Although I had long tired to refute the relevance of ancestral influence in my life due to such pain and alienation in my own family, when I became a shamanic healer my practice immediately put my denials before me with stunning clarity. I realized if I was to be of any use to my clients and all their obvious ancestral trauma, I would have to turn deeply in this direction myself; both for my own growth and understanding of my place in the web of life as well as to be competent navigating the mystifying dynamics of the internal landscapes of others. And I have found through deep experience that our ancestral connections are the key to both the wild and holy beauty of our species, as well as to our great pain and cascading destructiveness.
We all carry some degree of ancestral trauma; some limiting beliefs and behaviors. This is evident and easy for most to accept even though it is apparent from the state of the world that we are greatly missing commonplace resolutions. In addition to our personal trauma and its collective consequences, all around us are our ancestors who did not die well and who haven’t fully transitioned. Their presence in this way can delay, limit or distort our own abilities to heal and live well in right relationship with our world. These ancestors press upon the earth. Their grief is our grief, their needs are our needs. Their healing will be our healing and a great sigh of relief for all of Mother Earth. And we have Great Ancestors already available; those who can nourish and uplift our families when we recognize and lovingly attend to them. They are all waiting for us and are our beautiful responsibility.
Whatever your other interests or callings are for living as a sane, life-honoring human in this complicated, uncertain world, turning and facing both your healthy and unwell dead is essential as a fundamental working basis for building any kind of effective earth stewardship practice; for inhabiting psychological well-being; for creating equitable social communities; for knowing what beauty and liveliness is ours to create that the earth can support, and how to do so.
We are being called to bring the light of awareness and connection to our ancestral lines; recognize and know how to stop the passage of toxic thought-forms between the generations; understand what it means and takes to give someone a good death; allow and inhabit the grief of our experiences with conscious grace; heal our unwell dead so they can fully transition and become true ancestral spirit helpers; and form active. loving relationships with our healthy ancestors and other compassionate spirit beings to guide us as we re-envision ourselves and align our life practices for what is being called for now by planetary consciousness. In this training we will have the remarkable invitation of being in deep community together over the course of nine months, touching in creative, intimate ways some of the most moving and crucial longings and expressions of our breath and our blood: the cosmic patterning in our dreams and our bones. What does it really mean to be fully, beautifully human?
To explore this we will use storytelling, shamanic journeys, music/sound, movement, artistic expression, prayer and ceremony as complementary ways of moving through the following material. We will sit around a fire whenever possible, soaking up the ancient starlight and having magical opportunities to experience how deeply we are loved by the Earth and Stars, and by our ever-present Ancestors.
COURSE DETAILS
Session One:
—-What does it mean to work with the dead and heal our ancestral lineages? What is the Ancestral Weave?
This will be a conversational introduction to the mission and goals of this initiatory training coupled with your inquiries and hopes for what will be experienced.
—-Creative updates of personal after-life cosmologies.
You’ll be examining your personal after-life cosmologies as well as your beliefs about the nature of the physical and spiritual realms. And you will use your creativity in whatever way feels most expressive to update these cosmologies to more accurately reflect who you currently are.
—-Aligning with the needed helping spirits/resources for ancestral work; gaining clarity and experience in working more effectively and responsibly.
You will learn what it means to work rigorously and in an experiential way with your helping spirits and what human responsibility is in this regard. You will receive a council of the spirit helpers and the contexts most needed for ancestral healing and move with more surety in the felt experience that there is actually no separation between what we refer to as the physical and the spirit world.
—-Exploring beliefs, feelings and behaviors related to many kinds of death. Cultivating Death as a benevolent ally.
You will explore your beliefs, feelings and behaviors related to death; the death of yourself, of your lived ones, other species, and of the eventual demise of this sentient planet Earth, and how this plays out in the cultural zeitgeist. Befriending death and working with Death as a natural and beneficial expression of life.
SESSION TWO
—-Your covenants with Life and Death; journeying to what your own death might be life: experiencing what the death of other species might be life.
