Episode #43

Episode #43: Torie Feldman Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Laura Dawn: I am so excited for you to tune into this really powerful conversation with ancestral healing guide, Torie Feldman.

Song: As I dance on the spiral, through the passage of these rights, with the wisdom of the cycle and the mother-blood that gives me life and waking of her daughters and the burying of these bones, to the birthing waters where I find myself reborn, I honor my lineage, lineage, as I honor my lineage, lineage.

Torie Feldman: Hello.

Laura Dawn: Hi, gorgeous.

Torie Feldman: I love it. Oh, I’m so excited, thank you so much for having me.

Laura Dawn: Oh my goodness girl, it is my absolute pleasure. I am so excited for this conversation and just so grateful to have this time with you and to be able to learn more about you and your story, and I was thinking that’s exactly where I’d love to start. I’d love to know how you got to where you’re at today and how did your ancestral healing journey begin.

Torie Feldman: So, I grew up Jewish and growing up as a white woman in Los Angeles, growing up Jewish, I actually wasn’t introduced to any of the spirituality, any of the deep ancestral spiritual traditions. I was just told, this is the tradition, and we do this because we do this and you get Bat Mitzvahed to make your parents and your grandparents proud. And so, I grew up feeling very disconnected and I didn’t even know what I was disconnected from; I didn’t grow up with any spiritual mentors, my parents weren’t spiritual at all, and so that caused me to go on a journey of finding something that filled that sense of mystical longing that I always felt inside of me that I didn’t have words for.

And through my travels, I was really blessed to have parents who loved to travel, we would go to beautiful places all over the world and I always felt since I was really young, a deep calling to go to the ruins and to connect with the ancient cultures and all of the traditions. And whenever we had a tour guide, I would obsessively ask as many questions as I possibly could, specifically about death and the afterlife and what life was like in ancient times.

And through that journey, I became really, really obsessed with looking at indigenous ways of being indigenous cultures and the wisdom that they carried, and so when I went to college, I studied cultural anthropology and I specified my studies on indigenous rights, indigenous wisdom and cultural revitalization. And after graduating, I went and I worked and volunteered on a reservation, the Tohono O’odham Reservation, and after a year there working with elders and youth, our goal was to pass on the language and the culture to the next generations.

I realized that as a white woman, who was very deeply disconnected from my own ancestors, I felt this deep, deep, deep, deep passion for the elders to pass on their wisdom and their knowledge, but it was actually coming from a deep wound within myself. I realized that I was so passionate about this happening for this culture that hadn’t yet been lost or forgotten that I decided to go and look at my own wound of separation from my ancestors and to find the stories in my lineage and as a Jewish woman to do the intergenerational ancestral healing that my ancestors have been through. And that guided me on a whole other deep journey, but that was just the beginning.

Laura Dawn: Yeah, do you want to unpack, what was the whole other journey, let’s get into it?

Torie Feldman: Yeah. So, I, after living and working around this reservation, felt the deep call to go to Peru, I had two friends who invited me and within a week of them inviting me, I flew down, and when I flew down to Peru, I had no idea what was going to happen. I felt like I was about to die, I had all of this fear about getting on the plane and going there, and I’d flown so many times in my life, it was just this deep mystery like I was being hurled into the void, I had no idea what was happening.

I had just shaved half of my head, I was kind of going through an identity crisis, and when I landed in Peru, I ended up staying there for three months in Peru and Bolivia and worked with shamans and with the medicine there, and I remember in one of my journeys, all I could do was lay back, I couldn’t even sit up, and my intention for that ceremony was, show me who I am. I really want to know who I am, and what the medicine showed me, was everything that I’m not, I came face-to-face with all of the times in my life that I had been inauthentic with myself, all of the times that I had been wearing a mask, all of the times that I was putting on a front of who I thought that I should be or who I thought that I was, that wasn’t really deeply authentic to me.

And so, after a deep journey in the jungle, I decided to visit my ancestral homelands to learn who I was, now that I saw who I wasn’t; and through my experiences, I went to Prague and I also went to Israel, these are two places that my ancestors are from. I had a full-body ancestral awakening, specifically in Israel, and I had this moment where I saw The Kotel, the Western Wall, or the Whaling Wall from the temple of Jerusalem and every single cell in my body started resonating with this sense of I’m home, and this is what my ancestors have been praying for, for me, for their descendant to return to this land after so long not being there.

