Ancestral Medicine

20/08/2025

Over the past week, myself and 45 other kind and radiant humans did a deep dive in ancestral and cultural repair work in the mountainous jungle of Costa Rica. We gathered for nearly a week on traditional Maleku lands at , a center for applied cultural transition. Their work and vision as a community is really wholesome, culturally mindful, and recommended.

Aside from the co-weaving with thunderstorms, butterflies, macaws, and lush tropical flowers, one highlight for me was learning from and supporting the Costa Ricans in circle. Shares of how much traditional knowledge has been lost through the centuries of exploitative colonialism, Catholicism, capitalism, and white supremacy. Shares of the burden of performing “la pura vida” for outsiders to try to make ends meet in a tourist economy. And also a deep and enduring solidarity and love for the land despite the outside impositions.

We spent days together weaving a safe enough space to turn toward some of the generational pain and, with ancestral support, to invite the dead to truly make their way home. We spent time listening in with the elder forces whose bodies are the land with curiosity about ways to rebuild trust and to live in more Earth-attuned ways. We laughed, cried, made offerings, and brought our specific selves to multicultural community with kindness and cultural honesty.

In one sense, spending a week like this is a tremendous privilege. And to come together in ritual with matters of healing and cultural repair is also ancient, everyday human behavior. This is what we do.

Thanks all who contributed to this convergence. Donations made to , the Maleku community, and a Costa Rican women’s rights/support org. I’m tired upon returning but grateful.

Images from the offering crafted. Next stop (and final one for a bit) is Sarajevo in early October. 🙏🏼❤️‍🔥💀🌙🌎

11/06/2025

Thanks for helping to get the word out to Bosnian folks you may know in case this offering may be of benefit.

For details, including in Bosnian if helpful, on our site. Easy to find from the homepage: ancestralmedicine.org.

10/06/2025

The application period is open for the new Animism and Earth Ritual Training that I’m guiding starting in early 2026. Spaces are about a 1/4 full and will likely fill by the end of the summer if not before.

We urgently need long-term solutions, steady medium-scale structural changes and healing, and immediate intervention to end colonialist imperialist atrocities. All of the above, all at once.

Our connection with the Earth and the many beings is also a way to revision loving and just culture. We must both oppose what destroys life and also grow food for the coming season. All at once.

May we each find our soul-level groove and surrender to doing exactly that. Teamwork instead of extreme isolating individualism makes this possible.

Photo credit Sarah Foor, Cascada del Rio Santo cerca de Durcal.

20/04/2025

Morning glories (ipomoea) at the site of Cerro de la Encina in Monachil from last week. It’s basically a ruined Bronze Age city 15min from our home that was a regional capital from 2000-900 before current era.

Our lives are so brief really and these souls such ancient travelers. The juxtaposition is stunning.

Take risks to be honest and loving. We’ll be pushing up flowers before long. May they and the echo of our lives be so glorious.

24/02/2025

Palermo! Last week over 40 of us from at least 10 nations and diverse origin places gathered for a five-day deep dive in ancestral healing work in the capital of Sicily. This was my first time to the island and I left feeling very nourished and grateful for the time.

In addition to usual themes in group ancestral healing work, some more potent threads included:
—Class, racism, and transforming stereotypes and prejudice toward Sicily, including from other Italians
—Disconnection from homeland, returning, and shifts in perception of immigrati (meaning here ‘those who left’) from ‘you abandoned us’ to compassion and ‘we haven’t forgotten you’
—Naming and inviting healing around sexism, patriarchy, and violence toward women. Inviting the land and elements powers to support this
—Welcoming kindness into places of generational betrayal and hurting

Big respect to all who joined and particular praise to our six supporters .waverley Vanessa, Elsa, and Cornelia…to event co-organizers …and to sources of cultural support and anchoring .astrology .riotta and .

Images are from the offering crafted. This one was the most representational I’ve even gone (trees, waves, volcano) and so it flowed this time. The consecrated olive will be planted locally today, and the offering bundle was buried on Mount Pellegrino near the Santuario di Santa Rosalia.

Un grande ringraziamento agli antenati. Big gratitude to the forces seen and unseen.❤️‍🔥🙏🏼🌋🇮🇹💀🕊️🍋 🌊

03/02/2025

Exciting co-teaching with Tamala Floyd coming up next month!

Challenge your perspectives on the intersection of ritual, animism, and parts work in a live 90 min event with Tamala Floyd and Daniel Foor.

29/01/2025

If possible, be a bit protective of your joy, creativity, tenderness, and ability to celebrate everyday beauty.

Many I know in the U.S. are freaking out a little or a lot at the predictable, but nonetheless super real, unraveling of important stabilizing structures.

