Ancestors: The Cloud of Support Around You
In this third episode in the Summer of Support series, I'm sharing what I've been taught and have experienced with regard to working with our ancestors. We cover who our wise and well ancestors are, how they can help us, and ways to work with them.
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Welcome to a Wild New Work, a podcast about how to compost capitalism and the norms of dominant culture and answer the soulful callings of these times we live in, which includes the call to deepen our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother, writer, teacher and guide. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I'm your host today.
Hi friend and welcome. Thank you for being here. Really delighted to spend this time with you today. We are still in the midst of the summer of support. Last week we talked about tracking as an orientation and a way of navigating through life, and this week we're talking about the ancestors, and this is a big, big topic and today we will be kind of just scratching the surface, but my intention is to give you enough to begin on your own and to offer a refresher for any of you have who have already learned some of this material working with me or who have your own ancestral practice.
So this is part of the summer of support because the ancestors are such a vast source of wisdom and help and not just help in the spiritual sense, but material help - real 3D tangible help. And it is high time that more of us invited in, their involvement in their presence. Things in the human world are heavy. It's hot. It's. A lot right now, and I know we're trying to meet our needs the best we can ourselves and maybe in right relationship with other humans and the beings that we share a life with, but without tapping into the support of our wise and well ancestors, it's just like our roots aren't deep enough.
We're not getting hydrated enough to be the, you know, sources of support that I know we each want to be. So this is a practice, a way of relating to your heritage that I hope you will take up and integrate into your daily life and practice. And I wanna say at the outset that you do not have to know the names of your ancestors or even what exactly your heritage is, you don't have to know who they were when they immigrated, when what their life stories were. We are gonna start from long ago with people who were in an intimate relationship with the earth.
And from that place, with that relationship established, then you can begin to work more with your, say your recent ancestors that you may be curious about and wanna learn more about. So I hope you'll come along with me for the rest of this episode and see what lands for you and work the material into your life in a way that makes sense for you. Two quick announcements before we dive in. The first is that I'm teaching a class on Tuesday, July 29th called The First Harvest, and this is going to be a culmination of our summer support where we're going to actually work with each of these themes.
We will be doing some tracking. We will be. Meeting an ancestor if you'd like to. We will be learning about the five elements and the fire element and the shift into the earth element in late summer, and we will be talking about ways to communicate with and work with. The land in this late summer period.
So if you've been enjoying the material and want to go deeper and work it into your life in real time together, I hope you'll come. And everyone who registers will get the link to the recording as well. If you can't make it live, it's available for $22, but if that's a barrier, there are discount codes on the registration page so that you can come, even if you aren't able to pay right now.
And my second announcement is that the reason I'm able to do that and offer these classes at a discounted rate for those who need it is in part because there are people in Eagle Creek who are helping to make this work possible. So thank you to those of you who are contributing every month. To support the show and allow me to do this work in an accessible way.
If you've been benefiting from the show or from my work and you have the means and would like to go deeper and receive my monthly behind the scenes emails and a few other sweet things, I hope you'll check out Eagle Creek at Wild new work.com/eagle-creek and the class on July 29th can be found at a wild new work.com/events.
All right. Well, with that, let's shift into our opening and vocation and then into the material for today. So wherever you are, I just wanna invite you to take a moment to feel your body, this body that was made possible in part because of the actions and choices of your ancestors. This body that shares the DNA of people who lived thousands of years ago, who lived before electricity, before cars, before concrete, before jobs, before wage labor, who lived in alignment with the rhythms of the earth in alignment with the land that they made a home on, in alignment with the.
Of their own soul and spiritual lives, all of that is in you. And so taking a deep breath to feel that just for a moment, may each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with.
I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Multnomah, Cowlitz, Bands of Chinook and Clackamas tribes among many others who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on. May this episode be one small stitch in the great reweaving of right relationship that so many indigenous teachers are calling us into, and so it is.
Alright. Well, I wanted to start with just a little bit about my journey into working with the ancestors so you know where this material is coming from and how it's kind of unfolded in my own life in case that's helpful. I've been on a journey of working with. The dead, my ancestors, my lineage spirit guides For the last 10 or so years after I went through a kind of spiritual reclamation after having left the Christian faith about.
