FREE OFFERING
Bridging Culture and Psyche with the Ancestors
A Conversation with Ancestral Healing Practitioners
with Amber McZeal, Anna Hoffman, Annie Blackstone & Daniel Foor
May 7, 2024
90min at 12pm Vancouver | 3pm New York | 21:00 Berlin
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Our Invitation
Contradictions and false dichotomies abound in spaces of healership, psychology, and activism. Healer types could stand to get more vocal and politically active. Activists could often use a little extra nurturance, introspection, and personal healing. People of relative privilege who train in approaches to mental and spiritual wellness are often a bit checked out from systemic oppression. A systems analysis alone can unintentionally flatten or dehumanize the humans who make up those systems. Round and around…
Fortunately, increasing numbers of practitioners are thriving outside such binaries to skillfully bridging psyche and culture.
The ancestors are one powerful and effective focus in this essential bridging. Many if not most of our personal challenges, upon deeper inquiry, have some ancestral and lineage origin. And systems of oppression are themselves the reverberation of ancestral confusion, upheld by ghosts, and reminders of the unfinished work and pain into which we’ve been born. Ancestral healing is personal and cultural, both inner work and systemic.
In this free 90-minute teaching and conversation, Daniel and three experienced practitioners of Ancestral Lineage Healing (Amber McZeal, Anna Hoffman, & Annie Blackstone) will share from their experience of working professionally with ancestors and culture. This will also be a time to learn of the upcoming cycle of the Ancestral Healing Practitioner Training with a focus on Decolonization, Indigeneity, and Belonging. Expect ample time for Q&A. The call will be recorded and shared afterward with all who register.
We’ll explore topics like:
- How can ancestral healing help to dissolve unhelpful cultural conditioning and clarify life path and purpose?
- Why is accessing ancestral support a useful part of transforming cultural supremacies and internalized forms of oppression and harm?
- In what ways might a focus on ancestral healing inform one’s view of essential work for cultural change?
Our time will include:
- Kind, pragmatic teachings from four practitioners of ancestral healing arts
- A guided practice to access ancestral support in your work for culture change
- Opportunity to bring live questions to our presenters
- Orientation to the training structure for the eighth cohort of the Ancestral Healing Practitioner Training
Extreme individualism is psychologically hazardous, harmful for the Earth, and one of the greatest obstacles to collective action and systemic change.
About the Presenters
Amber McZeal
Writer, vocalist, & sacred scholar Amber McZeal utilizes sound therapy and guided somatic imagery to engage the knowledge of the body within an interactive and liberatory arts practice. Amber weaves somatic praxis with social justice and spirituality to center the psyche as foundational in movements to end oppression and create more humane social & cultural relationships. She holds an M.A. in Somatic Depth psychology and a Ph.D. in Depth psychology with a specialization in Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Ecological psychologies. Her ancestors are from Louisiana, with roots in Haiti, Cameroon, Congo, Nigeria, Benin, France, Spain, and Indigenous North America. Amber lives on the Indigenous lands of the Ohlone people in Oakland, CA. Learn More
Anna Hoffman
My ancestors are from areas now called Germany, Northern and Eastern Europe. For most of my life my confrontation with my origins felt determined by dealing with fascism, class and being white. Now I also know about my completely different ancient heritage – one of integrity, humor, healing powers. A whole new sense of belonging, self-confidence and aliveness. Reconciliation and reparations have meaning that is now rooted in relations and connection. It is a pleasure for me to accompany people to get in contact with their ancestors and to put this contact on a new footing. My professional background is in somatics and trauma therapy. I am a queer artist and doglover. Learn More
Annie Blackstone
Annie Blackstone is and has been many things in this life, and more than anything she is a bridge connecting people, spirit, nature, ancestors, and community. A hypnotherapist for 30 years, she also teaches and practices ancestral healing, shamanic practices, EFT, Brainspotting, Biofield Tuning, and Reiki at HCH Institute in Lafayette California. Annie’s people of blood and bone come from England, Portugal and Cherokee nation. She lives above the redwoods in Canyon, California in the territory of the Huichin, Ohlone, and Confederated tribes of Lisjan peoples. Learn More
Daniel Foor
Daniel is a doctor of psychology, experienced ritualist, and the author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing. He is an initiate in the Òrìṣà tradition of Yoruba-speaking West Africa and has learned from teachers of Mahayana Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and the older ways of his English and German ancestors. Daniel is passionate about training aspiring leaders and change makers in the intersections of cultural healing, animist ethics, and applied ritual arts. He lives with his wife and two daughters near Granada, Spain in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Learn More
