THE HIDDEN PATH OF ANCESTRAL HEALING
When I was young I was never taught about ancestral healing. Nobody said, "Hey Dailey, here's how you do ancestral healing."
However, I was raised buddhist, and in some of my earliest memories I would sit on my mother's lap in rooms full of smiling women of all ages, talking about life and chanting the buddhist prayers.
At the end of our buddhist chanting, said twice a day every day, was a special prayer for all of our loved ones who had died and moved on, for all of our teachers and community leaders who had set a foundation for peace while they were alive, and prayers for the world to be healthy and happy.
I loved this part of buddhism. As I grew older it allowed me a powerful way to connect to the love of my grandmother who had died, and to feel the loving protection of my grandfather reaching for me from the beyond as I moved through the challenging trials of my 20s.
Every time I sat down at my altar and said prayers of peace for my grandparents, thanking them for all they had given me, I was practicing ancestral healing.
And later, as I began to recognize multigenerational themes and patterns in our extended family, such as alcoholism, verbal abuses, and fear of pursuing dreams, I sent healing light and love not only into my living family, but into the generations of family members I had never known. I prayed that wherever that originating pattern had first been created, that it could also be lovingly resolved now, across time, space, and dimension. This, too, was ancestral healing even though I hadn't thought of it in that way.
THE POWER OF REMEMBERING
When I was in my 20s and wildly into witchcraft and many forms of paganism, I first learned of the concept of your "Beloved Dead" through my studies with Reclaiming, a magical tradition that blends earth consciousness, creativity, transformational magic, and political activism.
It was a lot of fun to discover many more practices that I could do to deepen my connection with my ancestors. For the first time I built an altar to my "Beloved Dead" the people I had known in my life who had passed on, and who I missed.
I knew from my ancient Egyptian studies that the best way to remember or even immortalize the light energy of loved ones, is to remember them, to speak about them, and keep the stories of their wisdom and love alive through storytelling.
After all, storytelling is a form of spell casting. It's a way that we organize the energy of our thoughts and intentions, into a form of manifesting here on earth. When we tell the stories of our beloved dead, we are bringing them to life right here with us, sometimes for people who never had a chance to know them. We are sharing the energetic transmission of their love and their teachings (both conscious and unconscious).
It is said in Reclaiming and in Egyptian traditions, "What is remembered, lives." In some ways I've come to see the entirety of my life as a process of remembering... remembering my mission here on this planet, remembering the truth that all things are love... and the remembering even of things that have happened in this life to define me and turn my path towards love.
Reclaiming has some wonderful ancestral traditions, including the annual Spiral Dance which takes places in October, in the Northern California Bay Area every year. During this extended ritual performance, participants are able to trance--journey to connect with loved ones. At the same time, there are altars built so that the community has a chance to mourn and celebrate their beloved dead, with love. The names of the dead are read out loud, so that they can be recalled and remembered by the community.
These are the experiences that shaped my younger life and perspectives in ancestral work. Ancestral healing can be practiced in so many different ways, but ultimately it's a practice that connects us to the wisdom, strength, and resilience of those who came before us.
We are stronger when we remember where we came from. Even if you are adopted or don't know your blood lineage, the stories that live in your blood are activated when you create an altar, "to my ancestors who love me, whom I don't yet know."
RECONNECTING WITH FORGOTTEN ROOTS
In my late 20s I met a wonderful older priestess, teacher and writer, Luisah Teish. She'd written the book Jambalaya, which shared some of her magical perspectives based on her personal life experiences and a multitude of magical traditions she'd risen up in.
Now, I hadn't read the book but I knew all about it because friends I knew and trusted would say, "Oh you should read Jambalaya it's a great book." After meeting Teish and spending a few evenings with her in deep conversation (me mostly listening because she's an incredible channel if you just stay quiet, haha), I decided I had to read this book because she was such a powerful, colorful woman!
What impacted me most was her beautiful teachings on ancestral healing (which really I think is the whole of the book!). As I worked through it, I found my own practice deepening. I'd spent years working with ancestors as primarily the ones I'd known. I did a lot of work healing my relationships with them, even after death.
However, Teish's book was a big reminder that we can work with ancestors we've never known.
I refreshed my ancestral altar and began to make specific daily prayers and offerings.
"What a shame," I thought, "That so many people can count their family history multiple generations back, but all I know is the name of my grandparents!"
Still I set up my altar. I added lovely grains, fresh water, and written prayers.
I'd learned through Buddhism and Shinto that a traditional altar has certain things on it like candles, water, incense, evergreens, or fruits and vegetables because that helps to "feed" the spirits. Unsurprisingly, it is the same in other traditions.
