Dr. Daniel Foor is a psychologist, a ritualist, the founder and director of Ancestral Medicine. In this episode we talk about the importance of ancestral reverence and ancestral lineage healing as an important step for cultural repair and releasing transgenerational traumas.
You can read more about Daniel here: https://ancestralmedicine.org
Daniel’s book: https://ancestralmedicine.org/rituals-for-personal-and-family-healing/
More information about Anna: www.escuchavital.com
Music: Jordi Marquillas (producción de Jordi Campoy)
Video edition: Lluc Oliveres
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Dr. Daniel Foor es psicólogo, ritualista, fundador y director de la Medicina Ancestral. En este episodio hablamos sobre la importancia de la reverencia ancestral y la sanación del linaje ancestral como un paso importante para la reparación cultural y la liberación de traumas transgeneracionales.
Puedes leer más sobre Daniel aquí: https://ancestralmedicine.org
El libro de Daniel (también en español): https://ancestralmedicine.org/rituals-for-personal-and-family-healing/
Más información sobre Anna: www.escuchavital.com
Música: Jordi Marquillas (producción de Jordi Campoy)
Edición de vídeo: Lluc Oliveres
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Dr. Daniel Foor pszichológus, ritualista, az Ancestral Medicine alapítója és igazgatója. Ebben az epizódban az ősök tiszteletének és az ősi vérvonalaink gyógyításának fontosságáról beszélgetünk, amely elősegíti a kulturális reparációt és a transzgenerációs traumák felszabadítását.
Daniel-ről itt olvashat bővebben: https://ancestralmedicine.org
magyarul: https://azosokgyogyitoereje.hu
Daniel könyve (hamarosan magyarul is, az Ursus Libris gondozásában): https://ancestralmedicine.org/rituals-for-personal-and-family-healing/
További információ Annáról: www.escuchavital.com/
Zene: Jordi Marquillas (Producción de Jordi Campoy)
Videó: Lluc Oliveres
[Music] hello everyone very good morning or afternoon thank you very much for being here with us today in this is my channel Escucha Vital or Vital Listening in English, and I like to introduce today Dr Daniel Foor who is and was my teacher in Ancestral Medicine practice which is a ritual practice that is really something that makes me very passionate and I would like Daniel, to invite him to introduce himself because I think he can do it best. Good morning, Daniel – Good morning, thank you Anna, thank you for the invitation. To share a bit… I can say a little bit about myself: my name is Daniel and I was born and raised in the United States, my lineage ancestors are early German and English settler colonialist to North America and so my people ancestrally have been living in what’s now the United States for at least five-seven generations. And I live now with my wife and two young daughters in Andalusia, and near Granada in Spain, and we moved here last year, and I am the founder and director at Ancestral Medicine and that’s a business what has become of my personal practice: it’s now an organisation focused on animism, Earth reconnection, ancestral healing and being an inclusive international platform for teaching Ritual Arts and Earth connection. and my yeah from my own background a bit I professionally am a doctor of psychology, I have a PhD in Psychology and I’m a marriage and family therapist. I’m no longer practicing with my license but I have trained as a therapist and I’m a student of religion of history of culture and I mostly am a ritualist and so I’ve really focused on studies of religion, spirituality, applied ritual arts as they relate to healing, and cultural change. So I guess the last thing about my own background is that I wasn’t raised with any framework to relate with the Earth, the ancestors or any of that but I had the good fortune early in life to encounter teachings and living teachers from whom I could learn and so I’m now 45, and I’ve been basically 30 years of conscious active involvement in study of ritual spirituality and all that so it continues to be a source of real nourishment and delight and it’s become a job too, yes. – I can relate to what you’re saying that maybe someone who is not raised by any work of rituals or religion can also be drawn to this practice. – Yeah – From your perspective why is it so importantant to have some ritual practice in our life? – Well I think the even more important thing is to consciously relate with the rest of life and to recognize that living humans we’re just one lovely dangerous complicated kind of person in the Big World, there are also the dead the ancestors, there are also the other than humans, the big spirits of the mountains and rivers and plants and animals, the deities, God directly, the old powers that hold up the universe, the Earth, the stars, and sun… And the world is animate, is relational, is responsive and our ancestors knew that up until very recently. And some lineages have longer histories of amnesia than others, but for the vast majority of our history as a species we humans have recognized that we’re in a relational world, a responsive world, and the consequences