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 / 10am MT / 9 am PT / 18:00 Berlin
The Season’s Invitation
The Dark Is Deepening. Who Stands Behind You?
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 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.
What we’ll explore together
In this free 75-minute gathering, we’ll explore what this ancestral season is asking of us, what it means to belong to a lineage, and how we can begin tending our relationship with the ancestors through simple practices of remembrance and reciprocity.
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.
Relationship and reciprocity
Ancestral relationship is more than receiving guidance or support from those who came before us. We’ll explore the role of attention, tending and reciprocity, and what it means to approach lineage as a living relationship rather than something we simply inherit.
Tending grief in ancestral season
This season can bring grief closer to the surface, whether we are grieving someone we have lost, something in our family or lineage, or something harder to name. We’ll explore how to give grief a little room when it is present, and how to meet it with tenderness without trying to turn it too quickly into meaning or gratitude.
Join the free gathering
Your inbox is sacred, we’ll treat it that way.
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.
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.
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.