Ancestral Futures of Transformation
September 2022 - November 2022
with Sara McFarland & Amanda Fiorino
Who are you? What relational crossroads have made the life of you possible? What near and distant lands and waterways have mattered the cellular nature of your existence? What are the many voices that have sung you into being? Which ancient stories reside inside your heart, waiting to shape and be shaped? Who are the bipedal, four-legged, wind-sailing, blossoming, current-riding, bank-bending, root-reaching peoples from which your miraculous presence springs?
Who are your ancestors, and what do you know of your own ancestral-becoming?
The word "ancestor" often carries past-tense and human-centric implications (in the contemporary west), relegating those who have come "before" to stretches of inactivity and absence. But if you were to pause for a moment, settle into your supple impermanence, and taste the breath rolling back and forth over your tongue you might notice something astounding. That your beating heart circulates ancient rhythms through rivers of blood that entangle you with "past" peoples who live on through the body of you. Peoples that are not only human, but also bacterial, faunal, floral, mycelial, aquatic, boreal, riparian, viral, and more. As you listen for their presence within and all around, you may also begin to feel the cilia of unknown future ones listening for and to the ancestor of you. An ancestor bequeathing gifts that flow through stretches of immeasurable time.
Ancestral Futures of Transformation is a 3 month invocation of ancestral re-membrance where we both (re)connect with our personal ancestries, as well as tend our own ancestral becoming. For some this will be a journey of initiating relationship with ancestors, for others it will be a deepening and expanding of current ancestral connections - quite possibly both. Regardless of your perceived "starting point," tending our ancestral ground opens us up to even greater and unforeseen ways of participating in these times of immense change. Ancestors are irreplaceable allies in our on-going healing, as well as the emergence and integration of our gifts. Embodied capacities that render us response-able, and enrich the ground of future worlds longing to find form and expression through our entangled and multiplicitous lives.
Over the course of our 3 months together, we will be opening up pathways of perception through eco-mystical practices, ceremony & ritual, deep imagination, dream work, somatic inquiry & experiencing, story & myth, and the art of council. Our full-bodied, synesthetic listening will extend from stretches of place-based belonging as we choose to stay with what is constantly unfolding and enfolding us. Listening to and for the voices of ancestors, unknown future ones, and the ecologies of our own ancestral emergence. Listening as a way of being trans-formed by what we hear, and out of such transformation storying-with the world from renewed places of wonder and imagination.
We will move with our ancestors not as entities of the "past," rather as presences informing present-moment possibilities.
As unseen mattering forces invoking unknown futures of remark-ability and wonder.
Dates, Times, & Areas of Focus
Human Ancestry
IMMERSION I
September, 2022
(Saturday & Sunday)
DATES COMING SOON
Sessions will have a 4 hour container with off-screen time and breaks folded in.
FERAL COUNCIL
September, 2022
DATE COMING SOON
9 a.m. - 11:30 p.m. MST
5 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. GMT+1
4 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. GMT
FERAL EMBODIMENT
September, 2022
DATE COMING SOON
9 a.m. - 10:30 p.m. MST
5 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. GMT+1
4 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. GMT
We will begin our deep dive with our human ancestry - the peoples of our personal blood and bone lines. To feel the arroyos of their skin as our skin, the caves of their hearts shaping our hearts, the supple muscle of our tongues intuiting shaped sounds and rhythms from their tongues. To invoke their gaze so as to be seen through and within their eyes, and to let the power of their multi-sensory perception change us.
You will be invited to deepen your understanding and relationship with your human ancestors, invoking their presence through the body, imagination, movement, dreamtime, and ceremony. Wading through waterways of birth and death, catching echoes of their songs and ululations, beckoning you toward the ecstasy and grief of your astounding existence.
Floral & Faunal Ancestry
IMMERSION I
October, 2022
(Saturday & Sunday)
DATES COMING SOON
Sessions will have a 4 hour container with off-screen time and breaks folded in.
