Lunch with The Ancestors

While savoring a delicous fall meal prepared by Lea Rainey at Roots Market, your hosts, Denise Barrios from Guatemala and Blake Sherlock from McCall, will lead you on an encounter with our passed love ones. Ancestors are an integral part of Mayan spirituality and philosophy. As All Saints Day and the Day of the Dead approach, we will take time to connect more deeply with our own ancestors and share in the Mayan traditions of working with and giving thanks to the Ancestors. Through the creation of an altar for the ancestors, sharing of food and story as a group, we will connect with our ancestors, rendering homage to their life and honoring their path, which was the one that allowed ours to be opened.

We will work with a practice that will allow us to individually work with each of our ancestors and address the fragments of their life that have been passed to us so that through this work we can heal and release the fears, behaviors, feelings that are part of our lineage learning. Then we will thank our ancestors through a ritual of elevating our thoughts and wishes to them.

We will culminate with the creation of an altar for our ancestors. Please bring photos—no originals, copies only please—to the class to be included in the ofrenda, an offering we will create for the Ancestors.  Limited to 15 participants

Workshop taught by Denise Barrios and Blake Sherlock. Denise is an Ajq’ij, or daykeeper, in the Mayan spiritual tradition and the author of  “The Mayan Count of the Days”, a Journal of the Energies of the Sacred Cholq’ij Calendar.  Denise is the daughter of Carlos Barrios, author of "The Book of Destiny: Unlocking the Secrets of 2012", and she was his translator for many years when they visited the US to share the Mayan world view and the wisdom of the sacred calendar. For many years, I read and used Carlos’ book as a guide to my investigation and understanding of the Mayan world view. When I lived in Antigua in 2019, I had the opportunity to meet Carlos, and his daughter, Denise.  We became great friends, and after her father’s death in 2020, Denise and I were simultaneously inspired to initiate walking the spiritual path of an Ajq’ij.  Together, Denise and I have experienced not only the death of her father, but the rebirth of this spiritual path inside each of us. We are fortunate to be able to accompany each other on our individual paths, and we have had the great fortune to join our paths at times, celebrating fire ceremony together in Tikal only the most recent of our journeys together.