Tirzah Firestone – Wounds Into Wisdom

How can you become better aligned with your soul’s sacred purpose?

In this opening session, Tirzah will set the foundation for your journey together. She’ll open with a welcome to your new global community, an invocation, and an overview of the course.

She’ll share the many reasons why ancestral healing is so critical now — to your own wellbeing and the planet’s.

And she’ll guide you to begin thinking through powerful inquiries — including how your soul’s journey corresponds to the unfolding global events, how your family’s unhealed legacies are obscuring your path (and what you can do about it), and much more.

In this session, you’ll explore:

• A brief reading from Tirzah’s Wounds Into Wisdom book, setting the stage for the alchemical work of transforming your dark and dense legacies into compassion, strength, and healing
• A review of Plato’s parable of the acorn and the oak tree — and why it’s foundational to both the Kabbalah and C.G. Jung’s axiom that “the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are”
• What you’ll need to know to enter the imaginal realm as a bridge to the unconscious — and how it can help you access guidance and interact with well and wise ancestors and spiritual allies
• Powerful tools for self-regulation and self-compassion — including 4 affirmations, the Butterfly Hug, and the Hawaiian Waterfall
• Creating your own sacred space to deepen your spiritual work, begin life mapping, and calling in your ancestral allies
• A guided meditation, What Our Souls Know, to help you understand your choice to enter the world at this time and through your particular bloodlines with all their unique challenges and resources

What are the residues that trauma leaves behind, and how do they get passed on to new generations — affecting entire ethnicities and collective society?

You’ll explore how to wake up to these unconscious influences and find freedom, compassion, and healing power for yourself and the world.

Tirzah will guide you to think through your trauma history as a continuance of ancestral patterns… and show you how you can stop what she calls the trauma train.

We all came into this world to help effect changes and innovations in the collective consciousness of the planet. As you’ll discover, knowledge is power — and bringing unconscious patterns into the light of awareness and compassion can liberate your life.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• Hallmarks of individual and collective trauma — with an eye to your own bloodlines and the larger societal patterns at work in the world (for example, racism, colonization, patriarchal oppression of women and the feminine principle)
• Ways to delve into your genograms (intergenerational family maps) to study their ruptures — and uncover resources, positive allies, and encouragement for your situation today
• How to explore exactly what your family lived through — for instance, were they colonizers or colonized, upwardly mobile or just surviving?
• Ways to outline your personal issues — mental loops, compulsive behaviors, relationship issues, and more — and view them in the context of ancestral (genetic/epigenetic) legacies
• A practice to invoke and connect with your wise and well ancestral guides in your sacred ritual space — and tools to help you sit in their presence and open to their guidance
• A guided meditation, We Meet Again, to open channels to members of your soul-pod and deepen rapport with your wise, well ancestral and spirit guides to hear their guidance and receive their protection

How do your personal anxieties, fears, and life issues have roots in your family’s history?

In this module, you’ll explore Jung’s concept of the shadow — the unacceptable, repressed, or unwelcome aspects of our lives.

You’ll also deepen your exploration of the intergenerational shadow with a paradoxical approach called Chöd — the 11th century Tibetan Buddhist practice of Feeding Your Demon — applied to our ancestral legacies, pathologies, and complexes.

Tirzah will ask you to bring one particular life issue you’re working on to class with you — perhaps it’s addiction, OCD, sexual abuse/patriarchal domination, depression, etc…

Whatever the details of your struggle, Tirzah will create a caring, safe space for this practice.

She’ll then guide you to create a personification of your life issue. You’ll enter active imagination to walk the “creature” back into your lineages as you discover more about its gravitational pulls. In this powerful session, you’ll discover:

• The true meaning of “the shadow” — and how you can uncover the shadow of your family and lineage
• Why bringing your “demons,” the unacceptable, repressed, unwelcome aspects of your life, into the light of awareness reduces their destructive power — and releases the enormous life energy stored within them
• A practice to locate the core issue/demon as a sensation that lives in your physical body — and how to invite a picture (an image, form, being, or creature) from the unconscious as an embodiment of this sensation and feeling
• How to face your two bloodlines
• The power of your family’s gravitational pull

In this practicum, you’ll create a sacred space to deepen the healing ritual of the ancient Tibetan Chöd Practice.

Within the loving, safe space Tirzah creates for you, you’ll face your ancestral demon, invoking its personification once again and communicating with it to discover what it wants and needs from you.

Then you’ll learn how to feed it the nectar of your essence, allowing it to magically transform its shape and become your protector and ally.

Did you know that your biggest enemies hold untapped sources of support and protection?

