4 Chapter Four – Walking Proudly with Almond Eyes

I grew up wishing my eyes were bigger and hated that they got even smaller when I cried, which I did a lot, being the sensitive child that I was. I didn’t look like I was supposed to, even though I had my father’s eyes. He had his mother’s eyes, and she, her father’s – who had his grandmother Belamina Cashin’s eyes. Belamina was of Chinese descent, born in Malacca and adopted by a Maltese family in Singapore. My nephew shares this feature with us. When he was young, there were sotto voce remarks about his “Chinese eyes” that were distinct from his siblings, as if we were embarrassed on his behalf. It’s not as if we hide our Asian ancestry. We are proud to be Eurasian, but there is definitely a sense that it’s the European part we are prouder of – a hangover, no doubt, from the colonial days when being and looking white would afford you greater status and opportunities, therefore more wealth and security.

Race and ancestry have played an important part on both sides of my family throughout history, like many Eurasians in Singapore. We are interested in where our ancestors have come from, as they have come from many different parts of the world. Some people ask if we’re confused or if this means we don’t know who we are, but we have developed our own culture over the last five hundred years, since the first Eurasians were born in Asia, descended from Europeans who came to Asia and married Asians. There are Eurasian dishes like Feng, a mild curry made from pork, liver, and offal, and Devil Curry, or curry Debal. Debal means “leftovers” in Kristang – a creole language spoken by Portuguese-Eurasians from Malacca. Devil curry was originally made out of leftovers from Christmas meals but is now served on Christmas night and other occasions. The spiciness of the dish is probably why curry Debal became known as Devil Curry. Though few Eurasians speak Kristang now, most of us do have a particular way of talking with one another, like when we ask who our fathers and mothers are when we meet to see if we are related in any way or know each other’s family, as was often the case in the past.

The Beginning

Because ancestry interests me, when I came across Ancestral Lineage Healing in 2019, it wasn’t a stretch to consider this healing method. I had already been practising Family Constellations and appreciated its potential for healing health and psychological issues that had not responded to other treatments and therapies. I read a book on Family Constellations work in high-security prisons that had helped inmates take responsibility for their crimes and start to make amends, which I thought was incredible. After doing this work, some inmates received calls from family members they had not spoken to for years. The Family Constellations work had resulted in a significant change in the mindset of prisoners and their relationship with their family members.

But I had reservations about Family Constellations. At a Family Constellations group facilitation in Singapore, I witnessed a participant pull others across the room with such force and disregard that one of the people in the group fell on the wooden floor. Nothing was said about this by the facilitator, neither to address the person who had fallen and make sure they were not hurt nor to prevent it from happening again. I thought there should have been more care taken to give safety guidelines and expectations that participants engage with each other in a respectful, safe, and considerate way.

When I attended a Family Constellations training in Australia in December 2018, there wasn’t any talk by the teacher or organisers about being inclusive of different cultures and embracing diversity in other forms, such as gender. I appreciated what I learnt overall on the training, but my experience as an overseas participant was that my cultural context was not respected. I was treated with disdain for my ethnicity by one participant, who was both a medical doctor and psychologist. Family Constellations doesn’t teach about the importance of creating a safe therapeutic container and responding to the vulnerability of others with care. The teacher of the training in Australia was kind and skilled, but this was overshadowed by several interactions I had that were unkind. I wanted to deepen my understanding and ability to help others heal through ancestral healing, but I had concerns about the callousness I had experienced while doing Family Constellations in groups and the lack of a clear competency or certification process with this work. There is a huge range of training offered, some very comprehensive that run over several years, and others, like the one I attended, lasting a few days. People who had attended a few online classes were using these techniques with others without completing any other professional therapeutic training.

