6 Chapter Six – Outsider Wisdom: Ancestral Healing with Immigrants

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive – don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen – your final delectation – to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

~ C.P. Cavafy

Migration, whether an informed choice or a flight from intolerable and life-threatening circumstances, is a complicated process to navigate. In its wake lie a multitude of consequences that affect both the ones leaving and the ones left behind. For the ones leaving, the act of migrating is often accompanied with hopes for a better, more easeful life, away from the difficulties of home. Although this holds true to some extent for people fleeing from life-threatening situations where survival is at stake, migrating is rarely a simple unburdening of one’s ancestral past and culture. Immigrants arrive at a new place only to face the acculturative stress of adjusting to the cultural conditions of their new environment. Whilst living in a new place, they also must negotiate internally and relationally their original culture and cultural practices. And they have no guarantees as to how this will pan out. According to Berry ¹ there are four different acculturation strategies: integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalisation. Integration suggests contact and identification with both cultures. Separation involves identification with only the culture of one’s original place. Assimilation involves identification with the new place’s culture and rejection of one’s original culture. Marginalisation is the absence of identification with both cultures.

Of the above strategies, integration is often the more optimal outcome for most immigrants. However, in my work as an ancestral healing practitioner with 1^st and 2^nd generation immigrants, I often wonder what else is involved. As part of my role and through my own experiences I hold the possibility that there’s something more than the Latin “ubi bene ibi patria”  or “Home is where life is good.” I lean towards the suggestion that being an immigrant, alongside carrying an array of challenges, also brings its own blessings, seeds of wisdom and opportunities for transformation. In this chapter I will use both personal and clients’ stories of relating with the ancestors to explore whether there is a deeper way of belonging available for immigrants, and how engagement with the ancestors can help cultivate the capacity for this type of belonging.

My personal experience with migration started very young, as my family moved countries several times for work. However, the most decisive turn was when I emigrated to Britain to study as a young adult. Although I was privileged to have the support needed for this move, being in a new culture offered many challenges. Not long after arriving in a place I had only read about and experienced through popular culture, I experienced a huge disillusionment between those expectations and the reality of life in Britain. Furthermore, the study programme I had chosen was deeply unfulfilling and uninspiring. As a new immigrant, I questioned my choice again and again.

I remember speaking on video calls with a friend who had also recently emigrated to another country. After chatting a bit, we would sing traditional polyphonic songs together across the wavelengths. Apart from the difficulty of coordinating our voices with the time delay and distortion of an electronically mediated song, singing these songs together had a powerful effect for us both. Given my intensely painful nostalgia and yearning to not be where I was, the act of singing brought my heart both comfort and good medicine. I was transported to the lands where these songs were sung, touching in with the grandmothers who sang them with us, the smells of the earth, the texture of the air there. This gave me so much courage and ease that I could face what was difficult about life in Britain without needing to run away, although I often wanted to do just that.

At that time I knew very little about the ancestors. Looking back now, I have the sense that our shared songs tapped us into an ancestral field of wellness and support that allowed us to be more present in our lives, even with our individual challenges. As Halifax writes,² “tradition is the body of the ancestors,” and for those of us with some access to traditional art, music, dance or craft, the practise of those traditions is a communion with the ancestors. To practise art forms that have been passed down along generations invites us to remember that we are part of a great river of continuities. We experience through our bodies how we have been shaped by our blood ancestors and by the places where they lived. The past, simply in being laid to rest, has a way of sinking back into the earth. But in reconnecting with the ancestors and stepping back into the river of continuity, we also become a living link which nourishes the Earth and the non-human world around us. In this way, we re-establish our part in the interconnected, interdependent and interpenetrating body that is the Earth.

