Five Ways To Connect To The Ancestors (Fellow White Folks, Especially For Us).

At the beginning of every psychic reading, I was trained to invite in my ancestors and healing guides, as well as those of whomever I’m reading. The ancestors that show up for me are pretty consistent. Jesus and Mary Magdalen are always present. There’s a dragon-being who helps me clear with fire, and a boyish Peter Pan-like youth who keeps her company. Often, too, I have a large-bodied male ancestor who glows red and helps me ground and hold the perimeter of the reading.

Recently, as I finished a reading, one of my clients asked: who are the ancestors?

What a great question! And seasonally suitable, as we approach a time of year when many cultures and spiritual traditions speak of the "thin veil" that brings the ancestors a little more closely into felt presence.

The ancestors are everyone no longer or not currently taking up residence in a physical body. Spiritual traditions worldwide have varying ways of describing ancestors and understanding who and “where” they are. Ancestor remembrance was deeply important to those of my Christian heritage, particularly in the early church when many Christians were dying at the hand of the Roman Empire. The “communion of saints” and the vast “cloud of witnesses” kept martyrs and departed loved ones close at hand and participatory in the real-time paradise-present kin-dom.

In my Celtic druidic lineage, ancestors were remembered at Samhain, an observance this time time of year when the veil between worlds was known to be thinnest. Samhain was a celebration of the descent of the Goddess into the underworld, the pagan new year, and when the spirits of the other worlds came out to visit and play (and cause mischief!). This was later assimilated into the Christian calendar as All Hallow's Eve, All Saints and All Souls Day, a season when the saints and souls of the dead were remembered and honored.

In one of my more favorite pagan-flavored practices of my upbringing, we prayed to saints and loved ones who were passed like they were just in the next room over. “Where are the keys, St. Anthony??!!” or “Mother Boniface, please, we need to find a parking spot.”

These parts of ancestor awareness has a very light-hearted and playful feel for me. But as I journeyed deeper on my spiritual path and into my psychic work, I learned about and experienced the ancestors in an even deeper way. You may have read here of my encounter with Jesus, which occurred even before I began to learn about ancestors, but who I have come to consider to be my most consistent and tangible ancestral companion. The Ancestors are of a busy spiritual world that overlays and impacts our world. Some Ancestors are a part of our DNA lineage—our actual great-great-great-grand-whatever. But there are many ancestors that have “chosen in” to our spiritual lineage—these can be human beings who have passed, other earth beings, elementals (fairies, elves, etc), star beings, beings from other planets and dimensions, ascended masters like Jesus and the Buddha, deities like Quan Yin or Brigid. I am grateful to my teacher Nancy Rebecca of Intuitive Mind for the teachings she shared with me on this topic.

My current growing edge has been exploring ancestral practices at the intersection of anti-racist white identity formation.  To be clear, though I think most of my readers know me in person, I am white, and this learning is not emerging comfortably. I owe all credit and deep gratitude to the work of Tada Hozumi and support and mentorship of Yvette Murrell for their guidance and wisdom on this topic, and I encourage you to check out their work.

What I am learning about is that, for many white people, we are generationally so far removed from a spiritually-whole ancestry and ancestral land that we have to reach way back to find healthy ancestors. I mean way back. That’s because imperialism, colonialism, and whiteness as a cultural norm has left its powerful descendants split from any ancestral identity that wasn’t based on domination--which does damage not only to the colonized but also to the colonizer. (This is not at all to make light of it, but for the nerds among you, it's not unlike the horcrux arrangement--one can have immeasurable power over others, but it costs the wholeness of ones soul).

Strangely, the surge of violent "heritage reclamation" and the deeply disconcerting chant of "Blood and Soil" amidst white-supremacist rhetoric--though not the kind of ancestor work I am talking about--actually does shine a light on something true. There is a truly deep psychological and cultural wound that motivates white supremacist rage and violence. The cause of the pain is severely mislabeled, but the wound is there nonetheless.

White supremacy, one could argue, is the most extreme reaction to the deep culture-wide psychological insecurity that results from the soul-split that whiteness has demanded, severing us from any sense of who we were before being colonizers and before "white" existed. Less obvious but also damaging reactions that have now become cultural behavioral agreements occur a thousand times a day in me. Consider "symptoms" such as addiction to perfection, a false sense of urgency, the feeling that "I'm the only one", politeness, conflict avoidance, and overvaluing the hyper-rational at the expense of body/feeling wisdom—I am only just beginning the exploration of how these are all alive and habituated in my own body in a particular way as a result of being conditioned into whiteness. And it makes me a part of the problem in so many more unseen ways than the obviously racist things I may do, say or think. I am immeasurably grateful to Heather Kawamoto for first introducing me to this premise as it relates to white organizational culture.

To be clear, this is not a justification for racist behavior or comparison of the pain it has caused. Colonialism and whiteness/racism/anti-black-and-brownness have done and continue to do immeasurable damage to indigenous people and persons of color worldwide, and the damage is not comparable. There is so much healing, restoration, and reparation to be done. Hozumi, though, suggests looking at whiteness itself as a "cultural complex trauma" caused by a painful separation from ancestry—that has occurred for white, black, brown and indigenous folks alike (though in very different ways and to very different affect). Most indigenous people of the world and persons of color live with the reality of this violent severance from ancestry as an all-too-real daily experience. White privilege, however, has ensured that white folks have had the power to numb from this pain of this severance, and act out our unmetabolized pain violently on black and brown folks. By un-numbing white folks from this pain, the hope is to get us back in touch with our own felt sense of what was lost—as well as awakening our own incentive and agency in what could be restored—for ourselves and our black and brown neighbors. If this framework intrigues you, check out their blog.