You will investigate what your unconscious as well as known covenants are with LIfe and Death. In light of those covenants and with possible amendments, you will experience what your own death might be like through a shamanic journey, as well as the death of other species who come to teach you.
—-The nature of thought-forms versus sentient beings; how they are maintained and how they affect your well-being. What is a Time Spirit?
In this session you will begin understanding the nature of thought-forms and how to recognize and track the energetic signature of thought-forms versus true sentient beings. You will learn how thought-forms affect your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. And you will learn what Time Spirits are and how they affect not only you but the Ancestral Weave.
—-The Time Spirits which have disrupted the weave between the worlds of matter and spirit and how to re-integrate from this rift.
We will address some of the historical thought-forms which have attacked the weave between our physical and spiritual world. We’ll begin a conversation about how to re-weave this tear in the soul’s consciousness connection to matter/energy and we will create a ceremony to support this.
—-What is the MIddle World? How does it relate to ancestral healing? How to navigate it effectively.
In this gathering you will learn what the Middle World is and how to navigate it’s landscapes and relate to Middle World beings. You will also learn many of the possible characteristics of the Middle World and ways it and the physical world interface.
—-Meeting and working with your healthy Ancestors.
During this time you will also begin to learn how to approach, recognize and work with your healthy ancestors and have them resource you as true allies while honoring how they have dreamt you into being and learning from their successes and failures.
SESSION THREE
—-Working with your unwell ancestors so they fully transition into true ancestral spirit helpers.
You will learn how to approach and work with your ancestors who may have had gtrouble dying well and remain lost, confused, attached, suffering or in other ways debilitated and have not fully transitioned. You will learn various protected ways to give them the care they need to heal and take their rightful places as Ancestor helping spirits. This will be a large work and flow through all the rest of the sessions in some way.
—-Which Time Spirits most affect you personally, their origin point in your lineage and ways to resolves this holistically.
You’ll discover from your helping spirits the most influential Time Spirits affecting you from intergenerational sources, how they first became dominant throughout your lineage and receive from your spirit helpers ways to remedy their effects both in ordinary as well as non-ordinary reality.
SESSION FOUR
—-Spiritual protection and the practice of Transfiguration.
You’ll have the chance to explore what true spiritual protection really is as you become aware of your beliefs and experiences about this. You will also begin the practice of Transfiguration—learning how to embody your divinity as an intentional practice and noting the internal and external changes as you do so.
—-The necessary beauty of broken-heartedness
How our broken hearts connect us to the Earth spirits and our ancestors.
SESSION FIVE
—-The signs of initiation; learning dependable rites of passage.
In this session you will learn to recognize and understand how the signs of initiation present within you and how to recognized and meet them in others; learn various good ways to respond and the need for appropriate rites of passage.
—-Creating beautiful and effective ceremonies/rituals
With your spirit allies and human colleagues you will learn how to create beautiful, effective and emotionally resonant ceremonies/rituals for both yourself as well as in and for groups. We will use various creative ways to undergo a naming ceremony in order to cross a threshold into a more authentic version of ourselves as well as learn about various present day opportunities for rituals of passage.
SESSION SIX
—-Recognizing, clarifying and applying your personal medicine in the Ancestral Weave.
In this session you will explore what your personal medicine is. You’ll learn how to clarify and enhance it as well as how to apply it in doing ancestral healing work
—-The role of the true Psychopomp.
You will also learn what a general psychopomp is and some of the ways a psychopomp works for large populations of beings, both humans who are not personal ancestors as well as for animals and possibly other kinds of beings.
SESSION SEVEN
—-The many languages of grief; creating dynamic movement with loss and grief
ON the first day of this gathering close to Samhain you will explore how to recognize the different languages of grief, both in yourself and in others. You will gain familiarity and greater ease with the varietal expressions of grief and also how to note the rising of grief in its early stages. You will also learn how to clear yourself of limiting thought-forms around grief.
—-Day long grief and forgiveness ritual open to the public.