In my work with Anastasia, a 2^nd generation Greek-American client, she began to connect with a vibrant matrilineal ancestor. Her mother (and her mother’s people) came from a particular village in Greece which I had visited on a number of occasions. Anastasia had no knowledge of the culture or the land there, had never read about the village or seen any photos; she just knew the village name that her mother had given her. However, when she started connecting with her well and wise ancestors, she began to perceive stone structures, lots of sheep, fir trees, and a wide river. Having visited there myself, I knew that this is exactly how the land of her ancestors looks – a village famous for their stonemasons and sheep herders, a village built on the slopes of a high mountain covered in fir trees and very close to a wide river bank. As Anastasia remembered this place she had never seen or experienced personally, I was transported to that very place that I had visited and admired. I could feel the air, see the trees, and sense the sounds of the place in my body. The land stepped forward through her people and was experienced by both of us. This shared experience strongly suggests that the ancestors are the land and of the land, not separate but interdependent. Even though you may never have visited the land of your ancestors or know anything about them, when you develop relationships with the well ancestors, you nurture a profound sense of belonging that is rooted in your ancestral lands. This is a level of belonging that honours the nostalgia and pain of separation from the land, and restores some sense of a deep connection.

The artist Bruno Catalano creates sculptures of people in transit (Picture 1). With an immigrant background himself, Catalano’s sculptures are in a dynamic dialogue with their surroundings. In each sculpture it is as if the missing pieces these voyagers left behind are filled by the land and the environment where they are now, and are made whole again. For immigrants to actively engage with their own ancestors is to also work with the tension between difference and sameness of their lands of origin and their lands of residence. As the ancestors cut through notions that we are separate individuals, islands isolated from our surroundings, we see how our ancestors who might never have visited the place where we live now are helping us feel more connected with the new place. As the ancestors live in the land and are the land, they can mediate across geography, such that even when in an unfamiliar place, we can have a sense of belonging there.

Picture 1: Voyager, by Bruno Catalano

EXPERIENTIAL PRACTICE:

Visit a sparsely populated area nearby, such as a park, forest or beach. Make sure you can spend ample uninterrupted time there. Find a spot to sit quietly and observe. Start by attuning with your breath. Notice how the ground supports you. Observe the colours and shapes in your surroundings, both up close and at a distance. Notice any smells, sounds, the temperature of the air on your skin. Invite your wise and well ancestors to step closer to you. Together with them greet the land where you are. Speak out loud for yourself and your ancestors. For example, “I and my people greet you…” the other-than-human beings here – trees, stones, water, rock, etc. Make a small compostable offering on the land for them. Ask them to see you and your people and to welcome you into their presence. Ask them to help you be more embedded in the place where you live. Let your intuition receive the guidance and support they offer. When this feels complete, thank the land and the ancestors for their presence.

Years after leaving Greece and after I completed my studies in Britain, I decided to return to live in Greece. Although the decision was filled with joy and excitement, the reality of being back in my native land proved far more complicated. Something was different and even more, I was different. Whereas before leaving I would not question many of the norms of my original culture, I now questioned pretty much everything. Belonging was not something I thought about before leaving, in part because I had not experienced belonging before. I had grown up feeling like an outsider due to the particular dynamics within my family. The experience of living for a few years in a different country had both revealed and amplified this way I experienced the world. I felt like a foreigner in the place I had moved to, and like an outsider in the place I had moved from. I was somehow lost, dis-identified from what constituted my identity prior to leaving Greece, and not yet anchored somewhere new.

To navigate this painful recognition, I found comfort in long walks into some newly established immigrant neighbourhoods in Athens. There, amidst the different cultures and the newly established diversity in an otherwise rather uniform and monocultural place, I was less self-conscious; the pain of otherness receded. I did not need to explain why I looked, thought or behaved differently there.

Humanity has not always lived in a settled way. For the larger duration of Homo sapiens’ existence on Earth, people have moved through the world and with the world, following animals, the wind, the water across the land. Often this movement was a form of collaboration with the land. Jenkinson³ recounts the story of the Scythians, one of the last nomadic tribes in Europe, who spent lifetimes wandering on purpose, rather than fleeing an intolerable situation. This kind of wandering allows for being at home and belonging, in a way that does not require people to be “permanently” settled. Flight from a human-made crisis (enslavement, war, genocide, poverty), on the other hand, can cause a deep sense of existential homelessness, a profound loneliness and lack of belonging that is so prevalent in the modern world. Few people today can claim that their ancestors never had to flee in a crisis, or that they personally have not experienced this sense of homelessness on occasion. One consequence of our movement towards modernity and globalisation is the loss of a capacity to be at home. In fact, we have even forgotten that we once had such capacity. This capacity to be at home is inextricably tied to being a part of the land. Even in their wandering lifestyle, the Scythians always knew where their ancestors were buried. They returned to that place and maintained an ongoing relationship with their dead. In fact, this continuity of care for the ancestors was true for the majority of humanity prior to agriculture and a more sedentary way of life. Staying in one place does not in itself offer roots or a sense of belonging. Rather, knowing who and where your ancestors are is the ground on which your belonging grows.

