FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
WHAT IS ANCESTRAL HEALING?
Ancestral lineage healing is a guided process that empowers you to access and sustain supportive relationships with your own wise and loving ancestors, and enlist their help in repairing multigenerational wounds and cultural harms along each of your lineages.
WHO ARE THE ANCESTORS?
For the purposes of this work, the ancestors are the human dead from whom you are directly descended, your lineages of blood and bone. However, you don’t need to know anything at all about your ancestors or your genealogy or biological family in order to do this work.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF ANCESTRAL HEALING?
Through ancestral healing, you can better align with your own life path or destiny. You can heal toxic intergenerational patterns and change unhealthy dynamics in your living family. You can reclaim relationship with Earth and the natural world. You can contribute to cultural healing from long-standing wounds such as colonialism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia and transphobia, religious fundamentalism and the like.
IS ANCESTRAL HEALING RIGHT FOR ME?
If you’ve done psychotherapy or other personal development work, but still carry burdens from earlier generations, you will benefit from ancestral healing. If you want to come home to yourself, find a deeper sense of purpose, experience both a sense of belonging and healthy boundaries in your relationships, this work will be right for you.
WHAT IF I’M STILL WORKING ON HEALING MY OWN TRAUMA?
Ancestral lineage healing is an excellent ally of psychotherapy, though not a substitute for somatic, trauma-informed inner work. In addition, ancestral healing is a spiritually grounded process in which the heavy lifting is done by the wise and loving ancestors, not by you or your practitioner. You move through the steps at your own pace, each step building on the one before. The model emphasizes ritual safety, with clear and effective boundaries between you and any ancestors who are not yet well in spirit.
WHAT IF I HAVE TROUBLE BEING IN MY PHYSICAL BODY?
There are a number of ways to come fully present in the moment without centering on your physical body. You might orient each of your senses to your immediate physical surroundings, quiet your thoughts, and notice that you are breathing, for example. If you have a beloved pet, you can come into presence by connecting with your cat or dog kin. If you feel an attunement to the land on which you live, to a tree there, or a particular plant or stone, to a lit candle or the breeze coming in through the window, your sustained focus on any one of these can bring your whole self into a full and grounded presence. See what lands well with you.
DO I NEED TO HOLD ANY PARTICULAR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS TO BENEFIT FROM THIS WORK?
No, not in terms of any particular faith background, or lack thereof. However, there are several core assumptions that serve as the foundation of ancestral lineage healing. These include: (1) Consciousness continues in some form after death. (2) Not all the dead are equally well. In other words, dying doesn’t automatically make you a wise and loving ancestor. (3) The dead can change, heal and transform, often more quickly than the living. (4) We can communicate in spirit with the dead. This isn’t an especially spiritual or magical idea; it’s actually quite ordinary and natural for the living and the dead to communicate with each other. (5) The living and the dead influence and impact one another. We don’t get to opt out of this truth.
WHAT IF I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT MY ANCESTORS?
A lack of family genealogy information, or being adopted, need not impede your ancestral lineage healing in any way. Because this is heart-centered intuitive work that begins with the well ones who lived long before remembered names, you can still make connections with your wise and loving ancestors even without information about your biological family ties.
WHAT IF I’M NOT ANY GOOD AT INTUITION?
Intuitive sensing or knowing often feels like a lost art. At best, it may be a novel and unpracticed skill for you, but one that can improve with patience and tenacity, and an authentic longing to connect. When you wear your heart on your sleeve and bring your vulnerability to the work, the ancestors will often respond in ways you can trust.
WHY CAN’T THE ANCESTORS JUST HEAL THEMSELVES?
Some do. And some are so troubled they don’t even know they’re dead. Others are somewhere in between. Our wise and well elders don’t usually intervene in lineage repair work unless invited to do so. That’s why it’s so important to make the connection and ask for their help.
IF WE REINCARNATE AFTER WE DIE, HOW DOES THAT SQUARE WITH ANCESTRAL LINEAGE HEALING?
Perhaps the idea of multiple souls works well here, wherein the soul’s integrity is neither diminished nor magnified by multiple incarnations. Soul math need not adhere to any linear or sequential rules of human creation.
A FAMILY MEMBER RECENTLY DIED. WILL ANCESTRAL HEALING HELP ME CONNECT WITH THEM?
That depends. If your loved one passed a very short time ago, you may still be in an acute period of grieving. It’s important to be fully present to that grief journey. Given time, beyond the immediacy of loss and grief, often comes a period of intentional “turning away.” For the living, this means recalibrating to life without the loved one. For the one who has passed, this means the opportunity to complete their transition. After a period of a year or more, it becomes possible to reconnect in spirit with the loved one. While ancestral healing can be supportive at any point along the way, it may be most effective when your loved one is available to engage again in spirit.
I sTILL HAVE QUESTIONS. WHERE CAN I FIND MORE INFORMATION?
Follow this link for a wealth of additional information. Also available on the Ancestral Medicine website are podcasts, video interviews and details about upcoming courses.
