Ancestral Healing
The blessings of our ancestors, as well as their painful patterns, lie dormant within each of us.
Discover your family’s legacy, heal your ancestral wounds, and reshape your destiny.
Ancestral Healing is for you if you:
Wish to deepen your transformative work in the world from a place of personal awareness.
Want the blessings of wise and well ancestors whom you feel are out of reach.
Want to move forward with your life but feel some heaviness in your family of origin that keeps you unsure, unsteady, or lacking direction.
Have relatives who have died or left the family under difficult circumstances such as war, displacement, accidents, suicide, mental illness, or addiction.
Objectives of Ancestral Healing:
To identify trauma patterns and other psychological tracks that have been laid down by earlier family members and ancestors, and understand their effect upon our lives.
To find keys that open doors and set us and future generations free of unconscious compulsions caused by earlier traumas, injustices, or separations between family members.
To create and experience the power of an intentional healing vessel, kli kodesh, and through it, to constellate resonant family fields by which to unlock persistent patterns so that order and joy might be restored.
To add our energies to the ongoing healing and repair of the Jewish people, as well as the larger world.
Ancestral or intergenerational healing begins with the discovery of your origins. We all have ancestors. Who were yours? What did they live through? Your ancestors’ stories have enormous relevance for your own life, health, and resilience. The hardships they experienced and the resources they called upon can help you navigate your own challenges because the residues of their life experiences, both their wounds and their wisdom, live in you.
Rabbi Tirzah offers courses, retreats, workshops and talks on ancestral healing, during which we will study our family legacies through texts, exercises and ritual. Classes orient around trauma science, depth psychology, and case studies to better understand how personal life-riddles are founded on our ancestral legacies, and how we can transform their seemingly impenetrable lead into radiant meaning. To inquire about scheduling an offering with Rabbi Tirzah Firestone please contact us.
Learn at your own Pace: Online Ancestral Healing Courses
Ancestral Wisdom for Walking the Path of the Holy Being: A 7-Module On-Demand Video Training
Immerse yourself in the ancient teachings and powerful practices of two ancestral traditions — Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism — to walk a sacred, empowered path dedicated to self-transformation and the illumination of others.
Ancient Mystic Wisdom to Repair Personal & Ancestral Wounds: A 7-Module On-Demand Video Training
Heal the intergenerational wounds of your lineage — through the rich lens of Kabbalistic wisdom and its profound and holy practices — to remember and fulfill your soul’s sacred purpose.
Find Healing & Resilience in Ancestral Wisdom: A 7-Module On-Demand Video Training
In this 7-part transformational intensive, Rabbi Tirzah will guide you through a unique and original blend of depth psychology; meditative practices; embodied, somatic healing modalities; storytelling; and scientific research — to free yourself of the inherited trauma of your lineage so you can hear the calling of your sacred purpose and bring healing to our planet.
Wellsprings of Wisdom: Deep Ancestral Healing through Jungian Archetypes, Ancient Mysticism & Trauma Science
A 7-Module On-Demand Video Training
Journey into the deeply mystical work of repairing the wounds of ancestral trauma through three profound wisdom wellsprings — archetypal psychology, ancient mysticism, and modern neuroscience. Connect with your yet-unsourced healing powers, your own unique sacred purpose, and the spiritual allies and ancestors who are always available to guide you.
Wounds into Wisdom:
A 9-Module On-Demand Video Training
Embark on an experiential journey to heal your ancestral legacies, discover untapped vitality and spiritual resources — and quiet the turbulent outside world to connect with your sacred purpose. This transformative course also includes two sacred ritual practicum sessions to take you deeper into ceremonial ancestral healing work. This intensive builds upon the core teachings from the Find Healing & Resilience in Ancestral Wisdom 7-module course.
Jewish Ancestral Healing Workshops & Retreats
Our venerable Jewish lineage has accrued much wisdom over the past 3,000 years and many wounds too, due to generations of relentless historical trauma. We know now that traumatic wounds don’t simply disappear over time. The difficult circumstances that our ancestors endured over generations ripple across time, often cascading downward, causing painful patterns that become stuck in the unconscious field of our families, affecting us and our children. Jewish Ancestral Healing work is designed to help alleviate these traumas and dissolve their negative influences. We do this by facing and honoring our ancestors and deceased family members. When we restore our avot v’imahot to their rightful roles as ancestors—those who are meant to bless and guide our lives from beyond—our family body is healed and energy can begin to flow again.
To schedule a workshop with Rabbi Tirzah Firestone in your community, please contact us.
Why is Intergenerational Trauma Healing
so critical now?
In the past several years, scientific research in the fields of neuroscience and epigenetics has come to light demonstrating that unmetabolized trauma, such as feelings of agitation, numbness, or shame, can be transmitted to future generations.
The field of intergenerational trauma healing, also called ancestral healing, is very new and trending, yet it comes to us from multiple cultures in the ancient world. It applies to all of us as individuals, as well as to groups and ethnicities who have suffered grave challenges such as discrimination, displacement, and poverty.
