HEROICA + Ancestors In Training

Ancestors in Training™ is an educational project and lived experience that centers sacred traditions, new technologies, intergenerational healing and grief work.

This work of tending to our legacy in real-time, while we’re still here, is not easy. It takes so much self-regard, community care and healing to unearth cycles in our lineage that we want to interrupt. There are also cycles we wish to generate. To be an ancestor in training is to not only look to the past to be in the right relation with the future, but to embody that elevated ancestor you aspire to be in the present.

Over the past seven years, we have guided folks on this journey through creating sites of care, (un)learning and radical imagination. We encourage connection, mentorship and inquiry-based healing. Whether a course, a panel discussion or a healing through writing experience, we offered multiple opportunities to reflect on the multiplicities with ourselves and each other.

Now, we are partnering with Heroica to bring you a monthly column where we will reflect on any questions you may have about how to access and connect with your lineage. Our hope for this collaboration with Heroica is that you’ll trust us to explore some of your deeper curiosities and possibilities around belonging, ancestral traditions and archival memory across space and time.

With Heroica based in the United Kingdom and Ancestors in Training ™ based on Lenape lands (currently known as New York), we also want to expand our shared definitions of diasporas, and what it means to feel both connected and a part of each other, our ancestral traditions and even our spirituality. This liminal feeling brings us to this liminal space. Much the same way that the concept of home is an ongoing project, so too is diasporic belonging, and we reach both back and forwards as we weave ourselves through the plains of time.

Our guiding prompts for this monthly column include:

We understand that our time here is finite without fear.

When your descendants look back on these times, what will they say that you did?

How can you embody what you want to be known for?

How can the sacred teachings of the Global Majority (BIPOC) be tended to with care and respect?

How can we nurture the inherent abundance and futurity of an ancestors-in-training approach to community care?

Welcome to Ask Ancestors in Training™.

Got a question? Ask it here.