Seven years prior to that. So that process really began through the help of one of my mentors, Rachel Rockey, and I'm really grateful for Rachel's guidance in. Just helping me trust the innate connection I have to the divine and to my beloved dead. And that was really an essential beginning and flowering for me.
And then about a year ago. I did some work with a teacher named Old School Nate, who introduced me to the work of Malidoma Patrice Some, who was a wise person from the Dagara Peoples of West Africa. And in that container I learned about working with our wise and well ancestors specifically, and that's been incredibly helpful.
So I credit Malidoma Some and Old School Nate, for a lot of this teaching, um, as the sort of a, a really important puzzle piece in how to work with our heritage and our ancestors. I also wanna say a big thank you to everyone who has gone through the Meant for More for more curriculum this year, whether in a small group or one-on-one.
This is where I began. Teaching about the ancestors more explicitly this last year, and I've learned so much from each of you and how you've experienced the material and how you've made it work, and I'm really grateful for that. And finally, I'll just say that the most important teachers about the ancestors have been the ancestors themselves.
I learned directly from them. I've been guided into teachings that I needed to understand them better, and I'll talk more about how I do that in a little bit later on in this episode. I am so grateful for their wisdom and what I have learned through that relationship. So I believe that working with our wise and well ancestors is just a part of being human.
That there's nothing you are missing or that you can't understand or can't access that by virtue of being here, literally bought your body. Is a connection is a portal to your ancestors. The ancestors have become the earth herself. So as you relate to the earth of your own body and the earth of the land around you, you are already in relationship to the ancestors.
So what I'm gonna share today is a way for you to. Hone that or create more of a container around it so that it can be a little more potent, how to deepen that relationship and make it more, well just strengthen it, really. But I wanna just be really clear at the outset that this is material that. Should belong to everyone.
That does belong to everyone because it's really just how the earth works and life works that we all have beloved dead who came from long ago, who have become the Earth, and now we are here and we will become the earth as well. So it's a really beautiful cyclical reminder of this web and cycle of life that we are a part of.
The ancestors is a big. Complex topic, depending on which culture you're learning from, different cosmologies where you are in the world, there's gonna be lots of different variations on this topic. It's very complex. There is a lot of pain and nuance and complexity in the story of our ancestors, and I am not gonna try to make it neat and tidy.
There's just no point. It's not helpful. So I'm gonna share today what is most true for me? What I've learned, kind of staying, again, close to the ground of my own practice. And I wanna share what seems to work best and be most clear in this sort of introductory material. And like I said last week, you get to decide what you wanna do with that.
You get to decide what feels. True and like a thread you wanna pull on and what's not for you. That's not because we all make up our own reality, although I think that's true to a certain extent. It's true because this won't work unless it's coming from you and your own desire to connect to your wise and well ancestors.
If it feels like something that someone is forcing you to do or that doesn't resonate with you, it's probably not gonna click. And so that's. Why it's really important that you either come up with different words that fit for you. If they're different than my words, that's okay. Um, but it's gotta be something that feels congruent to you.
That's really important. I. So when I say ancestors, I mean a few different things. One, I mean your human blood lineage in all of its complexity and intricacy. I mean, the people who share your DNA whose choices led to. New children being born and the old dying, and more people being born on and on until it has led to you and your birth parents and who you are today.
Ancestors can also absolutely include your adoptive family or your chosen family. It can also include ancestors in a particular healing or teaching lineage if you're part of that. And ancestors can include, of course, our nature kin. Really, our ancestors are not just humans, are they? They're the animals and plants and fungi that have given life to this planet, but I'm not gonna be covering that today.
We're just gonna talk about human ancestors. I'm also not gonna cover ancestors from past lives or how that might. Overlap or work because I'm just not sure. That's not a place I've explored very deeply. Again, I just wanna share what I have direct experience with and what I feel to be most true at this point.
Now there's the ancestors, which is just kind of a blanket term for all of the humans that have come before us. And then there are our wise and well ancestors, which means people who have died. And then crossed over and done their work to become helpful, wise and well ancestors. These are not people who are ghosts.
These are not people who are restless or caught in between. I. With unresolved business. These are people who have lived on this earth, know fully what it was to be human, who died, who crossed over into the realm of the ancestors and who underwent some kind of journey and made a choice to be there. Now, as wise and well ancestors, if you grew up in a Western cultural context, you probably don't have a lot of experience with or awareness of.