of forgetting that are really steep. We’re in a time in 2023 here of deepening ecological catastrophe… it’s really… we could say so many things about that but it’s very sad and also very urgent that we make some changes, like big changes and we could adjust the systems and all that, and may we do that urgently but the the lasting change comes from a change of perspective which is to reclaim the understanding that we are just one kind of person in a big web of other kinds of people, and that calls for ethical moral accountability to those other people, so we need to change how we live. – It also – excuse me – it’s like a call to change our pattern of thoughts because our present society imprints us in a way to think and behave like normal, like Dr Gabor Maté says, he also says in his Wisdom of Trauma documentary that "we say "Mother Earth" and look at how we’re treating our mother" – like there is no relationship between us and including all those very difficult life experiences that one can live in this earthly life – I also share the belief that it’s of an utmost importance to relate to all the things that surround us and individuality… if we seek different religions it’s like a myth in itself, no? Like Thich Nhat Hanh says, that we are "interbeing" we are interconnected with everything we can’t even look at a sheet of paper or take a piece of bread without getting connected to all those persons who have created this object or this food, or all those elements that actually can be found in it: the sun, the rain, so I think it is really necessary to expand our consciousness to this relation field, because also, when we speak about different traumas it’s usually a rupture in our relationships, or something that happens with us that creates a response in our bodies, in our nervous system that separates us from the rest of the world. – Yeah, yeah, it’s true, I know as a white PhD American about individualism, I’ve been conditioned into that it’s been really part of what I’ve received culturally what the world has reflected back to me around achievement and implicit supremacy kind of thinking and so… I agree that it’s very toxic to see ourselves as extremely separate from the rest of life now it’s important to recognize that we each do have a kind of unique energy or destiny or soul configuration and that can inform what we bring to the world, what we bring to community, but it ultimately is important to live in relationship and in that way to circle back to your question about ritual, for those drawn to ritual and spirituality and religion and all that, it’s great, I mean there’s a lot of richness there to be had and often the rituals are about tending to the relationships, about tending to the relationships sometimes with other living humans. There are many kinds of rituals that are about caring for other human relationships, rituals of forgiveness or atonement rituals of celebration, honoring rights of passage, etc… and there are also rituals of which are about communicating and honoring the gift of the bodies of the plants and the animals that we eat of, honoring the sun and the Earth and the elements directly, etc. But in a sense the ritual is a means to facilitate relationship and to work with intent and to regulate energy and all that so I happen to be a ritualist so I love it, but it’s important to say that it’s not going to be everybody’s calling, the most important thing is a relational stance and ethical ways of being in the world including with the way the systems are held so that the necessary push for justice for fairness includes also our relationship with the Earth with the land with places, etc. And includes the relationship with all those who have passed away, who are not incarnated because they also are part of the earth you know, when we go to the cemeteries we connect deeply with all those who we loved and are not among us, except and this is a curious comment, that I just passed a few days in the Arctic, close to Spitzbergen, and in one Island, Svalbard in Norway, it’s prohibited to die basically because the Earth is permafrost so all those bodies who are in the small Cemetery maybe since 120 years ago, the bodies haven’t decomposed so it’s really interesting how, when we change our settings in the earth, on the globe, even all these cultural heritage change in a way so it’s really curious for me, and I call it cultural heritage because I know that there are very different ways in each culture how we relate to all those who have passed away. There are I think in every culture, every mythology, every code of conduct, that we have from our tribes, original tribes or settlements: it was a very important way and somehow in this past 100, 200, 300 years it mostly diminished and… I’m really curious Daniel, how did you come to relate with your ancestors and why ancestral medicine? Because a medicine is something that is good for us… – Yeah, as a teenager I was fortunate to encounter the combination of books on rituals and Shamanism, combined with experience with psychoactive substances and so the experience with LSD, cannabis