Finding a Clear Path

In early 2019, the Shift Network ran their first Ancestral Healing online summit, and I came across Daniel Foor and the method he developed: Ancestral Lineage Healing, which he taught through Ancestral Medicine. A few of the speakers at the summit were his students and spoke highly of him. I liked his unassuming and down-to-earth manner. He came across as both measured and generous in sharing his in-depth knowledge and experience of working with ancestors through ritual. I joined short online courses run by Ancestral Medicine and noticed the aliveness of other participants and the supporters. Many were doing work that mattered to them, making a difference in diverse areas such as music, academia, social justice, palliative care, spirit work, and the healing arts. The content of the courses was no less impressive, in both richness and the sheer volume of what was being offered.

The animist approach of Ancestral Medicine was a homecoming. I grew up spending many hours outdoors, climbing the rambutan tree in the garden at home, and industriously making perfume from the wispy petals of the white spider lilies that lined our driveway. Being barefoot in the garden with my feet on the coarse, damp soil was when I felt most joyful and alive. I also spent many years working in a natural health store with essential oils, herbs, and natural plant products. It was a natural extension for me to feel an affinity for spiritual practices that honoured nature and the earth. I had encountered shamanic teachings through my experiences working with plant medicines in South America from 2005-2009, and on the psychospiritual counselling course I had taken when I lived in the UK in the early 2000s. My teachers had studied Native North American and Celtic shamanic traditions which informed our classes. But it had been ten years since I was immersed in nature-based spirituality, though it had always stayed in my heart.

Ancestral Medicine’s core values of multiculturalism, anti-supremacy, accessibility, commitment to conflict resolution, and inclusivity of all genders and sexual orientations were so respectful to me. I felt welcomed and included when I engaged with the network. The ritual and psychological safety foregrounded in this approach to working with ancestors was also welcome. One of the assumptions of Ancestral Lineage Healing is that not all our ancestors are well because of unhealed wounds from historical and intergenerational trauma. This lined up with my experience doing Family Constellations work with one client whose parents were refugees from Cambodia and another whose parents were immigrants to the UK from Bengal, India, after the partition of India in 1947.

The diversity of the Ancestral Medicine network was another big plus for me. I particularly liked that the certified practitioners weren’t all carbon copies of Daniel. They were individuals expressing themselves in unique and dynamic ways. I felt I would be accepted and supported to be myself, like they were. I checked out the practitioner training and liked how extensive and comprehensive the requirements and training programme were. This was the training I was looking for, with a clear path to completion and certification. I chuckled at the prerequisite that applicants have the ability to be a “non-annoying learner.” They had me at “non-annoying.” These were clearly my people.

Nevertheless, I hesitated as I was on a two-year mindfulness meditation teacher training and had other financial commitments. I didn’t have the time, money, or bandwidth to take on another training, let alone one that would require me to fly to the East Coast of the US twice within eight months. But I very much wanted new tools to help my clients with their ancestral trauma. I noticed that not all my clients responded to Family Constellations. In addition, I wondered if the training would include material on how to heal a chronic health issue I had. I was spending a lot of money on treatments and directing all my resources and mental energy to this health issue and was not moving forward in other aspects of my life, like dating and having a serious relationship. I felt stuck and like I couldn’t “grow up” because of this health issue, much like my mother’s sister Phyllis, who died at the young age of 19 when she got malaria during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore. In Family Constellations work, the belief is that unresolved issues in a family can be experienced by extended family members and descendants, especially when the issues are unacknowledged or not talked about by the family, like the tragic early death of Phyllis. In the past, it was thought that by not talking about painful issues, a family would be able to move on and not suffer as much, so I barely heard about her, but the emotional wound still existed in the psychic field of my mother’s family and was possibly influencing my inability to heal my health issue and causing me to feel that I couldn’t “grow up.”

A Series of Nudges

My ancestors then came to me in a dream. My father asked me in the dream if I was “the crazy one,” which to me meant a healer or shaman, as they are often seen as weird or crazy. I also saw my mother’s brother, Henry, and my grandmother in the group that was comforting me as I spoke of my struggles and sobbed. I was crying so much that I went to get a tissue to blow my nose and then threw it in the bin in my room. I thought to myself, if I see this tissue in the bin when I wake up, I will know if I was really crying or if it was just my dream. When I woke up, the tissue was there.