Crossing over the dead or tending to the dead. But most intact cultures have practices for helping their dead to complete their journey from this realm into the next. There are practices like not saying the name of the recently dead, there are practices like sitting vigil to shoo their spirit on to.
Grieve them very deeply and through our tears, send them to the other world. There are burial practices that are, you know, burying people with different symbolic items to help them on their journey to the other world. Many of us have lost touch with these practices, and as a result, we've inherited generations and generations of the untended dead.
Not everyone, but there is a lot. There is a backlog for most people of dead ones who have not been fully invited over or crossed over into the ancestral realm and are here on this planet, stuck in between maybe trying to be helpful, maybe not, maybe feeling lost, maybe not knowing where to go, feeling trapped and untethered between worlds and.
I really trust the longstanding wisdom of practices that are among people who have a close relationship to the earth who aren't part of machine culture. And so I do think there is a really good argument, and it feels very sturdy to consider the fact that when someone dies, it's not as if their journey is immediately resolved, that they immediately go to a new place and it's all done and tidy.
Or that they go nowhere. I don't believe that either. If you think about when a baby is born into this realm, there is a liminal in-between growing stage. It's not like we were born into this dimension and we're just here fully. I. You know, in our, in the fullness of ourselves and our capacity. That's not to say that babies don't, aren't fully developed in their own way, but there is this time when a baby feels very and is very close to the spirit realm still.
So that could absolutely be true for the dead as well, that when we die, there is a liminal period of transition. Where we are still sort of here, but we're stepping fully into the next realm, and there will be a period of developing and learning and becoming an ancestor. I have learned that it's very important and helpful to work with the wise and well ancestors exclusively.
I know that we all have. Maybe not all of us, but many of us have beloved dead that we want to feel close to that we might miss. And I would never say that you can't or shouldn't continue to be in relationship with your beloved dead. And I know from experience that. These people, if they haven't gone through the process they've needed to go through to fully cross over.
They may want to stay or feel like they have to stay, and they may want to be helpful and stay close to us because they love us, but they are not in their full capacity to be helpful. They need to go home first and then come back. And I had, I was working with my grandfather, um, before I started practicing in this different way.
And I felt very close to him and I felt as if I could call on him and that he would show up for me and, you know, be sweet in some ways. But it was kind of like. One of my teachers described it as like they're, it's kind of like having a happy, drunk person around that they really wanna help and it's sweet and fun, but they're just not really sober and it's just, it gets kind of messy and it's not in the clarity and fullness that they need.
And also it's not in their best interest. They need to cross fully over so. When we work with our wise and well ancestors specifically, these are beings that don't need anything from us. They don't need anything from us. They're not here trapped with some unresolved issue. They don't long to be in a physical body.
They don't feed off of our energies. They are fully in their own capacity with their needs met, and they are blessed by a relationship with us. It's a relationship that is not codependent, but between two beings who are sovereign and well, it's not exactly an equal relationship because I think we do need a lot more from the ancestors than they need from us.
So you might think of them as just loving, benevolent people who don't have emotional drama or need anything from you other than to just be in relationship with you. Which is kind of, uh, can be a novel thing for most of us who learned kind of maladaptive relating techniques with other humans. So there's a period where we have to learn how to be in this kind of a relationship.
Our wise and well ancestors know what it's like to be human, so working with them is different than if you work with other deities who are. Primarily spirit or never had a physical body. Our wise and well ancestors know our gifts intimately because they've been handed down through our heritage. They understand why we're here, what purpose we have on this planet, and they are wise teachers that so many of us yearn for and need to be in relationship with.
So when we call on our whys and well ancestors, most of us are going to need to go way, way back to a time when our ancestors had intact cultures that tended to their dead because again, we're trying to connect with those who aren't trapped in the in between. But have been fully crossed over, and that may require that we go hundreds, even thousands of years back until we come to our people who were indigenous to a place and who knew how to work with their wise and well ancestors who knew how to cross over their dead.
