Over the last many years there has been an increased awareness of the need for ancestral healing. This has inspired many to dive into spaces like 23andMe to understand the genetic makeup of their lineage and bring some clarity to personal and collective traits. This has also sent people into despair as they grasp for a sense of belonging and have no record or memory of their blood lines. And all they can glean, due to personal and collective traumas, are stories of pain, of being orphaned from lands that held their people.
Ancestral Grief rituals have sprung up to help clear the wounds of our ancestors we have all inherited, and begin to recover the primordial origin stories where “our people” walked the beauty way.
And yet, I have witnessed a slipping into the seduction of the pain stories as they are gripping, dramatic, horrifying and everything that keeps the martyr, victim and therefore the addicting drug of adrenaline alive in the body. This is where sacred medicine ceremonies, held with prayer and the embodiment of someone who carries the transmission of memory, can ally the recovery of innate ancestry (full exploration for another time or reach out for a session)
Our ancestors do not heal by our retelling of the traumas. Nor, will we ever know them through that lens. Yes, the grief rituals are vital to cleansing the lies and the genocide and the raping of the many bodies of beings- and yet your ancestors did not dream you to tell that story. Feel the depth of the pain and let it melt in a sacred fire, pound it into the Earth with the spiral dance of the ancestor drum and let that sh*t go.
It is not an easy task to recover the medicine underneath the wound because it will put you face to face with Love and a path that shapes your life differently than the one you have been walking in- slightly or completely. Meaning you have to let go of any place within you that blocks the medicine of your soul and therefor the medicine of your people. This is how you get to know them. Not by looking at a family tree with names. And yet, the names can be an important piece of your reclaiming. Names carry codes of fate and destiny. Any understanding of how the names of “your people” resound inside of you and influence your life can be very helpful and healing.
As a collective Universal family we are in a great transformation. When the gates of transformation open the veils thin. Our ancestral stories will surge, memories will be more easily recovered. The medicine and the wound will do their evolutionary dance.
The ancestral story you choose to tell shapes your life and the origin story of the next many generations. If your motive for ancestral healing is to recover Original Medicine the wounds will naturally rise to the surface to get the “f” out of the way for that medicine to come through. You have profound access to healing them by remembering what is true, not by repeating them and attaching to them as your story.
Healing ancestry is mulitdimemsional. It’s is an awakening and reconnecting to primordial memory of original medicine carried by not only my blood lineage of this life, but my soul and Universal lineage.
When this memory is recovered it brings alive the cosmologies, traditions, sacred rites and ways of being of my ancestors from all walks of life- flesh, blood and stardust.
Even if I know nothing of my blood ancestors, like that family tree was burned- engaging in healing processes to remove the lies and traumas of the current corrupted consciousness will recover original memory and that will weave itself through all of my ancestral lines. My healing recovers my ancestral memory.
As I clear the lines through the healing and reclaiming of my original being I will naturally be drawn to those things that are most connected to my deep ancestral medicine and therefore begin to know my ancestors from the inside out. This is how I discover my soul’s cosmology.
Here I lay down the pain story and tell the deeper, stronger and more real story- change history and enhance evolution. Oh- and I am my ancestor. It’s not an ancestral line. It’s an ancestral spiral we heal. (Really magical short story below)
By walking a path of “Holistic Integration” you awaken your ancestral wisdom and inherit the medicine in your blood and soul lines from those who walked the beauty way.
When you access this level of remembering you heal appropriation and the desecration of the Earth by recovering sacred reciprocity. You are now a transmission of the dream of a billion dreams that created all the beauty we see. Blessed be.
Holistic Integration
My new Ebook will walk you through the sacred path of ancestral remembrance with practices, transmissions and the explorations of the psyche- how to dance with the wound and the medicine.
ONLY $5. It is free when you become a paid subscriber where there are more gifts in the hopper. You support my art. My journey. My dream of being a paid writer with your paid subscription or your $5.
And here is a magical short story to inspire your inner ancestor—→»
“You Are Your Ancestor”
I was called to a vision quest in Death Valley, CA in 2017 through the School of Lost Borders. I had signed up on a waiting list for the spring quest that culminated on my birthday. I was fifth in line. The elders advised I choose another time as it was unlikely that I would be chosen and they wanted me to be able to mentally prepare without question.
Nope. This is my time. That is my quest. I let it go. I checked into a silent retreat in Mexico (I was in a big healing mode). The day the retreat ended I knew in my bones that my space had opened up. The email: “I don’t know how it happened, but your name is at the top of the waitlist and we had cancellations, which never really happens”
They don’t know how my Gods guide me.
