What is Ancestral Lineage Healing?
An extensive, by no means exhaustive place to start.
I sit down-lineage from so very many blessings and so very many burdens of folks from Germany, Scotland, Poland, France, Canada, and Italy who made their way to the Midwest US in the early to mid 1800s. I wasn’t raised with the ancestors in focus and often would erroneously and flippantly describe the region I grew up in as having “no culture.” The pervasive culture was whiteness, settler-colonialist, and materialist. Like most from the area, I suffered from a deficiency in relationship to the land and other-than-human kin. Exactly zero of the education provided to me included exposure to different states of consciousness or rites of passage that aren’t rooted in capitalism.
I shared my long and winding road to coming into deep communion with my ancestors here. TL;DR: one day they crash landed in my awareness and I was serendipitously guided to the work of Dr. Daniel Foor and Ancestral Medicine.
Ancestral Lineage Healing is a type of spiritual repair work that addresses deep attachment and cultural wounds through contact and meditative time with the spirits of your ancestral lineages.
I guide and train you to 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. I act as a facilitator, helping to foster your connection with your ancestors and offering prompts for where the session might go, but allowing space for your ancestors to really lead the process in connection with you. Some folks feel the process is similar to guided meditation or somatic experiencing.
Relating with my ancestors has erased the fallacy of not belonging anywhere, of feeling restricted by the patterns and behaviors of living family members, it has connected me to my purpose and mission, and has been an unending well of emotional resource to sort through all of the above.
Animism as the larger framework
I’m an animist. It’s my worldview. This largely means that I recognize that living human people are just one kind of person in a much wider relational field of kinship. There are also plant people and animal people. There are the ancestors, the human dead. There are also mountain people, star people, elemental people, and lots of other kinds of people/powers that we don’t often have the words to reach for in English. Humans aren’t better or worse than any other kind of being, we’re just different. This is a worldview shared by millions of people over millennia, in every corner of the world. Recommended reading to go deeper is Graham Harvey. Ancestral Medicine also offers online courses.
This is important with Ancestral Lineage Healing because not only do you relate directly with your own ancestors, but with the others that they are still in communion with: the plants, and animals, and deities of your ancestral lineages, or the land where you're at or where they lived. This doesn’t require anything more than being open to the possibility of a wider relational field. It’s not so much an identity or even a belief system. Though I am bringing it up to give a little breathing room from the more extreme end of Western conditioning that is something like dismissal or unexamined objectifying scientific materialist atheism pretending to be objective or intelligent. Animism references thought and cultural systems that recognize that relating with the dead is a normal, ancient, everyday human behavior.
Who are the ancestors?
Some people might say that their ancestors are the moon, the waters, and the rose. Yes, we are all from all of those things. In this work, we use the word ancestor a bit more specifically to refer to humans, and those among the humans who are not incarnate right now, but who were previously incarnate on Earth.
Even more narrowly, we can use the word ancestor to refer to those among the dead who are in a relatively healed and well condition. Dying is a rite of passage that if it goes well, results in arriving at the elevated status of an ancestor. There are the rituals of ancestralization, of assisting the soul of the one who died. They understand they’ve died. They’re connected to other ancestors. They’ve arrived permanently on the other side. This is in contrast with the ghosts, the not-yet ancestors, the ones who are still in an in-between state. That’s an important distinction that is underscored all through the work and beyond. When encouraged to connect with your ancestors, in any context, connect with those among your people, who are safe and well to relate with.
Types of ancestors:
Ancestors of blood and bone: The ones we were born to. Our family. Not not complicated for a lot of folks. We're inextricability linked.
Lovelines: Folks who are adopted have bloodline ancestors and loveline ancestors-- those of their adopted family.
Ancestors of place: The original peoples of the land you currently live on. You walk and sleep on their bones every day. This could be the same as your ancestors of blood and bone, or it could be a totally different population of folks.
