11 Chapter Eleven – Intuitive Knowing: A Conduit to Ancestral Connection

The Call of the Ancestors

It began over a cup of tea. We sat on floor cushions at the low table, bare feet tucked under our knees. In hindsight, the altar had been set right there in the tea shop, the elements invoked in the earthy floral leaves, the steaming water, the fire under the pot, the breath of conversation. I wrapped both hands around the warm cup and let the scent of jasmine fill my nose. Today I would recognize this as ritual space, a liminal threshold in ordinary time. Back then it seemed no more than tea with a friend on the Autumn Equinox.

My friend Marianne wanted to share about a training program she had recently completed in Ancestral Lineage Healing. She talked about the course retreats, the people in her cohort, the teaching team. But the most surprising aspect of the program was the contact she had made with her blood lineage ancestors. She met my eyes and weighed her next words with care, “I have never felt more resourced in my life.”

She explained that her ancestors had her back. Even those who had been troubled in life were now vibrantly well in spirit. They supported and guided her in ways she could not have imagined. She had access to their ancient wisdom and felt held in their love. I shifted uneasily on the cushion. Her ancestors? How could this be possible?

Marianne explained that she had met several ancestral guides and developed the kind of relationships with them that one might have with respected and loving elders. Wait, she connected with the spirits of her dead relatives? Maybe that wasn’t such a stretch for someone I knew to be a gifted intuitive, a skilled energy healer, a ritualist. I might even have described her as clairvoyant. But she made this ancestral connection sound entirely normal and ordinary, as if anyone could do it.

The skeptic in me did an internal eye roll. I was no kind of clairvoyant or medium. While I might be able to suspend disbelief and imagine it plausible that Marianne could interact with the dead, I had a hundred reasons why I would not be able to take that leap. Even so, she had done more than pique my curiosity. She had my full attention. I took a breath and leaned across the table, “Tell me more.”

As Marianne described ancestral lineage healing, I made a few notes on a napkin, questions for later. She explained the foundational assumptions of the work as taught by Dr. Daniel Foor: Consciousness continues in some form after we die. Not all the dead are equally well; just dying doesn’t make a person an elevated ancestor. The dead can change. The living and the dead can communicate with each other. The living and the dead have substantive impact on one another.

The very idea of talking with long dead ancestors unnerved me. Were they even available for a chat? Was there some portal to the next world I didn’t know about? What if my ancestors had already reincarnated somewhere else? At the same time, at odds with my internal skeptic, a door cracked open in my heart space. I pushed back, a bit frantic to keep that door closed, afraid of what lay on the other side. But a longing had already stirred awake in me, one that must have lain dormant for millennia, a longing to connect with those who had gone before, the ancestral mystery.

The call of my own ancestors was muffled at first, but quite persistent. It throbbed like a faint pulse, sometimes just above my heart, at other times deep in the belly. If a pulse had words, the words most aligned with that beat were, “Listen. Pay attention.” The call grew both in clarity and volume in the months after that cup of tea. My resistance felt largely futile and irrelevant.

Yet I continued to resist. In the mountains where I live, traditional territory of the Cherokee peoples, the season between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice is a time of waning light. The ubiquitous invitation is to slow down and go inward, to step into the dark months of the year. That year the season itself spoke the words I most needed to hear. Shed what no longer serves. Make room for what wants to emerge. A kind of energetic force field compelled me to incubate, to dream, to wander around in a state of disorientation. The familiar landmarks disappeared. Whatever lay ahead, I had to first adjust to the dark.

Feeling my way in that dark, I sat for weeks with this new longing to connect with my ancestors. I took long walks. I was cranky and conflicted with myself, irritated that I felt called to do a thing I was so clearly unsuited for. It was as if a conversation had started without me, just out of earshot, an insistent whispering. I could never get close enough to make out the words, but it felt like others were making plans for me that they would share on a need-to-know basis when the time was right. Whatever “they” had planned, I waffled between resistance, doubt, and longing. I wanted to inhabit this new ground but could not find a foothold. Nearly four decades as a psychotherapist had lulled me into thinking I knew a few things. But this was uncharted territory and demanded a sharp pivot back to what Zen teacher Shunryū Suzuki called beginner’s mind.

