Tending the Wounds of Eros
Healing Inherited Trauma Around Sex, Power, and Intimacy
SIX THURSDAYS
BEGINNING AUGUST 6
11am Los Angeles | 2pm New York | 8pm Rome
About the Course
Patterns of sexual harm related to bodies, intimacy, and power do not exist only at the level of individual experience. They move through families, cultures, and histories, shaping how we relate to ourselves and others. This course is rooted in ritual, and grounded in safety, pacing, and ancestral support. We’ll approaches patterns of harm as both personal and collective and offer frameworks for understanding how these troubles are expressed, passed on, and potentially transformed on the level of lineage and larger systems.
Come to understand sexual harm in a broader context: how trauma repeats in systems, how families transmit wounds, how harm recurs, and how shame can obstruct healing.
Build emotional capacity by practicing consent and new ways to resource your nervous system with ancestral support.
Identify inherited patterns by recognizing old dynamics, relational distortions, and unconscious loyalties to lineage pain.
We aim for participants to come away feeling more resourced in their healing and more confident in maintaining healthy boundaries.
Move from confusion to pattern awareness and from shame to understanding cultural context. Start to shift the balance from reactivity to standing in your agency and choice.
Transmute inheritances of harm into conscious relationship with sex and power so we may become healthier future ancestors and build a safer world for the generations to come.
About the Course
Patterns of harm related to bodies, intimacy, and power do not exist only at the level of individual experience. They move through families, cultures, and histories, shaping how we relate to ourselves and others. This course is rooted in ritual, and grounded in safety, pacing, and ancestral support. This course approaches patterns of harm as both personal and collective, and offers a framework for understanding how they are carried, expressed, and potentially transformed through lineages.
Come to understand sexual harm in a broader context: how trauma repeats in systems, how families transmit wounds, how harm recurs, and how shame hides patterns.
Build emotional capacity by practicing consent and new ways to resource your nervous system with ancestral support.
Identify inherited patterns by recognizing old dynamics, relational distortions, and unconscious loyalties to lineage pain.
You’ll come away feeling more resourced in healing and repair to move toward healthier boundaries and new relational choices.
Move from confusion to pattern awareness.
From shame to contextual understanding.
Eschew reactivity in favor of agency.
Transmute inheritances of harm into conscious stewardship so that we may become healthier and wise future ancestors to build a better, safer world for the generations to come.
Gently repair connection to the body as a place of steadiness, intuition, and choice.
Welcome support to identify and release unconscious attachments to ancestral pain.
Restore access to lineage gifts, resilience, and hidden antidotes to inherited wounds.
Explore pathways of repair and restorative change in personal and collective life.
This course is for you if...
This course is for anyone who feels called to participate in healing the wider cultural field around sexuality, power, and intimacy. Including those…
- who have experienced sexual harm either within or outside family systems
- engaging this material primarily as a lineage, ancestral, or cultural pattern
- carrying impacts that are subtle, confusing, inherited, or difficult to name.
If you wonder whether your experience “counts,” it does. No need for a history of sexual abuse to join. If you’re feeling the impacts, you’re welcome. That said:
This course is best suited for those who have…
- relationships with supportive guides and some kind of active spiritual practice
- participated in Ancestral Lineage Healing work (recommended, not required)
- access to extra support (e.g., therapist, trusted practitioner, loving community)
- enough emotional and psychological stability to engage sensitive material.
This course is meant to sit alongside therapy and support work, engaging the cultural, ancestral, and relational layers of healing that are often outside the scope of those spaces.
This course may not be a good fit, if…
- you’re in crisis, experiencing acute destabilization, in an unsafe situation
- You are primarily seeking psychotherapy, or a space to process your story in depth
- You feel easily overwhelmed in group spaces and are new to engaging personal pain related to past harm
- Your awareness of your own experience is very recent, and you have not yet had space to process it in a one-to-one setting
- You do not yet have consistent access to grounding, regulation, or external support
If that’s the case, one-to-one support is likely the best way to go.
We ask that participants take responsibility for pacing and honoring personal limits. This course is not a substitute for therapy or other depth one-on-one healing support. When we say that, we’re affirming the importance of individual support for so many people in their healing journey. Everything in its time and season.
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 Ashley Waverley + course supporters
Small breakout sessions with trained ritualists
18 carefully curated resources to accompany 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
- Orient to collective and lineage-level blessings and wounding
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 the close relationship between wounds and gifts, blessings and burdens
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.
- Explore ways that repair can look across personal as well as collective, cultural levels
- Consider 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 Tending the Wounds of Eros
Register for Tending the Wounds of Eros
3 and 6 month payment plans available at checkout at 0% interest.
Early Registration | 20% Off
-
Discount rate available for a limited time or until capacity is reached.
Supporter
-
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
-
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
-
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 Instructor
Ashley Waverley
Lead Teacher & Main Call Anchor
Ashley is a ritualist and writer who supports individuals in building relationships with the seen and unseen. As an incest survivor herself, her work centers adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, walking alongside them through the stabilization, healing, and integration of these experiences. She is passionate about creating the conditions for folks to hold more complexity about their experiences. Ashley’s ancestors are from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Scotland. She currently resides on Mohegan land on the East Coast of the U.S.
Catherine Dunne
Ancestral Healing Practitioner, Psychotherapist
Catherine Dunne MA, has over 35 years of experience as a psychotherapist, supervisor and leader of embodied dance and community ritual. Her therapeutic work has include decades of working in and supervising front line services including community based therapeutic services and rape crisis work. Her passion and service in the world is rooted in embodied relationship – with ourselves, with other human folk, with our ancestors, and with the other-than-humans. Born and raised on traditional Lenape lands now known as Queens, New York, all eight of her great-grandparents are from Cork, Kerry, and Tipperary in southern Ireland, and for the last 35 years Catherine has been back living on her ancestral lands of Munster and resides in Co. Kerry.
Orson Morrison
Ancestral Healing Practitioner, Psychologist
Orson Morrison, a psychologist, healer and mindfulness practitioner, brings gifts of a diverse ancestry and well-honed skills to help to create a safe container supporting clients in addressing the heart-level intentions they bring to ancestral lineage healing. Orson is supported by ancestors who hail from Southern-African indigenous populations, indentured workers brought to the South-African Cape from South-Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, Central-Africans, West-Africans brought to the Caribbean as slaves, indigenous populations from Guyana, European settlers, slave-owners and those who fled religious persecution. Orson lives on the land of the Council of the Three Fires near Chicago, IL.
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?