Ancestral Lineage Healing Intensive
Costa Rica
January 27 – 31, 2027
About the work
Ancestral Lineage Healing is the practice of relating directly with one’s blood ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing. It involves safely establishing relationships with wise and well ancestors and enlisting their participation to deeply heal your lineages as they speak through your life today.
If you’ve participated in various kinds of personal healing work and you’re seeking greater breakthroughs, ancestral healing may be for you. This approach weaves helpful elements from psychology, cultural healing, and spiritual/ritual traditions. Patterns rooted in intergenerational cycles and cultural pain can finally find resolution. Coming into relationship with recent and more ancient ancestors can serve to re-establish obscured blessings, improve relationships with the living, and encourage clarity of purpose.
With all the blessings and challenges included, we are the face of our people on Earth.
— Daniel Foor
About the location
TIERRA VALIENTE | BRAVE EARTH
Brave Earth is located between San Ramon and La Fortuna, nestled in between Arenal Volcano and the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, the largest reserve of protected wildlife in Costa Rica.
As a living lab, they have experimented with different building modalities using AirCrete and materials sourced on the land including bamboo and adobe. They’ve implemented biophilic design, closed-loop systems and permaculture design principles. Ornamental, food, and medicinal gardens surround the center as well as hiking trials to a nearby river, and a natural swimming pond.
Cultures of Transition
From the fine folks at Tierra Valiente: The impulse for Tierra Valiente stems from an awareness of our civilizational trajectory within the dominant culture with its source code of extraction, domination, commodification, colonization, control, entitlement, and separation from the living world.
We are both informed by this critical lens and inspired to create outside of the old values and incentive landscapes to build a culture based on reciprocity, regeneration and resiliency.
In this collective transition – whether you call it the Anthropocene, the Kali Yuga, late-stage capitalism or capitalist modernity – our intention is to become more attuned to this cultural context in order to decolonize the conditioning of the dominant system and be in deeper service to our collective potential.
Logistics
Registration includes lodging, ritual, and three meals daily. Prices do not include travel to or from the venue or any extras like spa services.
The Venue: Tierra Valiente | Brave Earth, Center for Applied Cultural Transition, is a living laboratory rooted in principles of regeneration, resiliency, and reciprocity. We provide immersive experiences in Nature that share alternative ways of living and being that are suitable for modernity and contextually relevant for the rapidly changing world we live in.
Accommodations: Your rate is fully inclusive of the choice of single occupancy rooms or double occupancy for the full duration of the event from January 27 – 31, 2027.
Ritual Space: We’ll gather for dedicated time in group ritual over five days. About seven hours per day over three full days (approximately 10am to 6pm with pauses for meals and other breaks) with shorter gatherings on the first and last day of the intensive. Ritual space will be within the Maloca.
Meals: Your rate is fully inclusive of three meals per day served on site on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Wednesday’s dinner is included in the price as well as Sunday’s breakfast and a light lunch before departure. Vegetarians and other dietary restrictions will be generously accommodated, and the meals are notoriously delicious. We’ll take spacious lunch breaks each day.
Price: The price range is between $1720 up to $2700 USD. Fees will be paid in USD. Scholarships are available, especially but not only for Costa Ricans and Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Language Accommodation: We respect that this gathering is taking place in Costa Rica and Spanish-speaking lands, and we aim to gather in ways that are culturally humble, honoring of the land, and truly inclusive. We are able to offer live whisper translation and small-groups options in Spanish. If this would be of benefit to you, please let us know in your registration notes.
Scholarships: We welcome scholarship applications from anyone who feels this gathering would be of benefit, and we will be prioritizing funds for Costa Ricans and Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Scholarship applications will be accepted from July 1 – December 28, 2026. We will review applications monthly and will issue replies on a rolling basis. Please give us three to four weeks to reply before reaching out to check in.
Refunds: If life shifts and you need to cancel, deposits are fully transferable as a credit or gift when you cancel more than 90 days out. Within 90 days of your reservation, deposits are non-refundable.
