Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone – Find Healing & Resilience in Ancestral Wisdom

What is the soul? What am I here for? In this opening session, you’ll begin to develop an understanding of the soul and how its evolution leads you to become the person you were born to be — with the sacred purpose you’re here to fulfill. Tirzah will engage you in discussion and illustrate how the guidance you receive from your unconscious keeps you on your path.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• What intergenerational healing has to do with your soul’s journey
• Why ancestral healing is so critical now to your wellbeing and the health of the planet
• How dreams, physical symptoms, and other messages from inside and around you help keep you on the path of your sacred purpose
• Henri Corbin’s imaginal realm — a bridge to the unconscious — which you can use to access guidance
• The practice of “Active Imagination”

Why is family so important? Who is my real family and where do I belong? In this second class, you’ll explore what it means to be part of a “soul chain” — a pod of souls who’ve intentionally decided to be here at this time and place to effect particular changes and innovations in the collective consciousness of the planet.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• How your soul is implanted in a particular family with its own particular resources and ruptures
• What sacred purpose your soul family is here to help you fulfill
• Your bloodlines, which are often but not always the family you grew up with
• How to unpack both genetic and epigenetic patterns within your family… so you can harvest their riches and transform their traumas
• A guided meditation to connect you with your soul chain and your wise and well ancestor and spirit guides

What resources can you draw on, both genetically and spiritually? In this class session, you’ll begin to build your intergenerational family maps, or Genograms, to reveal the multigenerational family patterns — medical, behavioral, psycho-emotional, and relational — including both the ruptures and riches that influence you and your children. This is an intensive project that continues throughout the remainder of the course.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• A guided Active Imagination process to meet a well and wise ancestor and access their spiritual guidance
• How your ancestors can energize you in your spiritual work around your family legacies
• The historical traumas in your past and your lineage that beg to be healed

What are the personal and cultural traumas you’ve experienced or inherited? How do you identify trauma in yourself and in others? In this class session, Tirzah will guide you to redefine trauma, as she offers a neuroscientific approach to studying the four hallmarks of trauma and how they influence both individuals and entire ethnicities. Although the four hallmarks of trauma are life-saving mechanisms, if they aren’t monitored, they can become the very systems that lock trauma into place.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• Remarkable stories of trauma transmission and how trauma not only “lands” in subsequent generations, it can also be healed by them
• The process of referring to your family maps and journaling about the trauma hallmarks
• Heartmath tools for self-regulation, as well as affirmations for the cultivation of self-compassion

How do the hallmarks of trauma show up for women? Can the historical traumas engendered by centuries of patriarchal domination be healed? In this class, you’ll conclude your study of trauma’s hallmarks with a powerful discussion around shame. You’ll learn about the tendency to unconsciously recreate past conditions that ensure injury — leading to trauma cycles that are hard to break.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• The neuroscience of self-awareness, self-witnessing, and mindfulness — and how it supports the healing of these unconscious patterns
• The healing power of being witnessed and seen through eyes of compassion
• A Heartmath quick coherence technique
• The Hawaiian waterfall cleansing breath practice

Is it possible to transform the effects of personal and historical trauma? To survive life’s heavy blows with more wisdom and a sense of inner freedom? In this class session, Tirzah will share her research from around the world… stories of heroic people who defied normative trauma responses such as hate, vengeance, or being paralyzed by fear. The common themes that arose from these stories are distilled in seven healing principles.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• What the 7 principles are so you can journal about them and discuss them with the group
• Key elements that demonstrate how you can survive extreme trauma and be changed in radically positive ways
• Seven directives for staying morally grounded in this unpredictable world

In this final class, you’ll examine the family resources and trauma legacies you inherited… as well as the tools, practices, and inspiration to metabolize your legacy. In a final meditation, you’ll be guided to call in your ancestral allies to help you see your future, further developed, whole, and healed self — to help you project what it might feel like to have metabolized personal and societal injuries and converted them into wisdom you can use to serve the world.

In this module, you’ll:

• Review how the tools and teachings from this course will help you on your soul’s journey
• Be guided in a final meditation to enlist the help of your well and wise ancestors
• Participate in journaling exercises and a final closing prayer

Terry Real interviews Tirzah Firestone on the topic of multigenerational trauma, both at the individual and collective level. Tirzah explains how we receive the transmission through different mechanisms, including through our dreams and nightmares, as well as through our experiences. Through a series of stories and recollections, Tirzah discusses her journey of healing and how it’s informed her work.

Terry Real is an internationally recognized family therapist, speaker, and author. Terry founded the Relational Life Institute (RLI), offering workshops for couples, individuals, and parents around the country, along with a professional training program for clinicians wanting to learn his RLT (Relational Life Therapy) methodology. A family therapist and teacher for more than 25 years, Terry is the bestselling author of I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, the straight-talking How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women, and, most recently, The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Make Love Work. Terry specializes in leading couples on a step-by-step journey to greater intimacy — and greater personal fulfillment.

Join Tirzah as she details how our family legacies can give us the strength to heal the world. When we do our personal work — creating an inner revolution — we are better equipped for the outer transformation so desperately needed in our world today. The inner work begins with a deep dive into our families’ legacies — their riches and resources, tangles and traumas — because these intertwine within us to form the patterns of who we are and who we are becoming.

During this helpful session, you’ll discover:

• How to identify the patterns of trauma and richness that have been laid down by earlier family members and ancestors — and how to understand their effects upon your own life
• Ways you can make contact with well, benevolent, and helpful allies and ancestors to open new pathways for increasing creativity, health, and spiritual evolution
• The ways you can find keys to open doors to set you free from unconscious compulsions caused by earlier traumas, sexual assaults, injustices, or family separations

How do we approach the global phenomenon unfolding in our midst with a spiritual orientation, one that is infused with the wisdom of the the Divine Feminine? Mirabai and Tirzah, dear friends and sisters on the Path, will converse about COVID-19 as a message-bearer for us all and share personal stories about plumbing ancestral and feminine wisdom across the traditions to illuminate this dark time.

Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author of creative nonfiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature. She taught Philosophy and World Religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos for 20 years and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practice and interspiritual dialogue. A certified bereavement counselor, Mirabai helps mourners harness the transformational power of loss. Her latest book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, was named one of the “Best Books of 2019” by Spirituality & Practice. Mirabai is also on the 2020 Watkins List of the “100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People of the World.” She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico.