Women’s Ancestral Reverence Group – Weaving Our Radical Roots In These Darkening Times
(Spring 2023, dates TBA)
– Tuesday Evenings, 6:30 - 9:30, in The Kirkja –
$575
For those who are already established* in their Ancestral work (please read below for the specific pre-requisites for this program), this is an opportunity to weave the wellness of our bright and brilliant Ancestors and to hone our skills in community, with the powerful assistance of the Fire.
Within the unknown, this 8-session gathering will be a time for council and for journeys into the other World through the portal of our deep imagination. It will be a time for each of us to take up our full and rightful space, to share and grow our power-in-service. This is a space to honor our Ancestors by sharing our tools and craft with each other, to learn even more what is each our own unique way as Ancestral listeners, spell-weavers and enchantresses. There will also be time for sound-making, singing, drumming, spontaneous poetry and all of the other things that seem to come quite unbidden (but oh-so-welcomed) when women gather in circles such as this, with the express intention to be with the Grandmothers and Grandfathers. Especially when we are blanketed in the darkening, cooling and quieting night. We will be a small group, at no more than 13 of us total.
We will make special room for both the spontaneous and the planned uses of our voices. If there is an underlying intention for this particular round of the Women’s Ancestral Reverence circles, it is to strengthen the musculature of our unapologetic, un-self-conscious expressions of love, of curiosity, of rage, and of gratitude. So many of us have learned to be stealth with our spirituality, our unfettered devotion and passion, and the unique sounds, words and gestures that express these essential attributes of our wellness. Here, around the Fire, we will create an environment of both permission and responsibility, to use our voices in praise, grief, gratitude and celebration of what we hold most dear.
*You must have had at least three Ancestral healing sessions with me, or an equivalent practitioner and you must have a robust relationship with your Ancestors on at least one lineage line. If you are interested in joining but haven’t begun your Ancestral work, there is still time. Be in touch with me.)
Remembering what it means to be human in a time of unraveling
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.
About Me:
A steady migration further and further away from Western Industrial Culture’s ideas of wellness and success, my life is entirely woven around mending and tending our human place in the Web of Life. I am an outspoken guide, writer and teacher in the realm of our human healing and wholing; redefining (with many others) what it means to be well humans who know how to create well families within thriving, generous and benevolent communities, who understand what it means to be initiated adults inextricably and gratefully embedded within the multi-layered complex and diverse ecology of The World.
More practically, my central focus on our remembering includes teaching, writing, guiding folks as an elder in the essential and wild terrain of healing and wholing and ancestral healing and reverence. I am the founder of the Institute for Erotic Intelligence, and the OneWoman Movement and Project including OneWoman Radio and a co-founder of The Quickening Collaborative and The Verdant Collective.