Ancestral Medicine

A practical guide to connecting with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing • Provides exercises and rituals to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find ancestral guides, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace • Explains how to safely engage in lineage repair work by connecting with your more ancient ancestors before relating with the recently deceased • Explores how your ancestors can help you transform intergenerational legacies of pain and abuse and reclaim the positive spirit of the family Everyone has loving and wise ancestors they can learn to invoke for support and healing. Coming into relationship with your ancestors empowers you to transform negative family patterns into blessings and encourages good health, self-esteem, clarity of purpose, and better relationships with your living relatives. Offering a practical guide to understanding and navigating relationships with the spirits of those who have passed, Daniel Foor, Ph.D., details how to relate safely and effectively with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing. He provides exercises and rituals, grounded in ancient wisdom traditions, to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find supportive ancestral guides, cultivate forgiveness and gratitude, harmonize your bloodlines, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace. He explains how to safely engage in lineage repair work by connecting with your more ancient ancestors before relating with the recently deceased. He shows how, by working with spiritually vibrant ancestors, individuals and families can understand and transform intergenerational patterns of pain and abuse and reclaim the full blessings and gifts of their bloodlines. Ancestral repair work can also catalyze healing breakthroughs among living family members and help children and future generations to live free from ancestral burdens. The author provides detailed instructions for ways to honor the ancestors of a place, address dream visits from the dead, and work with ancestor shrines and altars. The author offers guidance on preparing for death, funeral rites, handling the body after death, and joining the ancestors. He also explains how ancestor work can help us to transform problems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious persecution. By learning the fundamentals of ancestor reverence and ritual, you will discover how to draw on the wisdom of supportive ancestral guides, heal family troubles, maintain connections with beloved family after their death, and better understand the complex and interconnected relationship between the living and the dead.

Winner of the 2022 Eating the West Award! Winner of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Book Award! An accessible guide to time-honored Indigenous wisdom, healing recipes, and wellness rituals for modern life from an experienced curandera. In Earth Medicines, Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz, a curandera (or traditional healer) who is a Xicana with Tewa ancestry, combines Indigenous wisdom from many traditions with the power of the four elements. This modern guide is designed to support readers on their path to wellness with lifestyle practices and recipes perfected by Ruiz in her twenty-five years of training and working as a curandera. Ruiz teaches readers to be their own healers by discovering their own ancestral practices and cultivating a personal connection to the elements. These healing recipes and rituals draw on the power of Water, Air, Earth, and Fire—a reminder that the natural elements are the origins of everything and can heal not only our bodies, but the mind and spirit as well. In chapters organized by each element, readers will first find recipes and advice for: Promoting inner harmony through Hydrotherapy for Headache Relief, Mayan Tea to Calm the Mind, or Ginger Fire Honey Chews Nurturing beauty inside and out with Tepezcohuite Honey Mask, Salt of the Earth Deodorant, or Sweetwater Herbal Mouth Rinse Taking care of the spirit by creating an ancestral altar, making loose incense, or performing a Mayan Bajo Steaming Ritual

Indigenous Medicine Woman Asha Frost invites readers to learn the healing medicine of the 13 Ojibway moons and the spirit animals that will guide their wisdom journey. The Medicine you have been searching for lives within you. Follow the path of the 13 Ojibwe Moons with Animal Spirits and Ancestors as your guides as you unlock your connection to your own unique, inherent healing power. Through storytelling, ceremonies, and Shamanic journeys, learn to apply ancient wisdom to your life in ways that are respectful and conscious of the stolen lands, lives, and traditions of Indigenous peoples. Discover how to: - Ground and root into your own lineage and meet your Ancestral guides. - Practice self-care and rest on your journey. - Return to Ancestral ways of cleansing and purifying. - Trust and surrender so you can manifest and thrive. - Release self-doubt, fear, disconnection, and insecurity.

Patrisia Gonzales addresses "Red Medicine" as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establish personal and social equilibrium. The book explores Indigenous medicine across North America, with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Gonzales combines her lived experience in Red Medicine as an herbalist and traditional birth attendant with in-depth research into oral traditions, storytelling, and the meanings of symbols to uncover how Indigenous knowledge endures over time. And she shows how this knowledge is now being reclaimed by Chicanos, Mexican Americans and Mexican Indigenous peoples. For Gonzales, a central guiding force in Red Medicine is the principal of regeneration as it is manifested in Spiderwoman. Dating to Pre-Columbian times, the Mesoamerican Weaver/Spiderwoman—the guardian of birth, medicine, and purification rites such as the Nahua sweat bath—exemplifies the interconnected process of rebalancing that transpires throughout life in mental, spiritual and physical manifestations. Gonzales also explains how dreaming is a form of diagnosing in traditional Indigenous medicine and how Indigenous concepts of the body provide insight into healing various kinds of trauma. Gonzales links pre-Columbian thought to contemporary healing practices by examining ancient symbols and their relation to current curative knowledges among Indigenous peoples. Red Medicine suggests that Indigenous healing systems can usefully point contemporary people back to ancestral teachings and help them reconnect to the dynamics of the natural world.

A practical guide to understanding and using Mexican healing traditions in everyday life Arranging ofrendas. Brewing pericón into a healing tea. Releasing traumas through baños and limpias. Herbalist and curandera Atava Garcia Swiecicki spent decades gathering this traditional knowledge of curanderismo, Mexican folk healing, which had been marginalized as Chicanx and Latinx Americans assimilated to US culture. She teaches how to follow the path of the curandera, as she herself learned from apprenticing with Mexican curanderas, studying herbal texts, and listening to her ancestors. In this book readers will learn the Indigenous, African, and European roots of curanderismo. Atava also shares her personal journey as a healer and those of thirteen other inspirational curanderas serving their communities. She offers readers the tools to begin their own healing--for themselves, for their relationship with the earth, and for the people. The Curanderx Toolkit includes more than 25 profiles of native and adopted plants of Baja and Alta California and teaches you to grow, know, and love them. This book will help anyone who has lost connection with their ancestors begin to incorporate the herbal wisdom and holistic wellness of curanderismo into their lives. Take the power of ancient medicine into your own hands by learning simple herbal remedies and practicing rituals for kinship with the more-than-human world.

Fred McDonald is a Cree Indian who grew up along the Athabasca River in northern Alberta, and received his MFA at the University of Calgary. His autobiography and community history is presented through an alternation of his paintings, poetry, and narratives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge. This wisdom is based on the authors’ oral traditions, research, intuitions, and lived experiences—wisdom inspired by, and created from, personal trajectories on the path to spiritual conocimiento, or inner spiritual inquiry. This conocimiento has reemerged over the last fifty years as efforts to decolonize lives, minds, spirits, and bodies have advanced. Yet this knowledge goes back many generations to the time when the ancestors understood their interconnectedness with each other, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces—a time when the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization, particularly in these fraught times. The wisdom offered here appears in a variety of forms—in reflective essays, poetry, prayers, specific guidelines for healing practices, communal rituals, and visual art, all meant to address life transitions and how to live holistically and with a spiritual consciousness for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The Art & Practice of Spiritual Herbalism, written by leading Black herbalist Karen Rose, addresses herbalism and medicine making from the perspective of diasporic ancestral traditions.