Connecting with Your Ancestors for Healing
Starting Ancestral Healing Work
What comes to mind when you read or hear the word ancestor?
Your grandparents?
Your great-grandparents?
If you’re living in the U.S., your relatives who lived Somewhere Else?
When orienting a client to ancestral ritual, I give the metaphor of the beach: standing on the sand on the clearest, brightest day, we can see as far as the horizon, and then there is the rest of the ocean.
Genealogical information is the same.
Even if someone has many generations of names, dates, and locations, there eventually comes a point where known names and written history end.
When we talk about the ancestors, we (as humans) have been at this level of relational, modern functionality for 50,000 years, and have been Homo sapiens for nearly 300,000 years. That is a lot—a lot!—of ancestors. So many, in fact, that it can be helpful to widen your aperture of perception in three phases:
Recent generations: the ones you’ve maybe met, know their names, have some photos of.
Middle of the lineage: those who lived 500–5,000 years ago.
The ancient, ancient ones: all the way back to the very beginning.
There are folks who come to this work who are adopted, having no idea who their parents are, let alone their ancestors. Guess what: it’s no problem. There is nothing needed to begin this work.
Folks who come to the work with a thick binder full of information can sometimes be at a disadvantage: they have to wade through all of the story, projection, and attachment that is there in the written history. It could be a lot of terrible stuff. Big, gross, upsetting stuff certainly gets documented: owning property (including people), murders, stealing, belonging to political parties or organizations that were formed simply to treat others poorly, rape, infidelity—the list goes on and on. Or maybe really great things get documented: love notes, inventions, generational wealth being created, overcoming adversity or illness.
Most things, however, don’t get documented. The darkest parts of my family history live in the bones, not in newspaper headlines.
It’s from this expanded perspective that we approach the ancestral repair work: all the way back. Thousands of generations. From this place, we can begin to reckon with the fact that in all of our lineages—all of them, every single one—is both oppressor and oppressed. It may be because of race, gender, or faith. More than likely, it’s a combination.
A common topic of discussion on discovery calls is folks telling me they’re still deciding whether or not to work with me because I’m a white lady. How could I possibly understand or hold space for oppression? It’s a projection of their own lack of perspective.
If you feel or know that you’re down-lineage from a lot of darkness/density/scary/gnarly/no-good-very-bad stuff, either personally or culturally? It’s okay. In Ancestral Lineage Healing, you never, ever have to, at any point, directly relate with any among the dead who are troubled and not at peace. Hard stop. You do not have to enter the radioactive, toxic gunk to transmute it, or even to understand it.
The waves of grief and sorrow for the loss and the pain have a role. We relate with those big waves of feeling and emotion in a way that is ritually and psychologically resourced and safe—in the exact amount your nervous system can tolerate at any given moment.
The method focuses on connecting deeply and strengthening the sources of wisdom, love, and goodness in your lineages. Even if that is something you’ve never had the embodied experience of, because there is so much brokenness in recent generations. It’s in partnership with these ancient, wise, well ones that the burdens can begin to be moved and metabolized.
I can hear someone stubbornly saying: “I don’t have any healed ancestors anywhere on any lineage.”
You do. You really, really do. I promise.
Again, the concern is a projection. The concern is something closer to this: the recent generations and the known dead (either personally or culturally) are in a very troubled state and demonstrated extraordinarily terrible character. Without any evidence or proof of anything otherwise, it’s just best to assume this is how it is all the way back. It can often be extremely accurate about the recent dead. But this is the thing: we don’t know what we haven’t ever even considered. If you’ve never widened the aperture to sense into the ancient, ancient ones, you really just don’t know. It’s very important to notice when we are projecting instead of having a direct experience with what is important to notice when we are projecting instead of having a direct experience with what is.
🕯️ Join me Saturday for Introduction to Ancestral Lineage Healing
In this workshop we’ll cover:
-Who are the ancestors?
-Cross-cultural assumptions about ancestor reverence and ritual
-Five stages of the lineage repair work and overall intent of Ancestral Lineage Healing
-Q & A time
We’ll also do an embodied guided practice so you can experience what we’re talking about.
☯️ Enrollment is still open for Polarity Sessions: Scarcity + Abundance.
A 6‑week group transmission series exploring the Scarcity + Abundance polarity through lived presence, energetic inquiry, and collective coherence.
Together we will enter into the deep structures of the Scarcity + Abundance polarity, a highly ingrained dynamic that influences our sense of security, self-worth, and relationship to resources.
Scarcity and abundance are often regarded as states of material wealth. Yet beneath the surface, this polarity reveals a more fundamental truth: our relationship to life itself—how we receive, how we grasp, how we fear, and how we trust.
This is for those who recognize the scarcity + abundance dynamic in themselves and the world—and long to enter a space where it can gently unravel, beyond advice, effort, or technique.
💀 July Bookings are open for Ancestral Lineage Healing
Ancestral Lineage Healing is a type of spiritual repair work that addresses deep attachment and cultural wounds through contact and meditative time with your ancestral lineages.
I guide you as you cultivate your capacity for deep connection with blood-lineage ancestors that are well in spirit to invoke their support for healing generational trauma and cultural wounding through your ancestral lines.