DAY 3 : Daniel Foor — Partnering with the Dead for Cultural Healing and Recovery
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Ancestors and ancestral healing are trendy.
This is good; may the dead exert their claims on the living and may we be responsive. And merely thinking about the ancestors is a world apart from coming into direct, sustained dialogue with our lineage kin. Ancestral relationships are just as fraught as those with the living and often bring additional demands for unlearning and humility.Although most come to ancestral healing practices with a focus on personal and family wellness, in this shared hour, we’ll focus on ways that practices of ancestral reconnection can support efforts for cultural and systemic healing. This includes exploring ways to partner with our ancestors to in turn serve as more effective and resilient change-makers. Our time will also include consideration of the risks of ancestral reconnection. This will include: sober assessment of risk in the unseen/spirit layers of reality, ancestral support for unraveling unhelpful binaries, decolonization sensibilities as applied to ritual arts, metabolizing cultural trauma with ancestral support, and the truly terrifying process of actually trusting in imperfect elders enough to grieve, heal, and learn. Expect time for brief Q&A and an experiential
practice.ancestralmedicine.org.
Daniel is a ritualist and educator focused on helping others to reclaim their innate capacity to relate with their ancestors and with the greater web of other-than-human kin. He is the author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing and an internationally respected teacher of ancestor reverence and ritual. Since 2004 Daniel has guided over 150 multi-day ancestor-focused healing rituals in eight countries, reached thousands of participants through personal sessions and online courses, and mentored over 60 practitioners to guide the work of ancestral healing and reconnection.Daniel is the child of early settler colonialists to North America, largely from England and Germany, and he is a white, cis-gendered, able-bodied, U.S. citizen deeply committed to historical honesty, reckoning with unpaid ancestral debts, and cultural healing with respect to race, class, gender, American imperialism, and other ways in which the Earth longs for better from the human folk.
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