Nearly all human cultures (with the exception of western industrial, capitalist culture) practice complex rituals designed to foster on-going intimacy with, and healing of, their ancestral lineages (deceased relations of our blood lines). In western industrialized culture (and increasingly around the world, as Patriarchy colonizes more, and more, of the globe) we suffer from a devastating orphaning. One which, among many other harmful fallacies, tells us we arrive alone into a harsh, malevolent world neither belonging, nor beholden, to anyone or anything. Yet our modern science of trauma and neurobiology – as well as millennia of brilliant and complex lived human experience – tell us a very different story. Woven intricately into our intimate daily experience, wired into our genetics and our souls equally, every one of us carries both the blessings and burdens of thousands of generations of brilliance and joy as well as grief and trauma. This imposed and erroneous orphaning is, in part, responsible for our increasingly fragmented and diseased human culture; our depression, anxiety, addiction, alienation and sociopathy.
The work of Ancestral Healing has three intentions:
to make connections with people of our blood and bone; those ancestral relatives who are vibrantly well and eager to provide us with their support, love and guidance as we journey through our lives.
to heal the significant trauma burdens woven deeply into most human lineages today; trauma burdens caused by endless war, poverty, social and economic injustice, environmental devastation and the diaspora it causes, racism, sexism and all forms of intolerance and violence toward the multiplicity and diversity of Life’s expressions – in a word, the toxic Patriarchy. In this healing process the brilliance and medicine of each lineage is excavated and brought forward into its present-day expression.
to do the intimate ancestral healing work necessary so that we are capable of turning our attention to the tremendous harm we continue to cause to the Earth, to each other, and to all life.
The Work:
The particular path I take to foster loving connection and healing relationships with our ancestors is a non-dogmatic, cross-cultural, animist framework accessible to people of all faiths and cultural practices. Our primary vehicle for contact is the practice of ‘journeying’ involving gentle guidance into a state of consciousness that is just slightly relaxed from our daily awareness. In this realm we all have the capacity to become aware of essential and empowering information that is right here, ready to be discovered, at all times of our waking and sleeping experiences, but that we have been taught to ignore or overlook.
Ancestral work is most valuable – in our personal lives and to the wellness of the Earth and all its people – when we allow our intimate relationships with these magnificent elders to become a constant, ever-unfolding conversation; a conversation we tend to not only when it’s conveniently scheduled and guided, but also when we are at the grocery store, falling asleep at night, reading to our children or exercising at the gym. We come to this place where the worlds weave together in our own consciousness throughout our daily lives – where we are as much an individual with our own agency as the living face of our people’s medicine and gifts – by entering a devotional space with this work. Here, we have a much greater chance to rewiring our highly habitual neurological patterning that has us sliding back into the inertia of our disconnected dayworld lives. Therefore, I prefer to work with clients who are committed to their journey, in the form of prioritizing the session work, until you are off and running on your own, doing the form of this work that is uniquely yours to do. Once you’ve got a strong ground of health in your relationship with your ancestral elders, as well as the daily rituals and wellness that comes with these relationships, I will delight in supporting you as needed. One of my greatest loves doing this work is helping you to discover the process of ancestral healing, reverence and reweaving that is uniquely yours. There is no one method for this work. There is no right or wrong way. There are languages, rituals, songs, prayers, ways of praying and so much more, that I have never seen before; that The World has never seen before. Each time we enter the journey space we have the opportunity to discover a new way of being more fully human, at a time when it has never been more critical that we do so!
The first session is 90 minutes. All subsequent sessions are typically 60 minutes. This work is equally powerful whether we are in-person or meeting via video technology.
To book an initial consult or to schedule sessions please email me.