Stay tuned… an ANCESTRAL OFFERING IN 2026 is unfolding.
My co-guide, Laurie Adams, and I have been mentored by Annie Bloom and Peter Scanlan—including their twleve-years-in-the-making ancestor program, which they have now graciously handed on to us. We are currently shaping the details for our second 5-day Ancestral Offering to be held here on the land I live on in Kentucky at Harrod’s Creek Sanctuary, a place held by forest, water, and long memory.

Save the dates: September 13–18, 2026.
More to come as the vision clarifies and takes form.

Ancestral~Soulwork is a living, breathing path of radical remembrance and soul-rooted becoming—an invitation to honor the dialogue between the soul’s calling and the ancestral echoes within us, human and more-than-human, recent and ancient. It arises from the understanding that soul does not grow in isolation and that our lineages live not only behind us, but also within us, shaping our dreams, wounds, and the deep memory of Earth’s long story. This work turns us toward what has been forgotten, unlived, or unspoken, inviting us to meet inherited grief and buried gifts with devotion, creativity, embodiment, and deep listening. Dreams, symbols, and memories become both inner personal guidance and murmurs from the ancestors and geologic time.

For many Western people severed from ancestral memory, Earth intimacy, and initiatory culture, this path offers a return to rootedness and belonging. As we walk the land and tend our particular lineages—Irish, Lebanese, German, Polish, Italian, and more—the body often becomes the first site of remembering. It responds through tears, resistance, tremors, or relief as ancestral and soul-memories rise to be felt and metabolized. In this way, the body becomes a bridge between past and future, soul and Earth, what was lost and what is ready to return.

Ancestral~Soulwork also invites a nuanced relationship with lineage: ancestors are not divided into good or bad, healed or unhealed, but are multidimensional beings whose unmetabolized experiences may live on in us. The aim is not to fix “unwell spirits,” but to cultivate right relationship with the living presence of lineage inside us—honoring their gifts, acknowledging their harms, and engaging with them in reverence, complexity, and reciprocity. This echoes many Indigenous, African, and Asian traditions in which ancestors are respected not for their perfection but for their place within the great web of being.

Woven through this work is the recognition of a “first wound”—a primordial rupture found in mythology, evolution, psychology, and ancestral history. This wound is not a mistake but a sacred threshold, a place where transformation and deeper connection become possible. Even imagination—sometimes framed as the original separation between humans and the Earth—becomes here a sacred faculty of reconnection when rooted in body, ritual, and love. It allows us to listen for the myth ahead, the emerging story shaped by our healing of the past and by soul’s instructions for the future in conversation with what Thomas Berry called the Dream of the Earth.

In a time of global unraveling, as Joanna Macy describes, ancestral and soulwork become both refuge and necessity. They offer deep-time perspective, resilience, and continuity, guiding us to listen more closely to the ancestors who endured before us, the Earth who dreams through us, and the soul who knows the way ahead. While this work welcomes the raw material of trauma—grief, rupture, longing—it is not a replacement for clinical trauma therapy. Instead, it provides sacred containers where these experiences can be witnessed and transformed through ritual, ceremony, symbolic expression, and the innate genius within each person.

Finally, Ancestral~Soulwork does not claim to address the specific wounds of colonization, enslavement, systemic racism, or the traumas carried by marginalized communities. These likley require culturally rooted, trauma-informed spaces and leaders. What this work does offer is a place—especially for those from Western or European-descended lineages—to begin the difficult but necessary tasks of reconnection, reckoning, and repair within their own ancestral lines. In doing so, we take responsibility for what is ours to tend, honor the complexities of lineage, and offer our healing as part of the long restoration between humans, ancestors, and the Earth itself.