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Ancestral Studies for Living Souls
Passages is a lineage-rooted Earth School devoted to cultivating nature literacy—the ability to read, remember, and participate in living systems of life.
Through ancestral studies, embodied inquiry, and earth-based cosmology, we explore the mythic, ritual, and psychological threads that shape the human experience.
Our offerings weave anthropology, oral tradition, plant wisdom, and initiatory practices to help living souls reconnect with their origins, their purpose, and their place in the great ecology of being.
The Earth is Alive.
You are a part of it.
OUR MISSION
Our mission is to support living souls in becoming nature-literate—remembering where they come from and who they are becoming—while cultivating clarity, reverence, and embodied leadership rooted in reciprocity with the Earth.
OUR VISION
Our vision is a world where people become biocultural leaders who carry lineage with integrity, walk their path with truth + authenticity, and participate in the ecology of transformation with courage and devotion.
OUR FRAMEWORK
Passages exists to regenerate cultural memory, rebuild relational bridges, and help the modern heart return to the rhythm of the Earth. At the heart of our work is nature literacy—a way of learning that unfolds through lived experience, ritual practice, and embodied attention.
WHAT WE STUDY
Ancestral Story & Mythic Memory
We explore the myths, symbols, and archetypal stories that shape human consciousness across cultures and how these narratives guide our inner and outer lives.
Plantcestors & Earth Wisdom
We learn from cacao, corn, tabacco, and other plant- and the Great Elemental beings as teachers of relational ethics, memory, reciprocity, and ecological consciousness.
Womb Consciousness & Embodied Cosmology
We examine the womb as a spiritual, biological, and energetic portal: a place of memory, descent, creation, and initiation. This includes menstrual cosmology, the underworld, fertility of earth and body, and the cosmological relationship between womb and grave.
Biocultural Belonging & Leadership
We explore how lineage, land, culture, memory, and identity weave into an integrated sense of belonging - supporting leadership rooted in reciprocity, integrity, and the living world.
Indigenous Cosmologies & Ritual Technologies
We study earth-based cosmologies, ceremonial frameworks, calendrical systems, and the ancestral technologies that orient human beings within cosmic time, space, and the living world.
Death Awareness, Grief & Initiation
A Relationship Reclimation to Death: We study death not as an end, but as a guide. Grief as a sacred passage. Underworld journeys as psychological and cosmological thresholds. Ancestor veneration as continuity.
Depth Psychology & the Mythic Psyche
We engage the psyche through the lens of Jungian, archetypal, and somatic psychology; understanding descent, shadow, transformation, and the imaginal as processes of soul-making.
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OUR PATHWAYS
COMMUNITY STUDIES
Deep immersion programs bridging anthropology, story, embodiment, and ritual.
Yearly Cohorts include: Reimagining Death, Skin of Corn & Heart of Cacao, The Womb & The Grave.
Featured Studies & Offerings
January
Our Weekend Study
The Primordial Waters We Carry
Ancestral Memory, Currents & the Living Psyche
Across Mesoamerican cosmology, depth psychology, and biological science, water is understood not as a passive element, but as a carrier of memory, movement, and relationship. In this session, we explore Imox deeper as the primordial waters where ancestral memory circulates — shaping emotion, perception, and the unconscious through currents rather than fixed narratives.
We will examine ancestry through a hydrological lens: how emotions move like rivers through lineage, where currents become stagnant or diverted, and what allows memory to mature rather than repeat. Drawing from river systems, watershed logic, and the molecular structure of water, we explore how coherence, flow, and disruption operate both in the natural world and within the psyche.
This workshop also introduces water-based reflective practices that support emotional circulation — not to bypass grief or difficult feeling, but to allow movement where there has been holding, freezing, or accumulation across generations. These practices are offered as contemplative and ancestral technologies, not therapeutic techniques.
This is a study space for those ready to engage ancestry as a living system — one that moves through blood, memory, and emotion, and requires care, discernment, and responsibility to tend.
With
Mariana &
Nana Lucy Culum
Date:
Weekend of
Janurary 24- 25th
10am -12:30pm CST
With Breaks and Introduction session
NOW INCLUDED WITH THE ANCESTRAL WATERS DIETA
Upcoming Pilgrimages
Sacred Roots Retreat:
A Pilgrimage Through Maya Lands and Ix Cacao
A 8-day immersive pilgrimage in the sacred lands of Guatemala — weaving Mayan ancient wisdom, sacred cacao, nature, and spirit.
FROM FEBRUARY 24- MARCH 3RD 2026
ABOUT THE FOUNDER
Mariana Bandera
Mariana Bandera is an Anthropologist and Archaeologist, whose work weaves Mesoamerican cosmology, ancestral studies, depth psychology, and embodied ritual.
Walking alongside Mayan and Mexica teachers for nearly a decade, she bridges academic research with earth-based spirituality, mythic storytelling, and somatic inquiry. Her teachings center on death awareness, womb consciousness, plantcestors, and the ancient technologies that orient human beings within time, lineage, and the living world.
Through Passages, she offers spaces of remembrance where people can reconnect with their origins, reclaim their purpose, and walk with greater clarity, reciprocity, and devotion.
"Our Mission is to become leaders in our community in our own way, with our own unique gifts. And that makes us good Ancestors in the web of life"