I returned from Mexico, “who do I think I am to just jaunt off now to a vision quest?”- were the voices. As my teacher Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes always says- “begone!”
I packed my little Honda Fit with all the supplies and headed south, a two day drive.
The quest is a 10 day event with 3 days of elder council on either side of a 4 day quest. We set up base camp in Big Pine, CA. where rivers of gold use to flow and fill the Paiute Tribe’s lives with Earth’s treasures. Now the river spirits have up and run dry for a city of angels- meaning LA literally sucked the tribe dry. There is still a memory they call Baker Creek that carries the old stories.
This trickle feeds a field of green amidst the rough and tumbled sage brush and desert weed. There are cows. Who tends them I do not know. On this day they were birthing; an unmistakable lowing sound comes through the one stand of trees by the creek. The Sierra Nevadas stood jagged and raw and snow peaked before me. Behind me the Inyos- the color of Earth weathered by Sky. At their base stands a tree called the Bristlecone Pine. This Pine is one of the oldest plant organisms on Earth.
There was something in the air that brushed against my soul. I waved away the sense of a miracle stirring as I always have.
Until…
Upon arriving and after setting up my camp I set out into the desert surroundings to offer my prayers and gifts to the land as I do. I took a breath and said, “guide me.” I was taken this way and that, and over a little ditch and around some cliffs and through a stand of trees. “Keep coming. Yes, through the trees and into the field. Now look to your left.”
There stood a lone tree in the clearing. That is where I was asked to pray. As I approached I realized it was a Hawthorne tree in the middle of the desert, out of place and out of time. And behind me about 50 meters was a lone stand of Hawthorne that created a Faerie ring.
(Ok, this story is incomplete without telling you about my ancestral pilgrimage to Ireland a year before where I put a woven strand of my hair in a Hawthorn ring on a sacred hill, made out with a Bard, ate the sacred Salmon of wisdom and so on….)
I sat by the tree and said a prayer with Tobacco, ate an apple and was then asked to give all of the seeds, there were 7 (for the 7 generations to come), to the Earth between the lone tree and its family ring. I said goodbye, went back to camp and entered into my quest.
What conspired in Death Valley is for another day. But “they”say that there will be one quest in your life that will change the shape of things. Many quest once and receive a healing, but not the full revealing. Many quest many times and have one that remains the vision of a lifetime. Most don’t quest at all and for them I say a prayer. This was my lifetime quest. One of them. And my life is a quest.
The final day of the 10 culminated on my bday, as I said, and a full moon ;). Yeah, it was that magical.
We packed up our camp and our tucked our prayers into our hearts and I stayed behind another night alone to ground into the land before driving home.
I heard that voice that guided me into the fields when I arrived and realized I was being asked to return to that tree to give thanks and say goodbye. Of course.
I did not know if I would even remember where to go, but alas I found my tree and her Faerie family. I laid down my sarong, a sarong that had been all around the world with me, sat and went into a meditation. When I was complete, I gave my thanks and left.
Half way back to camp I realized I left my sarong. And, if you know anything about the Fae, if they call you back there is magic afoot. I was a bit afraid to be honest.
As I entered the field the Papa Bull had brought his Mama Cows and their babies into the clearing. He stood only meters from my sarong by the Hawthorne tree and as I approached he glared, hoofed the Earth and snorted at me. I backed myself into the Hawthorn ring with tingles of fear in my spine, grabbed the trees and said “what do I do? Help me.”
“Sing granddaughter. Just open your voice and trust.”
Out of me poured an ancient sound that wound from the roots of the trees into my belly. I could understand that it was a song about the Mother Cow and the birth of all Life.
As I began to sing, the Bull bowed his head and backed away and all the Cows in the field raised theirs in silence as if listening.
I finished my song with tears streaming from my heart and down my face, slowly walked to the lone tree, grabbed my sarong and gracefully turned to walk away and back to camp.
As I did I looked back at those trees and asked -“Who planted you here”
“You did.”
My whole body filled with lightning and the Earth shook under me. And I knew in that moment what I have had only hints of all along. I am my ancestor. I left the breadcrumb trail that would guide me to everywhere that helps me remember my song.
There is so much more to the story, but the path I walk mostly winds behind the scenes where I can deeply embody the sacred laws of reciprocity and become the relic of my Ancestor’s dreams.
Thank you for listening and walking this path with me.
" If your motive for ancestral healing is to recover Original Medicine the wounds will naturally rise to the surface to get the “f” out of the way for that medicine to come through." 💯