Everyone has loving and wise ancestors, and by reaching out for their support we access tremendous vitality for personal and family healing. In addition to supporting repairs with living family, our ancestors encourage healthy self-esteem and help us to clarify our destiny, relationships, and work in the world. 

Participants will learn to relate safely and directly with family ancestors, both helpful guides and the dead who are still in need of assistance. Expect to engage lineage ancestors through prayer, song, visioning practices, offerings, forgiveness work, and group dialogue. This is the core ancestor training that I've guided throughout the United States since 2005. 

There are no prerequisites, however, experience with inner work/psychological healing and relating with spirit guides/teachers are both helpful. Folks new to ancestor work, adoptees, and those with a tough experience of family are welcome. Those with a healing arts practice will learn new skills to support your work.

Dreams don't require buy-in to any human system, tradition, or dogma; they are as ancient as consciousness itself. In this way, your dreams are a profoundly intimate and reliable source of spiritual guidance and a natural access point to inner work for folks wary of organized traditions. Dreams cut across established traditions and cultural difference in ways that can be deeply intimate and magical. Also, honoring dreams doesn't require extra hours in the day and, once you have the skills in place, you're positioned for a lifetime of nourishment from the Dreaming.

Ideally at least one individual in any given family works in an ongoing way to insure that relationships stay healthy between the ancestors/descendants and living family here on Earth. This service may include assisting lineage ancestors who are not yet well in spirit, helping family members join the bright ancestors when they die, gradually cleaning up harmful intergenerational legacies, activating ancestral blessings, and generally encouraging the overall health and vitality of the living.

Heart pain, longing, and loss are inevitable here on Earth, yet modern American folk often feel ill-equipped to navigate the full, transformative potency of grief. We'll discuss ways diverse cultures weave ritual, grieving, and heart-centered community and talk about grief as one beautiful ritual strategy for mending cracks in the larger vessel of our humanity. 

After establishing a basic groundwork for the importance of grieving well, we call upon appropriate elemental powers and ancestral guides to hold a kind and protective space for grieving. This sacred tending takes place in the vessel of supportive community with ritual precautions to honor the potency and energetic reality of emotional pain. 

Participants are held in ways that allow for fully contacting the heart of their experience, expressing from this place, and also moving through the full cycle into ritual cleansing and return.  When obvious human losses are not the catalyst for holding a grief ritual, this work can also be effective in response to drought, when welcoming back natural cycles of rain (e.g., drought in California), or near the site of specific desecrations of the natural world.

One reason people of diverse backgrounds are increasingly called to relational, earth-honoring ways (indigenous traditions, shamanism, paganism, animism) is that these older and returning ways tend to deeply respect sacred difference. We each come to Earth with distinct gifts, affinities, and unique potential and destiny to (hopefully) fulfill.

We all enjoy some level of connection with supportive guides and ancestors as well as the innate capacity to forge new relationships with teachers in spirit. However, few people feel confident navigating strong, clear relationships over time with their personal guides. Participants in this training will learn safe and effective practices for visioning with the unseen and tending with spirit guides.

We'll make use of song, drumming, prayer, and cover the basics of energetic grounding and protection. Folks familiar with shamanic journeywork will find the visioning practices similar although my approach is also informed by training with different indigenous systems. Skills will include ways to access new sources of support, strategies to deepen with existing connections, and practices to sustain long-term relationships with guides in spirit.

People of any background, tradition, and orientation to spiritual practice are welcome; skills shared are more about how to effectively connect and less about determining which guides or teachers you personally connect with. This training is my 'introduction' offering; however, it's also designed to be a nourishing refresher day for experienced practitioners. 

This training will be offered Sat, Feb 20th in Athens, GA from 10am-5pm at Heart Path Studio (Facebook event page). Cost is $90 for the day, flexibility as needed.

Individual sessions tend to be about ancestral and family healing, spiritual guidance and mentorship, or occasionally consultation and support for folks building a holistic healing practice. People sometimes reach out to try to make sense of a spiritual calling, so that's welcome, and I'm also a psychotherapist with a Ph.D. in psychology if you're struggling with the 1,001 things of life and just want to approach it all from a more holistic angle.