Something as intangible as ancestral lineage healing was surely beyond the scope of my skill set as a psychotherapist. While I hold great respect for energy workers, mediums, and intuitives, I always assumed they possess special gifts for connecting with spirits in other realms, and that I lacked those gifts. My colleague Maris Bergrune (www.livingvoicemedicine.com) calls this the “special person trap.” We would not expect a pianist to become a virtuoso without years of repetitive practice. Why then would I expect my intuitive skills to be well honed if I had not invested time and energy to develop them? While some people do access and nurture their intuitive knowing from a young age, virtually all humans can learn ways to connect with their intuitive knowing, and with the spirit world. These skills are not extraordinary, witchy, or supernatural in any way. They are a normal and natural part of our birthright as human beings, a muscle we can develop with practice. Yet I remained skeptical.

At Marianne’s suggestion, I registered for Dr. Foor’s online course in Ancestral Lineage Healing. Could a 40-something year old man from the Midwest US possibly teach me how to connect with my blood ancestors? In the past I had looked only to wise women elders as mentors and spiritual guides. This would be a radical change. But the pulse kept saying, “Listen. Pay attention.” So I did.

The Drop In and the Doubt Whisperer

Each recorded lesson and live call in the Ancestral Lineage Healing course included an experiential practice, an invitation to drop in, to cross the threshold between ordinary reality into a kind of waking dream state. We learned that this was where we might meet a wise and loving ancestral guide on one of our blood lineages. The ancestral guide would do the lion’s share of the work in healing the lineage. In the process we would not invite direct contact with any of the troubled dead. Rather, we would learn ritual safety practices to reinforce good boundaries there. This language was new and strange for me, yet my longing for ancestral connection remained strong.

Dropping in is neither hypnotic trance nor shamanic journey. It does not involve astral travel or leaving the physical body. To drop in is to be rooted in the present and able to explore another area of consciousness at the same time. Rational mind takes a step back to make space for a more intuitive way of knowing. Could I quiet the chatter in my head enough to do this? I had so many doubts and questions.

While my therapist self had spent decades working with clients in an intuitive way, I was far less trusting of my own heart. I wanted to get this right, to be competent at something that seemed to come easily to others. Turns out the three most frequent worries expressed by people trying to connect with their ancestors for the first time are: Am I making this up? Is this just my imagination? Am I doing it right?

While everyone has intuition, those of us swimming in Western dominant culture may not know or trust that intuitive skills have merit, or that intuition is essential to our wholeness as human beings. Intuition has been touted as our first sense, rather than a sixth sense. Yet most schooling in the U.S. extols the value of rational induction, evidence-based problem solving, quantitative proof. At what cost? According to Albert Einstein, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” If we rely solely on reason, without a balanced attunement to intuitive knowing, we miss the heart of the matter.

In childhood my own imaginal realm was dismissed countless times by well-meaning adults trying to soothe my worries. That scary dream is just your imagination. Those noises are nothing but the wind in the trees. We are intuitive beings by our very nature, by our birth into human bodies. If we are fortunate to grow up in a culture that values those traits, we cultivate and hone intuitive skills and learn to trust our intuitive knowing. We learn that our gut sense is real and worthy of attention. But if we come of age in a culture that devalues intuition and favors a more tangible, data-driven reality, we may lose touch with the inner voice that is our birthright.

As a psychotherapist I had spent decades helping other people recover the lost parts of themselves and reclaim their inner truth. But for myself, I remained more attuned to the “truth” that came to me from the outside world than to the wisdom of my own inner voice. I had some realignment work to do.

The first step in the drop in process is to become grounded, fully present in one’s physical body. We come present in our bodies by tuning in to our senses, through creativity and movement, in practices like yoga and tai chi, in dance. As a lifetime gardener, my path to being grounded was through the literal soil. I connected with the earth, with the ground beneath my feet, in a touchstone practice of earthing. I would stand or sit barefoot on the forest floor for a few minutes every day to connect with the natural energetic frequency of the earth. NASA calls this “Earth’s heartbeat,” also known as the Schumann Resonance, which surrounds and protects all living beings on the planet. To access earth’s heartbeat, I needed regular physical contact with the ground outside my home until that resonance became familiar enough that I could find it inside myself. While sitting on the earth remains an important practice, I no longer have to be outside to locate the resonance. When I’m able to quiet the mental noise and sit very still, I can access from memory an internal state of grounded awareness by aligning my own heartbeat with that of the earth below.