and things like that when I was younger… it wasn’t just opening and like, wow there were things I wasn’t equipped to navigate culturally, but I also had the sense in some of those experiences of actual contact with forces or powers or spirits that were not me: clearly smart and interesting, not always safe but I didn’t have a framework to even think or talk about those ones, and the teachings on Shamanism, my own ancestral traditions have revived paganism from Northern Western Europe, and then the larger body of spirituality on Earth, I realized did speak to those matters and so that it was very motivating for me to fill in the cultural gaps from what I wasn’t shown, and the psychology training helped me to do that in a way that’s more grounded emotionally and relationally. But I’ve been in a sense healing or reparenting myself from the wounds of colonialism, of extreme materialism or individualism, racism in the United States, by you know, doing my own reconnection work and then also supporting others through that and realizing there’s nothing so special about the ways that I was born into. Disconnection, it’s a larger cultural disconnection, and so through my own healing I’m then more equipped to support others in that process, but specifically around the work with blood lineage ancestors my first teachers in shamanic practice in the late 90s, in Ohio in the United States encouraged me to connect with my ancestors and I hadn’t seen that as a source of value, no one talked to me about that. But I did and it was very potent and surprisingly helpful I ended up that first day really of ritual partnering with older ancestral guides and teachers from my lineages to help in spirit my grandfather who some years earlier had taken his own life, and it took directly assist my grandfather whom I hadn’t thought about much, through work with the spirits in this new to me exciting kind of shamanic ritual terrain, really started to connect the dots and so I found my family as a source of curiosity and sort to view them in a different way. I did a lot of research about our family history and I really got to know my own lineage ancestors and all the complexity, and disappointment, and goodness, and just mixture of things that’s there and a final thing is that process has been very helpful to me to be more culturally situated. There’s a way in which as a white American guy I was implicitly encouraged to think of myself as the normative person as like, just like a standard person, like a template for human being as arrogant and crazy as that sounds, but that’s the conditioning and getting to know my own lineages I’m like, oh I’m just a regularized person and born into a system that has issues and seeing myself in the context of my lineages has helped me to know how to relate more in a more balanced way with people of other backgrounds in a more regular sized way, so it’s also been very culturally reparative, restorative. -And that’s a beautiful way to to say this cultural repair recognising ourselves in the other, in a way and recognizing that we share a common ground in the Earth because everyone went through cultural and historical turbulences which may not finish when we pass away, and this was one of the discoveries that really enlightened me, because before I met with your work I was not… I didn’t think about that there could be a difference between those who have passed away and those who we call like ancestors, like someone who is already bright and well and benevolent and would not show up in our lives with ghostly energies so I really appreciate the framework you have created Daniel, because it’s something that facilitates greatly to connect with our ancestors in a very safe way and for me the core is this: how, when can we differentiate between those who are unwell and why is it important to actually do a process of ancestralisation? Can you speak a little bit about this, please? – Yeah there are a lot of people doing some version of ancestral engagement or ancestral healing both contemporary newly received or inspired practices, and then traditions of tending that are just unbroken or still maintained to some degree. So the specific ancestral lineage healing method that I’ve developed or received or teach is intended to address places of disconnect, so it’s a repair oriented method. There are other applications but that’s the… you know… the heart of the matter in a lot of ways and what’s distinct about it… one is that there is a very strong emphasis on discerning between those among the Dead who are really quite safe and healed and loving and kind and fine to relate with and those who are anything other than that. And we hold a kind of high bar with that and I don’t personally… I don’t encourage others to relate directly with the dead who are troubled but rather to assist them in a way that’s safe for us to do that without a lot of direct contact. And so we ask the older, healed ancestors to be the mediators or the ones who bring that about, and in that way it’s very validating of the reality of the ancestors: they’re not just a part of