FERAL COUNCIL
October, 2022
DATE COMING SOON
9 a.m. - 11:30 p.m. MST
5 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. GMT+1
4 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. GMT
FERAL EMBODIMENT
October, 2022
DATE COMING SOON
9 a.m. - 10:30 p.m. MST
5 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. GMT+1
4 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. GMT
Our second month together will entail an invocation of our faunal ancestries. The furred, four-legged, clawed, feathered, scaled, swimming and slithering peoples our human ancestors were entangled with and nourished by, as well as those with whom we currently share place and space. Faunal ancestors whose spiritual ways and cultural rhythms infuse(d) our dreams, and churn(ed) the digestive juices of our bellies calling out to the holy ground of our belonging.
We will also court and track our floral and mycelial ancestries. The peoples of root, stem, leaf, fruit, and tendril. You will be invited to deepen your understanding and relationship with both those your human ancestors entangled with and learned from, as well as the floral and mycelial peoples with whom you share current landscapes of co-habitation. Peoples imbued with healing capacities, the ability to expand consciousness, and the knowledge to decompose shape and form. Light- and death-eating and darkness-loving creatures who understand the world and these times from their own embodied places of perception.
We'll call upon their intelligences and ways of knowing through food & drink, ceremony, movement, deep imagery, the dreamtime and more, permissioning their ways of knowing to shape us from within. Remembering that their flesh, bones, roots, stems, fruits and flowers live within us, and our flesh, bones, and breath live within them. And, that through their eyes, breath, tracks, rootways, and blossoming intelligence we come to know ourselves with greater intimacy as multiplicitous beings whose dreams belong to the world.
Place & Space Ancestry
IMMERSION I
November, 2022
(Saturday & Sunday)
DATES COMING SOON
Sessions will have a 4 hour container with off-screen time and breaks folded in.
FERAL COUNCIL
November, 2022
DATE COMING SOON
9 a.m. - 11:30 p.m. MST
5 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. GMT+1
4 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. GMT
FERAL EMBODIMENT
November, 2022
DATE COMING SOON
9 a.m. - 10:30 p.m. MST
5 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. GMT+1
4 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. GMT
Waterways, forests, caves, mountains, grasslands, deserts - in our fourth month together we will invoke the forces of place and space. Those living tapestries of ecological confluence that envelop the senses, and hold the temples of inter-specied dreaming. The places and spaces our human, floral/mycelial, and faunal ancestors belong(ed) to, and those with(in) which we each now reside. Places and spaces that pluck at our heartstrings, and magnetize our imaginations through melodic memories of past and future that conjure the immensity of belonging.
We'll call out to and invite in the sandy, salty, root-waying, decaying, bursting, lush, arid, storming terra-scapes whose relentless changing natures remind us of what devotion really means. Through ceremony, deep imagery, place-based wanders, the dreamtime and more we'll feel the places where ours and our ancestors hands and feet, paws and claws connect to the ground of becoming.
What You'll Receive & How We'll Support You
In this course you will receive...
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Monthly videos presenting and exploring the month's theme, as well as introducing practices and invitations for wanders in the out-of-doors.
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Monthly immersions, live over zoom (4 hours)
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Monthly somatic practice and dyad explorations (1.5 hours)
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Monthly council sessions (2.5 hours long)
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A workbook of articles, practices and invitations
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Online private platform for sharing your experiences, and engaging with fellow wonderers and ancestral re-memberers in the course.
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Optional one-to-one mentoring with Amanda & Sara.
We are ancestors, and we are our ancestors. Enfleshed memories transforming through the bone and blood of our corporeal forms. Our gifts and powers are their gifts to us. Let us honor what we have been gifted.
- Amanda Jade Fiorino
Cultivating Resources
You will be supported in developing psycho-spiritual and somatic resources through daily practices, and on-going invitations.
Cross-pollination of Frames
We will be suggesting & providing resources that enable us to look at and confront pervasive cultural paradigms and dualisms that spring from and perpetuate capitalistic-colonial and industrial pathways of relating.
Wound Alchemy
You will have trauma-informed practices to support you in resourcing, and alchemically digesting the tender ground from which life has shaped you and your ancestral inheritance.
Virtual Workbook
Engage the videos and workbook at your own pace and rhythm. Our intention is to support you to create practices that will extend beyond this container!
Virtual Cohort
You will have a private online platform to weave a virtual web of connection with one another, our email contact, as well as a buddy with whom you will have one-to-one check in's for ongoing support and accountability.
Mentoring
Should you feel yourself in a place where you'd benefit from being deepened and held, you are welcome to schedule time with us.