I’ve learned that this muscle for being grounded and embodied requires time away from screens. It requires a commitment to the pause. To access earth’s heartbeat and my own inner voice requires the capacity to stop the tsunami of information that floods us every waking hour. I have to go offline, disengage the external receptors, in order to receive the internal input my intuition has to offer. Until I made effort to break the screen habit, I could not begin to find my way back to my own intuitive knowing. All that cerebral distraction, all the sound bites and doom scrolling, fed a kind of brain fog punctuated by lightning strikes of anxiety and periods of depression. The onset of a global pandemic only made the situation worse.

The second step in the drop in is to invoke our trusted powers, the spirit allies who walk with us, for support and protection during the ancestral healing session. As a psychotherapist I always sensed I had help in the therapy space but had no idea who or what that even meant. Who were my trusted powers and spirit allies? Did I need to know their names? Were they “good enough,” big enough powers to keep me safe from troubled ancestors? I swallowed my doubts and began by invoking Archangels Michael and Gabriel and the spirit of a Grandmother Oak tree in the woods behind our house. While these trusted ones can shift and evolve over time, what remains important is that they have big energy and powers above my human pay grade.

In the third step of the drop in we ask the trusted powers to help clear our space and our energy field of anything that does not belong to us, anything that might create interference, or that is not for our highest good. The language of energetic hygiene was not entirely new, but this felt both more nuanced and more direct. The invitation was to attune to my own energy and notice where things felt sticky or heavy. This meant slowing way down, filtering out the static, flexing the muscles of intuitive knowing. Again, the doubts persisted: Am I doing it right? Can I trust that my space got cleared? As is true of most new endeavors, this one got easier with practice. Lots of practice.

The fourth step of the drop in involves asking the trusted powers to establish a layer of protection around us. A layer of protection is essential to ritual safety when exploring other realms of consciousness such as connecting with blood lineage ancestors. Why such a focus on protection? Is this going to be dangerous? Not likely dangerous, I learned, but any time we invite spirit contact it’s important to layer in protection from unwanted energies looking for a place to feed. Despite the chorus of doubts, here it felt important to take a big leap of faith, faith that when we ask a thing of those big trusted powers, they come through.

By means of this bumpy journey into the actual drop in time, I finally slipped into that liminal space between conventional reality and the realms beyond ordinary knowing. But I slipped out again too quickly. Time and again, I could catch only a fleeting sense of the liminal before the mental chatter and self doubts kicked in. It felt like a fragile thread,and, like any muscle, the fragile thread required numerous reps and full body attention in order to grow stronger. If you’ve ever tried to start a fire without matches, you know how much patience and care it takes to strike that first spark, and then to keep it going. I spent a long time learning to see in the dark.

For months I was my own worst enemy. The Doubt Whisperer took up residence. While others in the class seemed able to keep pace with the ancestral connection process, I grew more and more frustrated. In the class breakout groups on Zoom, I envied every vivid detail transmitted by others’ ancestral guides. The Doubt Whisperer dug in: Why isn’t anything happening for you? It must be your fault. You’re not doing it right. Your intuition is probably defective. Maybe you’re a shallow person. What are you afraid of? The ancestors must not be listening. They don’t like you.

I felt alternately humbled and annoyed. The experiential practices during class were the worst. The Doubt Whisperer would not be silenced: Are you even in your body? What makes you think you have any “trusted powers” or “spirit allies” who will just come when you call them? Especially when you don’t even know their names?

Halfway through the course and I still had not met an ancestral guide on my maternal grandmother’s lineage. My 88-year old mother was deep into dementia and I wanted her to have a warm welcome when she made her transition. How could I help her when I could not build even a semblance of a bridge between the realms?

Did I have some kind of intuitive block? I was quite familiar with writer’s block; perhaps creative blocks extended to intuitive knowing as well. Maris Bergrune speaks to intuitive blocks in her article, “Nothing is Happening.” “We think nothing is happening when in fact something is happening, it is just not what we expect.” I surely had a legion of preconceived notions about what this process should look like. But by now those cinematic expectations had melted into a puddle of disappointment. I had lost my way in the dark.

Intuition has been defined as learning how to see beyond what mind can show us. Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer put it this way, “We know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing.” Yes, but we must first reclaim and realign with that intuitive knowing. We must let go of reliance on external voices for direction and trust our inner compass.

