Hello, I’m Adrianna. Welcome to Ceiba Medicine where we address the spiritual roots of individual and familial burdens for personal and societal transformation.
What is Ancestral Healing?
The land of the living and the land of spirit are as interwoven as the threads of an ornate tapestry. Many of us have a sense that we are deeply connected to the non-corporeal world, including our ancestors, other spirit beings and the Divine by many names, but being able to connect actively is often out of reach. How do we practice something that might have been lost for generations? There are many ways, and ancestral lineage healing is one map to guide your way.
You don’t have to do this life alone. We were never meant to be spiritually isolated, trying to survive and thrive all on our own, with only the living as support in this complex and challenging human world. We were never meant to be just a single human with a single nervous system. Imagine feeling so resourced and whole that you can take in the vastness of this world, in all its beauty and heartache, while being rooted in your purpose and gifts. There is so much more love and support available to you than you can imagine possible. The ancestors are waiting for you to connect, to offer their wisdom, love and care, and to reaquaint you with the wider world of spirit kin.
At Ceiba we understand that some part of our deceased relatives continue to exist even after they die but that not all of them are well in spirit. We hold that communicating with our dead relatives is a normal and intrinsic human ability and that we can impact the dead, just as they can impact us, whether we are conscious of it or not. We also believe that, just like the living, the dead are not fixed and static, but that they can change in spirit. In places like the United States where traditional practices of honoring and tending to the ancestors have largely been interrupted, condemned, and forgotten, unwellness among the dead is as common as it is unspoken. Patterns of this unwellness can be seen everywhere from oppressive social structures to our inter- and intra-personal relationships. It fuels generational trauma and blocks us from the gifts of our people. But we don’t have to live like this, and in today’s world the call to change is growing more and more urgent.
Ancestral healing is one way to address these ills. Through a facilitated process you connect with older, well ancestors who aid in healing your lineages and restoring beneficial contact between you and your people. This requires commitment and work on your part, and like any deep change can include the any number of experiences. It is not a passive spiritual reading, but rather a facilitated connection between you and your ancestors that you initiate. You learn to connect with your own people directly, and form relationships with them over time. Ancestral lineage healing is a safe, structured way to connect with your kin that is culturally and spiritual inclusive. There is no religious framework and even atheists have been able to access healing through it. It is impossible to predict the outcomes of this work for any particular person, but if you are called to it, the rewards can be deep, satisfying, and life-changing.
Some possible benefits of doing ancestral healing work include:
- Being able to call on your ancestors and know specifically who they are, where they’re from, what gifts they bring, and how they support you in spirit.
- Shifting old and entrenched family patterns.
- Feeling healthy pride and self-esteem in who you are in the context of the larger ancestral ecosystem.
- Doing your part in becoming an ancestor in this world, and a part of the larger healing needed in this time.
- Gaining more information about, and potentially shifting, difficult physical and psychological patterns not addressed otherwise.
- Attaining more spiritual and psychological wholeness by claiming and integrating all of who you are.
- Supporting larger societal shifts by helping you and your people heal.
- Gaining the agency to connect with your own guides.
- Protecting younger generations from familial problems and connecting them to the benefits of their ancestry.
- Atoning for harm done by your people to other humans, the land, and other-than-human kin.
- Feeling supported by a broader community. Addressing existential loneliness through spiritual community-building.
- Gaining a healthy pride in yourself and your people through renewed relationship with the beauty of your specific ancestry.
- Knowing that all the relatives on your altar or ofrenda are well in spirit and safe to connect with.
- Being able to call on deeper and stronger psychic boundaries by fully embodying your own ancestral spiritual power.
- Fully integrating your unique gifts in this world.
This might be for you if…
- You want to deepen your relationship with your ancestors.
- You want to find out more about where you come from.
- You want more capacity, empowerment, and resilience for these times.
- You have sought to address longstanding harmful psychological patterning with other modalities but feel like there is *something* you can’t quite get to or shift.
- You want to support a relative in their transition to the other side.
- You want to support your own process of eldership and preparation for death.
