How do we temper the heart(h) fires so we can burn brightly without burning out?

Every archetype has two faces. Through exploration, ritual, and guided meditation, you’ll encounter both the perils and the possibilities of each natural element — fire, water, earth, and air.

In this opening session, you’ll fortify your alchemical vessel and experience grounding practices to prepare for the powerful journey ahead. You’ll  examine the dangers of fire as well as its potency for quantum spiritual healing.

You'll also explore fire in all its forms — the inflammation rising in your body, the frenetic pace of society, and the raging blazes consuming vast swaths of Earth.

Through a guided journey into the imaginal realm, you’ll step into the cool alchemical laboratory, reconnect with perennial wisdom, and restore your link to the eternal, luminous fire within.

In this module, you’ll:

• Practice grounding techniques for helping you safely open and close your psychic centers
• Be guided into the imaginal realm, entering the alchemical chambers to receive instruction on the right use of fire in your life and the wider world
• Work with the fire element in your own nervous system and observe how it behaves across ecosystems
• Gain insight into your inherited ancestral legacies of fire — from its shadow expressions of anger to its luminous force of ardor

How many centuries will it take for humanity to truly mourn — to release grief fully enough to let love flow again?

The only force that can cool the raging flames is the water of the heart.

It would be easy to drown in despair over the cascade of crises that surround us in our world today. Instead, you have the opportunity to turn to the quiet medicine of your tears, the song of the heart, and the sacred technology known to the ancients as mikveh or baptism.

Explore and immerse yourself in the imaginal living waters that cleanse the body and soul, dissolving aged and hardened grief that has manifested as war and armored the ancestral “pain-body.”

Uncover the mystical meaning of peace — expressed through the ancient words Shalom and Salaam — as the perfect equation of fire and water in balance.

For this class session, please bring a bowl of water and a stone, crystal, or shell, along with a photograph of a beloved ancestor.

This week, you’ll:

• Discover the power of grief to heal and prevent violence from taking root
• Be guided in an ancient ritual that transforms energy and helps release your family’s pain-body
• Explore the nature of the pain-body and how it’s carried through generations
• Gain insight into your own family legacies around death, grief, and loss
• Experience a virtually guided mikveh meditation — an imaginal immersion into a body of water
• Learn the mystical secret of peace and how to embody it within your own being

Having immersed yourself in the elements of fire and water — within your body, your bloodline, and the shared global ecosystem — you’ll now be ready to journey into the numinous ancestral realms. Here you’ll begin the core practices of ancestor connection.

Drawing on the archetypal powers you’ve already awakened, you’ll call upon your wise and well ancestral allies to illuminate the legacies that have manifested in your family as shame, anxiety, anger, or fear. From these guides, you’ll seek both a talisman and a blessing — a gift of protection and strength for loosening the grip of wounds passed down through generations.

Rabbi Tirzah will carefully prepare and guide you, ensuring you feel safe, accompanied, and supported as you cross the threshold into these unseen worlds.

In this first ritual practicum, you’ll:

• Learn the foundations of ancestral healing work to ground your journeys into the numinous realms
• Connect with wise and well spiritual allies and relatives in the ancestral realm
• Feel secure and accompanied as you venture into unseen dimensions
• Travel into realms of surprise and vitality as you receive a talisman and blessing, helping you release generational wounds and supporting your healing
• Learn an ancient mantra to guide your journeys into the transcendent realms

Our culture suffers from horror vacui — a fear of empty spaces — driving us to fill every void with noise, possessions, and distraction. How do we reclaim the sacred spaciousness once occupied by emptiness?

By allowing silence to pulsate and turn nothingness into creativity, joy, and direct connection to Spirit.

In this module, you’ll savor the gift of air — a deep, clarifying breath that uplifts both lungs and spirit, like the fresh clarity of skies after a cleansing storm.

Here lies the clarity of your inner knowing — the wisdom of the prophet and priestess, where the Holy Spirit, Ruach HaKodesh, dwells.

You’ll return to the ancestral dimension where loving, wise guides will reveal the vastness of your own clear, unencumbered mind. In that spaciousness, you’ll receive insight into your life, death, and sacred purpose.