My cousin Debbie, Henry’s daughter, then contacted me to tell me that she’d been to see a medium who had communicated with my father and told her he was very proud of me, would always be guiding me, and that I should follow my heart and dreams, which I took to mean that I should go ahead and apply for the Ancestral Lineage Healing training.

One evening, as I was leading a group meditation in my office, I saw a vision of a desert in Africa and an African woman carrying a jug on her head. When I opened my eyes and we were drawing cards, I drew one of an African woman. This made me think of Daniel, who has made pilgrimages to Nigeria as a student of Yorùbá culture and an initiate of Ifá/Òrìṣà tradition. As I was closing up my office to go home that night, my friend Mandy from the UK sent me photos of my father, which she had never done before. It was another sign, the third one from my father, nudging me toward the Ancestral Lineage Healing Practitioner Training. I closed up and walked to get the bus, not far from Tessensohn Road, named after my great-great-grandfather, John Edwin Tessensohn, a community leader and pioneer. As I thought of him, strong winds whipped around me, making me feel that my ancestors wanted to make their presence known. I took this as final validation that I should apply for the practitioner training.

I then decided to leave my shared office space in September 2019 in anticipation of doing the practitioner training. The other therapists I shared the space with quickly found another tenant to take over my part of the rent so I could leave sooner than I had planned to. I would take a year off to focus on learning, and not having to pay rent for my office would help me cut costs. My intention was to move my work online, and in light of the pandemic that started six months later, this turned out to be a timely move. I would have had to pay rent for an office that I couldn’t see clients in because of the COVID-19 restrictions in Singapore. Within days of moving out of my office, I received an email telling me that I’d been accepted into the training.

Deepening Into Relationship

One of the requirements to enter the practitioner training is to have at least four individual sessions with a practitioner and two or more lineages healed. My initial experiences in these individual sessions were intense. I would get exhausted, sleeping for hours after a session. I had to learn how to build up stronger boundaries and tend to my relationship with my powers and guides so I wasn’t being drained by being too enmeshed with my ancestors who were not yet well. I also had to learn how to do trance work and discern what I was sensing. During one session, I saw in my mind’s eye a large, barrel-shaped, dark-skinned tribal man with brown and white feathers dancing. I thought he was an ancestor, but when I checked, he said that he was “just passing through” and then danced away. I did connect with my ancestors and receive information from them, but I was trying too hard at first, instead of just trusting my senses and deepening into relationship. In time, I relaxed and learnt to be patient and wait for my ancestors to respond to me instead of pushing for a response.

The first lineage I chose to work with was my father’s mother’s lineage because my grandmother Zena was the only grandparent who was alive when I was born, and I still felt a bond with her feisty presence. This lineage showed itself to me as a matriarchal culture from Melanesia, in the region of Papua New Guinea, likely where I get my spiral curls from. They greet me with dance. After seeing this in my sessions, I found out that they have welcome dances as greetings in Melanesia, and dance is a very important part of their ritual life. My ancestors showed me their experience of being invaded over many years. They had to go through battle and the loss of their lands, but originally they were peaceful people who lived close to nature and liked to celebrate and enjoy life. They often encourage me to dance and enjoy my life. I saw that this lineage has a tradition and gift of healing through the hands and with plants. They appeared to me as a vibrant line, one that I could connect with easily.

The second lineage I worked on was my father’s father’s line, a lineage that has changed so much over the years. When I started the healing work, I went too far back to my Neanderthal ancestors and had to come forward in time, where I saw my ancestors pillaging and invading other lands. It was not easy to witness the violence they had perpetrated, and it took a while for me to come to terms with this history. There was more healing work needed here than on my father’s mother’s line, where they had largely been the ones who had been invaded.