Those were lonely months. Uncomfortable with what looked like failure, I felt tender and exposed. I continued to seek answers outside of myself, from a colleague with shamanic training, a local psychic, in acupuncture, and energy work. Surely an expert with established intuitive ability and proven psychic credentials could identify my spirit allies and trusted powers? I wanted an expert to have a vision on my behalf and introduce me to the spirits I already walked with but had never met. Thankfully, no one presumed to do my homework for me. No one offered to see what I needed to see for myself.

Bring your heart, they said. Wear your longing on your sleeve. Be tenacious. Come from a place of vulnerability. Grudgingly, I welcomed these invitations and persisted. The Doubt Whisperer scoffed when I first asked her to take a step back. You’ll get hurt, she said. They’ll disappoint you. Maybe they will, but maybe not. When I finally understood that the Doubt Whisperer just wanted to protect me, we had room to negotiate. I’m still here if you need me, she said. I’ll keep that in mind.

The Alchemy of Intuitive Belonging

Then one afternoon it happened. Another session with an ancestral practitioner. Another drop in. Another journey to connect with a wise and loving ancestral guide on that maternal lineage. I have no clear idea what was different that day. Perhaps my heart was more cracked open, my longing more raw.

I found myself at the edge of a clearing in an old growth forest. Though I had not yet traveled to Scotland, this place belonged to the Highlands there. A damp mist hung low to the ground. It was hard to focus at first. I squinted, brushed a hand across my eyes. When I looked again, there she was – an old woman sitting on a moss-covered log, hunched over so I could not see her face. Was this the guide I had been waiting for? I sensed other beings peering at me from behind thick trees. Or perhaps one of them was to be my guide? I hesitated, then stepped forward to introduce myself.

The old woman lifted her head and met my gaze. A sense of recognition passed between us. Are you an ancestor on my mother’s mother’s line? She nodded. Are you willing and able to help with the repairs on that line? Another nod. Are you well connected with all those who went before you? She indicated the others in the trees and they all nodded together. Yes. Then she patted the mossy log beside her and I sat.

A kind of transmission began, a warm and weary welcome. It’s been a long time. We’re glad you’ve come. We’ve been waiting. For the first time I was clear that this encounter was not a product of my imagination but arose from a place both deep inside me and long ago in time. This grandmother guide was both ancient and present, fully then and fully now. She offered me a blessing by putting my hand on her heart, and her wrinkled hand on my heart. This is where we connect. You will find me here.

Over time I deepened in connection with this guide and explained what had brought me to her – the longing to have this maternal lineage of grandmothers in a state of bright wellness so that my mother would be well received when she made her transition. When the guide set in motion the lineage healing, she essentially called a convention of all the souls who had once been blood ancestors on that line.

If you believe in the possibility of reincarnation, it seems likely that each of us, for the duration of our lifetime, represents the confluence of a multiplicity of souls. The souls of my maternal grandmother’s lineage came together from wherever they are now in spirit because we asked them to gather and trusted they would agree. They consented to participate in the lineage repair process, regardless of any individual ancestor’s current state of vibrancy or unwellness. As a collective they took ownership and accountability for harms done over millennia. As a collective they accepted responsibility for generations of unmetabolized grief. They mobilized to interrupt toxic patterns, identify and resolve lineage trauma, and restore internal integrity to the line. To do all that, the lineage had to first wake up to the reality of its own history, the equivalent of a spiritual gut punch. As is true for living humans, when we know better, we do better.

Since I first sat with the guide on that mossy log, the alchemy of our connection has grown. The more I trust my intuitive knowing in our encounters, the more she reveals of herself. The old grandmother who appeared bent with age has more than once shown herself to be both larger and far more powerful than the way she first presented to me. Her support and love remain strong and unwavering. The same is true of the guides I have met on my other ancestral lineages, each one unique, each showing up with their own energy and personality, ready to help with the repairs on their given lineage.

Ancestral guides appear in a myriad of ways, not always in human form. They may present as a mountain, a body of water, an animal or bird, a cluster of stars, as Light Beings. Depending on how we receive intuitive information, a guide may manifest as a felt sense, as a being that is seen or heard, as energy experienced in the body, or by some other means. When you know how intuitive information comes to you, you no longer spin your wheels looking for it in the wrong places. Further, the more you learn about the conditions under which your inner voice will speak, the easier it is to recreate a receptive environment for that to happen again and again.

