Daniel Foor – The Ancestral Medicine

Discover the foundations and common precautions used in this experiential work through an exploration of cross-cultural views on the relationship between the living and the dead.

Learn how to cultivate ritual safety and cultural awareness as you enter the sometimes treacherous terrain of working with your blood family. Grounded in self-compassion and kindness, you’ll set the intention to relate only with wise and loving ancestors as you seek healing for yourself and your family.

This module will be approached with the understanding that some participants may feel uncomfortable with the focus on blood lineage ancestors (e.g., survivors of childhood abuse, those with little knowledge of family history, LGBTQ participants, adoptees, and those with no biological children).

In this module, you’ll:

• Learn the basics of an earth-honoring/animist approach to life that includes reverence and rituals for our ancestors
• Explore common cross-cultural views on the relationship between the living and the dead
• Address the benefits and limitations of genealogy research, historical inquiry, and DNA testing in ancestral recovery work
• Explore ways to navigate spontaneous ancestral contact through dreams and synchronicities
• Set intention in ritual space with your ancestors for the healing and reconnection work ahead

How do you know whether the ancestors in your specific lineages are deeply at peace? In this session, you’ll discover how to safely and systemically assess the present-time condition of your four primary blood lineages (each grandparent and the line before them).

Through guided ritual, you’ll also explore these lineages’ impact on you and other living family members and establish necessary boundaries with any among the dead who are not yet at peace.

This fundamental distinction — between well ancestors and the dead who are not yet well — informs all other aspects of this approach to ancestral healing work. In this module, you’ll be facing this question head on.

By trusting your own intuition and ability to discern the state of your lineages, you’ll also learn to break the cultural conditioning that disconnects you from direct and conscious relationship with your ancestors.

In this module, you’ll:

• Be guided in assessing the relative wellness in spirit of your 4 primary blood lineages
• Consider the current level of impact of each lineage on both you and other living family members
• Learn about the importance of “energetic hygiene” and maintaining clear boundaries with the troubled dead
• Decide with which lineage you will begin your lineage healing work
• Practice inhabiting your body and personal space free from ancestral interference

Your wise and kind ancestors embody the gifts of the lineage. They drive the healing for the dead who are still in need, and their very presence calls us to stand with them while we are still alive here on Earth.

In this module, you’ll be supported to make connections with much older ancestral guides and teachers along your lineage of focus — to leap beyond what can be known through historical research alone into direct relationship with the elders who serve as your ancestral guides.

Inviting connection with older, deeply well ancestors also brings you new sources of healing, protection, and life guidance. Caring for these relationships can be enhanced by creating a shrine, altar, or place of honoring for them.

These guides also carry a capacity to see us clearly and very specifically for who we truly are, a precious blessing when the dominant culture so often fails to appreciate each person’s unique gifts and medicine.

In this module, you’ll:

• Make direct connection with much older ancestral guides who are capable of bringing healing to more recent ancestors
• Seek personal blessing and support from these ancestral guides
• Explore a basic protocol for how to establish and care for an ancestral altar or shrine
• Discover different ways to nurture your relationship with your ancestral guides
• Reflect on the impact of conquest, colonialism, and earth disconnection on this specific blood lineage

Making connection with ancestral guides includes the practice of attunement. Attunement helps you truly receive the blessings of the old ones, inquire about spirits of affinity along your lineage, and invite other previously forgotten ancient wisdoms to resurface into conscious awareness.

In getting to know your guides, you also get to know beneficial ancestral inheritances and healthy sources of cultural pride. This remembering can unearth blessings that may have laid dormant for centuries or even thousands of years.

You’ll also work with your ancestral guides to establish a healing web of prayer around your lineage of ancestors. This accelerates healing for the lineage and also aids in your personal safety and protection throughout the process. As is the case throughout the course, you’ll be encouraged to let your well ancestors do the heavy lifting.

