Ancestral Medicine

A practical guide to connecting with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing • Provides exercises and rituals to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find ancestral guides, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace • Explains how to safely engage in lineage repair work by connecting with your more ancient ancestors before relating with the recently deceased • Explores how your ancestors can help you transform intergenerational legacies of pain and abuse and reclaim the positive spirit of the family Everyone has loving and wise ancestors they can learn to invoke for support and healing. Coming into relationship with your ancestors empowers you to transform negative family patterns into blessings and encourages good health, self-esteem, clarity of purpose, and better relationships with your living relatives. Offering a practical guide to understanding and navigating relationships with the spirits of those who have passed, Daniel Foor, Ph.D., details how to relate safely and effectively with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing. He provides exercises and rituals, grounded in ancient wisdom traditions, to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find supportive ancestral guides, cultivate forgiveness and gratitude, harmonize your bloodlines, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace. He explains how to safely engage in lineage repair work by connecting with your more ancient ancestors before relating with the recently deceased. He shows how, by working with spiritually vibrant ancestors, individuals and families can understand and transform intergenerational patterns of pain and abuse and reclaim the full blessings and gifts of their bloodlines. Ancestral repair work can also catalyze healing breakthroughs among living family members and help children and future generations to live free from ancestral burdens. The author provides detailed instructions for ways to honor the ancestors of a place, address dream visits from the dead, and work with ancestor shrines and altars. The author offers guidance on preparing for death, funeral rites, handling the body after death, and joining the ancestors. He also explains how ancestor work can help us to transform problems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious persecution. By learning the fundamentals of ancestor reverence and ritual, you will discover how to draw on the wisdom of supportive ancestral guides, heal family troubles, maintain connections with beloved family after their death, and better understand the complex and interconnected relationship between the living and the dead.

Daniel Foor, Ph.D., is a licensed psychotherapist and a doctor of psychology. He has led ancestral and family healing intensives throughout the United States since 2005. He is an initiate in the Ifa/Orisha tradition of Yoruba-speaking West Africa and has trained with teachers of Mahayana Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and different indigenous paths, including the older ways of his European ancestors. He lives in Spain.

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Part One Foundations of Ancestor Work One My Personal Journey with the Ancestors Making Initial Contact • Family Research and Personal Healing • Learning and Teaching Ancestor Work Two Who Are the Ancestors? The Dead Are Not Dead • Family and Remembered Ancestors • Older Ancestors and the Collective Dead Exercise One: How Do You Feel about Your Ancestors? Three Spontaneous Ancestral Contact Dream Contact • Synchronicity • Waking Contact in Nonordinary States • Waking Encounters in Ordinary States Exercise Two: What Are Your Experiences with Your Ancestors? Four Ancestor Reverence and Ritual Common Intentions for Ancestor Rituals • Practices to Sustain Ancestral Connection Exercise Three: Ritual to Initiate Contact with Your Ancestors Part Two Healing with Lineage and Family Ancestors Five Family Research and Initiating Ancestral Healing Gathering What Is Remembered • Considerations before Working Directly with Your Ancestors • Choosing a Focus for Lineage Repair Work Exercise Four: Attuning to Your Four Primary Bloodlines Six Meeting with Ancestral Guides Ancestral Guides • Using Ritual to Contact Ancestral Guides • Ways to Deepen Relationships with Ancestral Guides Exercise Five: Seeking an Ancestral Guide Seven Lineage Ancestors and the Collective Dead Ancestral Lineage • Assessing the Lineage • Making Repairs with Older Lineage Ancestors Exercise Six: Getting to Know the Lineage Exercise Seven: Ritual to Assist Lineage Ancestors Eight Assisting the Remembered Dead Emotional Healing, Forgiveness, and Unfinished Business • Psychopomp, Elevation of the Dead, and Ancestralization • Work with the Very Troubled Dead and Related Spirits Exercise Eight: Ancestral Forgiveness Practice Exercise Nine: Soul Guidance for the Remembered Dead Nine Integration and Work with Living Family Prayer for Self, Family, and Descendants • Embodiment, Channeling, and Mediumship • Completing the Lineage Repair Cycle • Ancestor Work beyond the Lineage Repair Cycle Exercise Ten: Embody the Lineage and Offer Prayer for the Living Exercise Eleven: Harmonizing Your Four Primary Lineages Exercise Twelve: Ritual to Feast Your Family Ancestors Part Three Honoring Other Types of Ancestors Ten Ancestors and Place Home Is Where the Bones Are • Public Memorials and Monuments • Ancestors and the Natural World • Nine Suggestions for Honoring Ancestors of Place Exercise Thirteen: Cemetery Practice with Family Ancestors Exercise Fourteen: Ritual to Greet the Ancestors of a Place Eleven Affinity Ancestors, Multiple Souls, and Reincarnation Ancestors of Affinity • Multiple Souls • Reincarnation and Past Lives • Integration Work with Family, Place, and Affinity Ancestors Exercise Fifteen: Celebrating Ancestors of Vocation Exercise Sixteen: Harmonizing Ancestors of Family, Place, and Affinity Twelve Joining the Ancestors Preparing for Death • Funeral Rites and the Body after Death • Ritual Tending in the First Year after Death Exercise Seventeen: Conscious Participation in a Burial Exercise Eighteen: Ritual for the First Anniversary of a Death Appendix Distinguishing Talking with Spirits from Psychosis Notes Bibliography Index List of Figures Figure 5.1. Family pedigree chart Figure 5.2. Family pedigree mandala Figure 7.1. Layers of lineage through time Figure 9.1. Ancestral mandala