Ancestral Dance Series

Everyone has accessible, wise & loving ancestors available for insight, guidance and healing. Relating with our ancestors provides greater understanding of the intergenerational blessings and burdens we carry, illuminates a sense of purpose and cultivates connection with the other-than-human world. 

Generally, the ancestors are the collective dead of human history. More specifically, ancestors are the well, elevated rather than troubled dead. While we also have ancestors of vocation and spirit tradition, working with our blood family ancestors is foundational and accessible by all. Working with our wise, well ancestors can support both beloved and unremembered dead, transmute patterns and trauma and brighten the energetic influence of our ancestors on our lives. Connection with spirit also helps us connect with our unique destiny.

Because not all dead are equally well, this ancestral healing form emphasizes discernment in relating with the dead and offers tools for energetic protection and ritual safety. The practice supports creating firm boundaries when necessary while opening paths of deep connection with bright ancestors. 

Dance has traditionally been a way to honor and connect with the earth, sun and lunar cycles, our other-than-human kin and the ancestors. Music and dance have been essential ways of grieving, celebration and healing. Ancestral Dance is a ritualized movement practice that offers opportunity to remember and reclaim our ancestral, animist ways. Engaging with the ancestors can support  healing of ourselves, the dead and the earth. 

In this context, Dance means being present in your body with a willingness to journey with music. No matter how big or small or still your dance is, this practice  provides space for folks with somatic and kinesthetic intuition to follow their embodied intelligence. Gratitude & joy, grief & rage are all welcome as we explore the embodied blessings and burdens of our ancestral inheritance and dance for personal and collective healing. This modality has grown out of years of study, personal practice, ancestral guidance, dance facilitation and guiding others with lineage repair work as an ancestral lineage healing practitioner. This embodied practice is geared towards folks with somatic and kinesthetic intuition but no dance background is required.

In a combination of 3 group rituals and 3 private sessions, participants will have the opportunity to directly commune with blood ancestors of one blood lineage for connection and guidance as well as to support the healing of any dead not-yet-ancestors. We'll start by learning a bit about the method and relating with other protective allies (plants, animals, archetypes). 

TOPICS WE'LL EXPLORE:

* Foundations of ancestral lineage healing work (developed by Dr Daniel Foor of Ancestral Medicine)

* Ritual skills (i.e. prayer & invocation, protection, listening/visioning, offerings)

* Ritual practice to learn more about your lineages and how they impact your life and body

* Somatic exercises to prepare the body to be receptive for connection and to cultivate embodied intuition

* Journeying through movement and visioning

* Establishing connection with an Ancestral Guide

* Group practice for tending unremembered and remembered dead

* Exploration of how ancestral patterns play into personal wounds/behaviors 

* Techniques for grief tending

* Movement / dance - as an offering, mode of accessing trance/expanded state, way of accessing information and integrating healing at the bodily level

* Somatic exercise to integrate blessings of the dead at the bodily level, extending them to the living and land

LOGISTICS:

* Series BEGINS in OCTOBER, DATES TBD

* Series includes THREE GROUP RITUALS (4.5 hours each) between October & December (time tbd by doodle of interested people)

* Series includes THREE 75 minute ONE-on-ONE SESSIONS. This will help us tend to any threads that need individualized attention. Sessions could be a mix of visioning, movement, integration, personal support, listening, tracking somatic processes, or whatever the ancestors bring our way. Private sessions to be scheduled between group rituals.

* One private session can include acupuncture and/or herbal consult with Jonathan Edwards to support the healing work at a deeper bodily level 

* Access to private FB group

RECIPROCITY:

*$375- $450. Flexibility and installment options are available if needed

* To confirm your spot, write JuliaNHartsell@gmail.com and send payment or deposit of $200 to: paypal.me/JuliaHartsell or Venmo JuliaHartsell

FACILITATOR:

Julia Hartsell is a dancer, catalyst for soulful, earth-honoring community and founder of The Flowjo, a sanctuary for embodied practice in Carrboro, NC. With a background in performance art and world religions, Julia has spent her adult life seeking the mystical through movement. Trusting the body’s inherent wisdom and sacredness, she utilizes these diverse practices to help access the body’s intuition for emotional expression and transformation.This spiraling path has spun her around the world, into non-ordinary states of consciousness and deeper into her devotional dance as a healing practice. With an animist worldview, her work is focused on reclaiming relational ways of living and ancient forms of medicine in service of personal and ancestral healing. Julia is an Ancestral Lineage Healing Practitioner, Death Doula and Home Funeral Guide and is committed to reclaiming the beauty, sacredness and meaning in times of death. She has developed Grief Ceremonies and Ancestral Dance practices for reconnection with elemental forces and ancestral allies. With devotion to the earth’s waters, Julia is an Initiate of Osun and Obatala in the Ifá/Òrìsà tradition of Yoruba West Africa.

photo by Anna Maynard