My medicine art project has come into being interwoven with a long-term project of connection and healing with my ancestors and with my living family. My Family Project birthed out of my frustration with what I saw as the limits, at least for me, of personal healing work. Well into the Covid-19 Pandemic, I was able to see that despite decades of meditation and work in holistic healing, I was still mired in suffering, both physical and emotional. It was obvious to me that my own patterns of dysfunction were also family patterns. I felt that perhaps we needed to heal these in a more collective sense.

While I have a few living family members who have gotten close to the project, I have mostly worked on this collective healing with my ancestors. This has meant first learning about them, listening to them, building relationships with them. Connection, attention (especially various ways of listening) and care have brought revelations and ongoing healing as surprising as it is delightful. It has also given me a sense of a broad and deep foundation of love and support, energetically. I feel this foundation is the natural gift that family and ancestors can provide, and which we can choose to attend to and, where necessary, rebuild.

I would like to acknowledge my father’s father’s parents, Philip David Foran and Mame McGowan Foran, for their dedication to the healing of our family and to The Family Project. With them I acknowledge so many dedicated ancestors, including David’s parents, Michael and Elizabeth White Foran, and Mame’s parents, John Joseph McGowan and Catherine Brown McGowan. They sustain me with their love and care. I’m hugely grateful to feel connection with them.