us, they’re not just part of a general field of knowing, they’re not a symbol, they’re not just an abstract group force: they’re as real as you and I, and they can change they can be in a troubled state and then have a shift or healing and that’s desirable it’s helpful, it’s important. A lot of those things were taken care of, or are taken care of traditionally, either just through living an ethical life. but also at the time of death around the funeral rights and the group rituals to make sure that someone joins the ancestor. So when the funeral, when the culture becomes disconnected, so we’re not thinking or tending to the ancestral relationships during life, and then additionally the funeral rights aren’t very effective always. Then we get a backlog of folks who have died but they’re not very vibrant, they’re not at peace or they’re actually acutely troubled, so then they fall back on the living: they become a source of interference, of illness, of mental-emotional turbulence, and we’re living with ghosts in a really not just a metaphorical way, but a very real way, physically. And so that discernment between the Dead who are healed and those who are not, in a non-judgmental way informs the very safety oriented approach, this way of working with the ancestors. Another thing is that the emphasis really is on the lineage and on seeing the individual ancestors or parents grandparents siblings great grandparents as part of a much larger lineage, as part of a collective, as part of a group energy. I don’t personally do a lot of relating with individual ancestors, it’s more of a sense of relating with an overall lineage or group that’s certainly true in a lot of spiritual traditions. I think it’s true with blood lineage ancestors as well, and I guess a final thing, and this is an interesting challenge for a lot of people who have a background in Psychotherapy or mentoring or coaching or work where they’re facilitating for the client: in this approach the ancestors themselves are the ones who are carrying out the healing. The practitioner is not like… channeling, they’re not saying oh Anna your grandmother tells me to you know… say this to you… so you’re not really intervening between the client and their own ancestors for one, but even beyond that there’s a a deep reliance on the healed and vibrant ancestors of the client to bring the healing that’s needed to those in the lineages of the client who still need that healing. And so in that way we’re really focused on the larger system that surrounds the client. And then secondarily, in many ways the benefits tend to reverberate in the life of the client as the larger ancestral field around them becomes more healed up. Yes, and this is another reassuring part of ancestral medicine or ancestral lineage healing at least for me: I’ve always had this consciousness of having like a backpack that I try to solve, I try to do something with it and it was not possible, so I did a lot of things and it did not cease to exist. And when I started to work with ancestral lineage healing and connected with my different lineages, at the first moment with an ancestral guide, a well bright one: it just took me off the backpack, it didn’t exist anymore. So the most important message I received was that "you don’t need to do anything, just let us do the work", and this is I think… it’s being able to lean back to that fabric of connectedness, of belonging that is missing from our lives for many people as. – It’s a shocking and challenging growth or grow edge sometimes for people training in the work. I say that because it sometimes the way in which we are approaching healing is reinforcing the wound, is reinforcing the problem. The sense of "I need to fix this thing in myself" rather than start from a stance of acceptance and curiosity. But also "I need to fix my lineages", "I need to fix", I need to… the implicit thing often is if I can just heal this, then I can opt out of the relationship, I can extract myself from ancestral influence, if I just heal it up… but that intent, the intent to disconnect from one’s lineages creates its own turbulence, because our connection with our ancestors is not optional. – No, yeah. – The choice is to experience that consciously or unconsciously. If we believe we have disconnected from our ancestors, and we’re saying I would like the unconscious choice, please, I don’t want to think about it, I want to disconnect from it, so it’s not inherently bad: it’s just unconscious then. – Yes, yes… and in case if someone is an adoptee, I know that it can work. Can you speak to that please how does it work with blood ancestors or those who offer the family? – Yeah. In general, for anyone who’s blood ancestors are not also family, whether they’re raised by adoptive family – or also known just as family – or they’re conceived through invitro fertilization or other methods whatever it might be… their blood family is maybe hazardous people or maybe they’re just never going to meet them, or they’re orphaned or whatever the circumstances might be: the sense in those cases are in general is that you have more than one set of ancestry. There are family ancestors, then there are blood ancestors, and they maybe overlap a little or a lot, for most people they overlap, those are the same but for a lot of people they’re distinct or there’s some overlap and they’re not quite the same. And how people navigate those different flavours of influence is… it’s a little bit personal, but it’s my encouragement and my view that it’s still good to include blood lineage ancestors, that they have a certain kind of unshakable body level influence that doesn’t mean you’re going to practice the traditions of your blood ancestors, it doesn’t mean you ever need to open up to family if those… if family is really harmful. There’s a need to have a boundary with like… biological kin. It doesn’t mean you need to focus on that a lot, or that becomes your identity, but there’s an unshakable influence from blood ancestry that’s worth including in a cycle of healing and beyond that for sure honor any in the larger human family that are important to you. Those might be family, who are not related by blood, they could be people who are part of a chosen spiritual lineage, the ancestors of the place where you live, the ancestors who are cultural like heroes or inspiration for you… there are many other kinds of ancestors than just blood ancestors, so that includes chosen or adoptive family, those can be important just don’t skip the relevant influence of body level ancestors. They’re worth including. – Usually the body is like an instrument to perceive what is happening in the field, as of my experience. – Yeah. – So there is a deepening in that relationship that can also allow blessings of healing to flow through our lives, so what in your experience, because you’re doing this particular practice since more than 20 years or 25 years if I’m not mistaken: so in your experience how can this practice affect a person’s life? How, what is to expect when someone starts to work with this? – Yeah, it’s hard to… in a way it’s hard to know, because I my whole adult life has been or almost all of my adult life has been spent in some kind of conscious relationship with my ancestors, and so I don’t have a different life to compare to, but that said, some of what I observe and for me and for those I’ve supported over the years, is that whatever challenges I might have in my life, I don’t feel lonely, even when I don’t feel seen by the humans in my life, that the living people, that I want to feel seen by, my own ancestors can give me that gift of like, "hey, we get you, we understand you, this is hard no doubt, but we see you on a soul level." So that matters to be really deeply seen, also there’s an implicit accountability to it like we see you and you can’t hide from yourself, you can’t hide from us, you can try, you can disconnect, we can’t make you do anything but because you’re seen, we want to encourage you to be your full self, and in that way the ancestors have always been a reminder about my destiny, what I’m here to do and allies in that, like you don’t have to do it alone and you don’t really have to do it, but if you don’t step into your fullness, you’re going to regret it later. We’ll have conversation when you die and it’s not going to be comfortable… so why don’t you just like embrace who you are, and then let the details sort from there? So, not feeling alone, clarity about path, you know they keep it spicy and interesting, like I’m committed to growth and awakening and having a useful life of service above comfort, I happen to be fairly fortunate in my life but I have felt I guess resourced enough or backed enough by them to make more courageous choices with my life. I think it’s easier to take risks in service to growth, when we feel supported and they’ve helped me to feel supported, and that has included healing at times, places of what we might call insecure attachment or you know, so they’ve been a source of emotionally corrective experience or reparenting and I give my dad, bless the man, isn’t able to be the nurturing Elder sagely wizard that I might hope from a father. And in my 40s, my ancestors can bring that, and I don’t have to, my biological dad he be well, doesn’t have the pressure to be all those things, so it has taken the pressure off of my living family to be all the things. Which has improved our relationship, because I can just accept them more for who they are. -Yeah. – And I mean they have an interesting, meaningful life, and even when I’m doubting it there are moments where I feel like they are reassuring and providing a way through the difficult patches so that’s… that’s made a huge difference. – Yes, yes, I think so. And I remember that one day, we were still in the training, you asked someone how did this practice improved or not their lives, or how they are doing in their own lives, because there were some doubts are facing, and this person answered that, well generally I feel okay, much better. And I’m still sticking with that and actually I use it a lot because if whatever we practice is not improving our life maybe we can look for a