About Us

Nan P. Moss, C.S.C., and David Corbin, M.S., C.S.C., are faculty members of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (a worldwide organization founded by Michael Harner, Ph.D.) and are certified by the Foundation as shamanic counselors. They teach beginning and advanced courses for the Foundation at locations throughout the Northeast, including Boston and New York City. They also teach the Foundation's most advanced courses, the Two-Week and Three-Year Programs in Advanced Shamanism and Shamanic Healing on the East Coast. Additionally, they lead 5-day shamanic workshops and month-long intensives at Esalen Institute in California.

Their interest in the spiritual aspects of weather is a longstanding one, and they have been teaching and doing research on this topic for more than 10 years. They have presented their introductory workshop, WeatherDancing: Shamanism and the Spirits of Weather, since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada. They have published CloudDancing: Wisdom from the Sky, a set of shamanic divination cards and guidebook using cloud images, as well as two articles on the spirits of weather in Shamanism, the journal of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. Their new book, Weather Shamanism, is available through Amazon or your local bookstore.

In addition to their training in core shamanism with Michael Harner and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, Nan and David have also studied with indigenous healers from various cultures, including Siberian, Tuvan, Saami, Chinese, and Native American. They are founding members of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners.

They have a private shamanic healing and counseling practice in Port Clyde, Maine.

Nan P. Moss

Nan P. Moss, C.S.C.

I grew up along the "mouth-waters" of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and in the New York City environs. Early on, I traveled nationally and internationally - which offered me a first-hand view of cultural and ethnic diversity. As a child, the natural world informed, inspired, delighted, frightened and comforted me - and still does. I lived with a strong sense of a greater unseen reality - and still do.

The settings of my childhood fostered my bond with Nature. I spent my happiest times on family farms, coastal beaches, the Canadian "bush", and summers on Big Ram Island. To this day, my fascination with the North country is alive and well, thanks to camping and berry-picking adventures with my father and family. A pre-school cross-country trip to California initiated my way west in later life, when I left the East coast to live in the Rocky Mountains for twenty-two years.

Likewise, I owe a great deal to my elders. It was my grandmother who first named me and who, at day's end, would beckon me to join her at the doorway as sunset unfolded across the river. It was she who introduced me to the moon and the moon's ability to follow me everywhere. I had a beautiful mother who loved storms and laughter. Both my father and maternal grandfather were consummate story-tellers. I can still hear their voices: my father's accent and my grandfather's drawl as they recounted ancient Greek myths, the adventures of Mowgli as he lived in the jungle, and other well-loved animal tales - with only minimal editing of the sometimes outrageous humor and pathos of life lived as a human animal.

While my grandmother gardened and my mother grew roses and let me stay home from school on stormy days, both my father and grandfather shared a common love for hunting and fishing. They knew things I wanted to know about the outdoors. I learned from them all, and saw how each had found their own way to relate to Nature and Life.

As a young woman I worked a few seasons as a fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico. My job was to look for "smokes", report them, and be able to verbally lead a fire-fighting crew to the exact location. I accomplished this from the vantage point of a tiny hut with windows all around, perched at the top of a steel tower rising 90 feet high from an altitude of 10,000 feet above sea level! I watched over miles and miles of forested mountains, canyons, and desert below. As vistas of this magnitude were totally new to my perspective of the world, I had to shift and expand beyond what I thought I knew. Day after day, as I sat alone on this tower in the midst of amazingly beautiful and rugged country, I experienced all kinds of interesting and intense weather - from brilliant blue-sky fair weather days and sometimes magnificent cloud formations, to late spring snowstorms.

I also observed expressions of weather I had never met before: such as tsunami-like waves of dense fog curling up from the desert and spilling over the ridgetops of mountain foothills like slow motion waterfalls. One day I watched as a towering opaque brown and gritty dust storm suffocated the desert below. I felt winds of every sort of temperament, and survived thunderstorms that left me awestruck and cowering as lightning danced wildly on nearby sky and ground. I learned first hand of what it was like to experience the power of the Thunderers at the pinnacle of a lightning rod on a mountain ridge! My experiences in that wilderness irrevocably altered the terrain of my "personal reality map." The fire "look-out" transformed my "out-look" on life.

Later, I moved to the Snake River country and attended the University of Idaho and Washington State University, where I received my Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology at about the same time my son was born. At this point, the course of my life's education shifted and intensified in a wondrous way, and once again I found my personal reality map stretching beyond its former boundaries.

A few years later our small family moved to Montana where I earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Education and began my work as a rural school teacher in Manhattan, Montana. A few more challenging years later, I entered a graduate school program in Education at Montana State University where halfway through, in a Native American Studies course on religion and philosophy, I discovered Michael Harner's book, The Way of the Shaman, and his teachings on core shamanism. This was a "Eureka!" moment for me as I circled back to a Big dream of a year before that presaged this incredible discovery and the subsequent unfolding of my future path.

Today I teach, along with David, the same Foundation for Shamanic Studies workshops that fostered my own spiritual growth and shamanic practice. For the past decade I have also been intensely engaged in my evolving path of weather shamanism - a calling that emerged from my strong foundation of core shamanism. It has been, and still is, an exciting time of explorations and ultimately, of sharing good things.

This path has brought me upheaval, healing, great joy, challenge, and profound learning. Along the way, I have been gifted with fine teachers and friends - both in this ordinary as well as non-ordinary reality. My ongoing explorations continue to reshape my personal reality maps as I am faced with the great compassion, wisdom, power, and humor of the helping Spirits. Their examples and collaboration abundantly sustain my love of life which inspires me to give back to our world in harmonious ways.

David Corbin

Living on the coast of Maine, watching eagles circle overhead, and hearing loons call seems a long way from my origins in New York City where Nature was what grew between the cracks in the sidewalk. Fortunately, we had a summer house on Long Island, where I spent days on the water and among the trees learning that Nature is good. This balanced perfectly with my winter city life where there was culture, education, and great instruction about the nature of Humanity.

My adolescence was one of exploration, seeking what we were not being taught I suspected that there was more "out there" than meets the eye. And I did get an eyeful when we began experimenting with rituals and seances (little did I know that they would really work); this was my first introduction to the world of spirits. I next turned to the study of astrology, which taught me that all things are connected.

In college I took a scientific approach, studying astronomy and physics. This proved to me that all is one, since the atoms in our body were once inside a star, whose atoms were once inside another star, and so forth all the way back to the big bang. During my graduate study in psychology, I learned about why we are the way we are and what I could do to help others.

After much exploration into various spiritual systems and teachings, all of which had something to offer, but still seemed lacking to me, I discovered shamanism. This spiritual approach embodied much of what I had come to believe, and gave the opportunity to learn directly from the source.

Now, along with Nan Moss, I teach for the Foundation in the Northeast, and see clients in a private shamanic counseling and healing practice. Nan and I are currently creating a space on our land in Maine for workshops and healing retreats where people can connect with spirits, watch eagles circle overhead, and listen to loons call.

(Photos by Cynthia Johnson-Bianchetta)