Blood & Belonging

Blood + Belonging is a unique journey of storytelling, ritual, magic and folk sensibilities to deepen connection with the ancestors and with being alive. It is a practice to be present with our roots in order to continue to grow as humans, to nourish parts of ourselves we may have neglected. I hold this space from my personal experience as a Sicilian/Italian American and from the massive amounts of wisdom I have learned directly from the Sicilian land and the elders who generously have taken me on as a student. I also invite guest teachers from cross cultural lines of ancestral wisdom to share.

During this 6-month experience we will learn, explore, and embrace practices, stories, and the innate magic of our ancient, and not so ancient, people. We will embrace what is folk. Because folk magic is the way of our most recent magical and healing ones. It is the ancestral medicine of the people. It is one of the bridges that can bring us back home to our magic.

We begin with the body and land, and then through the gut and the hands. Because almost every ancestral practice begins in these places. We’ll practice ancestral arts for tending, remembering, and being with what (and who) has been lost.

It’s spellwork. It’s dreamwork. It is root work— our roots are interconnected, spanning deep and wide. It’s coming together with community to be present, together.

We can all have a powerful, connective, healing, collective magical belonging. We can all be taken by the longing, together.

How We Learn:

Folk Animism: Constantly remembering and practicing there is life and spirit and being-ness in all things. We practice remembering our own folk animist technologies are passed on and live within.
Monthly multi-media content: videos, written content, and open prompting
Community: Small group intensive communities - if you choose this option your small group will hold you close and together you will navigate the lands of ancestral healing.
Initiation: If you opt in for 1:1 work with me, we will do the initiation work of ancestral healing, medicine making, and ritual to honor and be with the ancestors who are calling you to stand in your magic.
Guest teachers: Our live guest teachers are people who embody their ancestral magic, their folk ways, their stories, their crafts. These humans are generous, wise, and brilliant.

These cultural anchors are the themes that root us during our time together:

The Art of Altar-Building: Our "pre-game" practice will take you through the inside and outside of making a simple alter + creating a practice of offering + working with salt as altar as a way or handling tricky ancestors
Month 1 - The Body: We begin with our body, our ancestral bodies, and a constant practice of knowing we belong to ourselves, but also we are our ancestors, as well.
Month 2 - The Land + Plants: We move down into the land, ancestral land, our place on other lands, and our connection/practices with plants of the land an ancestral guides
Month 3 - Food as Ancestor: A beautiful way to deeply enter into ancestral stories is our food. This month we look at food as an ancestor. As a holy feeding for your ancestors. A holy feeding for the self, the family, and each other.
Month 4 - Dreams as Ancestors. Incubating for ancestral messages while asleep. Becoming the oracle while we rest. Devotion to our ancestral sleep deities.
Month 5 - Collective Folk Protection: how do we protect ourselves and community? Ancestral ways being that remove attachments, protect our spaces and bodies.
Month 6 - Grief + Death rituals: (personal, cultural, systemic). Communing with the Chthonic (underworld) as both grief holding and protection spelling. Protection + Grief are intertwined.
Bonus Content - Ancestral Storytelling: ancestral record-keeping and lineage prose. Here we practice giving voice to what you have learned, forgotten, and long to remember. We get to retell the stories, record them, to pass them on.

These themes are for the video and written content within the classroom.

The collective calls and guest teacher sessions (which will be available only to all options except self-paced) will go deeper and even beyond the scope of these themes, sometimes they are emergent, being totally led by the magic and spirit of the ancestors we call in.

6 live collective calls with MaryBeth: these calls will be part teaching/part ritual/part collective conversation. You will receive wisdom and also get the space to ask questions and share your own experiences. All calls will be recorded so that you can view and review at your convenience and also if you are unable to attend all live calls, you will still have access to the information.
6-7 guest teachers live calls: I have gathered teachers and community members whose work I admire and respect, whose work is formed by their own ancestral lens and magic, and who come on and bring their unique ancestral gifts and wisdom to the table.

