An Anthology offered by practitioners of Ancestral Lineage Healing
This collection of personal stories offers the “ancestor-curious” an accessible way to learn about ancestral healing from the perspective of practitioners trained in the work. The authors share their own experiences of deep belonging, multidimensional healing, earth reconnection, and ancestrally-supported activism, all sparked by contact and repair with their ancestors.
Each of the contributing authors here has a compelling story to tell. We were once “ancestor-curious” ourselves. We come from a wide variety of educational and professional backgrounds, and from four continents. We are people of the Global Majority, Asian and Pacific Islanders, Europeans, and white people descended from settler colonialists to the U.S. and Canada. We are healers, adoptees, teachers, therapists, artists, immigrants, cis and queer, and from different faith traditions. What we have in common is the commitment to share with you our journey with the ancestors, and the invitation for you to walk alongside us in the telling of these stories.
Whether at an early age or well into adulthood, at some point we each felt a nudge, a faint whisper, or the steady drumbeat of a call to connect with our wise and well ancestors. Perhaps we resisted at first, or thought ourselves crazy, but the nudges and whispers and drumming would not go away. Our journeys are unique but the path to ancestral reconnection has stretched our hearts and our sense of belonging in ways we could not have imagined possible.
Radical Belonging
If you, too, yearn for a sense of belonging, whether with your people or to the land, these stories will light your way. Alex Ioannou observes from his experience as an immigrant, “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.”
Orson Morrison in the U.S. and Litha Booi in South Africa, both speak to the African philosophy of Ubuntu – I am because We are. In other words, my humanity is inextricably linked to the well-being of the larger community. They each walked a path to radical belonging with their wise and well ancestors by reclaiming Ubuntu as part of their ancestral heritage.
Elah Zakarin describes a deep relational reconnection with their ancestors. “I feel them with me in the here and now – not as a memory, image or story but as a real living presence, felt in the body, known as intimately as you know the person standing before you.”
Adopted as an infant, Kimiko Kawabori highlights her experience of belonging with biological ancestors she never knew. “I feel like I am part of something bigger than me because I can trace personality traits back to a lineage. I no longer feel like I am walking by myself in the world, all alone in my DNA.”
Multidimensional Healing
While personal growth work rarely affords us access to the ancestral source of generational trauma, ancestral repair offers that missing piece. As psychotherapist Banta Whitner notes, “Ancestral lineage healing can target generational trauma and trigger patterns and resolve those so that they no longer represent legacy burdens for the living.”
Integrative therapist Alyson Lanier adds, “Your most radiant ancestors know what is most useful in addressing your stuck and unfinished places. …When clinical expertise meets ancestral wisdom, we can address both the immediate manifestations of trauma and its deeper roots in our lineage, creating a more complete path to the wholeness you have sought all along.”
The potential for larger cultural healing also emerges from this ancestral repair process. Velma E. Love animates the Black cultural practice of conjuring and explores the balancing act of working the wake, to calm the disturbance left in the waters of the Middle Passage slave ships – without losing the capacity for joy. Daphne Fatter confronts the legacy of her own whiteness in the face of harms perpetrated by her British colonizer ancestors, who participated in the enslavement of Black Africans stolen from their own ancestral lands.
Heeding the Call
Wherever you are in your ancestral journey, these stories will meet you there. They bear relevant ancestral wisdom for our tumultuous and challenging times. They hold ancestral medicines for both kinship and cultural wounds. They invite a reclamation of intuitive knowing. And they invite you to come home to yourself, and to the place where your own feet are planted.
We are deeply grateful to the Atlanta University Robert W. Woodruff Library for publishing the open-access online version of our book on the PressBooks platform. This free-to-you format promotes public engagement and broad visibility, and affords a level of access that is in service to the larger global community, rather than to profit or commercialism.
To access the book on the Ancestral Medicine website, look for the link at the bottom of this page https://ancestralmedicine.org/rituals-for-personal-and-family-healing/. Or you can read the book here: https://pressbooks.pub/ancestralwisdom1/.
May these stories enliven your own ancestral healing process, and weave for you a sturdy fabric of hope, purpose, and belonging.
