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Ancestors Trainings and Monthly Circles
Healing with the Love of the Ancestors: Weekend Intensives
This weekend intensive involves working with one's recent and more distant blood ancestors for the purposes of healing, forgiveness, and empowerment. Individuals choose beforehand which side of the family (1/4 of overall ancestry) will be the focus of the weekend. Prior knowledge of one's ancestry is useful but not required. Participants take steps to claim their positive ancestral inhertiance, assist the troubled dead in becoming supportive ancestors, and learn ways to transform intergenerational toxins. This training is especially useful for individuals who feel disconnected from their roots and who are generally not at peace with their family and history. The next SF Bay Area weekend will be December 6th and 7th, 2008.
December_2008_Ancestors_training_flyer.doc
Monthly Ancestor Circles
This is a new group forming in Fall of 2008 (first meeting likely in November). Space is limited to 8 participants and we will be meeting one night a month for three hours throughout 2009 (one month break in August) to focus on ceremonial work with the ancestors. Locations will be in the homes of circle participants or otherwise conducive spaces. Individuals who have completed a weekend ancestors intensive with me or have done prior ancestor work elsewhere will be given first priority. Also folks likely to attend regularly will be given first choice.
This monthly group will remain drop-in until there are 8 commited/regular participants in which case it will become a functionally closed working group until spaces open again or until the group decides something else. Cost per circle is $30 (to Daniel). If participants come over time to co-lead the group, cost can be restructured to reflect those changes. Day of the week will be Wednesday evenings and circle time will be 6:00-9:00pm. Be in touch for more information or to register.
See writing below and the F.A.Q. section for more context on working with ancestors.
“No shamanist ritual starts without the invocation of Father Heaven, Mother Earth and the ancestors”
-Sarangerel, Buryat Mongol shaman (Riding Windhorses, 2000, p.23)
Ancestors take many shapes and sizes. In the most inclusive sense, they appear as the cacophony of the past, of everything before this moment. These ancestors include star beings, woolly mammoths, and our forgotten dreams. More specifically, our deceased human kin are the ancestors, the homo sapiens sapiens that have lived and died on this planet for the last 200,000 years or so. Of these myriad human dead, those remembered by name, face, and deed exert particularly strong influence in our lives. Learning to relate intimately and honestly with one’s personal ancestors is one core task of those seeking to develop themselves through shamanic practice. And for those who have no particular interest in shamanism, entering into dynamic and conscious relationship with your ancestors is still entirely worth the effort.
Personal and family levels of ancestor work
Our experience and perception of the living family serves as a kind guardian or gateway to the ancestors. In psychological terms we tend to project our experience of our family onto all of our ancestors. To engage the ancestors is to call into question our perceptions of the living family and in many cases our stories about our selves. This can be destabilizing at first as our identity becomes both more spacious and more rooted in time.
On personal and family levels, ancestor work includes understanding and embodying our positive ancestral inheritance as well as identifying and transforming toxins and dysfunctional patterns. All of this is done in partnership with the loving ancestors. In my experience, ancestral or family illness responds especially well to ancestral or family medicine, and our well-off, loving ancestors absolutely want to help in this healing process.
Through partnering with the loving ancestors, one also learns ways to assist any troubled dead to be welcomed into the care of the ancestors. This helps the recently or unhappily dead to know greater peace and begin to effectively support the living. Family ghosts signing up for ancestor school. This healing for our ancestors also clears the path for our own death and the death of our loved ones by insuring that our recent ancestors are prepared to receive us (a skill they hopefully learn from the wiser ancestors). This work of intergenerational repair may include taking steps to forgive living or deceased family members and ourselves. Envision both yourself and your living family surrounded by the love and kindness of generations of ancestors. How might it be to live every day in felt connection with this support?
Collective levels of ancestor work
The boundary between the personal and collective levels of human experience is porous; we can’t help but be affected by the constraints of the time and places we inhabit. Our blood tells a story, our national identity tells a story, and the land we walk upon also comes with stories. As a descendant of early English, German, and Irish immigrants to this continent I stand in the river of their experiences and their memories. Yet the story of my people is also woven into the realities of Native American genocide, African slavery, and other atrocities committed at times by my blood ancestors. I also see how many of my European ancestors were persecuted or killed over the past two thousand years. In this uncovering, we explore the interplay of victim/victimizer, oppressed/oppressor and invite energies of collective healing and repair.
In weekend ancestor trainings, I have witnessed disowned Jewish ancestors clamor for a voice, Native American ancestors claim their rightful place in the family story, and modern pagans struggle to make peace with their missionary ancestors. When our identity derives from one side of our blood ancestry and we disown or devalue others, this points to an opportunity to personally engage in healing collective wounds. In the crucible of ceremonial space, the judged and disowned ancestors may also speak. And as we gradually repair these cracks in our personal psyches, we establish healing vibrations that ripple out into the collective.
Daniel Foor (650) 248-8917 danielfoor@yahoo.com
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