It was great to speak to Daniel Foor, a doctor of psychology, ritualist, and the author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing. We spoke a lot about ancestral lineage healing and how, deep down, and in most parts of the world, it’s normal for humans to routinely connect with older ancestors and non-human beings.
My adult life is defined by a calling to help others to come back into relationship with the earth, and with the larger web of the community we’re embedded in, the unseen, the ancestors, so that we can shift what’s happening on the planet in a more loving ethical way, address the ecological catastrophe we’re unleashing, and also be kinder and more responsible with each other… I want to be a participant in that. It’s the work of our time.
Daniel told me that he views his work with ancestors and the earth as primarily practical, as a way to address collective cultural erasure and trauma wrought by modernity.
We talked about the mixed record of modernity (because it’s not like it’s all bad), including one of the new sciences born in the modern era: psychology. Daniel, an experienced therapist, said that although psychology can be a life saver it often reaches for validity in the hard sciences and turns a blind eye to spirituality, religion, the earth, the unseen, and the collective. It’s also undeniable that there are class and race walls around psychology, walls that make psychologists susceptible to Euro-centrism and other supremacist practices.
We talked a lot about Palestine.
Daniel made a case for the crucial importance of recognizing that we’re utterly dependent on other humans, the earth, the universe, and the unseen. Working with and deepening this recognition, he said, can take many practical forms: communal rituals to reinforce ethics of interdependence, ancestral lineage healing, reclaiming the political levers of production.
Daniel’s political, eclectic, practical, and questioning approach to spirituality resonated with me. I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I enjoyed talking to Daniel.
To learn more about Daniel and his organization, please visit: https://ancestralmedicine.org
To read more about his book, please visit: https://ancestralmedicine.org/rituals-for-personal-and-family-healing/
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