Weekly Video Content: Your video content will include extra teaching sessions with wisdom I share, hands-on rituals, receipts, and crafting — “how to's” such as making a rosary, how use olive oil in an old country spell, or crafting a southern Italian cleansing ritual with plants and water. The videos were created to help you bring everyday ancestral magic and wisdom to everyday life.
Collective Community Space: this community is a place for you to ask questions, share your stories with like-minded people, weave and share your own wisdom and find even more resources through togetherness.

Pop Ups: Because I am a Sagittarius I must leave room for spontaneity and emergent spirit. I will hold some "pop up" calls that come from sensing what the collective may need — for instance, maybe a group tarot reading and ritual session, or I am feeling into sharing a folk song for grief, or a scapular making session together or I want to invite a brilliant friend on to share something….
A Weekly Digital Journal: a fillable PDF with content and space for you to process. It will be uploaded to the classroom every week.
Small Group Mentoring: for those who register for Re-Village. These small groups will be no bigger than 7 people and will be led by MaryBeth. They are for going deeper into the work, creating community, and being in support as well as receiving support through ancestral presence-ing and healing.
One-on-One Initiation: For those who register for La Soglia. You will have the opportunity to dive deeply on a personal level, and together we will create a bespoke ancestral initiation experience — helping you release ancestral patterns, create new worlds, and make more magic towards your ancestral dreams.

We will not ignore our grief or our longing. They are the portals to enter through. They are the practices where we can become ancestral medicine.

Guided by our ancestors, we will reclaim a more wild way of being alive through our senses, our hands, our guts, our arts, our magic, our medicine.

This journey is open for participants of any ancestral magic, memory, and heritage, biological or not. This program is for all genders.

There is room for you - you will be held with love and honor. Please come as you are, who you are, as messy and unsettled/settled, wild, aching joyful bodies.

We've designed four options to fit everyone’s needs and capacity.

Click the red arrow to expand the box and learn more about each option and pricing.

Your Rhythm | Self Paced

Roots School | We Do The Work Together

Re-Village | Small Group Gatherings

La Soglia | 1-on-1 Deep Dive

Prefer to pay in full? Please send us an email.

“Blood and belonging answers the sweeping call to return--to body, to land, to each other. It is about reverence, grief, ancestry, connection. It is a container that is able to hold the deepest of dives, the Big Questions, the messy and confused, the sacred unknown. It is not a space to evade, bypass, or stay in the strictly solar ways of being and knowing many of us have been taught, but that clearly are limited in scope and potential. It is an incredible tool that says "yes, I will meet you" to the current moment of complex, multilayered liminality. Blood and belonging is an opportunity to tune in at the cellular level, to feel in your body what it means to belong, as in to BE in a constant state of LONGing and remembering. There will be no neatly packaged present at the end, but, if pursued consistently, softly, and intentionally, it will offer endless opportunities for presence, and steady whispers of where we are going and where we've been."
- Kendra, 2021

We will begin on November 13, 2024.

And complete our journey on April 9, 2025.

You will have access to the classroom until September 15, 2025.

Our collective call and guest teacher call dates will be delivered to you soon after registration.

Nisha Moodley

Nisha Moodley is an Integrative Leadership coach, the founder of Global Sisterhood Day, and the host of the Devotion podcast. As a mixed-race woman with a background in health & executive coaching, intergenerational & energy healing, and community building, she has a unique understanding of the ecology of leadership and the ability to catalyze deep growth for her clients.

Through working with thousands of women, she’s discovered that the majority of us are holding the same vision for our world: a liberatory and regenerative future, where each person’s unique expression and gifts are woven in service of the collective.

Nisha’s been a coach for over a decade, leading mastermind groups, online courses, and nearly 50 retreats, supporting women to liberate their leadership and weave their gifts in service of our shared vision.

Adriana Rizzolo

Eros and Aliveness: Transmuting anger and grief - building boundaries and authentic love through embodiment and Black Madonna mysticism

Adriana Rizzolo is the founder of Body Temple Church, Power of Love School, and the creator of Body Temple Dance. She is a spiritual mentor, somatic healer, adult sex educator, and guide.

Adriana’s offerings have developed through many years of experience with therapeutic yoga training, voice and movement trainings, trauma release trainings and somatic education, intimacy and relational healing, devotional practice and study in Tantra & Bhakti Yoga, llived experience “doing the work,” 11 years of sobreity and healing from personal & familial trauma.