In the liminal space of not yet knowing, not yet finding that which we seek, we stand at the threshold between our previous way of being in the world and something entirely new. This in-between state often holds waves of chaos, disorientation, doubt, anxiety, and a deep sense of loss. Tenderness and vulnerability live here. In the dark we come unraveled, are dissolved in the metamorphosis of becoming, an essential prerequisite to intuitive belonging, first to ourselves, then to our ancestors and beyond.

Reclaiming my own intuitive knowing has been a years-long rite of passage, a kind of intuitive initiation. I have been undone, held, dismembered and remembered. In the choice to trust my inner voice rather than the external conditioning of the culture that raised me, I have come home to myself. The people who know me best say I am not the same person I was before I connected with my ancestors. This new version of myself feels more whole, more in alignment with purpose. At the same time, this new version of myself is far less about me as an individual, and more about a sense of belonging and connection, not only with my ancestors, but with the larger community of beings on the planet.

How does the alchemy of intuitive belonging happen? Much as in any new relationship, the onset can range from bumbling and awkward, to unremarkable, to dramatic epiphany. Perhaps it happens in a moment of stillness and quiet. Perhaps you have an unexpected heart-opening experience. You might need to surrender to the dark. Feel the earth’s heartbeat. Learn your own internal landscape, the sharp edges and soft hollows. Track the messages that come from the gut. With patience and tenacity, with blind trust and no small dose of terror, a deeper mystery comes to light.

Toko-pa Turner, author of Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, says that our task is “to reclaim the parts of ourselves that have been lost or have gone missing.” She reminds us, “Part of you always knows what you know.” Our indwelling intuitive knowing has been there all along. It has lived in the body as a kind of genetically encoded wisdom, an ancient connectivity shared with those who came before. We just needed to excavate it from the cultural burial ground and breathe it back to life.

Rivers of Healing

While my psychotherapy clients could heal their own lived trauma, and reclaim lost aspects of themselves, they often reported feeling the weight of burdens that did not belong to them. In Western psychotherapy the work of unpacking and repairing ancestral lineage burdens has historically been limited by the parameters of linear time and ordinary reality. No amount of individual personal growth work or trauma resolution in psychotherapy affords us the unique opportunity to go directly to the ancestral source of those lineage burdens and wounds. Ancestral lineage healing can target generational trauma and triggers that traditional psychotherapy has been unable to access, and can resolve these so that they no longer represent legacy burdens for the living. As a valuable adjunct to psychotherapy, ancestral lineage healing has been the missing piece that empowers entire lineages to come into a state of repair and vibrant wellness.

Sheila G. (she/her) puts it this way: I have benefited greatly through my life from working with wise, skilled, and compassionate psychotherapists. Since engaging in the Ancestral Lineage Healing process, I notice shifts on many levels. Though the old wounds and self talk still arise, I feel much less alone. What I believed to be individual problems or stuckness were actually the collective wounds of one or more of my lineages. So much of what has caused me to suffer goes many generations back in the family history. Having my lineages become well and vibrant renews my faith that I will continue to heal in my own life. I am ever so grateful to have gained access to this gift of connection.

Sandra S. (she/her), a seasoned psychotherapist, says: When my mother died at 72 years old, I was 35 and still single. Most of the women in my family had difficulty establishing loving and lasting relationships with men and were hurt by the men in their lives. Twenty years and many hours of therapy later, I still struggled to feel comfortable in my skin with men. I would regress into adolescence or younger when I met a man I was attracted to. Then I began to explore Ancestral Lineage Healing.    

I still can hardly believe the wisdom that comes when I drop into that liminal space. The messages are clear and warm. I connect with people who know exactly what I’ve experienced and can see where there’s room to grow. This work has expanded my capacity to trust my intuition. I feel much more resourced and can tap into courage more easily than before. I’m excited now about the potential to love and be loved well by a man should the opportunity arise. I also have more respect and compassion for those who came before me in my family. I respect their struggle to find peace and joy in this life, and I’m determined now to achieve that peace and joy not only for myself but for them as well.