No one in my memory or in conscious memory in my lineage has been to Israel in at least the last five or six generations, and maybe even longer, it may have been hundreds of years, who knows. And so, for me to be there, every cell in my body felt this awakening, and I felt this sense of the part of me that was so deeply wanting to find belonging in indigenous cultures or in all of these other spiritual lineages, finally, finally, finally felt this sense of full-body belonging that was beyond what my mind could understand being there on the lands of my ancestors.

And so, that was one of my deepest ancestral healing moments and was a part of the birth of sacred ancestry coming into being, so that I can help other people feel that sense of connection, even if they’re not on their ancestral homelands.

Laura Dawn: That is such a beautiful story, thank you so much for sharing that. I recently heard you say that our relationship with our ancestors affects every aspect of our lives, and I was like, whoa, that’s a big statement; from your perspective, can we unpack that a little bit? I’m like, wow, is that true?

Torie Feldman: Yeah, thank you. So, it’s wild to think about because our ancestors are literally the reason that we’re here physically, in our bodies, on this planet, during this time, in the lineage that we’re in, in the time that we’re in, in this reality that we’re in. And so, if we are in any way feeling disconnected from our ancestors or even ashamed towards our ancestors or resistant towards our ancestors, we’re in some way not embracing the depth of this lifetime fully, and we’re not embracing the journey of embodiment fully. If our ancestors gave us our body and we’re pushing away our ancestors on some level energetically or subtly, or even within our consciousness, we aren’t going to be able to fully embody our soul into our body.

And I believe that a part of the ancestral healing journey is feeling safe in our bodies because the stories of our ancestors live in every cell of our bodies, this is proven by the scientific study of epigenetics, and of course, so many different indigenous cultures all around the world have talked about how we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, it’s just a fact. And so, if we don’t feel safe in our bodies and in our nervous systems, a part of that is a sense of not feeling safe within our lineage, not feeling safe on the shoulders that we’re standing on, not feeling safe with the trauma or the gifts that are stored in every single cell of our body that sometimes are running unconsciously and sometimes have this energy that we haven’t quite claimed; a lot of them are spiritual gifts that we haven’t claimed.

And so, as we heal our relationship to our ancestors, it allows for our soul to feel safe to come into our body, to fully inhabit our body, and when we do that, it allows for our souls’ gifts to embody fully on this planet and to be used so that we can be vessels for healing the world, for healing ourselves, and for healing our lineages and bringing our deep spiritual soul wisdom from other lifetimes, even beyond our actual ancestral blood lineage. We can bring all of that wisdom of our soul and of our spirit into this body, into this life, and use it as a force for healing our lineages and ourselves and the earth.

And so, that’s just the spiritual perspective, the embodiment perspective, and then there’s also all of the other layers, such as our relationships because so many of our relationship patterns in love and in friendship and in community and with the sisterhood wound and with all of these other patterns are inherited from our ancestors. And so, oftentimes the stories, the patterns of our ancestors, whether we’re consciously aware of them or not, even if you don’t know anything about your ancestors, even if you don’t know the stories of your ancestors, those stories are running on repeat within our energetic systems, within our nervous systems within our bodies.

And so, when we do that deep ancestral healing work to clear those pathways to release those patterns, it re-patterns all of our relationships in our life, and of course, this applies to everything, it applies to our health, it applies to our relationship with money and career and life purpose, and the list goes on and on forever, it’s literally every single part of our lives.

Laura Dawn: That is so profound, and from an intuitive perspective, it makes sense, we literally came out of another human’s body, we were created within another body, which is actually really mind-blowing to even just consider that and that body came out of another body. So, the creation of ourselves was birthed through another body, so, okay, on a very profound level and intuitively that makes sense, and yet, for understanding that we carry unconscious codes and patterns that have been dictating our lives, it’s actually quite a lot to grapple with mentally and emotionally, especially because so much of it has been unconscious.

