The Ancestral Portal

Write the wrongs that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen in a piece of marble.  Let go of emotions such as resentment and retaliation, which diminish you, and hold onto the emotions, such as gratitude and joy, which increase you.  ~

Arabic Proverb

Welcome to the Ancestral portal.  The veil is thin, the forgotten songs of the Earth and its people are heard in the wind that now moves freely among the hollow bone of the bare naked trees.  The Ancestors are alive, beside you, within you and waiting to guide you back to the path Life mapped out so you could walk towards your greatest desire.

When I began my journey in this most profound path of devotion to Life, I would find myself in many “spiritual arenas” with prayer and ritual.  In every circle I have ever sat in, the Ancestors would find their way into the prayers and the intentions within the hearts of the people.   It was the first time I had consciously allowed the word Ancestor to penetrate my soul. 

Ancestry was not something my family talked about.  Like many of us, it was so violently dismantled from my cosmology that, even for a family tree project in high school, I had to borrow the ancestral flow chart of my boyfriend.  I still remember the dismembering feeling I had inside- and the shame that I could not access those channels in my own family.  So broken. 

Until now.

 I have spent years praying to the Ancestors and doing various rituals in hope of resurrecting them from such a deep, dreamless slumber.  For a long while the Ancestors felt conceptual and ambiguous as I worked diligently to remove the conditioning within my own epigenetic DNA that blocked the memories of them.  And most important, their support, wisdom, medicine, stories and song. 

The Ancestors are a living system that lives with and around us in the realms we have forgotten how to “see”.  The ancestry I speak of today is about those that were living human lives before me throughout the landscape of humanity until now.  Ancestry also expands out into our soul realms and encompasses an entire family line of animals and otherworldly beings that are always with us. 

In my “professional” opinion, Ancestral work is vital to living a full human life and healing those things that lurk deep within the closets closed to keep the monsters at bay.  A human life- one that co exists with, and is fully aware of, all created things, embodies and displays the art of reciprocity.  You know that thing that was severed and thus allowed appropriation, domination and severe anthropocentrism.    

The healing that has happened in my life has shifted the narrative of broken ancestry to a Myth of song and remembering.   I “see” my Ancestors, I feel them and they show themselves to me through the healing that matters to my Life.  And the healing that matters to my Life also matters to all Life.  They want to help. 

I pray to my ancestors every day.  A few weeks ago I cried out for help as I am confronting some deeply held traumas in my maternal line.  As much as I feel my ancestors I still do not know any of their faces.  There are no pictures, no full stories- nothing but some names:  Aunt Clara, Great Grandmother Delores, Great Grandmother Audrey. 

And then it happened. The sensations I have always had took visual form. 

Grandmother Audrey showed up to tell me that she has been praying over my mother every day.  You see My mother holds a Gift so close it has taken 65 years of suffering and debilitating illness to initiate it into being and she is at the edge of life. Yet, she is being tended by forces greater than any medicine in this linear reality.  I exhaled and wept tears of grief and relief.  Something is happening.

My great grandmother Delores, who is my grandmother’s mother, came to me as the dream that could never be. She was playing music, singing and writing- and free.  She told me “resurrect the music.  We used to write songs and sing.  There is a profound gift there”.  When the music is taken from the people then so is all sense of belonging.  We are severed from the world soul and our gifts when the music dies. It’s a device of oppression, control and death- like hers from abuse, trauma and illness at 44.

An hour later my Mother calls me.  “you won’t believe this, but cousin Cindy (who I have never met) just sent a whole bunch of pictures she found in her mother’s home (MY great aunt Sharon, again, who I never met).  I was emailed faces and stories of a family line going back 4 generations that was, still is, couldn’t have been, still wants to be….

Me. 

The dream.  I am a miracle and a dream of a thousand lines of unbroken wisdom.  Nothing is lost as long as there is Life.  Every story, wound, trauma, revelation, birth, death, desire- is me.  I am the embodiment of Earth and the stories of people.  My people and all people.

