I’m very glad to say that from late spring this year (2025) I will be offering online, reduced rate one-hour sessions in Ancestral Lineage Healing as a trainee as I near completion of my practitioner’s training at Ancestral Medicine, and move towards certification.

 

Introducing Ancestral Lineage Healing 

Ancestral Healing is a practice of reconnecting with and tending to our ancestral lineages. Ancestral Lineage Healing is the particular approach in which I am training, as taught by Dr. Daniel Foor, supported by ritual director Shannon Willis and other Ancestral Medicine mentors. Daniel’s approach is founded in the experience that our ancestors are as much part of our present as our past, shaping our wellbeing, our world views and the ways we show up in our lives, families, networks, and wider culture. The Ancestral Lineage Healing process can bring perspective, insight and deep healing across generations of each lineage of focus. It also encourages us to honour the gifts of our ancestors, whilst tending to repairing ruptures and unhealed wounds which may have been passed down through time. This healing impacts us on a family level, as well as a wider cultural level, given that it touches on war trauma, colonisation, and other troubles often disrupting the lives of whole populations, including the land, and other-than and more-than-human kin.

 

How it works

This work takes place in a step by step, ritually safe, structured way. As practitioner, I support you in turning towards and listening to the wise and vibrant ancestors on each of your main lineages, approached one at a time (e.g. our matrilineal, patrilineal and grandparents’ lineages).

 

What it is…

• a form of healing, yet it is not the same as, nor a replacement for, therapy

• a form of empowering communication – I will be supporting you to listen to your wise, vibrant ancestors, with the backing of my wise, vibrant ancestors, rather than acting as a medium

• a kind of everyday ritual – my people and I will be supporting you to clear your space, call in helpers who you call upon and listening to your people

• as relevant to folk who were adopted as it is for folk who were brought up with blood relatives

 

What it isn’t…

• genealogical research. Knowing about, talking about and being taught to intuitively communicate with our ancestors are different things. Genealogy can be really helpful and, on some occasions, can get in the way of this intuitive communication process, because it is a different, yet highly related, ancestral practice

• as binary as it sounds! Ancestral lineage work can come across as very gendered in the language of talking of ‘mother’s mother’s’ and ‘father’s father’s lines etc. Clients practising in Ancestral Lineage Healing often make contact with ancestors across the spectrum of gender identities and expressions. This can not only be deeply life-affirming, it also usefully challenges and reminds the status quo that gender was never a binary thing

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Working with me

I've been fascinated by all things ancestral for decades! (If it's useful, you can read about my interest in this subject in a piece I wrote last year). I have also been acutely aware of the implications of unresolved intergenerational trauma in my own family and in the families and communities of clients, supervisees and trainees with whom I've worked (as a facilitator and teacher since 1995, a qualified therapist since 2004 and a therapy supervisor since 2013). I draw on 30 years of Buddhist practice in terms of my 'back up team' in the unseen realms, and prior to that, a childhood intrigued by faith and the mysteries.

 

One thing I personally value about Ancestral Lineage Healing is that addressing personal difficulties, contributes to wider cultural repair work, thereby weakening the effects of different forms of damaging supremacy. Once healing starts to happen on the the lineages where it's needed we and our people need not be any better nor any worse than anyone else. Rather, a sort of 'right sizing,' happens and folk awaken to the very unique flavour and gifts and qualities of each of their particular lineage's origins. Seeing this happen on my own lineages, made up of coloniser and the colonised, amongst other complex dynamics, has woken me up to recognising the wider ripples of ancestral healing. 

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The Ancestral Medicine network

Ancestral Lineage Healing is now practiced worldwide by a network of people trained in this (and often, other complementary practices). It is proving to be a sound and effective method, taught and practiced across widely varying cultural contexts. Practitioners include practicing Animists, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, with services being available in more than 20 languages. If my style/approach doesn’t click for you, yet you’re still interested in doing this work, please have a look at the other Ancestral Medicine practitioner directory.

 

Possible next steps:

Have a read of Dr. Daniel Foor’s book: Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing

Listen to this longer You Tube introduction to Ancestral Lineage Healing

And/or feel free to contact me with any questions or arrange a free 20-minute consultation