Julie W. (she/her), Certified Internal Family Systems therapist, speaks to the compatibility of Ancestral Lineage Healing with IFS: I first became curious about Ancestral Lineage Healing because it complements a process in IFS known as Legacy Unburdening. While many modalities address trauma and healing, ancestral lineage healing has provided me a direct connection with my healed ancestors who want to support me and my living family to heal the burdens and embrace the gifts that have been lost in centuries of human suffering. 

Rex D. (they/them) shares this reflection: This work has felt like an in-road to the deepest foundational layers where beliefs and patterns took root, a depth I’d never accessed by conscious thought, or eight years of talk therapy dedicated to trauma healing. Most dramatic and unexpected has been the unhooking and unburdening from what was never mine to carry. How could I have expected to heal what I hadn’t known I was carrying? And in this process, the relief of so much pain, effort and suffering, making room to receive the long-craved connection, support and wisdom of my ancestors – which I’ve sensed has been there all along, but is now an active, relational resource. The unseen becomes clear and knowable. What a tremendous gift.

The science of epigenetics confirms that intergenerational trauma lives in our DNA as an inherited imprint on our genes. While DNA imprints from trauma do not damage or alter the genes themselves, what does change is how the genes function. This is referred to as an epigenetic change. In other words, trauma can leave an imprint on a person’s genetic makeup, which is then passed along to subsequent generations. If this trauma imprint is in my DNA, how do I sort out what part of it belongs to me and what belongs to my ancestors? When we reclaim intuitive knowing and begin to trust the embodied wisdom of our gut – our felt sense – we stretch our capacity to discern what’s mine and what’s not mine. We develop a kind of intuitive inquiry muscle, a curiosity about things that are not knowable by our thinking mind, things like ancestral burdens and trauma.

Regardless of the known or felt troubles along any ancestral lineage, we can connect with wise and vibrantly well ancestors if we track back far enough along the line. At some point in time, perhaps many thousand years ago, each of us had ancestors who lived in right relationship with each other, in integrity with the Earth and with their own ancestors. Those ancient ones have the capacity to initiate and manage the lineage repairs. Then why don’t they just heal themselves? Why do they need our involvement at all?

We who swim in Western white dominant culture long ago lost touch with practices of ancestor honoring and respect. Much tending has been neglected. Because we are in ancestral deficit, it falls on us, the living, to reach out to repair those frayed ties. The wise ones are polite and non-intrusive. They wait to be asked.

The reclamation of intuitive knowing happens not only at the individual level. It also happens with each collective of lineage ancestors. The recovery of intuitive wisdom at the lineage level then radically improves the potential for healing deep ruptures in the larger culture. This becomes possible because, whether we are still incarnate or have become ancestors, we are far more than individuals working through personal troubles; we are also the culture that formed us. That culture, the body collective, lives in our blood and bones.

As a cis white female raised in the American South, I have enough genealogical information about my settler colonialist ancestors to know that some of them likely stole Indigenous land and enslaved other human beings. Further back, some were tortured or killed during the witch hunts in post-medieval Europe. Several maternal ancestors were hung in the New England colonies for being outspoken religious dissidents; another was accused of witchcraft and burned. Many of my Scottish Highlander ancestors either perished in the Battle of Culloden or were forced to leave their homeland soon after.

Each of us has ancestral history laden with cultural troubles. From earth disconnection, colonialism, genocide and land theft to racism and white supremacy, patriarchy and misogyny, multigenerational harms run deep in our lineages. Neither traditional psychotherapy nor social justice work alone can rectify those harms, though both are vital to growth and change. Just as personal growth work and systemic change can reckon with personal and systemic harms in a pay it forward way, ancestral lineage healing brings those who perpetrated past harms to a reckoning of their own.

While ancestral lineage healing is not a substitute for activism in the living world, social and systemic change in linear time is most well resourced when the unseen realms are included in a collaborative way. When my ancestral lineages are vibrantly well, they can work with and through me in service to the greater good of cultural repair and earth reconnection. May we each reimagine and invest in a culture no longer engaged in oppression and erasure of ancient earth-based traditions. May we inhabit a global community nourished by its collective intuitive wisdom, and may we reclaim the ancestral and earth-honoring practices that reflect our mutual belonging to one another and to this planet we call home.

The Transformative Gifts of Ancestral Connection

Back when my friend and I met at the tea shop and she told me she had never felt more resourced in her life, I had no idea what she meant or what that might look like. Now I know, and those resources have transformed my life. The first unexpected gift was the reclamation of my own intuitive knowing, a trust in my inner voice, a willingness to listen deeply and take to heart what arises there. That was the necessary conduit to ancestral connection.

