The Ancestral Portal

bad grannies and ghosts

(don’t miss the video below)

Around 2 years ago I had a very powerful dream about my latent grandmother Lola.

Lola was a wretched woman. I barely knew and rarely saw her, or should I say I was protected from her. She microwaved a turkey for thanksgiving once, smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish everyday. She had a nasty old truck driver living in her mouth that she pointed at my father all of her life when the alcoholic in her fists no longer had the strength to beat him. She did, however, have the best costume jewelry collection, sticky, dust covered candies in old green glass ashtrays and more gaudy mirrors than a midwest antique store.

In the dream I was in a car with my father and we pulled up to Lola’s house, except the yard was a sparkling green and the house a fresh white, not that old dusty rose. My stomach was in a knot with an upwelling of unsafety and terror; it seemed I was in a nightmare. I was told to go inside.

Lola greeted me at the door in ceremony regalia like she had just stepped out of a pre-hellenic Goddess temple. She was poised and strong. She looked at me with sparkling eyes and wild, thick hair, smiled and handed me an old white Buffalo hoop drum. It was the lost song, the heartbeat of my people that got all tangled up on love gone wrong for uncountable generations. I woke up crying. A true inheritance. A healing.

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We are in the time of year when our ancestral kin have a little more howl in them. As the green bounty of summer drops fully away and the landscape turns a bristling burnt grey, the skeleton becomes more visible- its dance front and center, its howling wails more penetrable to the core of our living bones.

In many indigenous cultures throughout the world, honoring our ancestors was/is a non-negotiable, vital, part of life. Every home had a working ancestral altar to honor the undying dream, feed the ancestors, hold gratitude at the center of life and receive guidance from those who walked through the Earth portal to the other side. In most of these cultures it was paramount that the ancestral prayer call out specifically to the wise and well ancestors so that those caught in limbo, in some purgatory for all the “bad” behavior here on Earth, wouldn’t come in and haunt the souls of the living.

Well too late for that. Epigenetics has pretty much proven that the unwell ones in our family lines are alive and kickin’. They live on through us until recognized and remedied. We inherit the brittle, broken bones from a life of marching to another sort of drum and not dancing to the one in our hearts.

I have worked the ancestral altar from most angles, there are always more. What I have derived from my own experience confronts some of these ideas of evil ancestors while raising a question I have chewed on a awhile, that tugs at the narratives around forces of good and evil that govern our lives.

If old granny Lola was a wretch in this life does she automatically become an unwell ancestor, a ghost ready to haunt my soul for eternity if I don’t heal “her wounds” through me? (I did make a point to grieve her btw). Does she go to hell? Must I protect myself from harmful dead people, from evil? Seems to me the dream speaks to something else.

~Most people won’t go near their ancestral healing due to some notion that they have to dig up the old family tree, examine the roots, hear all the painful stories and flail themselves at the altar over the guilt and atrocities of those who walked before us. Most of us can’t even travel those roots back more than three generations. The loss is significant.

Healing, from my experience, does require a release of the unwept grief that has been living in the body/mind from the losses and tragedies of life. Mostly perpetuated by a dying off of our prayers and rituals for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. There is value in being able to honor out loud, in prayer, the names of my forebears. It is revelatory to understand how and why energy travels through ancestral lines, the forces of karma, Newton’s third law and confront the stories of why that PTSD, anxiety, mystery disease, nervous habit and addiction are super duper sticky. And it is not because I am a victim of some ghost from AD 30.

However, once I unpack the tragedies, if I tell that story the same way more than twenty times around the fire, the Elders send me back out into the wild, with no food and little water for 4 days to pray for a vision that unties the attachments to inherited identities, reties my soul to the truth of my being, to then return to the tribe with a new version of the story- or the ultimate healing story of no story at all. I have done my fair share of time in the desert.

Words shape our lives, which is why we call it spelling.

We cannot rush our healing. The actual tissues of the body and the patterns in the mind need to unwind slowly for safety, the cortisol release alone from extracting patterns can flood a nervous system. And yet, there is a fine line that one can hit where the story, if processed too long, can become an excuse to hide behind, another type of addiction, perpetuating victim identity.