And speaking as someone with European heritage, I think we really lost touch with this in the process of Christianization and colonization as the Roman Empire brought Christianity into Europe. So there's a lot of. Baggage to be undone, but there are still absolutely wise and well ancestors who lived before that time, who are sturdy and able and happy to show up and be in our lives now no matter what our heritage it's been like or what our cultural experience has been with colonization or Christianization or what have you.
I wanna say again that we don't have to know what ethnic groups specifically we came from, or what language they spoke, or what their names were, the wise and well ancestors can become. They are a sort of force that we can call on and we can get to know individual representatives, people who we can develop a more individual relationship with.
But in the end, they're really part of this. Sort of great cloud of the wise and well, a cloud of benevolence and wisdom that is behind us or all around us at any given time. So maybe I'll talk for a minute about how I think this works. And again, it's, it's a mystery. I can't say exactly how it works. I'm just a little human with a very finite amount of understanding.
But what I've learned and what I've worked with and has felt true is that, you know, there are many old ideas that this world and the other world are very close. Our parallel are even entwined together. And there are boundaries. Most of us don't see spirits walking around. We don't see our wise and well ancestors.
There is some kind of distance between this physical reality and the realm of the ancestors, but it's not like a chasm. It's not something that we can't reach across or permeate. It's not like anything has been cut off permanently. The wise and well ancestors have chosen. To stay close to us and help guide and protect their descendants.
So they are always close, but not necessarily heavily involved. They, I believe they help to hold us, shape our lives, protect us, but that they only really get involved if we explicitly give our consent in the traditions that I've studied and the reading I've done, despite how this. You know, dominant Western culture feels that in terms of our relationships to the ancestors, it is a consent based relationship.
They wait to get involved until we ask. They're not pushy or demanding. They can be sometimes, but most often they will wait to step in until we have asked, invited them, been explicitly clear in how we would like them involved. So it's really helpful to be clear about what kind of invitation you're making and to what extent you would like them involved.
Some ways that they can help us are one, just helping us hold what we have to hold in this life feeling witnessed by people who were people and know the gravity of grief or how difficult it can be to make sure you're fed, or the loss and heartache of a breakup or the joy and elation of being in a human body.
So one just being witnessed. And having help holding what it is that we're holding on this human journey. I think they can also help us to see opportunities that are maybe harder for us to see, or things that we couldn't notice before. I think they provide general energetic safety sending or amplifying messages opening up.
Pathways into new relationships or projects or gifts or you know, important junctures on our journeys. I think they can absolutely make the day to day of our lives much smoother and provide material help. It's very practical working with the ancestors. This isn't some like high magic kind of thing. Your great-great-great grandmothers and grandfathers did this.
They had relationships with their dead. The difference is that they weren't calling up the dead from, you know, hundreds of years of lack of tending and colonization and trauma, but were able to connect to their wise and well ancestors who had passed on. So this is folk magic. It's very basic and. Our wise and well ancestors can come in and help us individually of course, but we are no individuals are we.
We're part of this vast web of connection. And your wise and well ancestors are the same wise and well ancestors of your. Either your birth family or the family that is living that you are a part of. You share ancestors with many, many other people so they can absolutely help to tend our family ailments and pain and heal relationships with those that we share an ancestry with because it's in the best and highest good of everyone in the lineage that's living now.
They can't do our work for us. But they can make that work much less painful and not so heavy. We're still living in a universe where there is free will and agency, and we do have to do for ourselves what is ours to do, but our wise and well ancestors can make that so much more feasible and so much lighter.
My ancestors have helped me understand before I knew why, you know what to plan for in my work in my life, when I needed a lot of space and what things to pursue every day they have shown me how to live better with more richness, the value of wild foods, what to forage, and how rituals to do, how I can be of service.
How to make my life easier, how to find the rest and support that I needed. So this is very, again, practical material help, and it's kind of a wonder that more of us haven't been engaging with it and receiving it for a long time. And I am really excited. To see if more and more people start to work with their whys and well ancestors.
What might be possible when we're not coming from such a deficit of support and hydration? What it would be like if there were hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, millions who were in daily contact with their wise and well ancestors receiving the witnessing and support and guidance that they needed.
Instead of only relying on themselves or a partner or a friend or a therapist, what if it was all of that human connection, but also connection to a whole lit up cloud of benevolence and warmth and care? I think that would be really different. So now I'm gonna shift into ways to work with your wise and well ancestors if you would like to.