Let's Re-Member Together...
By “remember” we are speaking to a “re-membering" of our emergent natures with these immense times, and unknown futures of possibility. Re-membering as belonging to a shapeshifting world from renewed and unforeseen shapes. Shapes that articulate hybridic dreams of eco-plicitous, inter-specied, and ancestral becomings. Re-membrance not as a replication of an “in-tact” past so as to repeat an already lived, known and controllable future. Re-membrance as an invocational confluence of living memory and possible futures. A confluence where the “what was” and the “yet-to-be-known” in-form the present-moment shapes of us, and the present-moment shapes of us alter the holographic stretches of time.
Facilitated by passages of personal and collective transformation, re-membering asks of us deeper intimacy, discerning surrender, a willingness to listen to and from all the places of our existence, radical honesty, curiosity, widened perspectives, and patient devotion with all that will never be (re)solved.
When we re-member, we say “yes” to being changed, and our trans-formation reciprocally changes the world. “Forgetting,” then, becomes a cyclic necessity; another turn around the spiral that enables richer dis-integration, like the moon turning its face away from the sun every month. Might we re-member ourselves as ancestors of possible futures invoking the living memory of our multi-specied, place-based ancestries? And out of such re-membering, what revelations will fruit sporotic gifts bequeathed us by our heritages of belonging?
"Ancestral knowledge arises out of a place-based belonging, and the particular ecologies and voices we are embedded within and that are embedded within us." - Sara McFarland
Participation Fee
$400 - $900 sliding scale
$150 down payment to reserve your spot
*We understand that these times of uncertainty and upheaval are working all of us in varying ways, and we wish to make this offering as accessible as possible. If you are unable to pay the participation fee in full before the start of this program, please do reach out to us to discuss payment plan options (with no penalty fees attached).
*We would also like to encourage that if you have the ability to pay beyond the $900, your contribution will go into our Scholarship Money Cauldron for those who wish to participate and need additional financial support.
*We have one work-trade spot available that will reduce the participation fee by $200. Please reach out to us if you are interested.
Registration
This 3-month long offering is open to all!
If you can feel in the marrow of your bones, the beat of your heart, the flow of your blood, the cavern of your womb, the pliable soles of your feet, or the belly of your knowing a tempestuous, shaking, wailing, undulating, growling, or shivering YES, I WANT TO RE-MEMBER, please email us at ferallunacy@gmail.com - we're so excited to dive in with you.
We so hope you follow the scent and tracks of your longing - of the ancestors dancing along the cellular memory of your own becoming.
When you register with us we will send you a brief questionnaire so that we can glean an understanding of your interest in this program, and be sure that it will be of service to you, your longings, and your life.
"As an aspect of expanded-states, listening in this way could be likened to eco-mystical practices that enable us to interface with terran and cosmic forces capable of shaping and re-shaping our sense of place and purpose. By "purpose" I mean the relational fields that beckon our imaginations and erotic passion to conspire ongoingly with the world. A storying-with existence, which includes the unseen and formless, as well as the ancestral. Listening in this way re-members our bodily awareness to an animistic consciousness that recognizes the divinity, intelligence, agency, and en-soulment within matter. Eco-mystical states initiate transformations through embodied conversations with the animistic world, and our synesthetic bodies are the medium by which we can listen." - Amanda Fiorino
We are ancestors of possible futures invoking ancestral pathways of re-membrance...
Ancestral knowledge arises out of a place-based belonging, and the particular ecologies and voices we are embedded within and that are embedded within us. We are currently experiencing a mass global transformation, never-before-seen ancestral knowledges are being invoked. Rather than attempts at replicating the past, we are inviting the "past" to participate in the storying of life itself.
We are future ancestors moving within holographic stretches of time, being moved by the rhythms of the land.
Listen. Can you hear your participation unfolding?
Let us sing over the bones - our ancestors, our own, and those we find rooted in place. Let us enflesh a new ensoilment, singing in exquisite cacophony and harmony with all of life. Let us look again, and again, to discern what else is possible. We are calling you, inviting you to dive back in reciprocally, invoking our ancestral lines while wondering what else is possible.
Our ancestors are still here, still participating...
We were never not held within the golden web of life...
Let us live into the unanswerable questions of these emergent times.