Even just the fact of, wow, there’s a narrative around like, so much of our imprinting happens in the first seven years of our lives, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to undo those first seven years. And now I’m like, wow, now I have to go back generations and generations, and so where’s the entry point here, and how do we even start to become aware of something that’s in the shadow or in the unconscious?

Torie Feldman: So beautifully said and such a beautiful question. When it comes to, for example, healing the first seven years, as you named, a big part of that is looking at how our childhood wounds and our childhood patterns are actually also ancestral. Because our parents are raising us based on how they were probably raised and the ways that they probably haven’t healed their inner child is what’s going to be reflected in our inner child and what we later need to heal.

So, a part of looking at inner child healing, which goes hand-in-hand with ancestral healing is seeing that what we experienced as children is actually part of a long chain of what our ancestors also experienced as children. And so, a part of the entry point, I think that there are many, part of the entry point is looking at our childhood, looking at the beliefs that we have from our parents, and you can do this by looking at different areas of your life and starting to see the patterns. You can do this also by looking at healing your time in your mother’s womb, and this is a part of the work that I do, actually, in my course, The Honeyed Womb, is our patterns didn’t just start once we opened our eyes and we took our first breath.

A lot of, as you were saying, a lot of the patterns come from when we are in our mother’s womb and understanding that she was also in her mother’s womb and on a cellular level, all of our lives actually began in the womb of our grandmother because when our grandmother has our mother in her womb when she’s pregnant with our mother, our mother has all of the eggs that she will ever have in her lifetime, in her womb.

So, you can imagine the grandmother’s womb and within that is the mother’s womb and within that is the egg that gave birth to you, and so there is this red thread from womb-to-womb, to, womb-to-womb connecting all of the women, especially in our maternal line, especially as women, back, back, back, back, back to hundreds, thousands, even millions of ancestors back to ancient times. And so, a part of the work is looking at what did we inherit while we were in our mother’s womb, and a part of this is looking at if you can ask your mother or your loved ones, what happened while you were in your mother’s womb?

Were there any relationship shifts? Were there any traumas that she experienced? And if so, how many months old were you in the womb and looking at those stories consciously, and then there’s the level of what if you can’t ask those questions and not only to our mother, but what if we don’t have a connection to our elders or our ancestors, or what if we’re adopted, or what if it’s simply toxic to talk to family members? Or what if there are secrets, many grandparents have stories and secrets that they just don’t want to tell because they think that that’s a form of protecting the lineage, they don’t want to tell stories of trauma because they don’t want to pass it on.

But actually, within that, it’s telling the story that then the pattern can begin to be transmuted, then the shame can begin to be released, and then the energy can begin to move. And so, many of us don’t have the opportunity to ask these questions and that’s where the deep inner work and connecting to our ancestors comes in, which for me in my work is the mythic memory method. And so, as I shared, the memories of our ancestors live in every single cell of our bodies, even if we don’t consciously know what happened, our bodies remember, our bodies are these ancient libraries, not only from the past several generations but for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

And so, in my work, what I do is I guide women to go in and we create a safe ceremonial space and to connect with their wise and well-healed ancestors, which all of us have, sometimes you need to travel thousands of years back to find a time before your lineage experienced a core wound or a rupture, but we all have healed wise and well ancestors. So, we create a space to connect in, with the pure heart of our lineage, a time before there was trauma to remember, just like all of us have a crystalline purity to our soul and layers of trauma and conditioning or covering, as the healing happens, we begin to peel away those layers and reveal the purity of our soul, your soul can never be broken, it can never be tarnished, it can never be touched.

Even if it feels broken, that’s actually just layers of trauma around the purity. So, through ancestral healing and connecting in with our healed, wise and well ancestors, we begin to see, oh, my lineage also has a crystalline heart, my lineage cannot be broken or touched or tarnished. My lineage is actually from sacred ancestry, we are divine, we are here from a reason, our ultimate ancestors, our mother, father, God, our source, we come from source.

And so, reclaiming the purity of the heart of your lineage and then meeting an ancestral guide who can take you back to a time that a core wound happened in your lineage, and that’s where we facilitate ancestral healing, that’s where we see the stories of, oh, this is the original wound that happened, and sometimes it’s thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago. But what I’ve seen time after time, is through creating this safe space, through connecting to our healed, wise and well ancestors, these memories just start flooding back for people.

