Betrayal
Alchemy for Life’s Bitterness
SIX TUESDAYS
BEGINNING NOVEMBER 3
11am Los Angeles | 2pm New York | 20:00 Madrid
About the Course
Betrayal is a regular visitor in most human lives. It arrives as the friend who disappears without explanation. The institution that fails you when it mattered most. The spiritual teacher who let you down. It appears to you in the mirror, the moment you abandon yourself to keep the peace. Left unattended, these ruptures calcify into cynicism or armor. Metabolized, they become a source of clarity and strength. The latter is what this course explores.
Traveling a path of inner and outer liberation tends to reveal the many ways our social and relational agreements have been distorted. As we tend to this disharmony, with human and other-than-human worlds alike, in pursuit of bonds that actually sustain us, one theme surfaces again and again: betrayal, in its interpersonal, institutional, and spiritual forms.
Trust broken and confidence shattered in the wake of indignity and empathic failure is not a small thing; it can cause real psychological injury. Revenge is one response, but it keeps inhumane patterns intact. This course explores the alternatives: alchemical concepts and practices that restore our fidelity to life.
Learn about the distinct textures of betrayal: self, interpersonal, communal, and spiritual and how each moves through the body differently.
Build practical skills for metabolizing psychic and emotional charge, instead of suppressing or performing it.
Restore your capacity to stay in relationship with others, with trust itself, after rupture.
Explore the alchemical stages (nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo) as a map for turning bitterness into something usable.
More about the Course
Over six live sessions, Dr. Amber McZeal, joined twice by Daniel Foor and twice by guest teachers, will guide you through the full scope of betrayal: interpersonal, institutional, spiritual, and self-inflicted. You’ll walk the path of two overlapping maps. One for the emotional arc, one for the psychological and spiritual.
This course draws on two methodologies for moving through betrayal. The first comes from astrology’s teachings on Scorpio: scorpion, eagle, phoenix. First we sting: reactive, defensive, in survival mode. Then we rise high enough to see clearly, gaining perspective instead of just reacting. Finally we transform, changed by having moved through it rather than around it.
The second map comes from medieval and early modern European alchemists describing the real physical and chemical stages in turning base metal into gold. These ideas were later reimagined by Carl Jung as a psychological process: nigredo, the blackening, grief and wreckage, the mess betrayal leaves behind; albedo, the clarifying fire, sorting truth from story; citrinitas, the turning point where insight starts to feel like renewal; and rubedo, integration, where what you’ve learned stops being a wound you carry and becomes something you actually know.
Together, they offer structure for a process that can otherwise feel like free fall.
Small breakout groups with trained ritualists give you space to work the material in real time, not just absorb it intellectually. By the final session, you’ll have a working relationship with betrayal, not as an aberration to fear, but as a difficult teacher that, tended well, can restore your fidelity to life.
Why this course? Why now?
We are living in a time when wounds around sexuality, power, and intimacy are both exposed and normalized.
The Pelicot case. The still-redacted Epstein files. In February alone, an “online rape academy” reportedly drew tens of millions of views. All brutal measures of what we are facing. These are not only personal or familial failures, but collective ones.
Beneath the horror are patterns moving through families, institutions, and culture. What is broken at this depth will not be healed by outrage alone: it requires ritual, community, and sustained work for systemic change.
This course will be a space of safety, witness, grief, ancestral support, and sacred repair to restore dignity, intimacy, and right relationship.
With the strength of loving, wise ancestors behind us, we can start to return safely to our bodies, reclaim agency, and help end these patterns for those who come after us.
6 live teaching calls with Dr. Amber McZeal
2 sessions co-anchored with Daniel Foor
2 sessions with guest teachers on institutional and spiritual betrayal
Small breakout sessions with trained ritualists
18+ curated resources to accompany the lessons
Unlimited access to recordings and course materials
Access to a dedicated community discussion space
Course Curriculum
Lesson One: Resourcing, Safety, and Cultural Grounding
Locate sexual harm inside broader systems of supremacy rather than individual pathology only.
- Establish ritual safety and tend to healthy boundaries and consent
- Deepen relationships with affinity spirits, guides, and vibrant ancestors
- Introduce cultural conditioning around sex, gender, and body
-Explore cultural frameworks which offer antidotes to gender-based harm
Lesson Two: Strengthening the Field & Subtle Impacts
Clear heavy energies, shore up vibrancy, and sense the more subtle imprints of harm.
- Explore less visible and named impacts of sexual harm and misuse of power
- Deepen connection with lineage and other “composters” and “alchemists”
- Introduce principles and practices for safely working with very troubled energies
- Practice intentionally expanding into what is safe, healed, and life-affirming
Lesson Three: Tracing Patterns through Lineage and Culture
Understand the relationship between lineage burdens and blessings/antidotes.
- Explore ways that sexual harm enters and takes root in family lineages
- Consider systems and behaviors that allow harm to persist across generations
- Learn to differentiate personal experience from lineage and cultural burdens
- Explore how initiation and practices of community repair interrupt cycles of harm
Lesson Four: Pausing to Feel and to Tend to What Is
Develop skills for witnessing and allowing for grief without becoming overwhelmed.
- Explore the role of grieving in metabolizing and moving through past harms
- Consider the nuances and assumptions around possible forgiveness practices
- Practice letting lineage guides and other allies work to transform harmful patterns
- Learn ways to support shifts through presence, prayer, and tangible offerings
Lesson Five: Softening the Victim / Victimizer Polarity
Explore victim/tyrant dynamics to reduce reactivity and support greater agency and choice.
- Identify ways that these roles play out for you both personally and ancestrally
- Learn to call on collective level remedy to transform collective level stuckness
- Create the conditions for new embodied wisdom beyond this specific polarity
- Practice deliberately reclaiming balanced, relational forms of power and agency
Lesson Six: Integration, Repair, and Future Pathways
Translate insight into ongoing practices that support accountability, repair, and sustainable change.
- Consider what a healthy or supported relationship to eros might look like over time
- Explore the multiple benefits of restorative and transformative justice frameworks
- Integrate new ways of inhabiting your personal boundaries and relational patterns
- Orient toward becoming a conscious ancestor and proactive lineage steward
Waitlist for Betrayal
Register for Betrayal
3 and 6 month payment plans available at checkout at 0% interest.
Early Registration slots are sold out!
Early Registration | 32% Off
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Discount rate available for a limited time or until capacity is reached.
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
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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.
Reduced
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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.
Course Schedule
Six Teaching Calls with Ashley Waverley & TeAM
All calls are supported by two experienced psychotherapists, Catherine Dunne and Orson Morrison, as well as Ancestral Healing Practitioners.
- Thursdays | August 6, 13, 20, 27, September 3, 10
- 11am Los Angeles | 2pm New York | 8pm Rome
CLASS STRUCTURE
Each live session is 1hr 45min total. Ashley and course assistants, Catherine and Orson, will teach for 75 minutes. This time will include guided practice and live Q&A with the instructors. In the final 30 minutes, you’ll break into smaller groups anchored by trained ritualists in the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network.
All calls will be recorded and available in your course dashboard indefinitely. Look for recordings 24-48 hours after the call.
About the Instructors
Ashley Waverley
Lead Teacher & Main Call Anchor
Writer, vocalist, sacred scholar, and artivist, Amber utilizes sound therapy and guided somatic imagery to engage the knowledge of the body within an interactive and liberatory arts practice. In 2018, she launched her organization, Decolonizing the Psyche, where she weaves somatic praxis with Afro-Indigenous spiritual technologies and social justice—deep decoloniality—in efforts to address cultural trauma, foster transformation, and create more humane social relationships. She has been a certified practitioner since 2022, supporting people in reconnecting with vibrant ancestors to both tend intergenerational & cultural trauma, and embody the gifts of their people as spiritual inheritances.
