Live Teachings Thursdays, Beginning March 20
Ancestral Lineage Healing
Practices for Personal & Cultural Transformation
About the Course
We’re never truly alone, in our joy or in our struggles. The practice of learning how to connect with our ancestors – to really speak to them and understand their wisdom – reveals this to us. Join us and remember how to listen and to trust.
Through inclusive, well-crafted teachings and guided practices, explore living in conscious relationship with the many generations who came before you. The course is appropriate both for beginners and those with years of experience in the terrain of family and ancestral healing.
* please note, the video refers to 14 lessons, but the most current course is 12.
Embrace ancestral wisdom and support for healing, guidance, and inspiration.
— Daniel Foor
In this course you will
Learn a
five-step framework
Learn a five-step framework for safely engaging with your blood ancestors and for partnering with elder guides to heal your family lineages.
Acquire
new ritual
skills
Acquire important skills through over 20 live teachings guided by Daniel and four seasoned ritualists in the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network.
Establish
boundaries
with the ghosts
Affirm and maintain clear boundaries for ritual and psychological safety. Engage in lineage healing in nourishing, trauma-aware, and sustainable ways.
Join a diverse, international community
Enjoy learning and guided practice in an international community, where you can honor your own pace and enjoy support from experienced practitioners.
Build deep relationships with your ancestors
Internalize and make use of simple, effective practices to sustain a lifetime of potent and nourishing connection with your personal lineage ancestors.
Course Overview
Through inclusive, well-crafted teachings and guided practices, explore living in conscious relationship with the many generations who came before you. The course is appropriate both for beginners and those with years of experience in the terrain of family and ancestral healing.
Registration includes 12 pre-recorded lessons and over 20 live teachings. Live calls will be anchored by Shannon Willis, Ancestral Medicine’s Ritual Director; Amber McZeal, Chi Young Kim and Daniel Foor, author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Cultural Healing.
Weekly calls supplement the recorded lessons and dive deeper into each lesson’s themes. You’re encouraged to keep pace week-by-week and welcome to move through the course at whatever pace best suits your schedule. There’s no requirement to attend the live calls, but it is an opportunity to interact and ask questions in real time with a diverse, international community.
THURSDAYS
BEGINNING JANUARY 16
10am Vancouver | 1pm New York | 19:00 Madrid
12 live teaching calls led by Rachel Webster and Daniel Foor
12 additional live support calls with Erica Nunnally
Small breakout groups anchored by trained ritualists
More than 24 substantive guided experiential practices
50+ carefully curated resources to accompany lessons
Access to a dedicated community discussion space
Course Curriculum
Lesson One: Foundations of Ancestor Reverence
- Explore the animist and cross-cultural basis of ancestor reverence
- Learn the origins and framework for this approach to lineage healing
- Address ritual safety and differences between ancestors and ghosts
- Consider family inquiry, DNA ancestry tests, and historical research
- Enjoy resources on animism, ancestor reverence, and family research
Topic of the live call in week one: Intuitive and Historical Honesty
Lesson Two: Balancing Range, Honesty, & Ritual Safety
- Learn to distinguish our opinions of the dead from their present state
- Name the recent dead and extend to them a healing process and container
- Learn to collaborate with the dead in writing while honoring your boundaries
- Explore ways to enact effective protection from the troubled dead
- Develop writing techniques for tending boundaries with unhealed ancestors
Lesson Three: Understanding Lineage Blessings and Burdens
- Enjoy guided practice to deepen with wise and loving older ancestors
- Write into distinct blessings and burdens in your ancestral line
- Optionally enjoy group time with Rachel focused on ancestral writing
- Alternatively spend focused Daniel time refining spirit contact skills
- Explore writing before, during and after ancestral connection practices
Lesson Four: Working with Specific Lineage Stories
- Engage how you see your people as entry points for new, direct learning
- Explore, also in writing, the terrain of imagination and ancestral memory
- Practice writing as listening (clairaudience) and as seeing (clairvoyance)
- Continue to gently tend to those on the lineage still receiving healing
- Welcome any changes or healing shifts in your perception of the lineage
Lesson Five: Writing into Forgiveness and Emotional Healing
- Learn about the benefits of ancestral storytelling and a “coherent narrative”
- Expand through writing into the energy of non-judgment and compassion
- Attend gently to old stories that your lineage may be ready to release
- Address warriorship aspects of writing and the courage to name the difficult
- Practice writing as a form of active invocation, healing, and prayer
Lesson Six: Living the Gifts, Writing as Courage and Vow
- Discuss impacts of individualism on writing and ancestral reconnection
- Write as a way to connect past and present, personal and collective
- Explore ways to tangibly embody ancestral gifts in your daily life
- Continue to tend to those on the lineage still in need of healing
- Practice softening individualism to support good writing, living, and dying
Lesson Seven: Conscious Communion, Writing as Intimacy
- Explore intersections of channeling and ancestral co-writing
- Write about yourself as an embodiment of these specific ancestors
- Optionally enjoy group time with Daniel refining ritual skills
- Alternatively spend focused with Rachel on ancestral writing
- Practice conscious co-writing with your well and wise ancestors
Lesson Eight: Embracing Relationship, Writing for and with the Dead
- Discuss integration, next steps, and ways to deepen with course material
- Savor a handful of heartfelt writing shares from course participants
- Tend to the dead still mending and honor any recently healed ancestors
- Learn tangible ways to nurture and continue your writing projects
- Practice dwelling with your ancestors in the energy of celebration
Curriculum
Lessons emphasize psychological, cultural, and energetic safety and move through the foundational steps of the Ancestral Lineage Healing method.