During a period of ancestral work with Antonia, a 2^nd generation immigrant whose parents had moved from Spain to Britain, Antonia spent time visiting the small village in the south of Spain where her grandparents had lived. Antonia’s work involved helping people connect with the land in Britain, but at the same time she carried deep grief for her family’s loss of what seemed a more wholesome way of life in her own ancestral village. She felt stuck between two worlds, unable to move forward, unable to go back. At this point in our work together, her ancestors helped her to metabolise some of the accumulated grief. In one session her ancestors showed her the image of roots and reassured her that her ancestral land had fed her and would continue to do so. Antonia’s connection to her ancestral land had already deeply informed her work in the world, even when that work took her far from the ancestral land. The feeding of her well ancestors and living in alignment with her purpose in the world also feeds the land. As a result of her ancestral healing, Antonia began to focus more on what she had already built in Britain and soon a new and more meaningful life chapter opened up for her. She first had to grieve and close the door of return to the ancestral land of her parents, before she could begin to walk a new road.

After a year in Greece it was time to leave again. Greece was embroiled in a devastating financial crisis and it became impossible to make a living. I was settled in my decision. I returned to Britain and began to work as a therapist there. But I still fluctuated between a deep nostalgia and a denial of that pain, usually accompanied by an enormous drive toward professional overachievement. I focused too much energy on bettering my circumstances, as so many immigrants do, and forgot about other aspects of living. After a series of intense synchronous events and a personal crisis wherein it became evident that these coping strategies were no longer functioning, I developed a strong curiosity to learn about my ancestors. Even at the mention of ancestors I would become emotional and very tender. It was then that I began my own ancestral lineage healing, a modality in which I would later train as a practitioner.

As I reconnected with my ancestors, they began to guide me in ways that helped me feel more secure and fulfilled in my life as an immigrant. I leaned increasingly into mutual care with the people in my life, rather than perpetuating the heavily individualistic mindset that chases success and personal advancement. Whenever I focused on the latter, life became an enormous struggle that never got me to any desired place. But when I trust the support that my ancestors offer, and create mutually nourishing relationships with people, the land and within my home, I move gradually into better alignment with where I am meant to be. This ancestral guidance continues to develop and deepen, no matter the personal and world changes. Through a web of enormous care, I am learning that what is good for me is essentially good for the world. There is no place for self-hatred and human hatred, and little room for what I am not meant to be or do. This is not to say that ancestral guidance has any kind of fatalistic quality. To the contrary, it is more a dynamic interchange between your longings and desires, the way you bring them to fruition, and what the world and the ancestors bring back to you. Life and a sense of belonging continues to expand, neither extinguished nor satisfied by your longing, but fed by it.

Japanese actor Yoshi Oida⁴ tells the story of a skilled actor who makes a gesture and points at the moon. There is no visible moon in the scenery, and the audience does not notice whether or not the actor moved elegantly; they simply see and experience the moon. The actor becomes invisible. Born out in my own life and the lives of my clients is the assurance that close interaction with the wise and well ancestors fosters a similar quality – a life in which you are fully present and embodied, but not intent on self promotion. For immigrants, who often feel like outsiders both in the place of their birth and in the place where they live, a life of presence and embodiment might be more an imperative than a choice. It seems a necessity rather than a luxury, to have ancestral roots when roots are not found in conformity to mainstream culture or fossilised tradition. Ancestors offer a deeper, wilder root system that goes both deeper into the human, and beyond the human, in ways that make visible all that feeds you – the land, the humans and non-humans, the ancestors – rather than featuring you as an isolated subject. This way of moving through life points at life itself, like the actor who points at the moon. This way might eventually lead us to becoming good ancestors, too, which to me is definitely a project worth pursuing.

*Please note that all clients mentioned in this text have authorised the use of their stories, and their names have been altered to protect their privacy.