Read my article on Ancestral Relationship in Crazy Wisdom Journal
ancestral connection
In my work I frequently meet with people who sense that part of their role in this lifetime is to transform ancestral patterns and bring about healing for their lineage. Through conversation with clients and my own ancestors, I have come to believe that this work is a part of a transpersonal generational task that we are being called to do on the planet at this time. Many of us are Black, Indigenous and people of color who are working to metabolize transgenerational trauma, reclaim ancestral memory, and access a deeper felt sense of ancestral resistance. White folks are also being called to do deep work in healing legacies of supremacy, colonialism, and their own traumatic separation from cultures of care and relationship with the land.
In service to cultural ancestral healing work, there has been a great emergence of resources and approaches in the past few years. Ancestral work can take many forms and there are many routes to connect with and know our people. Some of these may include:
gathering stories from our living relations
somatic and meditative practices
states of non-ordinary consciousness such as meditative trance and dreamwork
genealogical research
genetic testing
Methodologies have pros/cons and considerations. For example, genealogical research has implicit bias and privileging of white/European ancestry. Genetic testing can be costly, opens the door to scientific racism, and offers less than accurate data about who our ancestors were, with potentially misleading interpretations. Family history and genealogical information may not be available to those who were adopted. In my work, I build on the practices for ancestral relationship that a person already has in place, and will encourage exploration of experiential and direct cognition methodologies in our sessions through traditional/intuitive work and co-creation of ritual practices for ancestral relationship and healing. This is a creative process informed by practices from my own lineage as a Xicana with Indigenous roots in Central Mexico as well as European settler ancestry.
I have been offering in-person and web-based programs on epigenetics and ancestral healing since 2016 and have 25 years of experience and study of traditional healing modalities and ritual. I believe strongly that this work be decentralized and accessible to all, since ancestor reverence can be found in the roots of all of our human cultural lineages worldwide.
animism & ancestor reverence
In traditional animistic societies, human beings lived in deep connection with their fellow relations, human and other-than-human. There was no question of the sacredness and intelligence of all life. Over some 200,000 years, human beings have evolved on the planet in deep relationship with the natural world, and in communication with our oldest teachers, the plants and animals. Through these relationships, balance was maintained and human beings knew their part in the web of life. Relationship maintenance included attendance to and reverence for those who came before, through ceremony and ritual offerings that honored cycles of life and death. In traditional cultures, ancestor veneration has existed in some form throughout human history worldwide. Rich cultural cosmologies were woven around relationship with the ancestors and with the entirety of the natural world.
Many of these old ways have been lost in contemporary Western society. For many of us, our sense of who we are, where we come from, and our identity as members of the natural world has been ruptured. The collective dream of life shared by the dominant culture has resulted in disconnection. Today, the concept of animism is laughable to the scientific mind. Yet, the scientific lens is uncovering findings that corroborate the traditional ways. Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, remarked in an interview with Krista Tippett for On Being that scientific findings are not demonstrating that plants and animals have less intelligence than we thought, but quite the opposite. Science is uncovering evidence that animals and even plants operate with an agency and intelligence that challenges the assumption that only humans act with intention.
In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, cultural ecologist David Abram writes about his experience as a researcher living in Indonesia and observing Balinese ancestor reverence practices. His initial reaction was amused curiosity when he saw women leaving food in certain areas of the village for the ancestors. Yet after continued observation, he realized that these offerings were indeed being taken up - by rodents and pests that would otherwise be bothersome to the community. He understood that the reciprocity taking place was indeed maintaining the natural balance of humankind living in harmony with the natural world. The offerings were left for the ‘ancestors’ - but who is to say what shape or form the ancestors take when they receive these gifts? As Abram writes, “‘Ancestor worship’ in its myriad forms, then, is ultimately another mode of attentiveness to nonhuman nature; it signifies not so much an awe or reverence of human powers, but rather a reverence for those forms that awareness takes when it is not in human form, when the familiar human embodiment dies and decays to become part of the encompassing cosmos.”