Learn a life-long framework to relate in direct, safe, and empowering ways with your family and lineage ancestors.
Establish connections with ancestral guides and work in partnership with them for lasting personal and family healing.
Join with your ancestors to support the resolution of larger systemic, generational, and cultural wounding.
What to expect during session
Over five days, we’ll gather each morning in the Maloca and stay together through full, unhurried days. You can expect a combination of teaching, experiential ritual, and guided practice, with spacious time for questions and real conversation between participants and teachers.
Across the intensive, you’ll move through more than a dozen substantive guided practices, held within a larger ceremonial container of drumming, song, and offerings. All teachings and practice follow the Ancestral Lineage Healing process as outlined in Daniel Foor’s book Ancestral Medicine, the online course, and individual session work.
Between teaching sessions, the larger group will have the chance to move into smaller circles anchored by trained ritualists — at least 5-6 supporters on hand to hold space for intimate sharing and integration.
You’ll leave carrying a lifelong framework for relating safely and tenderly with your family and lineage ancestors. And over the course of the week, we’ll come together to co-create something tangible: an intricate central offering we’ll design and assemble by hand, day by day. A gift for your ancestors and for the larger prayer of cultural healing.
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Register for the Costa Rica Event
Our partners at Brave Earth are managing registration for this event. To confirm your place, please head over to their website. We hope to see you in Costa Rica!
About the Instructors
Amber and Simon bring decades of combined practice to the place where personal healing and cultural transformation are not separate projects but one inseparable movement. Amber’s work is rooted in the conviction that the psyche itself is foundational to liberation, that somatic depth, ancestral reconnection, and social justice belong in the same room. Simon’s practice as a politicized healer and ritualist holds space for the embodied, relational work of collective liberation across lines of difference. If you arrive carrying grief or despair about the state of culture, know that this event is built for exactly that convergence: your own ancestral healing will not be set aside from the larger work, but woven into it as an act of cultural repair.
Amber McZeal
DOCTOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AND ANCESTRAL HEALING PRACTITIONER
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, in an approach that centers 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.
Simon Wolff
HEALER, RITUALIST, AND ANCESTRAL HEALING PRACTITIONER
Simon or Shimon Wolff (they/he) is a politicized healer, ritualist, and artist stewarding one-to-one and group embodied ancestral healing for the sake of personal and collective liberation. They identify as a white, antiracist, antizionist, queer, trans, disabled person of the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora living on Nipmuc and Pocomtuc land colonially known as Northampton, MA. Simon’s people are from Lithuania, France, Germany, and Eastern and Northwestern Europe. In their spare time, they enjoy printmaking, crafting herbal medicine, spending time in the woods, and sharing meals with beloveds.
How much individual support will be available?
This is an in-depth experience and participants should come well resourced. While Dr. McZeal, Simon, and at least five practitioners from the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network will hold the container with care, individualized support has limits in a group intensive. If you have questions about whether this is the right container for your depth work, reach out to the team beforehand. Please note that the intensive is not a substitute for personal therapy or physical medicines. Many participants also find it valuable to work with an individual practitioner; the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Directory includes options for different languages, low-income sessions, and other specializations.
What can participants expect with regard to cultural safety and belonging?
This work is experiential, non-dogmatic, and welcoming to people of all ancestries and any spiritual background. It is rooted in feminist, decolonizing, anti-racist, LGBTQ+-affirming, class-aware, and Earth-honoring values. It’s also held with warmth and an encouragement of the vulnerability that depth ritual requires.
Participants work directly with their own lineage ancestors and are not expected to hold space for others beyond mindful presence during group shares. Each person moves through their own process alongside the group rather than in service of it.
The intensive will also weave in explicit healing for the history of place, acknowledging the genocide, enslavement, and colonization that shaped Costa Rica and Central America, honoring the Indigenous peoples of these lands, and engaging in group ritual for the land itself. All participants, whatever their ancestral relationship to harm, are warmly welcome.