The first three pillars deal with our emotional and energetic inheritance, as well as providing energy management techniques. We are looking at the actual energetic ‘make-up’ of the individual and helping you access other aspects of your being, so you are free to become a better version of yourself.
So whilst you learn to appropriately honour spirit, and develop your shamanic skills, you will simultaneously learn how to show up as the best version of yourself.
Childhood trauma and tough experiences prevent us from remaining present in those situations, resulting in many of us missing out on, avoiding, or being numb to, everyday learning experiences. We miss out on our own growth experiences and then develop extreme coping strategies to live with the resulting fallout.
Many of us, therefore, are in need of fleshing out and filling the gaps in our early childhood training and need help reframing the ideas that shaped our early experiences of the world and family life. This is done through mentoring and training.
With mentoring, clients learn reality programming skills. Our reality is shaped by the ideas we hold about creation and our own limits. I help them examine and craft new ideas and new perspectives.
With the shamanic school, we learn how to interact with the spirit world, and if you have been paying attention, you realise we are teaching you how to actually show up as a better human. The respect you show the spirits is the same respect you should be showing to humans, who are embodied spirits. When this realisation actually drops in, then you become a much nicer person.
So I’m not just running a shamanic school and clinic. It’s just an entry point for teaching life skills, energy management, entity cleansing, and reality programming techniques.
Q4. You’ve spoken of soul retrieval and multi-generational healing. What are some of the deeper energetic wounds you commonly see passed down through family lines, and how does your practice help unwind them?
Joseph Callender: There are many common issues. Our parents cannot teach us the things they have not been taught by their parents. So most of us have not been taught how to create intergenerational wealth by our families.
This is mostly the result of generations of war and hardship, so the lineage now seems so beaten down that they have forgotten how to dream, thrive, and help each other. They carry such a low sense of individual or collective worth and do not know how to lift up their siblings, children, and extended family members.
Many hold themselves in toxic shame and tend not to feel worthy enough to invest in themselves or dare to dream of their perfect life.
Soul retrieval may be necessary here as a result of dysfunctional parenting, but it’s not really related to generational healing, unless we are talking about the collective family soul, which is the collective consciousness of the lineage. We deal with this in family constellation sessions and soul cleanses.
Soul retrieval is usually needed when we have lost aspects of ourselves due to trauma, accidents, and catastrophe, so we can get the bits back that we have lost, to once again feel whole.
Q5. As people awaken spiritually, many still struggle to ground that awareness in everyday life. What practices or mindset shifts do you guide your clients through to help them integrate higher consciousness with human responsibility?
Joseph Callender: Everyday life presents us with plenty of opportunities to share and experience different sides of ourselves and different aspects of our personality. Most of these experiences require interaction with others and must necessarily be experienced in our normal everyday state of being. We are not learning to be what we are not; we are learning to become more of who we are. So life doesn’t become a spiritual bypass, but a lived experience.
Access to higher states of consciousness is not supposed to be permanent. They are periods of intensity that will shake up the lower energy frequencies and idiosyncrasies that we possess. They are given to us to break us apart and disrupt the cyclical prisons that we have created for ourselves. They are supposed to be transformational, and every transformational experience will need to be integrated.
The result of many of the initiations we put the students through, the training they receive, and much of the therapeutic fallout that occurs, is that you shift perspective and gain a different frame of reference, i.e., you view your life through a totally different lens, which can fundamentally turn your world upside down. This is supposed to happen.
Everyone’s integration experience will be different. Some will feel more present and grounded; others may find it is quite an effort to rejoin “ordinary reality” after deep and multi-layered work has taken place. So, if you permit me, I will share the fallout that most people will experience after the bliss subsides.
People often feel like they have been run over by a bus, or quite the opposite, and feel like the ‘energiser bunny,’ requiring some level of adjustment to the patterns and frequencies of their usual existence. Life might seem a bit odd and pointless for a brief spell, or indeed, they may feel fully re-integrated into their usual patterns.
It is not uncommon to experience physical, emotional, or mental changes, such as a recognition of a change in energetic state: feeling calmer, more relaxed, free, light, at ease, relief, expanded, more present, more embodied, grounded.
Their senses may become more heightened, so they may feel, see, hear, and taste things with more vibrancy and intensity. Often they experience extreme fluctuating energy levels, such as exhaustion or feeling “high” or “buzzing.” They may feel called to rest more or spend more time outside in nature.
They may become more emotional as they clear out old repressed emotions. Sadness, grief, and anger can bubble to the surface, even whilst experiencing sudden bursts of bliss and joy. They may feel extra teary or delightfully giggly, and may find themselves in fits of laughter at times.
Some experience physical releasing symptoms, such as a need to go to the toilet more frequently with increased urine or bowel movements. Or they might experience some pain, headache, or cold-like symptoms. These are physical detox symptoms that usually pass quickly and can include itchiness or tingling throughout the body, or waves of hot or cold energy flowing through the body.
After paradigm-shifting experiences, it’s quite common to have insightful dreams, as the adjustments that the subconscious mind goes through may provide keen insight as to where the energy or routine needs to shift. I always encourage my clients not to be in such a hurry to make sweeping changes in their lives or get back to the usual structure of day-to-day life, but allow the energy to normalise in the days that follow.
To help with integration, I generally encourage clients to try to do those things that bring them back to a balanced state, such as drinking plenty of water, nourishing themselves with foods that feel good, and ensuring that they keep good company (of media, music, people, reading material, and thoughts). I encourage them to take salt baths or ocean swims and walks in nature, plus earthing, walking barefoot on the grass or beach.
Overall, use whatever tools, rituals, or techniques that bring a state of calm. The point is to be conscious enough to intentionally take full responsibility for their energetic and emotional state. Self-care and reflection are important. To get the most out of the work, we have to become very present to ourselves and pay attention to the subtle shifts that may occur. If they are fortunate enough to receive waves of inspiration and creativity, follow them. But wait several days before making life-changing decisions. Give yourself some time and space to reflect on what you experienced, so you can make the most of the changes you are being taken through, to land in a more resourceful state.
Conclusion
Joseph Callender has built the ideal place for transformation. His words carry the weight of lived experience, study, and spirit. From helping clients shed emotional heaviness to guiding professionals toward spiritual alignment, his offerings through Ascension Shamanism reach far beyond ordinary wellness practices. He’s a mentor, a guide, and a deeply committed teacher. Joseph reminds us to return to the stillness within. Through rituals, training, and soul-centred connection, he offers people a way to remember who they are and where their power lies.
