Are you at a loss to know your assignment in this political moment?
Are you longing for a community in which to deepen your anti-racist commitments and practice?
Are you ready to build toward a liberated future through ritual and land connection and your body?
Will you join us as we explore how CURSE BREAKING
through storytelling can be a potent form of resistance?
In this three-session series, we will begin to explore:
Understanding the curses we’re living our lives under as white people in the US inside the rapid decline of empire
Recognizing the collective power we have to break curses, reconnect with our imaginations, and start believing we are a part of the collective future
Interrupting family legacies of trauma and severance, so that we don't have to continue to suffer--or cause suffering--the ways our ancestors did
How you can do bite-sized experiments within your own community and family
We must counter the dominant stories of empire on purpose. This series is an on-ramp for you to begin exploring this work with your own family and community. What are the stories that are waiting to be told through you? Genealogy and ancestor work allows us to see the generational patterns in our families, to place them and ourselves in context, to work on the muscle of bringing both love and rigor to our relationships with them.
This is both political strategy and cultural work – logic and statistics aren’t going to carry us where we need to go. We need to build culture and tell the stories required to call the futures we long for into being. We endeavor to change our relationships to our ancestors and their stories. To stop lionizing, demonizing, or ignoring them, and instead to start listening, learning, and reckoning with them.
And we aim to do this work in a way that is an antidote to the severance inherent in whiteness, by instead actively cultivating a sense of belonging in anti-racist community, as we engage in this work together. We build our competency by starting first in a very local or familial way. How do you tell a story of your people/community/family that might break curses and seed liberation?
Each session will include:
A central story told by one of the facilitators, illuminating one of their own experiments in curse-breaking, as a way of modeling the journey
Simple framing around why and how we do this work: asking deep questions and sitting in the unknown and unsettling, risk taking, place-based ritual, etc.
Space for reflection and integration in community, and beginning to generate your own questions and ideas for exploration
Simple bite-sized invitations for you to explore between sessions and scaffolding for you to continue your curse-breaking explorations beyond the arc of the series
What do we mean by curse-breaking?
Getting clearer on the larger social and political forces shaping our ancestors’ actions
Finding a vantage point to see that abuse and addiction are generational patterns that require generational responses
Breaking family silences around participation in slavery, settler colonialism, war, exploitation, Jim Crow, xenophobia and other forms of oppression
Learning to love and empathize with our ancestors in all of their human complexity
Changing culture to get out of the hole we’re in and start to build something new
Exploring how we might call on the more-than-human, Spirit, the sacred to support and resource us in our work
Why this season?
This series is being offered in the season of All Souls/All Saints/Dia De Los Muertos/Halloween, and the lead up to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. At this point in the season when many believe and sense that the veil between this world and that of our ancestors is thin, it’s a juicy time to be engaging with this work. And as we lead up to Thanksgiving, when many gather with their families, it’s a ripe time to explore what intentional questions you may want to ask around the feast table.
What are the stories that haven’t yet been told inside an inheritance of silence?
Can we ask the questions that help us find the threads we can then follow to bring them into view?
What questions do you long to seek answers to in your own family history?
What silences, gaps, severances might it be your assignment to tend to?
These are the questions we will begin to ask together. And from here, we will begin to explore what deeper learning, ritual, and uncovering might be needed to step towards curse-breaking.
This course is for you if…
You were socialized as a white person, have white ancestors and/or if you are perceived as white today. It is a space to dig into our collective history, beliefs and experiences. The three of us will be speaking from our experience as white folks. That said, we warmly welcome everyone to this work and are committed to doing our best to hold a space where folks of all racial identities can dig into radical anti-racist genealogy and experiment with curse-breaking.
You’ll get the most out of this series if you have done some reflection and reckoning around whiteness and racial justice already. You don’t need to have done genealogy–just bring whatever curiosity and longings you feel for your people.
When:
We will meet for three 90 minute virtual sessions (a link will be sent via email after registration).
Wednesdays: October 14, October 28 & November 4
12:00 - 1:30pm ET / 11:00 am- 12:30pm CT / 9:00 - 10:30am PT
Cost:
We are offering a four tiers of payment options. We offer these options to make this series accessible for those with lower incomes & wealth and to center our values and politics on redistribution. We believe in a solidarity economy, one that centers racial and economic justice, and is based on care for all and not profit for some.
If you’d like some support discerning which payment might be the best fit for you - check out this resource at Finding Freedom.
We have limited 30 spots for this course so sign up early!
$45 6 spots
$80 6 spots
$125 15 spots
$200 unlimited
Deadline to register is October 12, 2026
Cancellation Policy: We will offer a full refund (excluding the Stripe online processing fee) if you cancel before the October 12 deadline.
Meet your facilitators:
Kari Points, Lucy Waechter-Webb and Nicole Cober Bauman
The three of us got to know each other when Kari participated in the first cohort of Weaving New Ritual: A year long community of practice for White people of Christian lineage to reclaim ritual fluency, offered by Lucy and Nicole in 2024/2025. Lucy and her mom also received some coaching from Kari this year as they prepared for an ancestral pilgrimage and returned a couple months later for some ancestral repair work. After traversing these landscapes of practice together we realized our starts were aligned and are excited to be making this new offering together, born out of weaving the three threads together.
Nicole Bauman is a midwest-based queer parent steeped in the sacred work of facilitation, transformative justice, somatics and Nonviolent Communication. They see building conflict resiliency as an essential part of living into the world to come, and are passionate about creating space where personal and collective liberation feel possible. As the descendant of white Western European peasant farmers who carried their trauma with them to the Americas, Nicole is committed to centering racial justice and ancestral healing in their work.
Nicole’s background in farming, intentional community, yoga, doula work and natural building grounds their work in connection to the earth and the body. Nicole is a Certified Professional Healing-Centered Coach and a student of Somatics with the Strozzi Institute and in the lineage of generative somatics. Nicole finds rootedness in growing food, daily walks to the river, weaving willow baskets, and tending and being tended by community in the Rust Belt city of Elkhart, Indiana (occupied Potawatomi territory).
Based in Durham, NC, Kari Points is a white facilitator, anti-racist genealogist, and ancestral curse breaker who has dedicated 35 years to organizing for collective liberation. Her expertise integrates racial, gender, and economic justice with healing-centered social change. She uses Southern organizing strategies and participatory methodologies to support groups and movements through deep change. Her latest initiative, Reckoning With Our Roots, uses radical genealogy and place-based ritual as a way to heal lineage trauma. Kari also serves as the c4 board president for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and co-founded We Are Finding Freedom to organize white women and genderqueers to upend our legacy as colluders. Kari grew up as an adoptee and working class in rural southern Indiana. Her people are mainly from Germany, France and Sweden, and a surprising number of them were blacksmiths. She holds a Masters in Public Policy from Duke University.
Rev. Lucy Waechter Webb is a somatics coach, politicized spiritual leader, mom, land-tender, ritualist, writer and organizer. After ten years as a pastor and community organizer, she is now focused on weaving together cultural change and organizing for material change, with the body at the center. She believes the work of engaging our spiritual life is not so very different from engaging in our shared public (political) life. She is the descendent of peoples from Germany, France, Ireland, Wales and Britain which include many Christian clergy. She resides on unceded Anishinaabek territory otherwise known as Leelanau County, MI. Her children are some of her best teachers, as are the trees and garden.