In this module, you’ll:

• Practice attunement and deepen your connection with your ancestral guides on your lineage of focus
• Ask your ancestral guides to surround your lineage in healing prayer and respectful containment
• Invite contact with spirits of affinity who enjoy a multigenerational relationship with your ancestral lineage
• Explore the practice of making offerings as a way to nourish your connection with your ancestors

We human folk are creatures of story, and in this module, you’ll partner with your ancestral guides to better understand the story of your lineage as it lives in the present.

You’ll explore questions such as: What are the ancient gifts? How were these forgotten, distorted, or diminished over time? How stuck are the unwell ancestors in patterns of wounding, and how strongly are these unhelpful stories currently playing out for you or other living family members? By seeking understanding, you’ll be preparing for more direct intervention by the guides.

You’ll also be introduced to a particular way of framing your thoughts about cultural troubles as they manifest in specific ancestral lineages. These toxins can include legacies such as earth disconnection, religious extremism, greed, and economic exploitation, colonialism, racism, and sexism.

By reflecting on the ways that these troubles also live in your lineages and body, you can start to reframe personal struggles as ancestral challenges and lay the groundwork for the explicit cultural healing work you’ll be doing in upcoming modules.

In this module, you’ll:

• Examine how both gifts and challenges can be passed generationally along a bloodline
• Explore ways of experiencing the energy of lineage differently than the energy of individual ancestral spirits
• Ask your ancestral guides to help you understand the specific blessings and burdens along your lineage of focus
• Be given a framework to view ancestral wounding as cultural wounding (e.g., sexism, racism, colonialism, exploitative capitalism)
• Consider making commitments to your ancestors to personally embody and restore lineage blessings

Like the living, the dead change, and in this module, you’ll increase your understanding of those processes and ask your guides to set them in motion.

You’ll explore how different cultures view the status change from ghost or recently deceased to well-seated ancestor (e.g., psychopomp, elevation, ancestralization) and ways you might perceive this healing when working in partnership with your guides. Through guided ritual, you’ll then ask your guides to receive older ancestors on your lineage of focus into the company of the healed and whole ancestors.

For the sake of both ritual safety and effective outcomes, you’ll be encouraged throughout the lineage repairs to allow your ancestral guides to carry out the work — and allow the transformations to occur with minimal personal effort.

You’ll also be given new offering practices and ways for maintaining your personal energetic safety during a catalytic healing process.

In this module, you’ll:

• Examine ways in which different cultures understand how the recent or troubled dead become ancestors
• Explore the stance of allowing your ancestral guides to effect healing, using minimal effort on your part
• Partner with your ancestral guides to assist in the elevation of older lineage ancestors
• Review the importance of ritual safety when working to directly help the troubled dead become ancestors
• Reinforce gains in the lineage healing using practices introduced earlier (e.g., offerings, focused prayer)

Family and ancestry are inevitably tangled up with questions of home and belonging, heartache and loss, love and lack of love.

In this module, you’ll explore the importance of grief in ancestral lineage healing, and be given tangible strategies for safely welcoming strong emotions during ancestor-focused rituals. The first guided ritual will include an ancestrally resourced space for contacting the inherited grief and heartache of your lineage of focus.

You’ll also explore the role of forgiveness in the healing of both the living and the dead, and have the chance to engage in a ritual forgiveness process. The approach to forgiveness isn’t forced or divorced from systemic injustice, and care will be given to the need for acts of repair from past harms when at all possible.

This module invites full-hearted, emotionally honest engagement in complement to the more driven ritual repairs of earlier and subsequent modules.

In this module, you’ll:

• Explore the benefits of and reasons for welcoming grief around the topic of your family history, lineages, and ancestors
• Be trained in how to safely regulate the intensity of grief in a ritual context that includes the spirits
• In ritual space, welcome grief or other strong emotions that may arise as part of the healing with your lineage of focus
• Reflect on the relationship of forgiveness to healing, justice, and ancestral wellness
• Engage in an emotionally honest and ritually safe forgiveness practice with your lineage of focus

In this session, you’ll ask your ancestral guides to receive the remembered dead of your lineage into the company of the well and healed ancestors.

Ritual to assist the remembered dead can cause participants to feel vulnerable due to memories or inherited stories — many less than positive — of the deceased. In addition to unfinished matters of the heart, the tendency for lineage troubles to find their strongest expression in recent generations can also increase the intensity of this stage of the work.