- You want support in a difficult family dynamic that has been hard to shift.
- You are worried about the impact of generational problems on yourself, your children or other relatives.
- You want to support your relatives who have died by helping them be well in spirit.
- You have the sense that you need stronger psychological and spiritual boundaries.
- You seek guidance in your life’s purpose or direction.
This might not be for you if…
- You do not have a lot of support in your life, or capacity to be in deep transformation.
- You have a hard time distinguishing between your own energy and other people/beings.
- You do not have the time or energy to dedicate to a regular practice of ancestral tending.
- You are easily dis-regulated by tapping into your inner world.
About Me
As a queer, mixed-race, first-gen practitioner, I practice medicine at the intersection of healing and social justice, working to reclaim traditional healing practices and tools to liberate the body. My people come from Abya Yala (Mesoamérica) but particularly Guatemala and Belize, as well as Québec, Poland, and Germany. I have worked as a licensed practitioner of Traditional East Asian medicine since 2011, incorporating many traditional modalities of Chinese medicine (acupuncture, moxibustion, cupping, herbal therapy, etc), Mayan medicine, craniosacral technique, various types of bodywork, and psychodrama. As of 2025 I am also a practicing ancestral healing efacilitator in training as taught by Dr. Daniel Foor of Ancestral Medicine. I work most often in the realm where the body, emotions, and Spirit meet, sleuthing out the complex interplay between all of our levels of being. I aim to always create safer space for everyone I work with, and operate with a slow and trauma-informed approach.
I am particularly interested in working with people of mixed ancestry, especially those descended from both colonizers and colonized. Mixed can mean many things, including mixed class, caste, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. I am curious about the way very different lineages can integrate to form something more, even when those lineages may have come together in violence or shame. We inhabit a special time in humanity where migration has yielded the interaction of people who would previously have never met, forming connections across vast distance and difference. The healing that can happen when these diverse lineages are tended and integrated is specifically called for in this time. There is power in the friction, and I would love to explore that with you.
The Social Justice of Ancestral Healing
My sense is that it is hard to find an ancestral lineage that is completely free from any kind of difficulty. Gender oppression alone is common worldwide and most of us come from people who both experienced and perpetrated some kind of harm. But there are also lineages whose members have done more than the average harm, lines of supremacists, settlers, colonizers, and imperialists who took the opportunity to exploit others for their own gain and were part of organized efforts to wipe out whole peoples. Our ancestors don’t need to have been the architects of slavery to have perpetrated large spiritual harm. But instead of shunning those unwell ones, there is incredible power in healing those wounds. The ethic of abolition can be extended to the spiritual realm as well, where we seek to restore full humanity to both victims and perpetrators alike. We hold agency and accountability for all our people.
Those of us who have lineages mixed with people both enacting and experiencing large cultural harms have an unique role to play in this spiritual work. By becoming whole in ourselves and our ancestry we are able to experience intimately the possibility of this kind of restorative justice for the world.
Healing restores wholeness. This may not be easy or gentle and the story that unfolds is likely to be complex and surprising. But I believe those of us called to the task are our ancestors’ wildest dreams, even if those ancestors never would have imagined who we would become. Especially those of us who are queer, trans, mixed caste or class, or people of color descended from white ancestors, we may struggle to imagine acceptance from our kin in life or death. But spirit knows no bounds. The gifts may be a long way back, but they are there, and they are uniquely ours to claim and inhabit.
What to Expect
Each session will be held over Zoom so you can be in the comfort of your own space. You will need a device, ideally a computer, to access the virtual meeting. Each session will open with an invocation and a bit of talking before dropping into communication with the ancestors.
The following is a general template of what to expect in each session, but the actual process can vary widely. Some lineages may need more time on certain steps and none of the steps are clearly differentiated from the next. Each session begins with an invocation of support and boundaries, a short check-in, and a drop-in to the intuitive space of connecting with spirit.
Session One
Assessment of Lineages
This is the most structured and layered step in the repair process and includes perceiving the current state of the four grandparent lineages with a special focus on boundaries. We are not yet connecting at this stage, only observing.