The second resource was the profound sense of belonging that accompanied my initial encounter with an ancestral guide and has been amplified with each lineage healing that followed. This relational belonging with the ancestors extends beyond the gift of their daily companionship, in ritual space, in the garden, on hikes, at meals. They call me into a similar belonging with “All My Relations,” a phrase used by Indigenous peoples in North America to describe the web of life, the interconnectedness of all creation. My wise elders want me to remember and cultivate belonging with the ground beneath my feet, the land where I live, the other-than-human beings who are my neighbors, as well as my human family.

A third resource is the regular invitation to embody more and more fully the blessings and gifts of each lineage. When I give visible or tangible form to something my people excelled at, whether a creative pursuit, a balanced financial account, a thriving garden, a healing session, I honor and nurture an ancestral birthright. We tell ourselves a great many stories about what we can’t do or aren’t good at, when the truth involves countless gifts and skills we simply have not yet recovered from the ancestral archives. Like our intuitive wisdom, they’ve been there all along.

A surprising fourth resource was a sense of clarity about my life path and purpose. Daniel Foor has used the term destiny here but is quick to add that destiny is not about our day job. Destiny is what we are here to be and do while in these incarnate bodies. The vibrantly well ancestors want us to get very clear about our life path and purpose and hold that steady focus until we draw our last breath. No time to waste. They pressed me to apply to the practitioner training program in Ancestral Lineage Healing, to become a Certified Practitioner, to scale back my psychotherapy practice, hone my skills as a ritualist, and offer ancestral healing sessions full-time.

As allies in the work of cultural repairs and systemic change, my wise and well ancestors provide unlimited collaborative support. Their input at every decision point helps me discern what is my work to do and what work is best done by others. This is both an invaluable resource and a way of holding me in integrity, accountable to my life path and purpose.

While these ancestral resources are both abundant and freely given, the ancestral relationships themselves are reciprocal in nature. How do we honor our wise and well ancestors? We ask what offerings would be welcome. We listen for what is needed. Part of the practitioner training in this work involved making vows of commitment to our ancestors. Those vows still sit on my ancestral altar as a daily reminder of promises made: To nurture our connection with prayerful listening and joyful laughter; to keep working through the layers of cultural harms in myself and my lineages; to bring ever more healed energy into the world; to honor the spirits of the land where I live; to tend family graves and support family rites of passage; to assist family members in becoming well seated ancestors themselves when their time comes.

I dedicate these pages to my beloved Council of Elders, to all who went before and on whose shoulders I stand. Your breath is in my breath. Your history lives in my bones. Your tears are in my blood. Your memory is written on my skin. I touch the Earth and know your feet walked here, too. I see the night sky and know we come from the same stardust. With your blessing, may I know the full measure of my destiny here on Earth and live into that destiny with each breath I take.

Experiential Practice: Let the Mud Settle

Set the intention to listen to your inner voice by asking a simple question, such as how am I doing? Or how is my heart in this moment? Find a comfortable, quiet place to sit. Bring attention to your breath. Give gratitude to your good brain and invite it to take a step back so you can stretch more fully into your heart space. Breathe fully into your belly and sink more deeply into your seat. Notice the weight of your feet on the ground. Take time to anchor in to the earth below.

When you feel centered and grounded, invite the presence of a familiar trusted power to resource you there. Be aware of any energy shifts that may signal their arrival. Trust that when we invoke the trusted powers, they show up. Ask the trusted power to clear your space of anything that doesn’t belong to you, anything that might create static or interference. Notice when the clearing feels complete. Now ask that they establish a layer of protection around you and give that time to land.

Imagine you are wading in shallow water and your feet have stirred up sediment, creating a muddy trail in your wake. You sit on a flat rock to watch the water below. Over time the mud and sediment settle, and you see clearly to the bottom. Allow your body-mind to mirror this settling into stillness and clarity.

Ask, how am I doing? How is my heart in this moment? Be curious. Notice what arises from the still waters within. Receive the messages in whatever ways they come to you – as sensations in the body, as images or energy, as a simple knowing. Ask, is there more? Be in a receptive, listening mode until you have a sense of completion for now. Without judgement, hold what arises with care and gratitude.