And it's very, very simple. You can just begin by inviting in out loud your wise and well ancestors to come and be with you, to help you to be involved in your day-to-day life. And it's important that you use those words wise and well, because again, when we make invitations to all of our dead, all of our ancestors, whether they're wise and well or not, then we can invite in.
Ghosts or energies that are caught in an in-between, and that can make life really heavy and messy and complicated. And I've had this experience, again, sort of opening the door to everyone, creating an altar to our families, dead. Everyone come on in. And it got messy just like. I mean, I don't know what you believe or what your experience has been like, but I was constantly kind of seeing things out of the corner of my eye in the house.
The kids would see things. It just, it was, things would like fall and get clunky and messy. It felt energy like energetically heavy. So once I started saying, alright, that's it. It's just gotta be the wise and well here for wi for a while, that's, we're gonna draw that line. Things got much smoother. My kids weren't seeing things.
I wasn't seeing things. It felt like I was in my own energy. We were in the energy of just our family and our wise and well ancestors. So I would encourage you, I. Even if you go back to working with your dad who may not be crossed over, I would encourage you to decide on a time in which you would just work with your wise and well ancestors, or just call them in and see what happens.
Maybe you won't have the same experience, but it's important that we make a delineation if we want to because our words have a lot of power, and if we're totally porous, inviting everybody in. It's just, it can get complicated. So I would use, I would encourage you to exercise caution about that. We want to connect to our wise and well ancestors from long ago first, because when we have done that and developed a relationship there and it's sturdy and we feel supported with.
By people who don't need a bunch of stuff from us, but just wanna be in relationship with us that want to see us grow and live into the fullness of our gifts, who are blessed by that at that point, then they can show us what our lineage needs. They can show us how to bring healing to our family lines if healing in our more recent lineage is needed.
It's better to start with the full strength of your wise and well ancestors, and let them guide you into that repair and healing and let them do a lot of it. Through you, you can do ritual and they can show you different boundaries to have or ways to bring healing into your living family so that it's not such a weight and a burden on you.
There are some ways of relating to the ancestors that are primarily rooted in like this idea that, you know, I'm here, I'm the living descendant and I've received this. Insight now that what we've done in the past is wrong and I'm going to go back and heal the whole line just as myself, not rooted in anything very real or deep.
And that's noble. 'cause I, I mean, I know it comes with good intentions, but in my experience, it has been much more effective to develop a relationship with my wise and well ancestors and let them show me. Where healing is needed and how, and there is a process called ancestral in which we develop a relationship with our wise and well ancestors and working with them, we can bring all of our dead home.
I. So that we're not in a lineage full of ghosts, but everyone has been invited home to the realm of the ancestors where they can be whole and tended to and become ancestors themselves. And I've done this with my four lines. My father's father, father's mother, mother's father and mother's mother. And I'm still studying that.
Um, and I'm not ready to teach about that, but that is something that the ancestors can show you how to do or that you could learn more about. I encourage you to learn that from them directly. And this is material that I teach in. Meant for more in my one-on-one in small groups, and we haven't gone as deep as ancestral, but I feel that that will be something I might be ready to do in the near future.
But I have absolutely seen, I. Ripple effects of healing in my extended family as a result of connecting with my wise and well ancestors. And I also feel a lot sturdier in how I'm called to help repair some of the damage caused by how my more recent ancestors were either complicit or actively involved in white supremacy and colonization.
The difference is that now it's not coming from a place of neediness and deficit where I just feel guilty or obligated. It's coming from a place of fullness where I can see how my own. Ancestors were cut off from their cultural practices, taken from their land, and the value in living in alignment with the greater web of life that we're apart.
That's coming from a place that is in my own heritage. I don't have to go find an indigenous person and take any of their heritage or their cultural knowing. It can just point me toward. Where I'm meant to go, what's in my DNA, what's in my body, what's meant for me that's been passed down? So that's a lot.
That's a different orientation and it's been a lot more helpful than this idea that I'm somehow here to save my lineage. No, no, no, no. There are thousands, millions of wise and well ancestors that can guide me and I can be a humble student of theirs. So to get into some more nitty gritty of how to do this work, if you would like to, the first step would just be to decide what you believe about this.