Samah Jabr
Guest Speaker
Dr. Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist practicing in Palestine, serving communities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank; formally, she was the Head of the Mental Health Unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health. She is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the George Washington University in Washington DC and participates in the Scientific Committee of the Global Initiative Against Impunity for International Crimes and Serious Human Rights Violations—a program co-funded by the European Union—as a member of its Scientific Committee.
Daniel Foor
Lead Teacher & Main Call Anchor
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
Main Teaching Calls | 105 min | Thursdays
11am Los Angeles | 2pm New York | 8pm Rome
Call 1: August 6
Call 2: August 13
Call 3: August 20
Call 4: August 27
Call 5: September 3
Call 6: September 10
The timing of the main calls favor participants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Thanks to our international community of learners for your understanding around the challenges of time-zone inclusivity. All who register get lifetime access to recordings, and you’re welcome to send in questions for our teaching team to answer during live calls or in written form.
To the very best of our ability, yes. All Ancestral Medicine offerings seek to embody an anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ-celebrating, decolonizing, and Earth-honoring ethic. They are also class-aware and internationally conscious. We offer a heartfelt, non-dogmatic approach that seeks to honor each participant’s unique life experiences and ancestral storylines. Resources included with each lesson favor ancestrally and geographically diverse voices.
All our live calls are held via Zoom. Shortly after you register, you’ll receive a welcome email with instructions for locating this event – and its call information – in your Ancestral Medicine account. There’s no need to wait for that email, however. Registration automatically enrolls your Ancestral Medicine account in the event and places it in your Student Dashboard.
No. This course is for anyone who feels called to participate in healing the wider cultural field around sexuality, power, and intimacy. Many participants may be working with inherited family patterns, subtle relational wounds, cultural conditioning, or impacts that are difficult to name. Other participants may be “allies,” such as therapists, teachers, or people who work with others who have experienced trauma. Direct personal experience is not required to benefit from this course.
This is a structured, ritual-based course focused on working with inherited and lived patterns of harm through guided ritual and direct relationship with ancestors and helping forces.
Each week includes a short teaching segment and a guided ritual practice. The emphasis is on experience and process, not discussion.
This is not therapy. It is not individual therapy, and it is not group therapy. It is not a space for in-depth personal storytelling, trauma processing, or receiving therapeutic support from the group or facilitators.
The work happens through ritual, not through talking or cognitive processing. This includes: guided ritual processes, working with ancestors and helping forces and noticing shifts in the body, perception, and relational patterns.
There will be limited, optional opportunities for asking clarifying questions during the calls, as well as in the 30 min breakout rooms where participants can share reflections or personal experiences. There is also the optional opportunity to share your personal story in a brief way in the course Connection Space.
However:
- sharing is never required
- there is no structured group processing
- the course is not designed around listening to or responding to each other’s stories
The primary relationship in this work is between you and your our own spiritual guidance (e.g., healed ancestors, connection to Earth and Spirit), not between participants.
It can be. The material itself can bring up strong emotional response, even without direct storytelling. The course is structured to support pacing and regulation, but participants are responsible for tracking their own capacity, stepping back when needed, and engaging at a level that feels manageable.
All live teaching calls will be recorded and made available 24-48 hours later in the course portal to watch and listen to at your leisure, with indefinite access.
All of our lesson videos have auto-generated English subtitles, as well as downloadable audio-only versions of the lessons. 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 a live 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 this course, you can request a refund before the second session begins. After this, no refunds will be offered.
The course is rooted in ritual and grounded in safety, pacing, boundaries, and consent. Each session includes guided support, live teaching, and smaller breakout groups held by trained ritualists. The intention is to create a space where participants can engage deeply without being pushed beyond capacity.
Catherine and Orson bring combined decades of experience in clinical settings, and Catherine in particular has worked directly with many clients who experienced sexual harm in religious contexts. As an incest survivor herself, Ashley’s work centers adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, with a focus on re-stabilization, healing, and integration of these experiences. All this is to say: we have taken great care with how the space will be held, and by whom.
If you are concerned about your capacity, we encourage you to have outside support in place through trusted family, friends, or clinicians. Please do not plan to use breakout sessions as therapy.
Have a question that’s not answered here?