This foundational module will introduce concepts and practices you can use to connect and write with your ancestors.

You’ll explore your bloodlines, milklines (teachers and mentors who may or may not be members of your bloodlines), and the Ancients (magical ancestors) — expanding your collective understanding of who your ancestors are and learning how you can deepen your relationship with them.

You’ll employ practical and mystical tools to open to the magical identities and stories that long to pour through you.

During this session, you’ll:

• Build a writing altar to ignite the spirit of your writing
• Expand and deepen your idea of who your ancestors are — like the roots of a tree — and open to their magical identities
• Develop an archetypal relationship with your ancestors
• Reclaim power for yourself and your family through ancestral retrieval
• Experience a Writing Spirit of Story meditation — an ancestral spell that can open storylines
• Develop the long arc of your story

Many of us have patriarchal wounding and colonizing stories woven throughout our bloodlines.

These stories can harden into shame and unhelpful assumptions about ourselves and our bodies — which can hold us back from being able to access our authentic magic and deep pleasure. (In this course, we conceptualize pleasure in an expansive way that includes but is also beyond sex and sexuality.)

You’ll open portals to pleasure through the power of ritual and your relationship with the dead. You’ll also unpack what it means to “pay a price” for the denial of pleasure through the unconscious deals that have been made within your bloodlines — especially in the matriarchal line.

Finally, you’ll explore what it looks like to open doorways to pleasure in surprising new ways by resisting the demands of the patriarchy.

In this session, you’ll:

• Create your Writer’s Black Book — a magical manifestation tool akin to a Witch’s Black Book
• Open to a more expansive understanding of pleasure
• Identify patriarchal wounding and unconscious deals from your bloodlines
• Experiment with intentionally opening to pleasure through ritual, resistance, and your relationships with the dead
• Practice Portal Writing to access the wisdom of your body

On the other side of our shame is our magic, which is synonymous with power. In this module, you’ll unmask shame by sourcing the ancestral and cultural origins of your unhelpful shame-filled blocks and the beliefs behind them.

You’ll use writing exercises to explore how you may have been silenced through both cultural and familial systems and how you may be unknowingly or knowingly perpetuating patterns of silence and shame in your life.

Experientially, you’ll tune into your uncolonized ancestral wildness — rather than being consciously or unconsciously driven by shame.

As you connect with the Ancients — your magical ancestors who can help you return to your Wild Mind (a concept illuminated by Natalie Goldberg in her bookWild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life ) — you’ll call back your power in writing, speaking, and being.

In this session, you’ll:

• Develop insight into the sources of shame inherited by ancestry and culture
• Un-silence and un-shame yourself through working with the Ancients
• Connect with your uncolonized ancestral wildness
• Call back your magic, which is synonymous with calling back your power

All children naturally possess magical, psychic, and intuitive gifts. In this session, you’ll focus on working with your inner magical child as a type of inner ancestor — who existed before shame and trauma took hold.

By tracing the shame-knots in your personal and ancestral histories, you’ll discern the messages your inner child received to suppress or marginalize their psychic and intuitive gifts.

You’ll examine the relationship of your inner magical child to trauma and how the grip of trauma can be loosened through exploration, play, and creation. Finally, you’ll create a playful land ritual to call back your inner magical child and express them in your writing.

In this session, you’ll:

• Learn how your inner magical child functions as a living inner ancestor
• Describe the relationship of your inner magical child to trauma and shame, as well as to magic and intuitive/psychic awareness
• Practice connecting with and reclaiming your inner magical child through writing, play, and ritual
• Design a land ritual to call back your inner magical child and reclaim your magical identity

What do you want your legacy to be? How can you reimagine wealth in terms of your community and what you envision for the world at large?

In this module, Tanya will guide you in an exploration of the relationship between your ancestors and wealth and help you re-story wealth in terms of late-stage capitalism.

You’ll expand your understanding of what wealth is and what it means to be wealthy. For example, wealth can consist of your ancestral relationship to the land, to abundance, or to radical generosity that includes the broader community and resource-sharing.

Through experiential writing exercises, you’ll explore your ancestral relationship to wealth and community. How did these get split in your ancestral lines? When did wealth become equated only with money versus resources, relationships, and flow?

You’ll examine what it means to allow money to be a part of your expanded conception of wealth — rather than the sole defining factor — and how ancestral work can bring you into a fulfilling relationship with wealth that aligns with your values and your vision for yourself.

In this session, you’ll:

• Develop an expansive conception of wealth that goes far beyond money
• Trace the knots of scarcity, greed, and poverty within your family and the culture at large
• Describe the connection between your ancestral relationship to wealth and scarcity
• Re-story the word wealth to address where there’s been exploitation in your family lines
• Rewrite your money/resources story to one that aligns with your values and vision now

Often, we look outside of ourselves for answers without realizing that we have the greatest power of all within — our stories — which have the ability to cast new spells and influence change for the past and the future.

You’ll experiment with what it means to become a Future Great Ancestor and investigate how your purpose can lead you to an embodied ancestral identity — opening portals to the past, present, and future.

Through your writing, you’ll resource your ancestral lines — shifting family stories of pain or shame. You’ll tune into not only your personal purpose, but also your ancestral purpose — which can reveal surprising possibilities for your descendants, your bloodline, and beyond…

… and foster a deeper sense of focus and connection to your ancestral elderhood and your Soul Why.

As you delve into this work, you’ll listen to the perspective of your future descendants, born and unborn, learning what they need from you now — which will allow you to embody your Future Great Ancestor self and align with an expansive view of your purpose.

In this session, you’ll:

• Connect to your Future Great Ancestor self
• Examine your purpose as an embodied ancestral identity
• Discover how ancestral purpose can reveal your Soul Why
• Learn how to listen to your descendants, born and unborn, through Somatic Writing

This final session will be devoted to integrating what you’ve learned and practiced over the last six weeks. You’ll return to the Black Book practice we began at the beginning of the course — observing what has been manifested and released over time.

There will be space for you to share how your relationship to your magical identity has expanded. What have you discovered about your ancestral narratives? Where is there a new sense of aliveness?

Through your writing, you’ll continue to focus on breaking the spell of the systems of oppression within your family lines.

You’ll explore how to find your place within the long arc and long story as it relates to humanity’s collective ancestor, Mother Earth… and discuss action steps and ongoing practices to continue nourishing your ancestral connections.

In this session, you’ll:

• Further develop your Black Book practice as an ongoing magical and accountability tool
• Gain a deeper understanding of your magical identity
• Understand how to locate yourself within the long arc of humanity’s story
• Nurture your relationship with Mother Earth as humanity’s collective ancestor

Ancestral Magic: Companion Journal
EWorkbook From Tanya Taylor Rubinstein

This 50-page eWorkbook contains writing prompts that will lead you into deeper discoveries around the concepts of worth, wealth, and pleasure. These illuminating prompts will guide you to establish deep ancestral relationships that will nourish you and provide soul-empowering resources for your writing journey.