Foreword

Praise and respect to the wise and loving ancestors, and to the land here in Granada, Spain.

Our world and our singularly precious lives are made of meaning. All of human culture is woven from stories rooted in generations past, in the cool dark Earth, and in the vastness of the stars. In this way, the global crises of the 21st century are crises of meaning, challenges of understanding our species as inseparable from the rest of life. Of the many ways to try to heal our estrangement from the rest of life, nearly all of them point to relating again with our other-than-human kin and with the unseen, the spirits, the greater. Solutions follow from a return to relationship. This anthology is a collection of first-hand accounts of such relational repair.

As founder and director at Ancestral Medicine, entrusted by my ancestors to bring this form of Ancestral Lineage Healing method into the world, I know from my own journey that the road to reconnection is rarely straightforward. Involvement as a teenager with paganism, shamanism, and study of world religions set me on a lifelong path of seeking knowledge, combined with direct participation in ritual arts and spiritual practice. But it wasn’t until 1999, when my first teachers in Earth-honoring ritual encouraged me to connect with my own ancestors, that I truly set out on the long road of cultural healing.

Descended from mostly early English and German settler colonialists to North America, I was born in the suburban United States in the late 1970s into an environment of unconscious cultural poverty. As a young adult, connecting directly in spirit with my older lineage ancestors helped me to orient toward cultural self-worth and an embodied knowing that Earth-honoring traditions are part of all of our human lineages. After five years of repair work with my own ancestors, in 2004 I began to gradually support others in ancestral approaches to reconnection.

My first decade of guiding ancestral healing practices coincided with training as a psychotherapist, and my understanding deepened around just how many of our personal experiences are a continuation of generational patterns and direct ancestral influence. In the second decade of guiding the work, my focus became more explicitly cultural, seeing systemic harm, oppression, and supremacy as troubles rooted in ancestral pain and Earth disconnection.

The diversity of voices in this anthology highlights this dance of personal, psychological, and cultural pain and transformation through the process of ancestral reconnection. I’ve been blessed to mentor each of the contributors in the specific practices of Ancestral Lineage Healing, and I know them as people of character and heart. Their international experiences reflect the inclusive spirit of the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network, and, more importantly, the universal values of ancestry, family, and belonging.

Two aspects of the ancestral healing journey stand out as deep themes worth underscoring at the start of an anthology that is such a rich transmission of ancestral healing and hard-won wisdom. The first is something like, “Big trouble, big love.” When we sense, or know with certainty, that we’re down-lineage from major generational pain and wounding, one can feel overwhelmed or in danger at the prospect of relating consciously with the ancestors. These are sound instincts.

The Ancestral Lineage Healing approach at no point encourages direct relating with those among the dead who are still troubled. We rely on the wise, elder, healed ancestors to establish safety and to catalyze whatever healing the lineage may still need. The collective wisdom of the truly elder ancestors, when accessed directly, is always greater than the lineage-level troubles, and we rely on that greater love to bring about the healing.

The second theme is about the non-linear, mythical, and malleable nature of time. Mending places of disconnect among the older ancestors reverberates in the present. Our children incarnate our grandparents and their elders. Our personal suffering reveals itself as the culmination of generations of focused pain longing for another way of life. Again and again, time is shown to be made of stories, and stories can change and transform.

In this way, ancestral healing is preoccupied with the future. This is a book about the future. A book about what we carry forward and what we return to the holy darkness of the Earth. A book about what the world to come demands of us today, and a call from the ancestors to make good on their sacrifices and our shared potential. May you and your people find yourself mirrored in the stories shared here and take something of benefit for the path ahead.

Daniel Foor
Founder & Director, Ancestral Medicine
Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing (2017)
Granada, Spain 2025

(Image from Ancestral Lineage Healing intensive in Budapest, Hungary, 2024.)