Once the ancestors have enough energy, the light-energy form of their body can reach to us across the veil and share wisdom, or even protect us and bring good fortune on our behalf.
This is in part why ancestral healing is so popular all over the world. In my family Japanese lineage it's so historically important in Asia to honor your ancestors, to recognize that you come from a family with love and intentions, and to honor your ancestry.
Because of the way I was taught African-American history growing up, and because of stories about the Middle Passage, I assumed I might never know anything about my ancestors outside of my grandparents. Their generation went through a lot and my grandfather didn't share a lot of stories with his children growing up, but by the time I was born, he was interested in sharing more!
I think we forget sometimes that our elders can go through some grueling experiences in their journey of evolution, and it takes kindness, and a willingness to really slow and soften, if we want to receive the gems of their life experience.
Many of us grow up with wounds, traumas, and gifts that have been passed down through generations, and ancestral healing is about working to heal them in the present. We don't have to be someone different in order to heal those traumas, we just have to be willing to be ourselves. We have to be willing to trust ourselves to move with self-authority and courage in the world, while also honoring the many different paths our ancestors took.
After reading Jambayala, and refreshing my altar, I really didn't think I'd learn more about my ancestors. I'd tried in the past, to no avail. Long ago, there'd been a family tree created by a distant relative, but it had been lost. However, it was as if the altar and water offerings opened up a floodgate of new information.
6 months into regular offerings, I spoke with my dad who told me new stories I'd never been told about the family tree on the east coast. I learned about my great grandparents on that side, and that my great grandmother had been an excellent midwife in New York city. I also learned about other ancestors.
Then my mother also surprised me one day, calling me out of the blue to tell me that our distant cousin had reached out to her. "Guess what?" She was so excited. "He sent me a copy of our family tree!"
Even though we weren't directly in his lineage, this cousin had taken the time to flesh out our little family branch! In the weeks that followed I suddenly had the names of my great great great grandparents and their extended families besides. I was also told brand new stories about many of these people that I had never known or met!
I felt that this was a direct response from my ancestors themselves, telling me they could see me, and they wanted me to see them. Some of these family stories helped to shed light on why some family members were the way they were, and how I might have compassion, while also being sure to chart my own pathway in life and not fall into the same patterns. Needless to say, when we honor our ancestors, we open a doorway to profound transformation and healing.
THE DEEPER LAYERS OF FORGIVENESS
In my 30s I took a Ho'oponopono training with a lovely woman, Belinda Farrell who wrote a book, "Find Your Friggin Joy." I was instantly drawn to Belinda because she an animated, funny woman who had adventures coming out of her ears, and an amazing ability to reinvent herself. At one point she was a precision stunt car driver, at another she was leading dolphin tours in Hawaii.
Anyways, the training was really powerful, and it was all about forgiveness. Many people today are familiar with Joe Vitale's ho'oponopono phrase "I love you, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you," but they don't realize that this Hawaiian indigenous practice goes much deeper than a single phrase and is actually a form of clearing karma, rectifying imbalances and transgressions in relationships, and making things "right."
I'd worked with my own forms of forgiveness ever since a trip to Kauai, in Hawaii years before where I'd stumbled upon a book about Huna in small shop, and had recognized how similar some of these traditional beliefs were to buddhism in which I was raised.
However after the class with Belinda, I was sick for 3 days and felt as if a wind came through and moved heavy karma from my limbs. I had no symptoms other than fatigue and I felt like my body was deeply clearing. And then my son was hit was the same, sleeping for several hours and just when I began to worry, popping up like he had no cares in the world. There was definitely some form of healing afoot.
Belinda taught me a traditional Huna prayer that had been taught to her with permission to share, from Morrnah Simeona, a kahuna lapaʻau (healer), with whom she'd studied and been given the blessing to teach. Morrnah was considered a living treasure of Hawaii for her work, and as the daughter of one of the last traditional native kahuna priests healing with words and prayer. So this prayer was very deep, I worked with it extensively when I first learned it, and noticed that there was a beautiful transmission that seemed to open me even deeper.
Because I am not native Hawaiian and this is not my mother culture, I approach it with respect and some reservation, so I don't often teach any huna (indigenous hawaiian spiritual practice) outside of the forgiveness work as it was taught to me. It doesn't quite feel like my work to teach, however I also recognize that forgiveness is needed and I'm sharing this story here because one of the most profound aspects of this class was---
are you ready for it?