The ancestral guide on this paternal line first appeared as a hooded white European man with long grey hair and a beard, then shape-shifted to a Gregorian monk. I sensed the monk was me or was related to me when I was an ancestor on this line. Some indigenous cultures, like Aboriginal Australian culture, believe that we can be our ancestors, that our soul has parts, and one part can be an ancestor while another part can incarnate into physical form, often in the same lineage and within a few generations. The ancestral guide on this line now appears as a shaman from Central Asia who wears a cloak with small rectangular mirrors sewn onto it like a mosaic. I often see a horse running fast in the wind when I connect to this line and the scenery of open plains with mountains. The ability this lineage has to shape-shift helps me bring transformation to my own healing work. These ancestors told me to eat beef, which I resisted at first, as I had been vegetarian and even vegan previously, and also just didn’t like red meat. I tried to bargain with them and offered to eat chicken or drink wine, but they kept harping on about it, so eventually I did eat beef. The beef was satiating and energising in a way that I did not expect. I think my gut microbiome digests beef more easily because it is what my ancestors ate for many generations. Blood tests later showed I had low ferritin levels – ferritin is a protein that stores iron – so eating beef likely helps increase these levels. I don’t eat a large amount of beef, and I eat grass-fed beef where possible, but when I do, I find that it nourishes and strengthens my body.

I left my mother’s lineages to last as I had seen heavy energy on those lines during the initial ancestral assessment. While I anticipated heaviness on both her mother’s and father’s lines, what surprised me was how grateful her father’s lineage was for the healing, as that line had the heaviest energy. When I worked on my mother’s father’s line, I saw that there had been a dislocation because my ancestors had left their homeland in Ireland, and this had caused a rupture and wounding in the lineage. As the healing happened, the whole line moved from Ireland to Sri Lanka. This land felt different. I was home. I recognised the land and had a stronger connection to it. A few days after the line moved in the session, my mother told me, without my asking her, that three of her grandparents had come from Sri Lanka to Malaysia. It’s not that I don’t have Irish ancestors, but my mother’s father’s lineage is likely from Sri Lanka. My mother said that her father’s father had taken his mother’s surname Bracken instead of his father’s, which was Perera, since there were not many males to carry on the Bracken family name. My ancestors on this line told me that we have the gift of using words to heal. For me, this manifests through the writing I do and in my work – how I communicate with my clients in sessions, talks, and classes. Debbie, my cousin on this line, sings, and her sister uses prayers and mantras to heal. I see the ancestral guide on this line as working with a large bird of prey, like an eagle or hawk. The bird is a helping spirit that brings a wider perspective, which helps me when I write and in my work with others. This line wants me to honour and show gratitude for life through breaking bread with others.

My mother’s mother’s line started in Ireland too, then moved to what looked to me like Sri Lanka, then India, and settled in a desert area that looked like Turkey or Western Asia. When the line moved to Asia, I heard a primal howl and saw a figure holding a trident. My research indicated that this was Rudra, a Rigvedic deity associated with Shiva and the wind or storms, also known as “the roarer.” The ancestral guide on this line appears as a lithe but tough female warrior. The women in this lineage have a reputation for being steely, so it made sense that the guide would be a warrior. I get a lot of strength from this guide’s “don’t sweat the small stuff” and “get over yourself already” stance and orientation to life. It doesn’t feel unkind or harsh; it’s just tough with little indulgence or sentiment.

I worked on these four lineages before and during the training, which is when I had the experience of them moving countries and the ancestral guides changing form. It is interesting to me how my experience of the lines moving from Europe to Asia mirrors the tendency of my family to centre their European ancestry. We were told, “If you marry a European, you will improve the breed.” Yet when my mother’s Swiss boss took an interest in her, she rejected him because he “smelled funny.” At the same time, she is quick to say that her family has Sinhalese blood, not Tamil Sri Lankan. Even among Asians, there are better Asians to be in my family, and Tamil is not one of them. Neither was Chinese. When a Japanese soldier, Morita, wanted to date my aunt Phyllis during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore, the story goes that my grandfather stood at the doorway of the family home, asking him if he was Chinese, and only let him in the house because he was Japanese.