The second day of this session will be a day-long grief and forgiveness ritual with the greater community. You will learn before the ritual how to set up the sacred space, how to move with your own grief during the ritual, and how to support others when they are grieving. We will be opening this ritual to the public. They will be invited to participate at no charge and come in whenever they wish and leave when they are ready. Those of you in the class will have ample time to do your own grieving and you will also have been previously resources to know how to support the public who come in to benefit from this sacred space. You will also learn good ways to close down such a densely energetic ritual so that you, the pace and the land become beautifully uplifted, while the grief expressed and any other related material is transmuted lovingly by the Earth.
—-Transfiguration and transitioning our personal dead.
The last day of this session we will explore what arose during the grief ritual and how to move with what was realized and what was shed back into our homes and families in sacred action to bring awareness and integration to our expressions of grief.
SESSION EIGHT
—-How the unwell dead affect land and spaces; learning ways to work with land devitalized due to ancestral trauma.
During this month you will being to learn about different ways the unwell dead affect teh land and our spaces. You will learn how to work with land oppressed by ancestral trauma as well as the presence of unwell ancestors.
—-Creating protocols of beauty and resonance to re-inspirit the land.
You will be provided with different approaches and resources for bringing back vitality, harmony and diversity in the seen and unseen aspects of land and spaces and you will be making inquiry to your helping spirits about what is and isn’t appropriate or effective regarding working with land in this way for you at this time. You will synthesize the guidance received from your helping spirits into a workable protocol of creative expression that you will share with the class.
SESSION NINE/CULMINATION
—-Determining with your ancestors what blessings are needed by you for the coming year and what blessings you’re being asked to offer the Earth and all relations. Working with spiritual power, filters and blind-spots. Bringing grace to the shamanic ego. Creating a prayer for the New Year. Grounding what you’ve learned back into families/communities and the Earth.
This last session will be centered mostly around the coming Winter Solstice. On our first day of these three you will be connecting in group journeys with your healthy ancestors, including at least one ancestor shaman. With their help you will determine what blessings are most needed and desired by you for the coming year and what blessings you will be asked to offer to your loved ones, to the animals, all Earth life and to the spirit realm as a whole. Creating your prayer for the New Year, included will be learning how to work with spiritual power in light of personal filters and blind-spots.
—-Sharing prayers for the Earth through artistic expression. Winter Solstice Ancestral Healer Initiation ceremony with friends and family followed by celebration. Seeding dreams into the Earth.
The second day of this session will focus on a winter solstice ceremony. Early in the day we will share our prayers for the Earth in a personal form of expression; movement, song, words, writing, art, etc. The second half of the day will be our ceremony where you will be initiated as an ancestral healer as you greet your compassionate Ancestors, receive their blessings, and rejoice. After his ceremony we’ll have a celebration. Being witnessed in this and integrating your own healing and expanded awareness and skills back into your circle of loved ones is a primary purpose of this training. We will sing together, dance, tell stories, have music, share food and drink. To conclude the evening, weather permitting, we’ll gather around a fire, seeding our dreams for the coming year into the earth for the benefit of all our relations.
—-World Work.
On the last day of this gathering, we’ll begin to look at the concept of shamanic World Work. You will learn what this is, why it is needed, how to recognize where it is needed and how to determine just what a particular space or being needs. you will learn as well how to determine your most personally appropriate response to these needs; who your allies are, what your obstacles might be, and what the parameters of your work must be in order to be truly effective. World Work is one of the most fulfilling and beautiful acts of service we can give. It changes both the spirit and the physical realms so that all of us—the living and the dead, animals, the land and all earth beings—-have the greatest chance to heal and for all of us to come into creative harmony and right relationship and lay the ground in a good way for those to come.
—-Ending the training; a rite designed together in collaboration with the helping spirits.
We will end the day through a rite designed collectively by the class with the guidance of the helping spirits. Con
Contact me personally through this website to ask more detailed questions about this training including dates and times for each session, costs, and/or to register.