Live calls, held each week, are followed by small-group breakouts with practitioners. These calls parallel and complement pre-recorded lessons and emphasize building ritual skills in areas that both nourish your ancestral reconnection practice and support relational wellness in everyday life.
One
Lesson 1: Foundations of Ancestor Reverence
- Explore the animist and cross-cultural basis of ancestor reverence
- Learn the origins and framework for this approach to lineage healing
- Address ritual safety and differences between ancestors and ghosts
- Consider family inquiry, DNA ancestry tests, and historical research
- Enjoy resources on animism, ancestor reverence, and family research
Topic of the live call in week one: Intuitive and Historical Honesty
Two
Lesson 2: Assessment of Four Blood Lineages
- Assess the current condition of four of your ancestral lineages
- Establish any necessary boundaries for you and your family
- Explore ways to trust your intuition and reclaim direct knowing
- Determine the focus of your ancestral repair work
- Enjoy resources on epigenetics, psychology, and epistemology
Topic of the live call in week two: Boundaries and Ritual Safety
Three
Lesson 3: Contacting Ancestral Guides
- Learn a framework for sustained connection with older ancestors
- Safely seek direct connection with wise and kind ancestral guides
- Invite blessings and support for your life from these ancestral elders
- Explore ways to nurture and expand into new ancestral connections
- Enjoy resources on West and Central African ancestral traditions
Topic of the live call in week three: Trusting Intuition and Direct Knowing
Four
Lesson 4: Deepening with Lineage Elders
- Learn about offering practices and ways to tend an ancestral altar
- Expand into spirit-guided historical inquiry and cultural recovery
- Practice attuning, listening, and following the lead of the lineage elders
- Ask the guides to surround the generations between in healing prayer
- Enjoy resources on ancestor reverence in Celtic cultures and Ireland
Topic of the live call in week four: Altar Tending and Feeding Relationships
Five
Lesson 5: Ancestral Blessings and Burdens
- Learn to conceptualize, identify, and transform ancestral legacies
- Consider six major types of cultural trouble and their antidotes
- Seek understanding from the ancestors on lineage gifts and burdens
- Embody blessings and transform burdens with ancestral support
- Enjoy resources on ancestor reverence in Mayan and Nahua cultures
Topic of the live call in week five: Aligning with What is Healing
Six
Lesson 6: Assisting Older Lineage Ancestors
- Explore causes of ancestral wounding and pathways for healing
- Support as needed in the ancestralization of older lineage ancestors
- Practice allowing the guides to oversee and enact the healing
- Reinforce previous steps and focus on stoking what feeds life
- Enjoy resources on ancestral traditions in China, Mongolia, and Korea
Topic of the live call in week six: Deepening Trust in the Sacred
Seven
Lesson 7: Grieving and Forgiveness
- Consider the importance and benefits of grieving for and with the dead
- Practice regulating the intensity of collective ancestrally infused states
- Seek to balance emotional courage, cultural awareness, and ritual safety
- Partner with the ancestors for potent grieving and forgiveness practices
- Enjoy resources on prehistoric ancestors and others in the genus Homo
Topic of the live call in week seven: Welcoming Strong Emotion
Eight
Lesson 8: Assisting the Recent Dead
- Learn important differences when assisting more recent generations
- Invite the guides to intervene on behalf of recent generations in need
- Reinforce safety protocols in cases of serious lineage disturbance
- Reflect on tales of trouble and healing from this stage of the process
- Enjoy resources on LGBTQ+ ancestors and diverse types of families
Topic of the live call in week eight: Inviting Big Shifts and Healing
Nine
Lesson 9: Tending the Bones
- Learn a framework and additional protocols for worst-case scenarios
- Explore ways to support lineage ancestors to shift from well to vibrant
- Consider the ongoing relationship of the ancestors to this dimension
- Practice caring for remains, ancestral objects, and inheritances
- Enjoy resources on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism
Topic of the live call in week nine: Caring for the Body and Physical
Ten
Lesson 10: Embodying Ancestral Blessings
- Consider the impacts of ancestral wounding and healing on living relatives
- Invite the guides to bring healing and goodness to your extended family
- Request physical healing and optimizing of your blood, bones, and DNA
- Embody lineage blessings and pray with the ancestors for your relations