My surname is German in origin, and my ancestor, Jochem Hendrik Tessensohn, came to Asia from Rostock on the northern Baltic Sea coast of Germany as a carpenter for the Dutch East India Company in the 1700s, and he stayed in Asia. My father’s side of the family also has ancestors from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Melanesia, England, Holland, France, India, and China through Belamina, as mentioned above. My ancestor on my father’s father’s side, Adriaan Koek, was a prominent Dutch Burgher and the biggest known slave owner in Malacca, according to a census in the 1820s. The Dutch Burghers are Eurasians from Sri Lanka. Adriaan’s grandmother was an emancipated slave of Sinhalese origin, and his wife, Maria Dionicia Wilhelmina Dieterich, was the daughter of an emancipated slave from the Spice Islands, Kittjil van Makassar. My great-great-great-grandfather on my mother’s father’s side, John Bracken, worked as a coffee planter in Sri Lanka. His descendants came to Singapore through Malaysia. From what I know, most of my mother’s family is Sri Lankan Burgher, and she has Dutch, English, Irish, Scottish, Swedish, Sinhalese, Indian, and Jewish ancestry. Her DNA results show Baltic, Balkan, and Mesopotamian ancestry as well.

The Greater Goodness

Since doing Ancestral Lineage Healing work, there is a feeling of being connected to a wider field of my ancestors, powers, and guides – a felt sense of being held in a greater container of goodness – that helps me navigate the challenging times of my life. When I struggle or have issues, I process them more easefully and don’t get as tied up in conflict with others and within myself. In short, my lows are not as low, I am more resilient, and somehow I find the right people to help me through times when I am down or unwell, or the right people come to me. I also have great friends in my life and a support system that sustains me and gives my life meaning, peace, and great joy.

Ancestral Lineage Healing has also been a process for me of uncovering the gift of words and story that I have received from my ancestors, and this has changed the way I write. There’s a lot more lightness for me in what had previously been a heavy and painstaking process. I can sense the words coming through me, and not just from my own efforts. My ancestors write with me and support me in finding my voice as a writer. I no longer feel so much like there is a “right” way to write and that I have to meet a standard that was always just out of reach. I feel more credible in who I am as a writer and that my way of expressing myself through words is valid.

It has given me a sense of purpose to support others in their Ancestral Lineage Healing work. What I consistently hear from clients is how loving and supportive their ancestors are. For example, Flo had such loathing for her Chinese heritage, but now feels proud of her Hakka and Teochew ancestry and brings this into her art and the new colourful clothes she wears. When she first started her sessions, Flo was afraid that her ancestors would be angry with her, that she would offend them, or that she would just be making it all up in her mind, but she found her ancestors to be kind, reassuring, and comforting. She feels very safe with them. This has impacted her relationship with her parents and living family for the better. Flo can bond with her father over conversation now, and not just when they watch TV together. She is no longer ashamed of her culture and doesn’t see white culture as superior to hers. She is more confident in herself and happier, and she doesn’t feel the need to take on other people’s problems as much, which she used to feel obliged to do.

It was really meaningful for me to support Luke, who did not want to look at how his white ancestors had harmed indigenous communities and profited off the exploitation of them and their lands. As he moved through his ancestral healing sessions, Luke decided to donate money to educational initiatives for Aboriginal children in Australia. Another client, Alex, found that her suicidal thoughts became less intense after her ancestral lineage healing sessions. She has not seriously considered suicide since she has done this work and increasingly thrives in her professional and personal life.

Yet another client very much wanted to be in a relationship and asked her ancestors for help, though she didn’t really believe that she would find anyone. A few months after the sessions, I saw photos of her with a man on Instagram and asked her if they were dating, and she said that she was very much in love and happy with this man she had met. Then there was a client who was trying to establish herself as a therapist and had more regular clients after her healing work with her ancestors and is now fully booked weeks in advance.

Diversity, Decolonisation, and Duty

I’ve learnt along the way in working with clients that not everyone’s ancestors respond to verbal instruction or want to sit still, so I use music and play my drum at times during sessions. This supports my clients in connecting with their ancestors while encouraging them to dance or move their bodies in ways they feel led. Traditionally, many cultures use dance and music to go into trance and connect with ancestors for healing work, so my intention is to reclaim and honour these approaches by offering this option to my clients and, in doing so, free any perception that has been limited by language.