This does not mean we forget. It means, as adults, we choose to live inside of it another way. For the children who cannot- including those that live inside of us.

Often the fear that created the protective patterns, (yes abuse, addiction etc. are forms of protection), that are then passed down and reinforced require great care and the support of professional/spiritual guidance and powerful ritual.

That story won’t budge much if there hasn’t been a felt sense experience of what fills in the gap when that story is dropped. When all we have known is a certain way of being there needs to be contact with something stronger to exorcise the ghosts.

Many communities are returning to the rituals that heal the ancestral lines. I do believe ancestral healing is key on the journey. Mainstream healing narratives are now including trauma awareness that points at understanding inherited pain patterns. Yet, what I unfortunately see in society at large, and in a lot of the Neo-shamanic/Neo-spiritual, ancestral focused rituals (which I have been a part of) is an incomplete cycle of healing due to the lack of understanding the function of trauma and pain, a void of exploring our true nature and the necessity of spirituality at the center of our lives. What is it all pointing to really?

There is a gift in our twisted family lines that presents an incredible opportunity to expand our view of family. If we are blessed with a wicked pain, it can be what drives us to places that reveal a more holistic sense of belonging. This potentially expands the aperture of the psyche to see why we chose such a life at this time of tremendously twisted ancestral lines, awaken compassion, a sense of meaning and reestablish a relationship with the Sacred.

Oh weaver, unravel the mystery spinning at your fingertips, reveal the gospel at the center of the Web we are all dangling in.

Here is where we can begin to break free of co-dependency, which is ingrained in the bedrock of our society, heal these family patterns and thus the issues that co-dependency breeds in society.

~I didn’t really answer my own inquiry. What I know-

What goes around does come around. Just does. It’s not personal. We are instruments.

There are energies we don’t want to entertain, because the law of “what we feed, grows” is real. Most of the time what we need protection from lives within us, reflected and fed by patterns that show up in society and life.

The Ancestral realm is to be respected. If we do not learn from and respect, we will only repeat, history. The Ancestors are our guides and allies when engaged properly.

The ghosts get fed when the consciousness is not aware, or mature, enough to understand the patterns that feed them.

Rituals are vital for survival.

They aren’t necessarily to ward off boogie men lurking in the shadows (even though I have been in haunted jungles that eat people), but to awaken the consciousness to make new choices that align with what we want to see in the world and no longer perpetuate the “evil” we see generating generations of abuse, war and suffering. The ritual also states “I am aware of what I am a part of. I honor and respect the function and boundaries of all things. I know my place”. There is simply some sh*t I don’t need my nose in. So, this is all a protection of sorts.

I do not believe my nasty ancestor is haunting me per se’, but the unhealed pattern is until I shine awareness upon it, reveal the shadow and choose to turn towards what feeds the soul over what creates fear.

(P.S there is such a thing as conscious bypass)

The ritual also sparks the psyche alive to another possibility, a different dream and reality to turn towards for our strength, rather than something to fight against to feel safe.

The Ancestors tell me that their healing comes through my ability to set down the weight of a false inheritance, lay down the mistaken belief that I am anyone’s healer, walk this Earth like God’s helper, “stop cryin’ over us and go sing your song”, transform the story, bring forth what lives deep within me, turn towards the silence within and around me, stand still in a righteous faith and ground breaking patience in the perfect unfolding of all things, stop being haunted by change and follow that old undying drum, forever beating in the heart of my soul. Some ghosts can be the good witch with a healing message.

My Lineage hails from the farthest stars the tend the First Light and dwell deep in the molten Womb of Gaia. My peeps walked this land I am privileged and honored to write from. I have sat in their stony laps on wild ocean shores and I have bathed in their multi gold hues as the day departed into night. They have brought me to my knees in prayer as their torrential storms came and reconfigured my life. They are Lola with a drum in her hand saying “there is a reason I dreamt you in granddaughter”. Bless her nicotine stained soul.

Go light a little candle today, call it an altar, say thank you, see what happens.

Blessed Ancestor’s Day (song inspired by Gospel of Thomas)~ Shira

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