- Enjoy resources on decolonization and select Indigenous traditions
Topic of the live call in week ten: Becoming the Face of Your Ancestors
Eleven
Lesson 11: Harmonizing the Lineages
- Learn new ways to celebrate well and healed ancestral lineages
- Reflect on personal shifts with respect to family, identity, and purpose
- Consider a ritual dedication to care for family ancestral wellness
- Practice the harmonization of multiple well lineages if possible
- Enjoy resources on ancestral traditions of Europe and North Africa
Topic of the live call in week eleven: Embracing Complexity and Nuance
Twelve
Lesson 12: Pathways for Deepening
- Learn ways to safely engage other-than-blood family ancestors
- Consider blood ancestors in conversation with ancestors of place
- Review pathways for cultural healing and tangible acts of repair
- Practice engaging ancestors of vocation or other shared identities
- Enjoy resources on ancestor reverence in popular culture
Topic of the live call in week twelve: Grounding Changes in Daily Life
Lesson 1: Foundations of Ancestor Reverence
- Explore the animist and cross-cultural basis of ancestor reverence
- Learn the origins and framework for this approach to lineage healing
- Address ritual safety and differences between ancestors and ghosts
- Consider family inquiry, DNA ancestry tests, and historical research
- Enjoy resources on animism, ancestor reverence, and family research
Topic of the live call in week one: Intuitive and Historical Honesty
Lesson 2: Assessment of Four Blood Lineages
- Assess the current condition of four of your ancestral lineages
- Establish any necessary boundaries for you and your family
- Explore ways to trust your intuition and reclaim direct knowing
- Determine the focus of your ancestral repair work
- Enjoy resources on epigenetics, psychology, and epistemology
Topic of the live call in week two: Boundaries and Ritual Safety
Lesson 3: Contacting Ancestral Guides
- Learn a framework for sustained connection with older ancestors
- Safely seek direct connection with wise and kind ancestral guides
- Invite blessings and support for your life from these ancestral elders
- Explore ways to nurture and expand into new ancestral connections
- Enjoy resources on West and Central African ancestral traditions
Topic of the live call in week three: Trusting Intuition and Direct Knowing
Lesson 4: Deepening with Lineage Elders
- Learn about offering practices and ways to tend an ancestral altar
- Expand into spirit-guided historical inquiry and cultural recovery
- Practice attuning, listening, and following the lead of the lineage elders
- Ask the guides to surround the generations between in healing prayer
- Enjoy resources on ancestor reverence in Celtic cultures and Ireland
Topic of the live call in week four: Altar Tending and Feeding Relationships
Lesson 5: Ancestral Blessings and Burdens
- Learn to conceptualize, identify, and transform ancestral legacies
- Consider six major types of cultural trouble and their antidotes
- Seek understanding from the ancestors on lineage gifts and burdens
- Embody blessings and transform burdens with ancestral support
- Enjoy resources on ancestor reverence in Mayan and Nahua cultures
Topic of the live call in week five: Aligning with What is Healing
Lesson 6: Assisting Older Lineage Ancestors
- Explore causes of ancestral wounding and pathways for healing
- Support as needed in the ancestralization of older lineage ancestors
- Practice allowing the guides to oversee and enact the healing
- Reinforce previous steps and focus on stoking what feeds life
- Enjoy resources on ancestral traditions in China, Mongolia, and Korea
Topic of the live call in week six: Deepening Trust in the Sacred
Lesson 7: Grieving and Forgiveness
- Consider the importance and benefits of grieving for and with the dead
- Practice regulating the intensity of collective ancestrally infused states
- Seek to balance emotional courage, cultural awareness, and ritual safety
- Partner with the ancestors for potent grieving and forgiveness practices
- Enjoy resources on prehistoric ancestors and others in the genus Homo
Topic of the live call in week seven: Welcoming Strong Emotion
Lesson 8: Assisting the Recent Dead
- Learn important differences when assisting more recent generations
- Invite the guides to intervene on behalf of recent generations in need
- Reinforce safety protocols in cases of serious lineage disturbance
- Reflect on tales of trouble and healing from this stage of the process
- Enjoy resources on LGBTQ+ ancestors and diverse types of families
Topic of the live call in week eight: Inviting Big Shifts and Healing
Lesson 9: Tending the Bones
- Learn a framework and additional protocols for worst-case scenarios