And in my work it’s never necessarily me telling someone, this is what I’m seeing, I’m actually not a channel or a medium in that sense, I don’t apply that gift to the work, I ask questions like, what are you noticing now? What are you feeling in your body? What emotions are arising for you? And just through the codex, the ancestral codex that each of us holds in ourselves, the memories pour through, the tears start flowing, and when we do that work to reclaim those memories and do that ancestral healing at the root, at the core.

Then that healing can ripple through our lineages, through generations and generations and generations until we reach the present moment, and then we allow for it to also flow into future generations and to be offered to the earth. And so, there is a gift in realizing that we actually don’t need to look outside of us, we don’t necessarily need to do the research, although it can help, it can support, it can be supplementary, but each of us is able to go within and find those memories within ourselves to reclaim them for our lineage.

Laura Dawn: Hallelujah.

Torie Feldman: Hallelujah.

Laura Dawn: Okay, random side note. Are you familiar with Tami Simon, Insights at the Edge?

Torie Feldman: Yes.

Laura Dawn: I love her interviewing style; I’m going to channel Tami here for a second. She would be like, Torie, for all the people listening who feel like that is way too radical, and is it possible that we could go through this ceremony with you, and it could just all be made up as a story in the mind? Can I imagine, oh, that thousands of years ago there was someone in my lineage that had this pure core and I’ll imagine it in my mind and I’ll create a narrative around it, and is that just as effective as whether it’s actually being remembered or imagined?

Torie Feldman: Yeah, such a good question. There are several different parts of the answer here, and the first is, if someone’s asking, was that real or was that my imagination? The answer is, yes. Both and. And through the mythic memory method, essentially, it’s looking at how just like in dreams or through visualization when we’re imagining something, our bodies, and our minds, our brain actually doesn’t know the difference of whether we’re imagining it or whether it’s real. And so, in that sense, there’s that layer of whatever you’re seeing, whatever you’re feeling is really changing and shifting something in the brain as well as evoking real emotions in the body.

And sometimes the mind will try to make sense of what the body is feeling, and so it’s really interesting, this is, I think, where the work also can weave in with the past life memories. For example, I’ve had one client, this doesn’t happen that often, but one client who, when I guided her through this process, she doesn’t have Egyptian blood, but her visions were all happening in ancient Egypt. But at the same time, what came through for her was even if you don’t have Egyptian blood, the mind sometimes will take something that feels familiar to you, she may have had past lives in Egypt or maybe she grew up and actually was interested in ancient Egypt as a child.

And so, the same dynamics between her ancestors may just be playing out in this Egyptian kind of setting so that her mind can in some way understand it or envision it when she doesn’t have any point of reference of what her ancestors’ life actually looked like thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, so there’s that level to it. And then at the end of some sessions with clients, what I’ve realized is a lot of them are actually like, wow, there’s this part of my brain that I just want to ask, was that all my imagination, but my body knows that it wasn’t, their experiences are so real.

The tears streaming down their face, parts of their body vibrating or shaking, or pain happens as emotions are moving through and then are released, and then the pain shifts and it’s this huge, huge just release and re-setting, after going through something like that and experiencing the depth of actually meeting a healed ancestor and feeling that you’re doing healing for the land that your ancestors stood on or where there was a slaughter in ancient times. Even if their mind is trying to wonder, was that in my imagination, deep down in their body and in their soul and somatically and on a cellular level, they know that was real, and so sometimes there’s that disconnect with the mind and the body, but ultimately the body is what holds the wisdom.

Laura Dawn: I love that, I love it. And I’ve had this conversation actually with Dennis McKenna around, well, when you’re on a psychedelic journey and you see something or you have this experience, is it real? Or is it a hallucination? And the answer is kind of like, it doesn’t matter, you’re experiencing something, and so in life, you’re also just interpreting data coming in and that still affects your body and the way that you interpret information, so it’s like, if you’re experiencing it, then it’s quote-unquote, real.

And we can’t even really define reality anyway, for as advanced as we are technologically, humans, we don’t have an actual working definition for what reality is or what consciousness is, you know? So, it’s like, well, I guess then we get to play with it and shape it and mold it, and then that shaping actually shapes us.