--was that when things get messy in our lives, it's because there may be karmic patterns at play that go back generations and generations. Even if we believe someone is in the wrong in our current situation, it's very possible that our ancestors kicked off a power struggle or a spiritual war that led to this frequency. When we work with forgiveness, we don't include just what is in front of us here, but we make amends by also honoring the beauty, grace, power, and vulnerability of our ancestors and the ancestors of our friends and frenemies.
In my 30s this was huge, and it gave me a powerful way to approach the things I didn't like about my family, as well as a prayer for healing and rectification in my life when I didn't have access to easy answers about how my life should go.
Healing happens outside of time and space, and then it trickles into our physical experience. Sometimes patterns formed over generations can change in an instant.
LISTENING TO THE STORIES OF YOUR BLOOD
I've spent a lot of time in this blog post sharing my own ancestral healing journey because I think this is a hard topic to be general about. There isn't one way to practice ancestral healing. Every ethnicity and culture in the world has traditional or indigenous ways of honoring ancestors, and the easiest way to begin is to find out how that is done in your culture.
Now, if you are multicultural like me, or you come from American culture and you're unclear about the traditions in your roots because you've been disconnected for some reason, don't worry. I truly believe that one of the significant roles that the New Age movement plays is to reconnect us with ways of working wtih the unseen world, where we've become disconnected due to history or trauma.
You can work with Reiki to deepen into your ancestry. When Mikao Usui developed his Reiki techniques he was always pretty clear that it was for everyone, and that he expected it to go around the world.
In your Reiki practice you can include appreciation and gratitude to your Reiki lineage and your ancestors. You can also create an altar for your ancestors, and you can begin to look into beautiful classes to deepen your traditions. For example, I often teach a Shamanic Journey Course online, and in it we do some very beautiful healing ancestral work. It's been fun to see beginners step into the work through Shamanic Journey, and also to see more advanced people come through and deepen into their lineage work. It is always healing!
Many cultures have practiced ancestral reverence and healing for thousands of years, so don't make the mistake of believing you have no traditions to pull from.
In Mexico, the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) dates back to indigenous practices where families create ofrendas (altars) to honor their ancestors, offering food, candles, and flowers as a way to connect with those who have passed.
In China, Tomb Sweeping Day (Qingming Festival) has been celebrated since the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BC) when families visit the graves of their ancestors, offering food and incense to honor their memory.
African Americans have long held a deep connection to ancestral healing as well, especially given the traumatic history of African enslavement by colonizers in the United States. For many, reclaiming this connection is a way to heal from generational trauma and rediscover the strength our their lineage.
Because of our history here in the United States, some celebrate through very strong Christian traditions of praying for the deceased and visiting their consecrated graves. Others celebrate through root work and hoodoo, with photos and altars of loved ones at home and small meals made with their favorite food dishes when they were alive.
Many different cultures have house altars that include gods, angels, and/or mementos to family members. Ancestral healing can begin with simply recognizing your ancestors. Remember they are not just the past, they are also in your future.
THE SUBTLE POWER OF ANCESTRAL GUIDANCE
In my own practice, working with my ancestors has been a journey of reconnection and healing. A few years ago, I felt overwhelmed with psychic information. As a long time intuitive, I went through many years of having dreams about people in my life, and knowing future outcomes before they would happen. It was distracting and overwhelming.
It's because of my ancestral work--and Reiki --that I began to heal this part of my psyche. After having a regular ancestral altar for several months, one night I had a dream of my Great Aunt on my Japanese grandmother's side. In the dream she came to me emanating light, and I could tell I was meeting with an ancestral spirit and not just a made up character.
I'd never met her before but she introduced herself to me and she said, essentially, "I know you feel overwhelmed but there is something you must understand about the women in your family. On this side, they are all very sensitive. We are strung very fine and tight like expensive beautiful music instruments whose strings need to be plucked gently. We are all deeply connected to the world of dreams and can receive answers about anything. Your great ancestors through Akiko's line were often priestesses, even before temples were formal. We have the gift, and sometimes it skips, but the sensitivity is always there in the women. You must understand that what would be normal for some may be too much for you, and what is clear for you may be confusing for others. To maintain your gift you will need to default to extra rest, choosing to lie down and do nothing even when your body or mind are active. You may sometimes need to stop even when others need what you offer. You will do best when you remember your sensitivity and give yourself permission to honor it."
Well! Coming out of this dream I awoke with a renewed understanding of my mother, my sister, and all of the other women in the family and how they have held their "gift." I suddenly realized that I'd misinterpreted the actions of my aunt or sister at times because I didn't understand their level of psychic overwhelm.
