Ancestral Dance is a ritualized dance form that has grown out of years of study, personal practice, ancestral guidance, facilitating dance rituals and supporting others with lineage repair work as an ancestral lineage healing practitioner. Ancestral dances weave together improvisational movement, somatic exploration and ancestral lineage healing. These group rituals offer opportunities to directly commune with blood ancestors for connection and guidance as well as to support the healing of any dead not-yet-at-peace.
Because not all dead are equally well, this form emphasizes discernment and offers tools for energetic protection and ritual safety. Fully embodied, this practice supports creating firm boundaries when needed, releasing of the heaviness from ancestral patterns and integrating of the unclaimed gifts of our ancestors at a bodily level.
Ancient peoples around the world have danced their grief and praise. Dance has been an essential part of sacred rituals for healing, marking important passages and communion with deities. Ancestralization and funerary rituals have also included dancing as a way to help the dead transition to the otherworld, rest at peace, integrate with a bigger ancestral consciousness. While some ancient dance traditions remain in tact, many have been repressed, criminalized and sometimes punished by death.
Ancestral dance strives to remember and reclaim lost ways, lost mysteries and bridge the worlds for reconnection with and ancestralization of the dead through movement and ritual. (See Ancestral Healing page for more about ancestors.)
My professional life has been dedicated to dance as a form of prayer. Over the past two decades, I’ve explored, developed and facilitated a variety of embodied, ecstatic movement rituals in service personal and group healing. Through practice, I’ve learned to access expanded states of consciousness to connect with the other-than-human realm and have developed or more likely remembered ways of ancestral connection and healing through the dance. As we dance together, people of diverse ancestries and ancestral burdens, these rituals can create potent places for profound cultural healing. Gratitude & joy, grief & rage are all welcome as we explore the blessings and burdens of our ancestral inheritance and dance for personal and collective healing.
See Events page for upcoming dances and trainings.
“Julia has an incredible gift for holding space. Diving into ancestral work can feel very vulnerable, and I felt 100% safe and cared for with Julia. This work is pivotal for anyone longing to deepen their connection with…… everything. I never knew I had such strong allies in my ancestors. I feel through this work that I am way more supported than I ever knew, and Julia so beautifully teaches me tools to connect in my own way. I can’t recommend her and this work enough.” ~Kaitlin