Session Two
Connecting with a Guide
The healed and well ancestors guide the work, and this step is about securing and sinking into that connection to lay the groundwork for subsequent lineage repairs.
Session Three
Healing the Older Dead
After making a connection with the guide and bringing containment and healing intention to the lineage
between, this step emphasizes understanding the blessings and burdens of the lineage as a whole and then bringing healing to the lineage from the guides to the recent or remembered dead.
Session Four
Healing the Recent Dead
Lineage troubles
tend to accumulate and compound from one generation to the next. Everyone is different, but emotional intensity may be
heightened at this stage because the intervention now reaches deceased grandparents, parents, siblings and children, bearing witness to their healing and transformation.
Session Five
Work with the Living
This step completes the five-step healing progression by anchoring the restored lineage blessings in the
extended and living family as well as your own body and psyche. This may include a celebratory quality as well as you assuming your place in the lineage in a new and healed way.
Most sessions will end with some suggestions from the ancestors on ways to continue the work or connect between sessions. You will receive notes from the session to remember what happened without having to rely solely on your memory.
In this structure we are focusing on the four grandparent lineages. Most of us are part of myriad lineages back and back before recorded time, but to simplify things we focus on the four biological lineages of our parents’ parents. However, families come in all kinds of constellations and we aim to make room for gender expansive ancestors as well as family that is not of blood. Adopted family and step-family can also be worked with in this way.
How to Prepare
These sessions are a kind of ritual space. It helps to be well-resourced when you enter. This includes being well-rested, hydrated, and fed. Find a space where you can concentrate and won’t be bothered for the duration of our time together. Many people need a quiet space, but it is not absolutely necessary.
Because doing this work can touch on difficult family stories and trauma, it is recommended to give yourself a lot of mental and emotional space after sessions. It is also a good idea to have consistent mental health support to integrate the experiences of the session. This can vary by person, but it should at least encompass time and space to process what unfolds with the ancestors.
You do not need to know anything about your blood relatives in order to do this work. Adoptees with know knowledge of their biological family can still connect intuitively with their people, as well as with adopted family.
Investment
While in training and pre-certification phase of facilitating ancestral healing, the rate for sessions is the following.
Intro Session
$150A focused 90 minute session to assess the wellness of your lineages
Follow Up Sessions
$100All sessions after the introductory session
Discounted Rate
To make the work more accessible to those disenfranchized by our current capitalist systems, both within and outside of the US, I offer additionally discounted rates. This is for anyone who cannot afford the rates above. This might mean that you live or work outside of the global north, are living paycheck to paycheck, are on government assistance, have little to no disposable income, and own no property. If you struggle to make ends meet, but have or expect to receive family inheritance, please consider using those means to pay for this work.
Barter arrangements are welcome depending on circumstances. Inquire during the free consultation if you would like to offer a barter. Organically-grown produce, medicinals and flowers are especially welcome.
Discounted Rate
$60For those who :
Acupuncture
I also offer acupuncture and bodywork in conjunction with ancestral lineage healing. This somatic work can support any transformations and repatterning that may happen on a psychological and physical level as you work with your people in spirit. It is not unusual for physical symptoms to be associated with ancestral impact and many people come to the work with questions about the body-level impact of ancestral wounds. East Asian medicine and culture has a long history of addressing the impact of spiritual harm on the body and offers an potent tool when working with somatic burdens. Inquire during the free consult or email adrianna@ceibamedicine.com with questions about using acupuncture to support you on your path with ancestral healing.
About Ceiba
The Ceiba (or Kapok) tree, like my father’s mother’s people, is native to Mesoamérica. Like many other sacred trees around the world, it is a World Tree or Tree of Life, holding up Creation. The Ceiba grows to be the tallest tree in the jungle and mature trees create huge buttresses with their roots. These revered trees provide homes and shade for many creatures. Due to their enormous stature, they form a connection between Earth and Heaven, resembling the connection between the corporeal living and the non-corporeal dead. Like the Ceiba, we seek to become a safe haven in the world, and a bridge to Spirit.
Are you ready to meet your people?