Spiritual or religious lineages: You could — by choice or by birth— be connected to a particular lineage or community whose dead you give reverence and appreciation to.
Ancestors of culture: Politicians, actors, musicians, thought leaders, from James Baldwin to Kurt Cobain, it's possible to ritually engage with these ones.
Chosen family and sacred friends: People who have been really impactful in your life. Folks who you have come to view as family who may not be connected by blood per se.
Why focus on ancestors of blood and bone and body and DNA?
Even if we haven’t experienced it directly, we’re all likely aware of the how complicated blood can be emotionally and beyond. It’s not the point of this work to perpetuate a narrow view of family as only blood. There can be an obsession with paternity or ancestry to uphold oppressive systems and structural power. Thumbs down to that. This work is deeply rooted in an anti-racist, anti-supremacy ethic.
There is undeniable impact and specificity of our blood and our bodies. And that matters. It’s a foundational place to start. Our family lineages are oriented to our best interests and destiny. (This is not always the case with other types of ancestors.) Having our blood lineages in a deeply vibrant condition resources us. We have a bigger support system. There are more to share the impact of life events with. This is an embodied way we can bend not break when life does it’s thing and is unpredictable.
Cross-cultural assumptions about ancestor reverence and ritual
These are the five cross cultural pillars that are the foundation of the work. This is
how folks who weigh in on the topic of ancestors tend to conceptualize and talk about their experiences between the living and the dead.
1. Something continues. There’s some kind of continuity of consciousness. Something ends and something continues. We’re not only the physical body. That something might be multiple, might be one. People think about this in different ways. Many traditions recognize that the soul is multiple, that the soul is a convergence of different parts or aspects. There is certainly nuance here, and it’s not about universal agreement on what a soul is. You exist before you exist and you exist after you exist. So, something continues after death and that something— those somethings—include what we think of as the ancestors.
2. Not all of the dead are equally well. Just like not all of the living are equally well. Dying doesn’t automatically make you wise and conscious, it makes you not incarnate anymore. And just like with living folks, this means we need to have discernment in how we approach the dead. Some are hazardous, some are neutral, and some are amazing and deeply nourishing to relate with. When calling upon our people for blessings and guidance: it’s a best practice to explicitly specify that you’re welcoming in your well and bright ancestors. Just like you’d likely have a guest list for a gathering in your home or community, or how you wouldn’t take advice from anyone simply because they are alive. There is flexility with languaging here: you can say well, bright, vibrant, healed, well-seated, deeply well. The most important takeaway is that there is a spectrum of vitality among the dead.
3. The dead, just like the living, can change. Just like the living can have a huge transformational moment of healing and growth and change the way they are, so can the dead. Death doesn’t freeze people in a static condition. People can live in really disappointing or even dangerous way while incarnate, die, and have a big opening and shift. This can happen months, years, or even centuries after the moment of death. This matters, too, for how one might die— that that moment doesn’t define their life or their afterlife. Maybe it’s really sudden and confusing or accidental and they didn’t know death was going to be like it is, they thought it was all just going to be over— they can still get their bearings and become deeply well in spirit. This also matters because the core driver of this work is healing. I’ll say it one more time: it’s imperative to hold the belief that the dead can change because the reason one engages in this work in partnership with their ancestors is for healing. So we have to be open to the possibility that ones on our lineages that perpetrated harm, whatever that harm might be, can seek and receive redemption. This isn’t about excusing past behavior but rather shifting and transforming the energy. Yeah, I know. It’s kinda radical.
4. Communication is possible between the dead and the living. Yeah. Kinda like talking to dead people. Your dead people. It’s quite normal. It doesn’t necessarily need a very spiritual frame or emphasis to it, any more than communication between two living people. This can happen spontaneously through dreams, or synchronicities, waking encounters with the spirits, and divination or ritual when engaged with intentionally (like Ancestral Lineage Healing.) Even if you don’t feel very good at it, it’s okay. It’s something that can be cultivated. It’s also worth nothing this doesn’t mean that there’s no misunderstanding. Of course, misunderstanding is possible. 100% of us have experienced misunderstanding with a living person that we’re in the same room as, all the more so between the living and the dead.
