What is Ancestral Healing and Why Would We Want to Practice it?

Well, I’m not the most linear-minded person, but I thought I’d make some effort to start at the beginning, for those not as familiar with this work! Welcome to the world of ancestral healing…

Ancestral healing operates on the principle that whatever an individual experienced during their lifetime, some energetic imprint of it remains and can be handed down through the generations (and possibly also has physical, tangible effects on our biology, as well, but we’ll look at that when we dive into epigenetics). What is handed down may be a legacy of joy and love—it does happen! But more often we encounter an inheritance of pain and suffering, trauma and grief. Love is powerful, but trauma creates a rift—a crack in the stone that can reverberate through the ages.

Sometimes the cause is known, through family legends and oral history, or through genealogical research. The trauma may stem from personal violence—one or multiple suicides in the lineage, abuse against other family members, and more. Or the cause may be societal violence—war, genocide, persecution, oppression. And the trauma is experienced on both sides of the coin—the descendants of the victims carry pain, of course, but the descendants of the perpetrators also frequently experience profound guilt and a weight from which they cannot escape. I’ve witnessed the pain of families whose past generations were the victims of slavery and racial violence, as well as individuals whose ancestors enslaved and lynched innocents—individuals who spend every day feeling like they can never make up for what their own family did. Or the trauma may be less dramatic, more private—lost loves, lost babies, lost hopes and dreams, until subsequent generations take on and reenact this mantle of sadness and loss without even realizing why. Sometimes the cause is unknown, but still strongly felt. You don’t need to know exactly what your ancestors experienced to help initiate the healing process.

Ancestral healing can take different forms and embody different approaches. For example, the lineage repair that Daniel Foor (author of Ancestral Medicine) practices, primarily focuses on what he calls the “unnamed ancestors”—those who came 1000 or more years before us. Whereas, my own cemetery-based practice, by its very nature, seeks to connect with and heal the more recent dead of the past four-five hundred years or less. Foor does not completely disregard work with the more recent dead, and I ask for and seek healing backwards and forwards, all along the ancestral line. But each approach has a different focus and serves slightly different purposes. You’ll need to decide what resonates most with your particular situation.

So, what does ancestral healing look like?

Ancestor reverence has been practiced by many spiritual and cultural traditions across the globe for millennia, and the simple practice of honoring and remembering is indeed profoundly healing in its own right. But “ancestral healing” takes this a step further. It is a conscious act and practice to bring peace, repair trauma, and heal the inherited damage, either for particular, individual spirits and/or entire family lines.

In addition to veneration practices, this is primarily achieved through ritual and ceremony, though it can also encompass many other modalities, including, but certainly not limited to: writing as healing (aka narrative medicine…more on this in a later post!); simple, regular offerings (graveside or at your own home altar); acts of offering, sometimes involving “unfinished business”; crystal reiki healing, sending the energy back and forth through the timeline; or simple, heartfelt remembrance—don’t underestimate the power of the phrase “You Are Not Forgotten.” These are the ways that I’ve found to be most effective thus far in my practice over the years, but you may find others that resonate with you and your beloved dead.

And finally, why do we perform ancestral healing? Daniel Foor writes “When we reconcile with ancestors who experienced different types of persecution or who enacted violence and oppression, we make repairs in our personal psyches and family histories that, in turn, mend cracks in the larger spirit of humanity.”ⁱ I would go even further to say that any healing we can catalyze in our ancestral lines/family history—even if the cause was not one related to societal violence and oppression—will profoundly help to mend these cracks.

So, we practice ancestral healing to:

1) Heal ourselves—so often what we feel did not originate with our own personal experience, and it’s way past time to free ourselves from that heaviness, that weight, so that we can go on and find purpose and meaning in this life, instead of reliving and reenacting their pain.

2) Heal our ancestors and beloved dead—as they can assist us, we can also assist them. It is a reciprocal relationship, and we have agency to help.

3) Heal the generations to come—what a great gift to relieve them of the burden of carrying the baggage of the family that came before them.

4) Heal the world—we are all truly interconnected, whether we want to be or not!

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”ⁱⁱ And if we’re perpetually reenacting the suffering of the dead, how can we truly live? How can we truly find and fulfill our passion, mission, purpose in this life if we are stuck, tangled in the weeds of the suffering of those who came before us? We struggle. We try our darndest. But perhaps it doesn’t need to be this hard. By partnering with our ancestors, we can help catalyze healing for all.