Week 3: Your Ancestors

Your Ancestral Burdens and Bundles

Week 3: Interview

Interview with Daniel Foor on Ancestral Wounds and Gifts

Although this interview has a good amount of information, I encourage you to listen to it with your felt sense. Let the Speech of your Soul tell you what is most important for you to take in, explore, and ponder.

Dr. Daniel Foor leads trainings focused on ancestor work, relating with spirits of place, and remembering our unique destiny/calling. His training in earth-honoring ways includes in-depth work with the traditions of his Northern European ancestors, Native North American life ways, and the Ifa/Orisha tradition of Yoruba-speaking West African and the Diaspora. Daniel especially enjoys helping therapists, healers, and other practitioners of ritual arts to strengthen their existing practices by including elements of ancestral healing and intentional time with wilderness/nature. He is passionate about embodying earth-honoring wisdom in non-dogmatic ways that emphasize our capacity for service and innate joy. Daniel now lives in North Carolina but continues to teach in the SF Bay Area and beyond. For more information on his practice go to: www.ancestralmedicine.org.

Here are some themes that were covered:

• Daniel shared his own path of engaging ancestral work as a central aspect of his calling
• Benefits of engaging the ancestors
• The relationship between embodiment and connecting with the ancestors
• Intergenerational wounds and cultural issues
• The difference between collective ancestors, those who are troubled, and those who are well
• Ancestors and the dreamtime
• Helpful first steps of exploration

Listen Now:

Week 3: Homework

Journaling: Gather your Ancestral Burdens and Bundles

1. What do you know about your maternal line that feels intuitively relevant to your experience of your obstacle?
2. What do you know about your maternal lineage that feels relevant to your experience of your gifts, claimed and unclaimed?
3. What do you know about your paternal line that feels relevant to your experience of your obstacle?
4. What do you know about your paternal lineage that feels relevant to your experience of your gifts, claimed and unclaimed?
5. What aspect of your lineage do you feel most connected to? How do you experience this?
6. What aspect of your ancestry do you feel most estranged from?
7. What positive qualities, skills, talents, abilities and powers can you trace to your ancestors, intuitively or rationally?
8. What challenges, struggles, shortcomings, or patterns can you trace to your ancestors? What wisdom, if any, have you garnered from this?

Week Three: Communicating with your Ancestors

Prepare an Altar:

1. Choose a place that feels right for you. A small surface that you can sit in front of would be ideal. Let your sense of beauty and meaning guide you.
2. Place photos of any ancestors that you intuitively feel are important for you as you gain clarity of calling and the courage to embody it. If you do not have photos or are not drawn to placing photos on an altar, you can place any object that represents the positive resource of ancestors. Do not place photos that include the living.
3. Place a symbol of your calling, as you understand it at this point.
4. Place a symbol of the greatest obstacle that you face at this time.

Engage the Ancestors at your Altar:

1. Open a sacred container. Some possibilities: light a candle, ring a bell, shake a rattle, play a drum, sing, chant, move, pray… Follow whatever feels right to you. Call your ancestors out loud. Let them know that you want to communicate. State clearly that you are only calling on the ancestors that are able and willing to help you with your calling, and who are in the highest for you to connect with at this time.
2. Offer something that you imagine your ancestor(s) would feel fed by, such as a favorite food or drink. Some other possibilities are corn, chocolate, water, alcohol, or flowers.
3. Have a conversation every day this week if possible, even if it is only five minutes.
   Allow your true longing to be present.
4. Allow the truth of your emotions to flow no matter what the feelings are.
5. Allow yourself to ask for help. Be specific.
6. After speaking, become receptive to any response that you may feel. Trust what you notice. The western mind will doubt. Just allow yourself to notice. Stay open to your experience.

Week Three: Track your Ancestors

Track what you have noticed as you gathered and expressed in relationship to your ancestors and to your calling.

• Inner Eye: Did any images arise that caught your attention, surprised you, enlivened you or disturbed you in any way?
• Inner Ear: Did you notice whispers of the soul arising as you gathered or expressed? What did you hear?
• Kinesthetic: How did your body feel during this process? Did your body speak? If so what areas came into your awareness? What sensations arose?
• Inner Knower: Do you know something about yourself that you did not know before you began this process?

It can also be helpful to also track: Archetypes, Symbols, Patterns and Synchronicities.