Ways Your Ancestors Can Support You Right Now
Photo by Jenna Anderson on Unsplash
Last week on my way to the grocery store, I was listening to a podcast episode with Martin Shaw. This episode touched me in such a deep way that I want to share some of the insights I’ve gleaned from it.
Martin is a writer and wilderness guide who has a unique perspective of the times we’re living in. In the podcast episode, he claimed that we are living in “mythic” times; that we are collectively undergoing a profound, otherworldly experience. We are in the part of the story where the heroine is in the underworld, deeply struggling, tasked with a seemingly impossible challenge. We’re at the point where we’re wondering if she’s up to it.
This really resonated with me, and it gave language to the angst that I’ve been feeling since the coronavirus crisis began.
Like many of you, I’ve been in deep contemplation over the pandemic and the collective shifts that are pulsating around the globe as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. While I’ve been giving myself permission to sit with the pain and complexity of it all, I’ve also been kicking myself, wondering why the work-from-home hacks I tried weren’t making me feel better. Or feeling disappointed that cleaning my house didn’t “fix things.”
When I heard Martin say that we are living in huge, unprecedented, “mythic” times, I felt a wave of relief throughout my body.
Each of us is responding to this crisis in our own way, and I understand that not all people want to change anything as a result of it. But for me and most of the clients I’m currently supporting, it feels inauthentic to ignore the cracking open that’s taking place all around and within us. The complexity of this time in our lives is inviting us into greater alignment - at home, in our bodies, and in our work. The process of re-aligning can be incredibly slow and uncomfortable, but it’s necessary in order to create the lives (and societies) that we desire.
Framing these times as mythic hasn’t “solved” anything, but it has enabled me to ask bigger, more important questions:
How do I want to show up in this against-the-odds, powerful, scary story?
How do I hope it ends?
And what small, daily steps is my intuition inviting me to take?
As soon as I started to ask these questions, it felt clear that I needed to connect with my ancestors.
This may not seem like an obvious first step, but stick with me.
We all have ancestors who lived in pre-civilized, pre-colonized/colonizer times. Ancestors who lived close to the land, who were in right relationship to the Earth. Ancestors who understood the natural arc of myth and were wise people.
Their resilience lives on in you, and I encourage you to connect with their wisdom right now.
The medicine we’ve tried in the past, like traditional job search strategies or ways to upskill in your career, just aren’t enough for most of us in the Covid-19 world. We need deeper, more effective tools for navigating these mythic times, and connecting with our lineage can be one of them.
You don’t have to know exactly where all of your ancestors were from, the language(s) they spoke, or how they lived their daily lives. You can simply imagine them and invite the wisdom of their culture into your life. You may even notice that you can feel them in your bones, your belly, or in the ether surrounding you.
I’ve been connecting with my own ancestry in a few concrete ways:
Listening to music that makes me feel close to my lineage, like traditional Gaelic music
Asking myself what my wise ancestors would do if they were living in these times
Holding my heart and allowing myself to slow down
Framing the daily activities of cooking and cleaning as a spiritual practice that allows me to embody their wisdom
Lightly researching things like Celtic energy healing and Druidic spirituality
Doing these things has felt much more nourishing than the more surface-level “tips and tricks” I’ve tried. So the next time you feel overwhelmed and want to numb out, I encourage you to connect with your heritage instead - in whatever way(s) make sense to you.
These times are not a joke. They are not comfortable, they are not easy, and they are not hopeless. In most myths, helpers appear from unexpected places. I believe our ancestors can be some of those helpers right now.
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