Ancestral Lineage Healing with Nancy Heischman, Certified Practitioner
About Ancestral Lineage Healing
Ancestral Lineage Healing is an approach to intergenerational healing developed by Daniel Foor, Doctor of Psychology. Daniel’s book, Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing, is a good source for more detailed information. Ancestral Lineage Healing is practiced internationally by a diverse network of people who have received extensive training in this method, which has proven to be cross-culturally sound and effective. Practitioners and clients include people of Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Vedantic, and animist traditions. Services are currently available in twenty languages.
Premises
See the book, Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing, for greater detail.
Consciousness continues after death.
Not all the dead are equally well.
The dead can influence the living, and the living can influence the dead.
Influences from direct lineage predecessors typically include specific gifts and blessings, as well as unresolved burdens and troubles.
Through direct connection and communication with our well and compassionate ancestors, we can help facilitate healing of troublesome intergenerational patterns, while strengthening our grounding in ancestral gifts and generative legacies.
Monoprint "Her Feet" by Stephanie Heit.
Why Do People Engage in Ancestral Lineage Healing?
Clients are drawn to Ancestral Lineage Healing for a variety of reasons, including:
To connect with roots deeper than those of contemporary society
To recognize and claim specific ancestral gifts and blessings
To address "legacy" wounds that predate the individual lifespan (and so are beyond the reach of psychotherapy)
To cultivate missing dimensions of identity and belonging
To reclaim the natural birthright of relationship with elders in spirit
To establish a solid stance from which to engage in social change, or repairing historic harms
What Ancestral Healing is Not
Ancestral Lineage Healing is not psychotherapy. The focus of healing is on legacies of intergenerational harms, both caused and experienced, generations before our birth - and as they affect us today. Experience with Ancestral Lineage Healing has shown that many issues presented in individual psychotherapy have much deeper origins than the individual psyche, family of origin, or contemporary social or cultural influences. Clients who come to ALH after years of psychotherapy (myself included) often find long-intractable patterns softening, unravelling, and fading away.
Ancestral Lineage Healing is not genealogy or historical research. Genealogical research and family histories can be valuable complements to ALH, but do not supplant it. In the ALH process, direct intuitive engagement with our ancestors begins with those who lived long before remembered names, and often before recorded history. Ultimately the healing extends to more recent generations, and of course to ourselves.
Ancestral Lineage Healing is not limited to engagement with heteronormative ancestors. While all living humans are descended from heterosexual procreation, participants in Ancestral Lineage Healing often make contact with ancestors across the spectrum of gender identity and expression. Finding ancestors who are "gender blessed" can be deeply life-affirming for those who have been alienated from living family as a result of their own lived experience as sexual beings.
To Learn More
Three ways to learn more about Ancestral Lineage Healing:
Read Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing, by Daniel Foor
Contact Nancy for a free 20-minute consultation
Assemble a group of 4-5 interested others for a group presentation, including an experiential introduction to the ALH process
“If you are looking for them, they are looking for you.” — Langston Kahn, regarding our ancestors