In this session, you’ll:

• Explore your ancestral legacies surrounding silence, emptiness, death, and fear of the unknown
• Be guided into the ancestral realms to encounter your own clear and “decolonized” mind
• Learn how chant and silence open the way to Ruach HaKodesh — the Holy Spirit — offering wisdom, prophecy, and guidance
• Work with an ancient breath practice that clears and balances both hemispheres of your brain
• Contrast horror vacui — the fear of emptiness — with the Kabbalistic axiom of the Divine Feminine presence
• Reflect on the impact of modern afflictions such air pollution and hoarding — and discover how to move beyond them into a mindful, spacious inner quiet

Can we find comfort in our animal nature amidst the tempests of today?

During this session, you’ll deepen your connection to your earthly existence and your own somatic wisdom. Even as our home, Mother Earth, roils with imbalances and harm caused by human hands, she offers her grounding presence as medicine for healing.

You’ll draw on this elemental strength as you practice self-regulation techniques for calming your nervous system. You’ll also explore your family’s attitudes and legacies surrounding embodiment — including sexuality, shame, and disconnection from the body — and begin the work of transmuting these burdens with compassion.

Having studied all four elements at this point, you and your cohort will then engage in a collective inquiry into this historical moment using the Tarot — whose four suits are rooted in elemental wisdom — as a divinatory guide.

In this module, you’ll:

• Explore your family legacies around embodiment in earthly form, choosing which to carry forward and which to release
• Recognize shame, shutdown, and rejection of the body as “heavy metals” you can alchemically transmute in your own inner work as you face your ancestors
• Discover how the Tarot deck is built on the four elements, and receive a divinatory reading for our times
• Learn techniques for regulating your nervous system and returning to inner stillness, even amidst the quakes and quivers of the outer world

What do the Earth’s wise animals know and what are they longing to tell us?

Confronting the devastation of climate chaos and the loss of species — from birds and bees to whales and bears — can throw us into a paralyzing form of “eco-anxiety,” as environmental activist Joanna Macy called it. Yet within this grief lies a potent medicine: the alchemical vessel of your own heart.

Begin to reclaim your kinship with the animal world — both living and ancestral — and rediscover the interdependence that’s always bound us together. Guided into the imaginal realms, you’ll meet the wild intelligence of animal allies who are ready to share their wisdom from the spirit plane.

As you open to their presence, you’ll tap into the compassion that bridges you to the creatures you love, receiving their guidance, strength, and unique messages for this moment in your life.

During this session, you’ll:

• Journey into the imaginal dimension to receive direct wisdom from the more-than-human world
• Explore how the human impact on birds, insects, and whales is inseparably linked to your own wellbeing
• Practice energizing body movements that reconnect you with your own animal nature
• Discover how the fate of 3 different animal species mirrors and informs your own
• Connect with beloved animal allies in their ancestral realm and receive their loving gifts
• Welcome surprising, personal guidance from the more-than-human world, personally attuned to your current path

As the Winter Solstice approaches and the season of gathering with family and friends draws near, you’ll harvest the riches of this course and prepare for the deep interiority of winter.

In our culminating session, you’ll engage in a ritual to honor the returning light and invoke the angelic guardians who’ve accompanied your sacred work, returning once more to the ancestral halls to bring offerings of gratitude.

You’ll be invited to reflect on which offerings are most needed to restore balance in your family lines — and what intentional gifts you’re being called to share to fulfill your purpose during your precious time on Earth.

You’ll receive answers to these questions as you journey one last time together into the realms of the sacred.

For this class session, please bring some candles, a stone, crystal, shell, or any other natural elements from which you can create an altar. 

In this final class session, you’ll:

• Participate in a Winter Solstice ritual as you contemplate the passing year — creating an altar with candles and the natural elements you’ve worked with throughout the course
• Step into your role as healer, elder, and ancestor-in-training for your family lineage
• Learn a mantra for communing with angelic guardians
• Offer compassion and understanding to your ancestors, recognizing they did the best they could