Along with making space for tending with the recent dead, you’ll take time to reinforce the gains made during the earlier modules and learn about the benefits of a grounded, systematic approach to ancestral repair work.

Now, over two months into the shared journey, we’ll discuss the importance of a flexible, patient, and heart-centered approach to healing intergenerational pain and disconnection.

In this module, you’ll:

• Understand differences between working with older lineage ancestors and with more recent generations
• Learn important skills for staying safe and resourced while assisting more recent lineage ancestors
• Ask your ancestral guides to intervene on behalf of your more recent lineage ancestors
• Reinforce the wellness of the older lineage and continue to practice allowing your ancestors to conduct a healing intervention
• Consider the importance of allowing the dead to change and evolve — and ways you can support this beneficial transformation

Sometimes everything that can go wrong does, fears of ancestral engagement are confirmed, and the troubled dead feature in a volatile combination of incarnate and ancestral dysfunction.

In this module, safely — and with a bit of macabre levity — you’ll be introduced to worst-case scenarios (assuming you have not already lived them with your family of origin). Together we’ll make sure that course participants with truly tangled lineages feel well met and resourced in their ancestral repair work.

You’ll be given a protocol for safely peeling back the layers in complicated cases — and for ways to frame worst-case scenarios. We’ll discuss how fear can be an ally in respecting our limitations and the critical importance of simply asking for support.

The ritual process will allow for putting these skills into practice as needed along your lineage of focus. You’ll also review a protocol for honoring the bones, ashes, and inherited ancestral objects.

In this module, you’ll:

• Consider more difficult cases (e.g., possessing spirits, curses, soul fragmentation) and guidelines for assisting
• Reframe family abuse, trauma, and dysfunction through the lens of ancestral wounding and healing
• Explore an approach to caring for ancestrally inherited objects, including physical remains
• Ask your ancestors to continue healing with the recent dead and to bless the bones of those on the lineage
• Practice shifting the state of the older lineage from well to excellent

When all your ancestors along a single lineage are well and at peace, the final stage of the repair work calls for directing lineage blessings to extended family and settling the healed, restored energy of this lineage in your physical body. After the previous stage of care for the recent dead, this is often the fun part.

In this module, you’ll be guided through a ritual to bring healing and blessing to the siblings and extended family of your grandparent, parent, siblings, etc. along this blood lineage. You’ll then be invited to ask your ancestors to update or optimize your physicality, your DNA as it were, to reflect the new healed energy of this lineage.

Finally, you’ll explore how to allow the blessings of your people along this lineage to flow not just around but through you as a conduit for prayer for living family members and future generations. With this, a circuit is completed and the relationship with this lineage begins to shift from one of healing and repair to one of maintenance and celebration.

In this module, you’ll:

• Extend ancestral blessings through the recent generations of your grandparents, parents, siblings, and children
• Ask for a personal physical upgrade of your blood, bones, and DNA to reflect the new healed energy of this lineage
• Embody lineage blessings and pray with your ancestors for any living family members from that state of greater alignment
• Return to focus on anchoring specific lineage gifts and blessings in your everyday life

Spiritual wellness is not ultimately separable from cultural wellness. Ancestors who held toxic views and enacted systemic and interpersonal violence during their lives on Earth will inevitably be invited to face the effects of their life in the process of becoming well-seated ancestors. This reckoning with the impact of one’s actions can include a kind spirit-level restorative justice or reparation that includes the dead working on behalf of individuals or groups harmed during life.

In this module, we’ll explore another layer or strata of ancestral repair work that includes directly engaging with themes of cultural healing. You’ll be invited to identify one specific kind of cultural trouble to bring to your ancestors with the intent of strongly establishing the antidote along the lineage of focus. The steps used for this can also be used for working with others kind of themes that travel along the bloodlines (e.g., physical ailments, bad fortune).

