Ancestral Lineage Healing in Historical Context
Many contemporary cultures have living traditions of ancestral connection, rooted in time before history. Community rituals and individual practices of contact with the ancestors are relied-upon sources of orientation, guidance, healing, and course-correction. The ancestors support their descendants in navigating the many passages of life and death, and rituals performed by the living, during and after the time of family deaths, support the dead in their journey to join the ancestors.
Within living traditions of ancestral relationship, each human lineage carries its own legacies of blessings, gifts, responsibilities, and burdens. Each has ancient roots in elemental and archetypal forces; each has specific plant, animal, and spirit allies. The ancestors are stewards of the essential knowledge, for each lineage, of who we are, what gifts and alliances we bring to this world, and what we tend and carry forward.
Along many of our lineages, these traditions and transmissions were disrupted, hundreds or thousands of years ago, by empire-building, forced relocation, enslavement, ethnic or religious persecution, colonial settlement, and other forms of local or widespread subjugation. In the wake of these disruptions, many of the people who came before us were not prepared in life or assisted at death to join their ancestors and become mentors to the living.
Surprisingly, to those of us born into the breach, the ancestors on each of our lineages, from before the times of rupture, are still there! They remain collectively conscious, cohesive, resourced, and available for connection.
Ancestral Lineage Healing is about partnering with the wise, well, and vibrant ancestors on each of our own lineages, to assist the dead who are not yet well (i.e. disoriented, troubled, or ghostly) to join them. This enables us, as their living descendants, to restore our relationships with intact ancestral lineages, as sources of orientation, guidance, and resilience, as we navigate the changes and challenges of own lives and times.
Sculpture "Motherhood Head" by Mary Warshaw
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." — William Faulkner