Adriana helps people heal trauma and patterns of helplessness, awaken their power, and feel at home in their bodies to start living life in alignment with their soul’s truth. Through her many years of coaching, teaching, and facilitation, she has helped thousands of people around the world awaken to their aliveness.

Vyana Novus

Creating a bridge through time with color - connecting us to our Ancestors and the significant land places we're rooted in.

Vyana Novus is a multimedia ecological artist & educator based in Ojai, California. Trained in PCA relational skills, various trauma integration frameworks, and many different healing modalities, Vyana creates workshops, classes, journals, and creative tools as a way to process dark & difficult emotions with a sense of pleasure, ease, and connection.

All of Vyana's ancestral roots are buried deep in the island of Sicily. Since early childhood, they've had a vivid and rich relationship with their Dead, predominantly connecting with their Zio Angelo and Bisnonna Pasqualina.

Their direct spiritual work began with meditation and yoga at age 12 after fracturing their spine. In their early 20s, they ran a school of energy medicine focused on cultivating an extensive relationship with the self as a way to embody each person's individual magic in the world.

Camden Torres

Embracing our relationship with the unseen as an act of ancestral reclamation

Camden Torres is a medicine woman, a seer, a mentor, and an artist. She identifies as Xicana and Indigenous, and is of Diné, Tarahumara, Spanish, Basque, and Portuguese Ancestry.

Her work is rooted in Shamanic Earth based practices (of Mexican and Inca cosmologies), Ancestral healing, Feminine Rites of Passage and ceremony.

Jo'el Adifon

Breaking the Stained Glass: A life of miracles and benevolent intervention from Spirits & Powers is not just for folks who lived a long time ago. It’s for you and me.

Jo’el Adifon is a blerd, neo-griot, and taumaturgo-in-training. His high jinks frequently involve the likes of saints and miracles, anime and comic book superpowers, and Black Joy that can literally fly.

Drawing from his Italian origins and West African roots, Jo’el blends his extensive and eclectic studies (including a Columbia University MA in Clinical Psychology) with lifelong immersion in the supernatural.

The 2021 winner of the IONS Consciousness in Action Award, Jo’el boldly explores the childlike fusion of real magic and performance art, the suspension of disbelief, the alignment of Grace and Luck, and the proximal power to make things real.

Tara Brading

Honoring the Sacred Waters in Ireland & Britain

Tara Brading is a women’s educator, storyteller and songstress, focusing on uplifting nature-based feminine wisdom & ancestral teachings from Ireland & England. She's been on a journey of remembering and reclamation for over ten years, honoring the earth based feminine wisdom left in her blood and bones.

She's the creator of The Roundhouse, which is an online community that lovingly guides women into nature based feminine wisdom from the Irish traditions. She's also the creator of Grail Priestess, a deep-dive program that guides women into heartfelt connection with their English heritage. She also runs a variety of other courses, events and workshops that serve thousands of women every year.

She journeys to Ireland & England regularly for pilgrimage, and currently lives on the ancestral lands of the Ute and Arapaho people in the mountains of so-called Colorado (USA).

Melanie Jade Frazza

Myth and Meaning: How the Trinacria and Sicilian Flag and it's symbolism reflect an unshakable identity of the island.

Melanie Jade Frazza is a granddaughter of Sicilian immigrants, carrying with her always a fierce love for Sicilia bedda. Never realizing so much of what her nonna, or cugine, or zie did was "folk magic," but rather just, "what we do," Melanie has been on a more focused journey and intentional exploration of Southern Italian and Sicilian folk practices.

From art to craft to myth to music, Melanie is sharing as she's learning, each new rhythm on her tamburello a devotion to La Madonna. Each new syllable pronounced in Sicilian a devotion to her nonna. Each bite her piccirriddi/bamini take of an ancestral food, a way to honor and move forward heritage. Melanie looks not only to the past of Sicily, dispelling limiting stereotypes with beacons of justice and anti-capitalism, but also boosting the efforts of Sicilians today to move their magical island forward while honoring her rich traditions.

Melanie lives in New Jersey with her artist partner and two beautiful bambini.