You’ll continue with the transformational process of alchemizing your ancestral demon, gaining further access to its deep reservoir of life force — and listening for its commitments to you as it becomes your ally and assistant.

Together, you’ll work to free up blocked energy and health, receiving renewed power as you realize personal and family goals.

As you’ll discover, the demon will continue resolving itself through satiation.

In this module, you’ll:

• Meet the demon in its newly personified form
• Discover how the demon’s transformed energy can become a positive and protective presence in your life
• Learn ways to gain access, protection, and help for yourself and your family from your ally, the former demon
• Find out how your personal transformation might impact your lineage
• Begin to ask yourself how far back your connection to your ally might go, and describe the energy around it — perhaps it’s fear, malice, ignorance, obedience, etc.
• Clarify and reset your life goals

What do your ancestors know about shame and honor? And how can you step beyond their history into your full radiant dignity?

You’ll examine your own history of shame and honor — and receive sanction and blessing from your ancestors and allies.

Tirzah will guide you to stand in your own dignity to become an agent of change and blessing for the world.

In this module, you’ll explore:

• Why the shame that often accompanies trauma is also an attractor for further shame and trauma, creating an ongoing cycle of trouble
• How traits like dignity and honor are also attractors for similar, admirable traits — and how they accrue positive potent power as we give honor to others
• How the ancient mystical term for honor, Kavod, is connected to the dark feminine — and what she may be telling you now in the form of COVID-19
• Three large cultural themes that play on our world’s current social and environmental crises: patriarchy, colonization, and racism
• How the demons of our times result in the large-scale robbing of honor/dignity of entire populations
• How to work through the cultural Chöd process step-by-step as Tirzah models how to transform the cultural demons of greed and power

In this practicum, you’ll once again create a sacred ritual space.

You’ll begin with several practices to strengthen your grounding to the Earth while opening up energetic portals to a larger version of yourself that’s strengthened by honor for your essential being.

Tirzah will guide you in the practice of extending Kavod (honor and dignity), first to your bloodlines, then to your compatriots, and then to troublesome characters in your life.

You’ll then begin to receive the Kabbalistic practice of becoming an Agent of Blessing, Ba’al HaBracha. This begins with learning to open your central channel, called the Middle Pillar in Kabbalah, to receive divine blessing into your own being. With an open fluid channel, you’ll allow the overflow of this energy, transmitting this power to three beings.

You’ll watch the effects of this powerful transmission, before safely coming back from expanded awareness to your here-and-now self — grounded and ready to take this practice into the world.

You’ll ask yourself, How can I become an agent of change and transformation in the world?

In this pivotal session, you’ll discover how to take all you’ve been learning and stand in your family and in the world as an agent of true change and transformation.

As Tirzah will show you, you can enrich your life and rise to your own greatness by tapping into the spiritual resources and resilience of the great souls who’ve walked this Earth before you.

You’ll turn toward your ancestors to bless and release them from their socially constrained and conditioned contexts… and come to see yourself as much larger and greater than your life’s patterns — because your soul’s light is actually your destiny.

You’ll discover practices to:

• Embody grounding and self-regulation
• Strengthen the open central channel through chi kung (aka qigong) and tai chi movements — or you can simply visualize strengthening your central channel — and cultivate the energy body to become a channel for blessing
• Step back into your genogram to find family blessings like resiliency, humor, ingenuity, arts, and community-building
• Cultivate courage and moral imagination for these uncertain times we’re facing
• Engage in a guided meditation for self-blessing to release your karmic burdens and open your internal pathways for blessing others
• Face, befriend, and feed the naysayer within who would like to obstruct your larger mission and radiance
• Draw on the work of Viktor Frankl to see your life’s “givens” — and explore why they don’t need to define you, after all

In this closing session, Tirzah will guide you to ask yourself, How can I keep my channels to the unseen worlds open and clear, to keep receiving divine guidance and protection as I go forth?

Ancient myths and legends provide plenty of guidance for this moment in history…

And as you bring your journey to a close, Tirzah will share how rituals and sacred space, which are so essential right now, can provide a bridge to the divine worlds.

In this final module, you’ll explore:

• Ways to help tip the balance in favor of healthy life on Earth
• How to work with 2 Kabbalistic stories: the cosmic myth of the shattered vessels and the teaching of the 36 hidden pious ones (Tzaddikim)
• Why both Kabbalistic tales correspond directly to the current state of our world — and provide direction
• A guided journey to see yourself as a fully flowered Tzaddik, who has the ability to travel back and forth in time to find and replant the kernel of good in your bloodline — the pure heart and intention that became misguided
• How to see through and beyond the outer husks of family patterns and unmetabolized trauma to the light within your ancestral lineage