In this module, you’ll:

• Explore more deeply the cultural troubles introduced in Module 5, along with corresponding antidotes and remedies
• Consider the ways in which the dead can also culturally change and serve as important allies in work for social and earth justice
• Partner with ancestral guides to work with a specific cultural theme along your lineage of focus
• Practice allowing for a reset in your cultural perception of this ancestral lineage and your sense of self in relation to them
• Be given a specific protocol for working a theme along your lineage of focus

After the healing, a moment for pause and integration.

With respect to the repair work still to be undertaken along other lineages, you’ll look into ways to celebrate with your people, including the ritual of the spirit feast, to welcome those newly ancestralized along your lineage of focus.

You’ll also explore the possibility of being the one in the family system called to tend to the ancestors in an ongoing way, and about the option to make this calling explicit in the form of an intentional and humble vow of service to your people.

You’ll be guided through a ritual of reviewing and reinforcing the previous stages of the ancestral healing work, including the choice to walk with the gifts of this lineage of ancestors.

We’ll also discuss and weave into the embodied ritual the way in which our ancestors are excellent allies in further clarifying your very specific destiny during this Earth walk. And we’ll also have a moment together, as it’s a very precious and meaningful thing, for your ancestors to consciously return their blessings to the realm of the living.

In this module, you’ll:

• Be given new rituals for embodying and celebrating well and healed lineages
• Consider crafting an ancestral dedication ritual that establishes you as a caretaker of the ancestors in your family
• Appreciate the shift from a repair approach to one of maintenance with this lineage — and learn ways to mark the shift
• Explore ways to incorporate ancestor reverence and ritual into your everyday life and specific path
• Review next steps for tending to your remaining ancestral lineage

In this conversation with shamanic practitioner Langston Kahn, Daniel explores ways that our diversely beautiful ancestors, including those who acted harmfully during life, can be potent allies for transforming racism in the present. The interview explores some intersections of ritual healing work, activism, and cultural healing.

Langston Kahn is a New York City-based shamanic practitioner specializing in emotional clearing and radical transformation. He stands firmly at the crossroads, his practice informed by the Western modality of Inner Relationship Focusing, initiations into traditions of the African Diaspora, the contemporary shamanic tradition of the Last Mask Center, and the guidance of his helping spirits and ancestors weaving it all together. He also serves on the leadership council for the Last Mask community, a community of contemporary people striving to live in alignment with ancient shamanic beliefs and principles in a way that answers the unique challenges of our time.

In this conversation with somatic sexuality and ancestral wellness practitioner Pavini Moray, Daniel explores the ancestral roots of diverse sexual orientations, gender-blessings, and fabulously queer magics. You will learn how ancestral recovery work can support LGBTQ folks in claiming their specifically potent ancestral gifts.

Pavini Moray is committed to practicing effective techniques that interrupt multigenerational cycles of harm and heal trauma in the living and in family lineages. This work is part of a commitment to helping to heal the disconnect people may feel from their ancestors, as well as the communal wounds around sexuality, queerness, and transness that we all experience on a cultural level. Pavini is a certified practitioner in Dr. Daniel Foor’s method of Ancestral Lineage Healing and is currently a doctoral candidate in Somatic Psychology at the International University of Professional Studies, completing dissertation research on effective techniques of ancestral reverence to support sexual healing. Pavini also hosts a podcast called Bespoken Bones: Ancestors at the Crossroads of Sex, Magick, and Science that interviews brilliant artists, spiritual leaders, and thinkers about trauma, healing, the erotic, and ancestors.

In this conversation, marriage and family therapist Saskia Ison talks with Daniel about ways that the ancestors can be kind, steady, and healing allies in metabolizing the ongoing pain from miserable childhoods and other kinds of human loneliness and suffering. The interview touches on other intersections of ancestral healing and psychotherapy without being overly technical.

Saskia Ison, LMFT, received her Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her background includes working in a multitude of settings with people from across all ages of the lifespan, as well as a very wide variety of presenting issues. She’s worked at a hospital doing guided imagery and expressive arts therapy with palliative care patients, at a mental health clinic with a sliding scale fee in service of the community and accessibility to mental health, and with homeless mothers and children. She’s also worked in the school system providing therapy to young children and teenagers with their families.