So often, the issues we are dealing with have their roots in the generations that came before us. Painful problems as varied as phobias, separation anxiety, fear of scarcity, and internalized guilt, begin to heal once we understand them in an intergenerational context. When we embark on this profound work, healing can occur across time, backwards to our ancestors and forwards to our own offspring.
“2,500 years ago, the prophet Ezekiel said: The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth were set on edge. So, the Jewish culture and religion has understood that children bear the burden of their parents’ legacy. Fair or unfair, it’s a fact. It’s a cultural fact. It’s a biological fact. Everyone is born with a unique set of genes. The task is to refine from these traits the best self that we can have and not get distracted by the traits that are weaker; build up the traits that are stronger. We all have the same job to do.”
— Dr. Rachel Yehuda
Testimonials
“I signed up for the workshop because I was drawn to your depth of wisdom and authentic energy. I didn’t consider myself as traumatized – in fact, I felt quite lucky given the tremendous sufferings going on in this world. Yet, I was reduced to tears and uncontrollable sobbing during the pair exercise. I remembered the traumas in my family – death in WWII, orphanage in Civil War, suicide during Culture Revolution, disownment, paralysis, prolonged vegetative state… There must be a lot more that I don’t know because I left home at 19 and Chinese families tend to be tight-lipped about such things.”
—RT
“Taking your course was profoundly important for me as a young woman seeking to interrogate my own relationship to Judaism and learn more about myself within the context of my family, my ancestors, and my inherited culture. The tools this course gave me to approach life with love, understanding, and strength are invaluable to the work of living mindfully and passionately in our world. I am confident the lessons and practices we learned will serve me for the rest of my life, and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to study with you at such a pivotal point in my young adulthood. Now I feel much more capable to face the challenges that will come my way as I continue to grow. Thank you for your wisdom.”
— IN
"I feel ... a weight has lifted off both my mum and dad and I feel so deeply connected with both of them now and it's truly a gift and a blessing. My mother keeps showering me with love from the other side and the message I get is that she can now enter because I 'claimed' her and that she could not do that from where she is, it could only come from me. A true and profound healing took place and I cannot thank you enough.”
— NE
Thank you for bringing the awareness and showing the path to healing.”
—MX
“For the first time I was able to actively look back in my family history to seek out the queer and trans ancestors in my lineage. I know they are there even if I don’t know them by name.”
—RB
“[Rabbi Tirzah] captures the choice we have in dealing with cultural, personal, and intergenerational trauma–to become permanently victimized, or to choose resilience and hope. And her way of dealing with the complexities of Jewish trauma, including in Israel, is complex and nuanced.”
—MF
“When I read this one line [about Yizkor], it validated my own story and experience and I realized, this isn’t just ‘my little story’, this is a universal story (or tribally universal : – ) And it totally unlocked my writing this story and I could access the feelings in the background, all because of your one sentence about Yizkor. Suddenly, I was no longer alone… So, thank you thank you thank you. I am so profoundly grateful for your work and for you bringing this knowledge into the world, more than words could ever express. You gave my stories a home. ”
—NR
“I caught your’s and Gloria’s [Steinem] talk at the 92nd St Y via live streaming. Very inspiring and real…the acknowledgement of the pain and the hope that you embody is absolutely enlivening. And I so appreciate your connection to struggles for liberation from suffering and generational repetition from peoples from around our globe.”
—TB
"Thank you so much for this weekend. Being seen and witnessed in such a way was humbling and profound. I’m still struggling to find the words for being a part of an event so enlightening, connective, and universal and yet so deeply raw, exposing, and personal. I drove away feeling a sense of community with you and those women (and men) that I haven’t felt in such a long time. Your understanding that bringing up traumatic events needs grounding and nurturing long after is noticed. I appreciate your responsibility to the work and to the people trusting you with their inner most demons. I felt safe and cared for the entire time.”
—EB
"[Rabbi Tirzah's] precise and thorough teaching style helped me hone a treasure trove of deepening practices. Working with my chosen ancestral shadow issue served to keep me focused on the present as I consciously honored aspects of unhealed ancestral and personal pain. At one point, when I thought my chest would crack from grief, I asked myself: “how can I be with this without breaking?” It came to me, so clearly, that to honor the pain by bearing witness and calling on the help of my guides and ancestors from the unseen realm, was an opportunity that many of my lineages did not have the time or chance to do. They had to carry on (immediately); there was no time to mourn or grieve deep, unspeakable losses.."
—MP
"Ancestral Wisdom introduced me to other layers of my self that I kept buried. The meditations were very helpful in keeping me focused and Rabbi Tirzah Firestone made the experience safe. Her compassion for the people who shared was remarkable."
—RA
"I have taken a series of courses on healing ancestral intergenerational trauma with Tirzah in the last two years and found the information and practices helped me find and connect with help and support from my wise and well ancestors. The development of active imagination through the meditations permeated my daily life and helped me develop insights and perspectives that are practical and which have improved some relationships in the "outer" world. I found myself in good company with a crowd of intuitive and creative fellow students whom I enjoyed meeting and learning from through the breakout groups and other study opportunities."
—JS