The Dead are Key to Our Survival
We’ve been born into a time of tremendous loss and great potential.
Our choices as a species over the next century will determine the fates of hundreds of thousands of life forms here on this precious Earth, including our own. All moments in history are dynamic, and it’s not a conceit to affirm that we’re currently amidst a very few especially consequential generations. Considering that it took a few million years for our species just to find our literal bipedal footing, we are now in a time of great acceleration, deeply shaped by the capacity to reflect on our story in written words that can be shared in an instant around the world.
Gazing into the great storm of the coming years, a perhaps unexpected vision appears of who we have been for so very long. A vision of our many ancestors in their strength and vulnerability, in their failures and in their tenderness. A vision of the truly ancient ones from tens of thousands of years past reminding us that these are our roots and also that these elders of our elders are among the ones returning here to Earth today.
It’s that the ancestors have never really been about the past. They’re the not-currently-incarnate ones in our extended human family, and like us, they live in the present moment. Yes, many of them have previously walked the Earth, but they are also the collective consciousness and communities from which human souls newly return. They’re the ones to come, tomorrow’s pregnancy, and the quiet witnesses when we imagine an accounting of our life on Earth. The ancestral waters touch all sides of the island of our incarnation, and they have at least as much to do with the future as the past.
To work for a better future is to work for and with the ancestors. To engage in ancestral healing is to seek to balance the ledger with the world to come and to bring that better world into present reality.
As we look forward to opening the next cohort of the Ancestral Healing Practitioner Training, these are the words I’m moved to write: The ancestors have very little to do with the past. They are more acutely – and especially – the ones to come. And they’re leaning on us now, asking us to stretch, to breathe, to open, and to relax into the greater reality that they have always known is possible. They are asking us to birth the vision of their thriving; through our choices today, our systems, our everyday rituals and yes, at times also through our bodies. And they are asking us to understand more consciously that our specific lives are the bridge for the world to come.
When people train to guide ancestral healing services, yes, it’s about resolving past pain to live more fully in the present. But it’s also about this work of midwifing the new reality, of helping our clients to relax, to channel, and to manifest the vision of a thriving Earth that includes human beings. This is not only possible, but is the work of our specific times and a task for which we have been preparing for many hundreds of thousands of years.
If learning how to work deeply with the ancestors is something that calls to you, we invite you to consider joining us for our Ancestral Healing Practitioner Training. In this training, you will cultivate your ritual skills in a way that allows you to work side-by-side with your ancestors as mentors and colleagues. In this immersive one-year training, you will work with experienced ritualists to learn how to safely develop your healership skills and catalyze deep lineage healing through cultivating safe, sustained ancestral relationships. The regional focus of the 2024-2025 cohort will be on the Americas.