Torie Feldman: Yeah. And so much of the experience too, when it comes to ancestral healing and also working with psychedelics is learning to trust our intuition again, learning to reclaim that feminine wisdom that lives within all of us, regardless of gender. And looking at the witch wound, which is also a big part of my work is how through the centuries, through millennia, the intuition has been silenced, it’s been trained out of us, and so a part of this work ancestral and working with psychedelics as well is retraining our natural sense of trust in ourselves, our natural sense of inner sovereignty, our inner queendom or kingdom, our inner sense of our inner knowing and authority.

And I feel through shifting our relationship with the intuition, through healing, the witch wound in the ways that that has been silenced or stamped out or burned out of our lineages, what we’re doing is we’re reclaiming so much more than just for ourselves and our relationship to reality, our relationship to how we process information and how we are creating our lives. But it’s also healing for all of our ancestors who weren’t able to trust their intuition, for all of the women who were told that they were too much or too crazy for their emotion, for their feminine wisdom, for their intuition, and for the ways of being that they held in their bodies that were in some way demonized.

So, I feel it’s really big, reclaiming everything that you just shared and that Dennis McKenna shared is just, I am so on board for that, and also the ancestral healing implications are infinite.

Laura Dawn: I want to share with you just a really brief story that I just feel is so pertinent, and I shared it a little bit in season one. I had this really profound medicine journey and this was after years and years and years of working with medicine and noticing a pattern really, really surface in my life and really being like, okay, I cannot deny this pattern keeps playing out anymore. And I was on a journey and I saw an experience being in the womb of basically being given up, and the next day I asked my mother about it, my mother and I are super close my whole life, and this was only a couple of years ago and I asked her about it and she immediately started crying.

I said, tell me what happened while I was in your womb and she just started crying, and then she said that it was a really hard time, she had already had three other kids, I was the fourth. It was a difficult time, I was unexpected and she actually went to the abortion clinic to give me up, and then in the chair, she decided, and she said to me, I gave my three other children a chance at this life, so I knew you had to come through. And I actually experienced the experience of that in the medicine journey, it was on, I have full goosebumps right now, so it was full healing in that journey, and I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to then do a very deep forgiveness practice with my mom, actually.

And we did that live on season one with a Hawaiian elder who teaches ho’oponopono, and we did it live together where we were really offering each other forgiveness. Now, I feel so grateful that I had that opportunity to say, I forgive you for that experience and for her to forgive me too, for actually coming into her life unexpectedly in that way, what about the people, all the people who don’t have that connection, who have these experiences, who feel very disconnected from their lineages to find healing there.

Torie Feldman: Oh my gosh, Laura, thank you so much for sharing that, I’m just going to take a deep breath to receive that because it’s so sacred. Ah, it’s so powerful too, that that’s on your podcast so people can listen to that and experience that through you, I’m sure that in itself is a healing for so many people who aren’t able to experience that directly with a family member. So, I believe that for some of us, it’s actually an act of ancestral healing to hold boundaries and to not speak to a relative who was abusive, and so at first, I want to speak specifically to anyone who isn’t in touch with a parent or a grandparent or someone who they want to heal that wound around that sense of disconnection or betrayal or hurt or pain who isn’t able to speak with them.

And I think that this can also relate to anyone who, for whatever reason, can’t speak to a loved one even if you are in touch with them, we are able, as Laura just shared, to experience deep ancestral healing and to heal a relationship with that person, even without them necessarily knowing about it. And a part of that is through deep forgiveness work, just as you named, a part of that is through feeling all of the emotions and going to the center of the wound and looking at how it’s not just a core wound in your life that started with that parent or that grandparent.

But it’s something that has likely been living in your lineage and been cycling through your lineage for generations and generations and generations and generations and generations and generations, as we shared beyond our conscious memory. And so, through feeling into and identifying what is the core wound, for example, looking at a situation in your life and asking yourself, what is the core of this? Is this a feeling of betrayal? Is this a feeling of abandonment of rejection of unworthiness?

What exactly is it? And really boiling it down and a part of how we do this is by asking the body, by stay