change, maybe it can be something different, but I also would like to present your book which is in English is Ancestral Medicine, it is also in Spanish, Medicina Ancestral, and it will come in Hungarian as well very soon: "Az ősök gyógyító ereje". This is going to be the title in Hungarian, and I think it’s also available in Polish…? It’s also available in Polish, Croatian, Dutch, French, Chinese and soon Turkish, Greek, and Romanian. – Wow, beautiful! I hope that this conscious relating practice will really benefit everyone who is reading about it, or comes to www.ancestralemdicine.org looking for the courses that are offered, where they can also meet you in the weekly calls. – The other thing I know that’s in my mind, that I was going to add is that very last question you asked about how it’s helped is you: know I’ve studied a lot about Enlightenment or non-duality or Awakening, or different mystical traditions and all that, and it’s easy as someone who isn’t born into a… like I’m born into a lineage of Lutheran farmers and settler colonialists, coal miners and working class European immigrants to North America. It’s not the most recently mystical lineage on Earth, them and… I mean there’s goodness there, and there’s mysticism in the older layers of the lineage, but not the recent ones so much. And working with the ancestors has helped me to understand that the quality of Awakening or really the most realised aspects of human experience can also be found in my own lineages, and that’s good for… it’s good for cultural self-esteem, it’s good for people who come from cultural backgrounds where they don’t see a lot of beauty in their recent ancestors, and to recognise that: No, we actually each are down lineage from very awake ethical people of presence, even if it’s been a minute since we you know, that’s been transmitted, so that’s been helpful, because it’s about finding your purpose, your medicine, your path in your specific context, you don’t have to become somebody else. -Yeah, and if we can be and are invited to be our own selves, maybe this is really the blessing that we can offer to everyone. And in the beginning Daniel, you mentioned that you have two daughters and I’m really curious how is it for you being in conscious relationship with all those who have come before you, and how does this show up or impact your fathering? – Yeah, well they’re almost six and three, and they’re doing great fortunately. And in a way I see them as ancestors returned and so changing diapers, doing bedtime dealing with tantrums, and you know all the things that just go with even healthy kids in a demanding way, that I see as a kind of ancestor reverence, and I trust that the Spirits understand that it means I have less time to like… hang out with them and do a lot of ritual, because I’m often underwater with parenting. But for both Sarah, my wife and I, we have done a lot of the lineage tending and so I do think it has encouraged a sense of health in them from the very start of life. I don’t say that to suggest that people who have children with different needs have somehow done anything wrong, it’s only that if one does deep healing with one’s lineages and the ones returning or ancestors returning… I do think it supports the prayer of healthy ones returning and you know they help me to be patient and to understand that the demands of raising children are nothing new. It’s just part of the human experience, so there’s like: what is it to parent with the ancestors, and let them through me, hold the kids and to see that they’re also… they’re big souls, there’s not like child souls, just like souls born into small bodies that don’t have their brains fully developed yet, you know and so they’re… you know they’re less regulated, but so seeing them in that way is good too, it helps them, I think, to feel like they’re being raised in a respectful environment where we can see them as big souls in small, somewhat disregulated bodies. And yeah, it’s… I wouldn’t trade it, it’s a parenting, it is demanding but it’s a delight and I do see it as part of the larger practice, even though it’s hard sometimes, because I you know, I want to be writing a second book, I want to be doing this and that, and you know it doesn’t work to write a book about ancestral reconnection and to be a bad father to do that. There’s a disconnect and so the public teaching will happen at the rhythm it needs to. – Yes, yes. I hear you and it’s a beautiful way of understanding that being present, being with those who need you and are learning from your presence and reverence as children, they are also the future ancestors for the future generations and they are also, as you said, ancestors returning. – Yeah, like that. – Thank you, Daniel, for all that you shared and I know that there are some new in-person events that also will be happening later this year or the next year to come, so I would like to invite everyone to just have a look here at www.ancestralmedicine.org, and peak around, maybe you find something that is good for you, and thank you for offering your time. – Thank you so much.