- Explore ways to support lineage ancestors to shift from well to vibrant
- Consider the ongoing relationship of the ancestors to this dimension
- Practice caring for remains, ancestral objects, and inheritances
- Enjoy resources on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormomism
Topic of the live call in week nine: Caring for the Body and Physical
Lesson 10: Embodying Ancestral Blessings
- Consider the impacts of ancestral wounding and healing on living relatives
- Invite the guides to bring healing and goodness to your extended family
- Request physical healing and optimizing of your blood, bones, and DNA
- Embody lineage blessings and pray with the ancestors for your relations
- Enjoy resources on decolonization and select Indigenous traditions
Topic of the live call in week ten: Becoming the Face of Your Ancestors
Lesson 11: Harmonizing the Lineages
- Learn new ways to celebrate well and healed ancestral lineages
- Reflect on personal shifts with respect to family, identity, and purpose
- Consider a ritual dedication to care for family ancestral wellness
- Practice the harmonization of multiple well lineages if possible
- Enjoy resources on ancestral traditions of Europe and North Africa
Topic of the live call in week eleven: Embracing Complexity and Nuance
Lesson 12: Pathways for Deepening
- Learn ways to safely engage other-than-blood family ancestors
- Consider blood ancestors in conversation with ancestors of place
- Review pathways for cultural healing and tangible acts of repair
- Practice engaging ancestors of vocation or other shared identities
- Enjoy resources on ancestor reverence in popular culture
Topic of the live call in week twelve: Grounding Changes in Daily Life
Accessibility is a core value at Ancestral Medicine. We offer several pricing tiers, and we leave it to you to select the most appropriate tier. The ranges in pricing aims to take into consideration global economic disparities, historical injustices, and personal circumstances. The system is designed for those with more to register in ways that support those with less.
Supporter
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This rate helps us make our work accessible to those with modest means and applies if you have investments, a retirement plan, and/or access to economic abundance.
Standard Rate
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Our standard rate allows us to sustain our work. This typically applies if you’re employed in the Global North, and you’re able to provide for your needs in a consistent way.
Community
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This rate applies if you’re relatively less economically advantaged in the ways listed under “standard rate” or that cost is simply out of reach for you financially.
If none of these rates are accessible to you and you’re called to this work, we offer a limited number of scholarships. Click below to apply for approval. Applications will close on September 4. Replies may take time due to high volume, but all replies will be sent by September 9.
Price
What’s Included
- Weekly live teaching calls (all recorded) with two experienced ritualists and guest appearances by Daniel, each 60-90 minutes.
- Small-group breakout sessions during the teaching calls, facilitated by experienced practitioners. Includes optional affinity space breakouts for BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and SWANA participants.
- Additional weekly support calls specifically designed to integrate course material and practice ritual skills.
- Course workbook to chart your path over these 12 weeks and beyond.
- Extensive course resources offering multicultural perspectives from around the world.
- Access to our private Community Forum, where you can interact with Ancestral Medicine staff, course supporters, and fellow learners.
- Lifetime access to course materials.
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, 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.
Shannon Willis
Shannon is a dedicated ritualist working at the intersection of dream midwifery, psychopomp, ancestral and oracular practices. She holds a Masters in Leadership and Professional Counseling and has more than four decades of experience leading individuals, groups, and organizations through consultation and ritual. She is an initiate of Ọbàtálá and Ọ̀ṣun in the lineage of Olúwo Fálolú Adésànyà Awoyadé, a devoted student of Jhankri shamanism through the 27th generational lineage of Bhola Nath Banstola, and Ancestral Medicine’s Ritual Director. She is a descendant of settler-colonists from the British Isles, Belgium, France, freed peoples of West Africa, and indigenous Cherokee and Kaskaskia/Illini nations.