5. The living and the dead have a lot of influence on one another. The level of impact is substantial. And we can’t unsubscribe. Think about intergenerational inheritances, positive and negative. Your hair color is from your grandma. Your uncle’s drinking is from your grandpa. Your talent for planing piano from your mother. Your people pleasing also from your mother. A lot of what people experience as a mental or emotional suffering, mental health issues— what if you understood that to be either unmetabolized intergenerational harms or direct ghost interference? The blessings that we embody often are unconscious gifts from our ancestors. Of course, bringing these influences conscious can allow for us to give thanks and to amplify the positive impact. And you sitting with ritual intent to bring vitality to your lineage when possibly no one living has done so in 100s if not 1000s of years, well, that can impact your ancestors. In a really beautiful way. There is a lot of healing that is available, in both directions.
Stages of the lineage repair work
This work first focuses on your initial four lineages, which we work with one at a time. You can think of your grandparents: your father’s father’s people, father’s mother’s people, mother’s mother’s people, and mother’s father’s people. We gather either on Zoom or in person for about an hour at a time. Each session will unfold a bit different, but the overall framework for the method is:
An assessment of 4 initial lineages and selecting a lineage to start the process with.
Connecting with an ancient, wise, and vibrant ancestral guide on the lineage of focus.
Working with the guide to tend to the span(s) of the lineage where repair is needed and fortifying that work with offerings or actions in your everyday life.
Working with the guide to come to know the blessings and the burdens of the lineage more intimately.
Working with the guide to formally and ritually ancestralize the dead who have not yet crossed into the ancestral realm.
Working with the guide to bring the blessings down the lineage, to the remains, and lands they lived on, as well as the living, and allow yourself to become the living face of the lineage.
Once a lineage has a certain level of vibrancy, you can begin to address the deep attachment and cultural work. This can look like invoking their support for healing generational trauma and cultural wounding through your ancestral line.
One one or more linages have made the transition from repair work to relational work, you can harmonize between the lines often addressing deeper between-lineage issues like historical trauma occurring between cultures, genders, and more.
Notably this work isn’t about personal effort. The first step in our time together is connecting with a Trusted Power: God, Gaia, celestial bodies, the Panther, Love, the Divine, by whatever name, connecting to Wholeness and Goodness outside of ourselves. This work is done in the posture of leaning on your trusted powers to help resource the work. Meaning: dialing up or dialing down the intensity, holding boundaries, maintaining a space that is clear of interference, etc.
Each lineage is, as you can imagine, so different. I have seen it happen with a client that an entire lineage was healed in one 90-min session. The other 99.99% of the time, it takes weeks or months, or possibly even years. As best as you can, try to remove linear time from the equation. It will happen as it happens.
As the work unfolds, clients have reported:
Sharper intuition and discernment.
Stronger boundaries with the living and the dead.
Addressing intergenerational trauma and dysfunctional family patterns.
Feeling more connected to your identities and cultural heritage.
Experiencing more secure attachments.
A wider capacity to be with uncertainty, grief, and loss.
More clarity and blessings for stepping into your own power and destiny.
A grounded sense of belonging, especially for those who feel like they don’t fit in.
Vivid intuitive guidance from your ancestors.
Renewed and vibrant relationship with the Earth and the web of life.
Greater synchronicity, blessing, and protection in your life.
A release of grief, shame, and fear.
A new sense of self-acceptance and worth.
Support to shift addictive behaviors.
In working with clients, and doing the work myself, I find, again and again, that this is a container for for having emotionally corrective experiences or a different kind of attachment or secure bond that may not be possible with other living humans. It has obliterated any illusion that I was ever conditioned to believe that I am ever alone.
It is the best medicine because it is specifically for you.