Amidst tough conditions, wherever you're at in the world, may each of us have an unbreakably strong link to Source and the Holy such that we never fail to witness everyday beauty and never fail to feel in touch with our core values.

This soul-level dignity is foundational for sustainable change work and is among what can not be taken.

**Image from Ancestral Lineage Healing intensive in Budapest 2024. Intensives in 2025 are Sicily (Feb), Barcelona (April), Costa Rica (Aug), and Sarajevo (Oct).**

22/12/2024

Hi all. Sorry I'm such a slacker about posting over here. I'm much more active on IG these days.

There's plenty happening through the org with three courses opens (one entirely new, all live), four in-person intensives in 2025 respectively in Sicily, Barcelona, Costa Rica, and Sarajevo, and regular free happenings too.

And mostly just a note to wish everyone a blessed Solstice. I hope you're staying touch with sweetness and nurturance on the daily.

-Daniel, (still the) Founder/Director at Ancestral Medicine

28/10/2024

This living Earth persists with autumnal glory blanketing the foothills of the again snow-capped Sierra Nevadas.

Spanish chestnut (Castanea sativa) is cut and regenerates, cut and regenerates, giving life again and again, despite and amidst the aggressions.

There's a genocide in Palestine, another in Sudan, and, and. There's a tenacity to empire, colonialism, and supremacy that requires long-term strategy and variable parts softness and fight. I'm improvising like everyone else, not turning away, in for the long haul. Putting my whole self in still doesn't lead to a quick solution. If only.

Life is so precious, tender, and fragile. May we become even more skillful at nurturing all that along while wrangling the monstrosity of war and empire back into the hell worlds from which they emerge. Yes and. We're all this.

While snow quietly falls on snow, far from humans. While the human killing continues. While children play. While chidren are killed while playing.

As autumn truly arrives here in the North, chestnuts begin to drop their leaves.

Área recreative "La Rosandrá", Aldeire, Provincia Granada.

16/10/2024

These begin today. They're a free, kind, open to all, non-politicized space to slow down, reconnect, resource, etc.

Asheville area folks here, please consider sharing, and anyone impacted by the rapidly changing weather is welcome.

They won't be recorded and it's ok to come for just part of the time, but best to be there for the start if at all possible.

07/10/2024

May all resistance movements to defeat colonialism end with success. May resistance fighters get to return home, open bakeries and schools, relax with their families, heal.

May all citizens of nations perpetuating Euro-flavored colonialist terror increase their appetite for historical honesty. In places like the U.S., Israel, Germany, England, Australia, Canada...may these citizens know the soul-level relief that comes from working in tangible ways over many years to end systemic violence. May we acquire a taste for reality and truth and not look back.

May the US election bring a defeat for the stranglehold of AIPAC and the supremacist ideology that is Zionism on US politics. May outcomes set in motion a series of events that cause the US to trend less externally genocidal and imperialist and instead more internally responsible toward its own suffering citizens and lands and to overdue historical reckoning.

On this October 7th, may everyone suffering in their own ways from the violence of colonialism and empire, through systems and through psyche, may you/we find the courage to turn our grief into an even greater love. May the forces of supremacy not destroy our tender-hearted humanity, Earth connections, and courageous loving.

May all those resisting the forces of colonialism in body, speech, and soul be victorious. And from these victories may we together make the necessary changes as a species to end human supremacy and return to more relational ways of Earth living.

In this way, may the deaths of the last year and of today and tomorrow be honored.

Love from Belfast. Some images from a morning walk on the West/Left side of old and enduring colonialist divisions before heading back to city centre for the first day of our ancestral healing intensive.

Go easy with your hearts today. To aspire to a world-shaped heart is to also welcome the sorrows.

30/08/2024

This is an image of a power loader from the 1986 film Aliens. It was an epic scene and a striking example of an exosuit or outer shell that confers additional powers.

If I had to choose a handful of images to sum up my training as a therapist, this would be one of them. It’s how it looks to me when less conscious, unintegrated, and often developmentally younger parts or aspects of the self are driving around adult bodies.

A scared six-year-old is fairly straightforward in that you mostly can read what’s going on. But when a scared child grabs the controls of the whole adult apparatus and is now driving an adult life, that’s a whole different story.

Fear in particular is so often at the root of unhelpful choices. Nothing wrong with fear, but when unconscious terror is pulling the levers inside an adult psyche and body, it’s possible to inflict major damage. And hey, sometimes there are giant menacing aliens, that’s also true.

These dynamics apply to whole nations, systems, movements, etc. What unholy alliances between fear and “protectors” (as they’re often called in parts work) lead to decisions like proactively harming real or imagined threats to try to increase a felt sense of safety.

Who’s driving? How do you know? If you don’t know how it feels for different aspects of self to (try to) grab the wheel of your life, you can safely assume that it’s still very much happening, just unconsciously and with less resistance.