But once it had been pointed out by this ancestor, the entire story of our lives together had a different meaning and perspective. I could see how their highly psychic sensitivity had led to some confusion at different times, and required a gentle touch.
I also realized that applying this new understanding of my psychic gifts and sensitivity to myself allowed me to understand where I'd been under-nourishing myself. For the first time, I began to create much needed boundaries around my psychic gifts so that I wouldn't feel psychically blown open by the world.
Over the years whenever I've met a client or student who has a similar energetic makeup to me (maybe 6 or 7 total our of the 1,000+ I've worked with), I've used a similar language to explain it:
"You are like a Stradivarius violin," (that's a $8-20 million dollar violin for all of you who don't know the reference. Yes, I said million). "Your body, mind and spirit are delicately crafted and meant for expert circumstances. You are not a practice instrument. So while some people may be able to flow in and out of psychic states without repercussion, you need to treat yourself with incredible care. Set intentions when you do the work. Be willing to say no like a righteous diva would if you're just not feeling the vibe. Trust yourself to hold the work, and to rest your psychic energy so that you ground properly every time. Ensure that your channel stays pristine and clear."
Some of you reading this will totally get what I've written and how impactful that can be. And this, for me has been the gift of Ancestral healing. You don't have to be a special person to engage with your ancestors, because we all have ancestors.
I found this quote that has been attributed to Wilma Mankiller, once Chief of the Cherokee Nation, though I've not actually been able to find the text where it was written, but this is also a commonly shared concept I've come across:
“In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions.”
This wisdom reminds us that our actions today are woven into the fabric of both our past and future. It's through being willing to look at the history of our ancestors, no matter how uncomfortable that may be, as well as our own actions today, that we create new causes for healthy living and a happy future.
ANCESTRAL HEALING ACROSS TIME & SPACE
This past month I went to an annual gathering where I was ordained years ago as a priestess. At the time of my ordination, I had gone because I was called through the Goddess Isis.
I'd been working with my ancestral altar, and I didn't realize it until much later, but I believe it was my ancestral spirits bringing me into this next step in my journey. At the time, I was directly ordained in my priestess path from two very larger than life ladies.
One, Lady Loreon Vigne, was incredibly creative, a genius in her own way, who had a gift for gathering talented zeitgeists and spiritually gifted people. Loreon had recently lost her partner whose last name was the same as my young son's first name. It was something of a marvel to see her eyes light up at this very young namesake boy.
I didn't quite understand it then, but there were many similarities that drew us together in what for her would be the later years of her life. I believe it was my need for ancestral healing and my ancestral work that led me to the perfect place where I could heal, be loved, and grow through some old wounds.
The other woman who ordained me was Lady Olivia, a true piece of walking history, member of the World's Parliament of Religions, and an amazingly talented oracle. I continue to learn surprising facts about her today, even after her death, and I'm very honored and touched to have known both of these women and to have been ordained by them.
When I first heard Lady Olivia speak, it was in a grand temple packed with people up to the rafters, and she spoke about times past, ancestors, and how many of those who were our ancestors over time have come to be called Gods, Goddesses, Angels, and other incredible titles. I will never forget that in her presence that first time and many times after, I came to understanding that the world of the living and dead is not separate. We are all here, commingled in time and space.
When we heal ourselves, we are also healing our ancestors, and the ancestors of our future. And when we need help, our ancestors are not far away, they are just there, next to us, living parallel lives and available to lend a little extra power, love, or support if we merely recognize our connection to the wheel of life.
Ancestral healing is a way of grounding ourselves in who we are today. We all carry the stories, joys, and challenges of life in our DNA, lived by ancestors who have been, and who have yet to be. By simply living and making empowered choices, we heal our lineage, past and future.
HOW TO BEGIN ANCESTRAL HEALING
If you’ve been feeling disconnected from your roots or wondering where to begin your healing journey, start by saying a simple prayer of thanks to your ancestors.
Create a small altar, welcome Reiki, light a candle, and speak their names. If you have reservations, simply say:
"I give thanks for my ancestors in their highest form, the shining ones, the akhu, who emanate in love, and even though I may not know them, who are witnessing me in love. Thank you for your journey, for your life. May you always be blessed and at peace."
In Reiki Training I teach how to safely open portals between time and space, and this allows even deeper work in this area. But it's not necessary. You can begin with a simple altar, and a prayer.
Know that your ancestors are with you, guiding you with their wisdom and love. Remember that one of your great gifts in this life is your free will, and as you do what is right and true for you, aligned in your heart, trust that your ancestors are right there with you, cheering you on as you step into the fullness of who you are.
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