A place for illuminating generational stories that have shaped our beliefs, identities, behaviors and patterning in order to widen our perspectives and deepen our understanding of who we are.”

An Ancestral Storytelling Council is a ceremonial process where participants access, express and integrate our generational stories. These councils are a cultural commons, a collaborative place for cultivating the art of telling old ancestral stories in new ways, a safe space for healing and transforming inherited trauma, and a shared experience of expanding ancestral lineage clarity and wisdom. 

We pay special attention to what intuitively resonates and to what is elicited by one anothers’ ancestral stories. This collective attunement facilitates a metabolizing of trauma by unearthing, identifying and releasing both the blessings and burdens we have carried over from internalized generational transmissions. The process clarifies what narratives we want to carry forward. 

New information, intelligence and insights arise as we access source material from our generational lineage and mine through the hard stories we hold in our bodies, hearts and minds. A pool of blessings and a feast of honoring emerges. 

When & Where

These Councils take place in person, in small groups, online, or in larger workshops and retreats. Michael Gelbart is available to facilitate a council for your family, organization, community or religious institution. 

Support & Guidance

These Councils support and guide participants in:

• Accessing and expressing ancestral stories

• Discovering transpersonal, archetypal and universal truths

• Transforming generational trauma by reworking inherited material

• Becoming authors of more empowering, liberating and healing narratives

• Expanding post-traumatic learning

• Differentiating ourselves from prior generational imprints

• Unburdening toxic beliefs and releasing shame

• Developing greater compassion and inter-relatedness

• Remembering, honoring and serving those who came before us 

• Growing respect for one another’s cultural backgrounds

• Reconnecting to our bodies and our sense of place

• Moving from fragmentation to wholeness

• Becoming more clear, passionate and purposeful

Ancestral Stories May Include

• Families of origin generational patterns

• Grandparents and extended family relatives

• Names and characteristics

• Ancestral geography, locations and displacements

• Villages, cities and occupations

• Heroes and villains

• Migration patterns

• Cultural and ethnic layers

• Inherited stories, songs, beliefs and ethics

• Formative identity influences

• Roots and branches of our family constellations

• Heritage burdens and treasures

• Ancestral wisdom

• Generational, epigenetic trauma resilience

Shift in Perspective

Sharing our multi-generational, ancestral memories, inherited narratives, experiences, impressions and reflections, is a powerful way of shifting perspectives on intergenerational blockages.

We learn how to find and open portals of connection with grandparents, ancestral lands, villages, events, occupations, beliefs and eras that have epigenetically shaped us. By opening and expanding our vision, our expressive and healing capacities may move in channels backwards and forwards in time.

Combining these origin stories with one another we amplify collective healing, upgrade our sense of belonging, and cultivate more meaningful threads of understanding our collective cultural heritage

These Sacred Wisdom Councils are shared “Soul Archaeology” digs, where we track and discern layers of our formative lineages and cultural/ethnic identities. Together we mine the gems of inherited values, resilience, passion, meaning, and higher purposes.

We contextualize and illuminate background influences and transmissions.

There’s an art to accessing our source material and expressing these narratives collectively. We do this within a conscious “witness field”, developing mindful awareness via somatic embodiment, transparent listening and resonance with one another, the teller and the witness.

We hold a sacred container for our Ancestral relations to have a safe place to belong, remember, heal and express: we are each the voices and hearts of the Ancient Ones we come from.

What’s evoked, what do we have in common? By resonating with one another, we refine and hone the telling so that these stories become teachings. We turn hard, raw inherited trauma material into insight and nourishment for one another, generating an honorable feast of generational wisdom and blessing-fullness.

All of us have equally important generational stories to tell from our own lineage, that can become food for one another’s healing, expansion of identity and growth.

Collective Storytelling can generate a transformative grace to our narratives, as we consciously unburden our hard lineage stories in a revealing, restorative, collectively illuminating way!

These narratives can be transformational as we cultivate new, more empowering and liberating personal, generational and collective perspectives.

Sacred, ceremonial councils can expand coherence, compassion and wisdom, as the puzzle pieces of our generational lineage come into a greater whole. Puzzle pieces drop in and magic happens when synchronicities and similarities exponentially generate epiphanies!

Through a facilitated process, we can ground, sustain and repair our Ancestral Energy Field. We mindfully access and develop explicit and implicit (invisible, sensed, epigenetic) stories.

We do this by co-creating a witness-field, a resonant awareness, a collaboration that can help us heal fragmentation and expand wholeness.

Turning inherited trauma into collective healing via the power of storytelling, we gain post-traumatic learning, wisdom and access to ancestral blessings, where we may become softened, strengthened, enlightened and fulfilled.

Universal archetypes are unearthed for shifts in perspective and a more expanded narrative that we can apply to our lives.

We honor our deep autonomic nervous system ancestral strategies: how our ancestors and us adapt, survive and thrive.

We expand awareness and become more dimensional, re-imagining our histories with more colorful, varied, diverse meta-field awareness.

Remembrance is becoming more whole, making sense of our archival, somatic, contextual backgrounds. In doing so, we sort out loyalty and legacy patterns, obligations and responsibilities, hidden and otherwise, that we’ve carried, to determine what we want to carry forward, and how.

Via experiencing lineage love and grief, suffering and courage, darkness and light, heaviness and lightness, we can differentiate and liberate our true selves, honoring past, present and future.

We become more available to the tremendous resources, gems and treasures within our ancestral legacies!

Learn more about Michael.

YOU ARE WELCOME TO JOIN US!! 

Click the button below to view our upcoming Ancestral Storytelling Council live events.