Chi Young Kim
Chi Young Kim is dedicated to helping people reclaim relationship with their ancestors, to one’s self, and to the larger community of the living Earth for a deeper sense of purpose and belonging. All her recent ancestors are from Korea and as a Korean American woman, she has learned to bridge multiple cultural realities and identities. Her offerings of ancestral healing and grief support are grounded, embodied and culturally mindful. Born in Seoul, Korea, raised in New York City, land of the Lenape, she currently resides in Asheville, North Carolina the ancestral lands of the Cherokee (Tsalagi) peoples.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Pre-recorded lessons are released in three batches:
- Lessons 1-4 will be released one week before the course begins, on March 13.
- Lessons 5-8 will be available after Main Call #4.
- Lessons 9-12 will be available after Main Call #8.
Main Teaching Calls are 90 minutes on Thursdays for 12 weeks at 2:00pm New York / 8:00pm Madrid. (See your local time.)
- March 20 with Daniel
- March 27 with Shannon
- April 3 with Amber
- April 10 with Amber
- April 17 with Shannon
- April 24 with Amber
- May 1 with Amber
- May 8 with Shannon
- May 15 with Amber
- May 22 with Shannon
- May 29 with Shannon
- June 5 with Daniel
Practice and Ritual Skills Calls are supplementary calls for additional practice, connection, and Q&A. These are 60 minutes on Tuesdays for 11 weeks at 8:30pm US Eastern with Chi Young Kim.
- March 25
- April 1
- April 8
- April 15
- April 22
- April 29
- May 6
- May 13
- May 20
- May 27
- June 3
All calls are recorded and can be viewed approximately 24-48 hours later.
All live teaching calls will be recorded. And all recordings will be made available within the course portal to watch and listen to at your leisure, with access in perpetuity.
These calls focus on the core content of the course and will generally reference the most recent lessons released. The Practice and Ritual Support calls guided by Shannon Willis offer time for specific questions and support and will also be recorded.
This is a 12-week course. Each pre-recorded lesson requires approximately 90 minutes per week and live weekly teaching calls are an additional 60-90 minutes. We also offer additional optional practice and ritual skills calls for one hour. Lessons are sequenced in an intentional way, so it’s recommended to create time for yourself to follow the lessons in order.
That said, the emphasis of this course is ritual skill building to support your daily life and practice well beyond these 12 weeks. So don’t let the feeling of “falling behind” keep you from joining the calls or enjoying the community, course material, and resources. There aren’t goals to hit within this course, and there’s no test; the lineage repair process simply needs space and time to unfold.
You’ll have access to course materials indefinitely, and all live calls will be recorded and placed into your course dashboard in the days following each call. So every moment of every teaching, including practice calls, can be returned to later.
In early 2023 we made significant updates to the structure of Ancestral Lineage Healing. If you took Ancestral Lineage Healing before, we think you’ll enjoy the updated focus on skill-building. The heart of the material is the same, but the outcomes and learning objectives are more clear. Some of the changes enabled us to offer this course at a lower cost, which makes it more accessible overall, which is a core value.
Support for these two groups include private discussion forums and 30-minute small group breakout spaces after the main teaching calls each week. Experienced course supporters who are familiar with the curriculum of Ancestral Lineage Healing and also identify with that affinity group will anchor these spaces. Details on affinity spaces, their intentions, and criteria for participation can be found here.
We ask folks to mindfully self-select for participation in these spaces, as best meets your identities and the communities within which you wish to be supported during this course. You’re welcome to participate as often or as little as you wish. There’s also no pressure to opt in.
We recognize there are many other affinity space interests. We encourage participants to self-organize through the private course connection space if interested in forming groups beyond the four available. In the event that there is not sufficient interest or we are missing a course supporter, it’s possible not all of these spaces will be available.
While the course and the lineage repair process are designed with ritual safety and self-paced practice in mind, this tender journey with your ancestors can bring up challenging emotions. If at any point in this course you feel overwhelmed, consider starting with participation in the Practice and Ritual Skills call.
Please also consider reaching out to someone in the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network for one-on-one support and guidance. Most are available for private individualized sessions, and many offer low-cost sessions to support financial accessibility.
Returning participants to the Ancestral Lineage Healing course will receive an email with a special discount. If you do not receive this email by March 1, please email info@ancestralmedicine.org to request the link to register at this discounted price.
All of our lesson videos have closed captioning, as well as a full transcript and additional downloadable audio-only versions. If you have needs not met here, please feel free to reach out to us with suggestions at info@ancestralmedicine.org.
Should you wish to withdraw from an online course or shift your registration to a future iteration, please contact us at info@ancestralmedicine.org to request a full refund within the refund window of that specific course. For our 12-week courses, you can request a refund up to 2 weeks after the course start date.
We’d be happy to help with any additional questions! Reach out to info@ancestralmedicine.org with your question and someone from our team will be in touch usually within two business days.
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