FREE TEACHING AND RITUAL GUIDANCE
Walking with the Ancestors
Remembering Yourself as a Descendant
A Free Live Gathering with Ro Marlen
Friday, October 16th, 2026 • 75 minutes • Online
12 pm ET/ 10 pm MT/ 9 am PT/ 18:00 Berlin
The Season’s Invitation
The Dark Is Deepening. Who Stands Behind You?
The Land is drawing inward.
What was green and reaching toward the sun only weeks ago is returning to the ground. Leaves fall. Sap sinks. Seeds disappear into the dark. The outward work of the year is coming to an end, and another kind of work begins.
We feel this turning too.
This is the time of year when what has been moving at the edges can come closer: grief we haven't had time for, memories without an obvious source, dreams that stay with us after waking, the longing to go quiet and listen.
It is also the season of the ancestors.
For generations, people have tended their relationship with the dead at this time of year. They brought food, lit fires and candles, tended graves, told stories, and remembered themselves as part of a long line of people reaching back beyond memory.
Modern life gives us very few places to experience ourselves this way.
We are taught to stand on our own, and so we approach our bodies, our healing, our work and even our spiritual lives as things we should be able to manage ourselves. Eventually, it can begin to feel as though everything depends on our own capacity to hold it.
But you did not begin with you.
You are a descendant.
And somewhere in the long line behind you are wise and well Ancestral Elders who belong to your people.
This gathering is an opportunity to turn toward them.
We will begin by remembering what it feels like to have a lineage at all, and to feel yourself standing within it.
There are some things we were never meant to hold alone
You may already know a great deal about yourself.
You understand your patterns and you've learned to listen to your body. You may have years of therapy, spiritual practice, somatic work, study or training behind you. Perhaps you're already the person others come to when something in their life doesn't make sense.
And still, there are moments when you think:
I should be past this.
You're tired in ways that rest doesn't always touch. Your capacity isn't as reliable as it used to be. You have practices that help you come back to yourself, yet lately, staying there takes more effort.
We have been given an extraordinarily individual understanding of healing.
Our ancestors lived inside a much larger field of relationship.
They knew who they were in relationship to their people and the places where they lived. The dead remained part of that web of belonging, and the generations behind them helped give them a sense of where they stood.
When those relationships are missing, we lack some of the Ground that tells us where we stand.
This is one of the places ancestral relationship begins.
What we’ll explore together
In This Free 75-Minute Gathering, we’ll explore what this ancestral season is asking of us and bring the teaching into the body through a simple ritual practice, so you can begin to experience what it means to belong to a lineage.
The ancestral season — and why we turn toward the dead now
We’ll explore this point in the seasonal descent, the old relationship between this time of year and the dead, and what the Land can teach us about turning toward what usually remains unseen.
What it means to be a descendant
Ancestry is often reduced to genealogy, genetics, family stories and inherited wounds. We’ll widen that view and explore what happens when you begin to experience lineage as part of the Ground you stand on.
Who are your wise and well Ancestral Elders?
Not everyone who dies becomes wise. I’ll introduce you to the distinction between the dead of our family and the wise elders farther back in our lineages who are able to stand with and support the living.
Discernment in ancestral relationship
How do you know when something is your imagination, your own inner material, or genuine contact? We’ll talk about approaching spiritual experience without abandoning skepticism, common sense, or what your body knows.
A simple practice of ancestral belonging
I’ll guide you into an embodied experience of yourself as a descendant. There is nothing you need to see, hear or make happen. We begin with body, Land and the long line behind you.
The Wound the Season Is Calling
Some of us have spent much of our lives trying to find where we belong.
We became capable. We learned how to read a room, anticipate what was needed and hold things together. We became the person others trust with what is difficult to say.
Somewhere along the way, belonging became tangled up with being useful.
So we keep becoming better at holding.
So when we begin to feel depleted or unsteady, we assume we need better boundaries or more self-awareness. We learn new ways to regulate our nervous system and pay closer attention to where we might be overriding ourselves. We examine our patterns, adjust our routines, and add another practice meant to help us come back to center.
Some of these things help. And still, we can find ourselves returning to the same question:
What is holding me?
This season turns us toward the long line behind us.
Toward people whose names we may never know, and toward the possibility that among them are wise elders who recognize us simply because we are theirs.
Sometimes finding our place begins by remembering that we come from somewhere.
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Your Guide
I'm Ro Marlen — threshold walker, wisdom teacher, keeper of the European Wise Woman tradition.
I’ve spent thirty years helping people find healing, stability, and vitality, much of it learned through direct experience: working with my own Ancestral Elders, the spirits of the Land, the seasons and cycles, and one-on-one with thousands of clients while paying close attention to what actually helped.
Along the way, I’ve studied with respected curanderos, wisdom keepers, scholars, and teachers. What I bring to this work has been shaped just as deeply by decades of practice and lived relationship.
I have spent much of my life learning how to discern what is actually present when working with the unseen, and how to stay grounded while doing it. For decades, I’ve also accompanied people through experiences that can be difficult to understand when the frameworks our culture gives us have no place for them.