What if connection is all around us, within us, but we’ve just not known how to enter in, participate? What if the human body is the portal for this incarnate connection, regardless of gender or orientation, but our dissociation(s) pull us further and further away from what is, whatever is right here for us? For us all?
These are some of the questions arising for me as I finally enter into the Ancestral Medicine work of Daniel Foor and his community of practice. I have had his book (published in 2017) for years, but felt an obstacle in entering in until recently, for whatever reason. An elder-friend of mine has some aversion to him, his work, so to honor her, I too kept him and his work at a distance. Another spirit-friend has worked within this community for a long while now. Her language is inviting, and a particular short-course to begin in August caught my own sacred work: After the Rage was the tagline for a course on Tending the Wound of Eros. An invitation into the foundational course, to be held over the summer, arrived in my Inbox. It finally felt like an opening, so I stepped through the door.
After nesting this past week, clearing the space for the sacred work of this season, I delved into the opening lectures (prerecorded) and the live-calls (recorded from Monday nights, but missed while I was on vacation in Quebec). I’ve created a body-recovery, easy-treadmill-walking space where I can watch/listen while getting some steps in. (I’m weary with the sedentary, computer-focused nature of my work, so thought this might be a good counterpart, which it is). I’m surprised at the intensity of felt-sense that it is finally time for this ritual practice orientation in my life. No one around me practices like this, which makes it appear odd, requiring privacy and confidentiality. My mind is sometimes chatty with fear-oriented awarenesses–how my partner will respond; how my colleagues would respond. Distractions like that are familiar for me in the work Spirit seems to invite with gentle assurance(s).
I could feel the belly tears arise as I began the first recorded lecture by Foor. I felt a shift inside my own body–a recognition, a deep sadness, a yearning with hopes of being met. An insight arrived that startled me too. My journey through ancestral-lineage-healing so far has required a multi-storied narrative of abandonment, awakening to it, and anointing for the tumultuous journey that was to come. The deeply embodied, felt-sense of abandonment was–is–terrifying, even as my energetic-signature-soul was moved past-through it into deepening webs of connection and relationship. I can still feel the searing sensations of abandonment, in other words, though I have been brought beyond them too. I’ve only had immediate family and then immediate ecclesial and academic community layers of story around this journey.
The insight that arrived? If I had lived again and again deeply connected in healed-wise ancestral lineages but then became born into an unhealed, rupture, dissociated lineage, it would feel like the abandonment I know in my body today. Being deeply connected, belonging with and to healed ancestors, then born into unhealed, dissociated, deeply wounded lineage(s) would feel like this in my body.
All of a sudden, the multilayered story I’ve been telling expanded into a larger frame of reference that holds innumerable invitations and bottomless freedom(s) for me, my lineages. This is a pattern I know well, with language around logic of the Spirit and the transformative logic of my dissertation days. I know to trust it, in other words. Besides, how does one ever get to the bottom of Mystery? How can one ever exhaust basically timeless, near-infinite connections with one’s own exponentially-numerous ancestors? The invitation for me is to invite ancestral guides from before the trauma, whatever it might have been, that led my ancestors to leave their homeland. For any of us, the invitation is to reach out/connect with ancestors from before the ruptures of industrialization, modernity, etc. I could image for Jews, with a dear friend in mind, they might have to go back further than most of us for the healed-wise-lineage guides.
The companion to this insight was no less liberating or inviting here, in this life. For decades, I have worked to be faithful within webs of friendships, spirit-friendships across family and tradition. I have held tenaciously to those who have touched me the most, those with whom I have felt the deepest spiritual and tactile intimacy (which is not necessarily sexual, fyi). This has involved increasing my capacity for receptivity, breathing into my own fears/insecurities, even persevering through felt-injury or wounds unintentionally (or intentionally, perhaps) inflicted upon me because of my refusal to let go, to hold healthy boundaries within the relationship. I most often will not let go because of a perception or drive to be faithful to the friendship, the relationship. This is a gift I bring into the world, but I can also see how it has harmed me too. I will stay attached to spirit-friends even when they are no longer germane to my own best or healthiest s/Self. Letting go, trusting the connection even when its manifestation in this life is done? Whew…tough for me. [Later addition: Brian and I landed on a good metaphor for me, in the painful differentiation or divergence with one of my closest spirit-friends here in Dayton: eccentric orbits. The connection is always there, just the distance increases sometimes, decreases sometimes. Helpful. And startling, realizing that Brian's pathway is closer to this ancestral learning than I had realized, though he's doing it with historical-geneaological research, well-suited to his historian needs, securities.]
The ritual practice of attuning to one’s healthy, healed, wise ancestors feels so familiar because of the insight–I’ve been deeply connected but chose this life of disconnection, so to heal-help healing–and because I’ve lived the healing journey of connection across family and lineage/tradition in this life. But those humans around me today are no longer the only relationships inviting me to connect, to bless, to be held, to be blessed. A whole world of worlds is inviting me, through the portal of my own body, my own inheritances of deep ancestral connection(s).
Entering into the practice today of contacting (an) ancestral guide(s) pushed me a new threshold on which I stand, through which I will lean, hopefully enter more and more fully. Are you an ancestor in this lineage of my father’s father? Are you able and willing to help healing? Are you well with those ancestors that came before you? Does this feel right and good to me? These questions brought me to belly tears again and again…
A deep grief my body knows, of disconnection after deep belonging, connection. A yearning for all this invitation into deepened connection across time/generations to be real, not my imagination. A fear of trusting into this connection, having lived most of my life in the sense of rupture, dissociation. A swirling of these questions/fears coming through me as tears, again and again. What is a human life, lived in undying, always available deep connection and belonging? Is it truly possible, with commitment to ritual practice, receiving, listening…like this?
For now, I know the invitation is to enter into the practices, repeatedly, and let the tears come. I know how to do that, even if my mind fears disappointment and distrust will win out. Next steps in trusting my own biology, where my ancestors’ inheritance(s) lives, breathes, opens…
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