As for myself, this healing process I have undertaken with my ancestors has helped me to decolonise and to reclaim my neurodiversity. I question where I feel the pressure to fit into neurotypical and cultural boxes, and I appreciate my almond-shaped eyes now – how they reveal my ancestry from one of the oldest continuous civilisations in the world and the rich culture of China through Belamina, my great-great-great grandmother.

I can see how devaluing local culture and seeing it as inferior to white European culture was a legacy of colonisation, where cultures were deemed less civilised so as to justify exploiting their resources. This can lead to cultural cringe in colonised populations – an internalised inferiority complex wherein people dismiss their own culture as inferior when compared to other, commonly European or Western, cultures. In Singapore, I have witnessed expats with a colonial mentality, viewing local culture as inferior to theirs, talking about it in dismissive and demeaning ways, while profiting from working here. This pattern is very like the colonisers in the past, who did not honour the culture and lands in Asia. Rather, they set themselves above locals while enriching themselves through the resources of the land of those they deemed inferior. Some of these colonisers were my ancestors, and I can still see their power dynamics and the hoarding of resources playing out in my family even today.

I have also started to question my desire to “master” writing and realise that I don’t have to be a “best-selling” author in order to prove myself as a writer. How much of my need for mastery has been influenced by colonial ideas of individualism, conquering, and accumulation of wealth through monetising creativity and seeing that as the epitome of success and credibility as a creative? I deconstructed my ambition as a writer and now write as a form of self-expression and service. I have much humbler goals in my professional life as well. I no longer seek to establish myself in a big way internationally with a wider audience. I recognise that I have many privileges that make it possible for me to give back and make a difference for others, so I seek to do that in any way that I can through my work as a healer and mentor, rather than as a way to make money. I’m not interested in accumulating wealth but in redistributing it, being a part of building a more equitable world through my actions, and helping others heal and live their lives more fully.

It is an act of decolonisation to stop thinking about what I want to achieve and attain as an individual. Instead I ask how am I relating and contributing to the greater whole in a beneficial way, being a representative of my ancestors, walking proudly on this earth with my curly hair and almond-shaped eyes. There is a deeper understanding within me that it is my duty to be a worthy member of my community and a responsible custodian in right relationship with the land I live on, the ancestral land of the Orang Laut, the people of the sea. I no longer feel entitled to or expect comforts or ease in my life, though I seek to enjoy each day, living in good relationship with all of life, human and otherwise, including myself.

Exercise: Connecting with Your Ancestors Through Music and Movement

~ Choose an instrument to play, like a drum, or music that you enjoy or that has an association for you with your culture and ancestors, e.g. Celtic music if you have Irish ancestors.
~ Set up a dedicated ritual space, e.g. burn a candle or light incense.
~ If at any point in the ritual you feel restless or unsettled, you can collect your attention by noticing and naming shapes and colours you see around you. Then resume the ritual when you feel more settled.
~ Ground yourself by bringing your awareness to your body. If it’s difficult for you to feel your body, try to focus your attention for a few moments on your feet, hands, belly, and then your heart or chest area in a relaxed way.
~ Pray and attune to any powers and guides you already have established relationships with, and ask them to set a boundary of protection around you, or visualise this boundary.
~ Begin to play the instrument or music and dance, holding a heartfelt intention to connect with your well ancestors. You may receive visions that confirm you have connected with your ancestors, get a feeling or bodily sense, or just know that you are in contact.
~ Once you have contact, allow yourself to deepen into the connection. You can ask your ancestors for guidance, insight, or healing. Their response may come in the form of a visual image, thoughts, sensations, or feelings.
~ Continue for as long as you want to or feel your ancestors are with you. Then give thanks to your ancestors and any powers or guides you have called in before you transition out of ritual space and bring your practice to a close.

Remember that you always have volition and can stop the ritual at any point. You also don’t have to agree with or accept what your ancestors communicate with you. If you feel unsafe, ask your powers and guides to strengthen your boundary, or visualise doing so yourself. If you would like more support, consider working with an Ancestral Lineage Healing practitioner.