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Everything we do, we do together.

I will practice showing up in integrity, compassionate, and in my own truth.

You will be honored.

You will be trusted that you are doing the work your ancestors are asking of you.

You will have the space to grapple and thrash, to be in joy and also explore your grief.

I will be an example of practicing what being guided by the holy dead might look like.

I will do my best to share bodies of culture, magic, and ancestral ways of being that have been passed down to me.

I will show up and guide in this journey through the lens of being encultured by Sicilian and Italian Americans as well as being a student of Sicilian people and the land. You will be trusted to find your own lens, way of being and ancestral lineages to learn from.

I am devoted to this work, to my ancestors and to helping and tending to people who long for a more rooted, connected way of being together.

If I have taken Blood and Belonging before, is this for me now?

What is blood and belonging?

When are the live collective calls and what happens if I can't make it?

Why aren't the re-village calls recorded?

Who is La Soglia for (and what does it mean)?

Is this only for Sicilian and Italian Americans?

How long will I have access to all the content and recorded live calls?

Do you offer discounts?

Still have questions? Email us at [email protected] and we will be happy to answer what we can.

“Before joining Blood and Belonging, I was neck deep in documents and family trees and searching for answers about ancestors that had been lost to time. I came in with a desire to learn more and grow closer to them, to find the missing pieces that would somehow make me whole. What surprised me, however, was that the missing piece wasn't some person or event in the past. It wasn't my blood. It was the greater sense of community found among those who also came in searching for more. Through sharing and listening to the stories of others, I found the common threads that tie us together -- and I left with lifelong friends."
- G.K., 2022 participant

May we create a healing incubator that uses our folkways to come undone together.

May each who feel called to join this community come prepared to worship mystery, to lean into hard lessons, to be in deep practice of magic in togetherness.

May we witness each other change and evolve.

May each of our visions and life paths on earth get clear and potent.

May our ancestors guide us closer to our purpose in this world, now.

May our well ancestors join forces, together, to support us.

May we reclaim our nourishing roots.

May we notice signs and alignments. May we pay attention to symbols and sounds.

May we create loving and powerful relationships with our ancestors.

May we honor our bodies as ancestral bodies.

May we sit with the nervous system and endocrine system in practice to help us to gently understand our body is the ancestral altar.

May this hard work be a path we devote ourselves to.

May we create a stunning, powerful ancestral revolution, within, without, below, above.

May we open up to a new and ancient world. The one our ancestors are dreaming through us.

Join the 2022 Waitlist

Blood + Belonging is a culmination of over 25 years of my own intentional practices of reclaiming and healing my own Italian and Sicilian American ancestral stories through earth-based, body-based, magical ways.

It comes from a lifetime of experiences and familial teachings. It comes from decades of research, writing, and traveling to my own ancestral land to study within villages, with elders and youth, and to receive the wisdom of this entact cultural soma.

I am a mother to 3, a writer with an MFA, a sometimes frame drummer, and an artist. I have studied and sat with plants, practiced prayers in my mother tongues, trained in movement therapy, studied midwifery, and learned many different ancestral healing modalities with incredible teachers, including Alessandra Belloni, Barbara Cresimanno, Whapio from the Matrona, Nadaar Shagagi, Maya Corrine, Kohenet YA, Lisa Fazio, Kara Wood, Jen Lemen and Jo’el Adifon. My mother. My children are my greatest teachers. As are many elders in Sicilia, who have taught me to weave and sing and stay devoted to the rituals, especially Gianpiero who has passed me the myths of my ancestral region, Paolo Uccelli who is my teacher in majaria (Sicilian mystics), and my cousin Leonardo who knows more about the indigenous Sicani of Sicily than anyone I ever met.

I owe huge thanks to San Espedito, Saint Antonio. Sant’Agata, San Calogero, Santa Rosalia, La Madonna Nera and La Madonna dell’Alto, my holy dead: my nonna Salvatrice, my nonno Emilio, my busha Mary, and my midwife lineage, Sophia. My father Sebastiano. Also, the Mediterranean Sea and the Hudson River. Also thank you to God. I am surrounded by so many teachers. We all are.