–>>–>>–>>

We are at a time where there is soooo much ancestral trauma that Life is struggling to continue.  We are clogged with the ungrieved and unremembered dead and it is a heavy burden for our beautiful Mother to carry as we plod along anesthetized from our own soul lines and dream weavers.  Greif is how we show what we lost how much we loved.  The tears of grief are the medicine of resurrection so that new life can emerge from the loss.  When this does not happen there is stasis in the cycle of Life. That soul is lost and then not able to alchemize all the traumas, illnesses, pains, loves, losses etc. of their life into nourishment. Those trauma patterns and illnesses then get stuck- in the living family line- and we have what we see so prevalent in the insanity of our times.  

Grief is medicine. Grief is endless- because love in endless.  No grief= No love= No more Life.  Grief is the medicine of pure gratitude. You are taken into a dimension of such belonging to something bigger than you that you drop to your knees in wonder and surrender and remembering 

This gratitude awakens a Myth inside of you that has been laying dormant under the stories of your life.  You begin to see your entire life through a different lens of compassion and mystery.  You come to understand your cosmology within the creation story and why your journey has unfolded as it has.  Your potential is shifted from a linear path of limiting beliefs you have been indoctrinated and manipulated into believing,  and you open your inheritance to a new horizon.  Your being will shift and this is how you know you have accessed the Other realms of life that are, and have always been, there to support your journey.  

How most of us know our ancestors is through stories of pain, through illness in our mind body soul and half lived lives, broken hearts and unmet desires.  But when we only tell of the suffering we block an entire channel of beauty from entering our lives. 

You are a miracle.  What your ancestors endured should tell of the strength and ineffable capacity of the dream of Life.  They handed you a LOT- because that is how much YOU are trusted to be able to metabolize the shit into beauty.  In that lot is a treasure trove that has every wisdom gleened from the immense journeys of love, suffering, redemption, reincarnations, resurrections, births, death, miracles etc.  Every thing is in you.  When you deny your gift and the medicine that carries you along in this life, you deny the existence of all that came before you and thus sever an entire limb of ally-ship waiting to support your gift in finding its way to the Earth.

There is a forgotten Well where the Ancestors live- their song deep in the Earth.  I still get feelings of elusiveness when I engage with them.  Old patterning comes through me that tries to spur doubt and disbelief and disconnection from them.  Disconnection from the medicine of my people is what allows domination, oppression and patriarchy to survive.  But, the medicine of the ancestors spans time that is beyond the destructions we face now and contains wisdom and medicine for the wounds of this time- like YOU.  You ARE the medicine. 

My life and body is a reflection of this deep healing. 

I have resurrected the medicine of my ancestors through much ritual and prayer.  However, the healing and full embodiment of wisdom has come through the connection I have to the wisdom of my WOMB.  Within my womb are the stories, lives, songs, myths, magic, tragedies and triumphs of EVERY ancestor all the way back to the Myth of creation.   I am the portal of birth, death and rebirth.  And, through that portal is every bit of wisdom I need to complete my own rebirth. Here I bring the fullness of my gift to fruition while being supported in confronting the conditionings and traumas that buried that gift.  Big stuff. 

Every woman, in fact every living thing, has access to this primordial wisdom.  We all came through the womb- which is where those ancestral codes live and arrived alive in YOU ready to be alchemized into potential- Life.

We can access the gift in our womb body.  Men have access to this womb essence by tapping into their feminine nature and asking for guidance. The Mother force of creation within the primordial codes of the womb body are more powerful than any force on Earth.   The Ancestors live in that realm.

The wounds that fester in the background of your life, the mystery illnesses, relationships that tear your heart apart, the stagnant creativity, the infertility, the pain in your womb and your body, the lostness- will heal if you are willing to step into this path and honor what is waiting to be included in your life.  

Since that moment a couple of weeks ago I have heard my Mother sing for the first time- out loud in a community gathering with me.  I wrote and sent a letter to my father.  I am playing the harp- well, practicing the harp.   My life expands with each prayer and surrender to listening to the wisdom that walked before me.   I am not alone.  Neither are YOU. 

I am committed to this path.  There are rituals that will help you begin to access these ways so that healing can begin.  Ancestral work is activism.

I only have a few session times open until January if you would like to begin. 

For now I will share a way “in”.  Prayer.  Yes Pray.  You remember how.  See what happens.  Take notice and just, for me, lean into believing in something other than “this”. 

Happy Samhain, Halloween, Dia de Muertos.   Stop allowing yourself to get tricked by forces that prey on your wounds and treat yourself to a little bit of magic.  (had to do it)

Blessed Be.