Ritual for Rupture
Sexual Violence and the Ancestors
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July 21, 2026
12pm Vancouver | 3pm New York | 21:00 Madrid
90 minutes
This event will be held live on Zoom, and will be recorded.
A recording will be shared with all who register within 48 hours after the event.
About this event
Sexual violence is one of the most visible ruptures across bodies, lineages, cultures, and systmes. It sits inside a wider often invisibilized field shaped by patriarchy, racial hierarchy, economic extraction, and colonial forgetting.
In this 90-minute live teaching and ritual space, we will explore what it means to tend to this wound without collapsing into our own rage or overwhelm. We will not bypass, nor will we become adrift in further fragmentation.
We will explore how forgetting is produced, how memory is interrupted, and how we can begin to recover continuity with ourselves, our bodies, and our ancestral lines.
Rather than approaching healing as an isolated personal project, this work situates recovery inside relationships: with ancestors, with the living world, and with the deeper intelligences that help restore orientation and coherence. Ancestral connection here is not escapism or idealization of the past, but a stabilizing force that can help us reclaim a more intact sense of self while strengthening the wider cultural work of re/membering.
What to expect
Empire does not only shape policy, economics, or institutions. It shapes perception. It trains the body to normalize disconnection, fragmentation, extraction, and forgetting. Over time, these conditions become more than a worldview. They become an ontology, a lived reality that determines what we can feel, remember, trust, and imagine as possible.
Through guided teaching, ritual, and embodied practice, we will explore how this systemic “amnesia” operates both collectively and personally. How memory is interrupted. How we lose continuity with body, instinct, lineage, land, and one another. And how these fractures are reinforced across generations through family systems, culture, and structures of power.
This is an invitation to move beyond analysis alone and toward practices that restore continuity, dignity, discernment, and belonging in a time designed to erode them.
This is not a therapeutic processing circle. It is a ritualized inquiry into what has been fractured and what is still intact beneath it. This space is for those ready to engage complexity and to meet the edges of this work with both rigor and care.
Register for Before the Fracture
About the Presenters
Ashley Waverley
Host & Ancestral Healing Practitioner
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.
Candice D'Meza, B.A., MPA
Guest Teacher
Candice D’Meza is an African-American and Haitian writer, multidisciplinary artist, ritualist, and liberation educator whose work bridges Diasporic African spiritual traditions, embodied practice, and cultural transformation. Having studied Dagara ritual and cosmology under Elder Dr. Malidoma Patrice Somé, her work explores ancestral power as a living response to systems of empire and extraction. Described as “an Archeologist of the Soul,” her work has been featured by major arts institutions and publications, including the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston and American Theatre Magazine, and she currently serves as a 2025–2026 Artist-in-Residence at Lawndale Art Center.
Take the full course
Tending the Wounds of Eros:
Healing Inherited Trauma Around Sex, Power, and Intimacy
You can register for the 90 minute one-time talk on this page, and if you feel ready, consider reserving a seat in our six-week live ritual course on similar themes. Ashley Waverley teaches alongside psychologists, Orson Morrison and Catherine Dunne. Build safety, reclaim agency, restore boundaries, and transform patterns with guided practice and ancestral connection. We’ll begin in July.