Does this feel true? Does it, how does it feel in your body as you're listening? Is there something around this that you're willing to try? Do you have resistance to different parts of it, and why does it compliment what you've already done? Does it feel completely new? Just deciding for yourself where there's congruence and where you would like to go with it is the first step.
I. The second step would be, again, keeping it very simple for you to every day, welcome them into your life out loud again, saying, my wise and well ancestors, you can say every morning or every evening. Wise and well ancestors, please come and cover me in your love and protection. You can ask for them to be with you throughout the day, to send you signs and affirmations to help the day go more smoothly, to teach you something.
If you'd like to build an altar where you can make offerings or be in touch with them, I encourage you to do that. You don't need to put any photos of your recently dead or you know, beloved dead from times in which photos could be taken. I would encourage you to focus more on your long ago general Heritage, and again, I.
It is meant to be complex and messy. There's no pure race or ethnic group. It's all a beautiful mixture, so it is enough to know my, I have people who came from. The area around what is modern day Germany, for example, or I know that I have people who lived in the Southern Mediterranean coast area, or I have people who lived on the Mongolian step.
It's enough to have a general sense of where on the earth, what kind of landscape your people come from. Again, I'm not trying to make this tidier than it is because it's just not, but you don't wanna get blocked or you don't need to stop just because you can't prove, you know that you had people living in such and such place at such and such time.
The ancestors will show you. Who they were. And it can be a lot for us to hold because it's, you know, people moved and there are lots of different cultural practices. So we will be shown and drawn to the cultural identities that feel most resonant or that are most alive for us now. And that's enough. So you can, without knowing who exactly they were, you can call them in, invite them in.
You can make an altar with different colors or symbols or plants that speak to your heritage, and you can just start there. If you feel like there are some spiritual shenanigans going on in your life or your home, you can absolutely draw a boundary like I did and say, you know, only my wise and well ancestors are allowed in this space right now, and that can be enough and okay.
I don't wanna overlook the pain that that might cause. If you have beloved dead that you're close to, that you want to keep close, I don't think any harm will come to those people or beings if you draw that boundary and you can ask your wise and well ancestors to help that person find their way home.
And if you're really unsure, you can also ask for guidance, um, to, to find a practitioner, a living, you know, shamanic practitioner who can help your dead crossover. There are absolutely people who do that. So that can be it. You could just start by inviting them in every day and see what happens. I also wanna encourage you to go on a journey and meet them in your own heart and visioning space.
I. And again, this can be very simple. You can get quiet and go into a meditative state. Maybe you turn on some music from your heritage long ago without words or um, some drumming music. And you can imagine that from your heart, there is a little flame in your chest that illuminates a path into the land of your ancestors.
And you just wanna see what you see and trust whatever comes, you can ask for a representative to come and meet you and see what you notice. You can start with one of your family lines at a time. Like your, you know, your father's father's line or your adoptive mother's mother's line, or you could start with one place, a representative from these lands in particular.
And again, you just wanna see what you notice in my experience. It was enough to, again, not get so stuck on details, but know that in general people came from Ireland, England, Scandinavia, Germany, and when I would journey to meet them, I would notice. What kind of a landscape it was. Are we by the sea? Are we by the river?
What kind of trees are here? What kinds of animals? Noticing colors, patterns, their clothing, what their villages are like. So not getting so stuck on the details, but just asking and watching and seeing what you notice. If you do this and you are journeying in your heart or your visioning space and you meet someone and you have a weird feeling, you can always ask, are you one of my wise and well ancestors?
If not, then they can go and you can. Ask them to leave and ask again that a representative from your wise and well ancestry come to meet you and you might see a being kind of just of light that's very vague. You might see what you, what seems like a person, but you can't quite make out their features.
It's okay. The mind will wanna get really specific and be like, okay. This is this person, like it's gonna want specificity, but it's really enough to just start with little glimmers that will grow. You can ask them what you should call them. You can ask them questions. Absolutely. This is a practice and a relationship that will build with practice and.
Again, this is work that I invite people to in my classes. Also, if you're a member of Eagle Creek, there are guided visualizations there on how, on meeting your ancestors, um, if you wanna do that. So it's just a matter of beginning. And trusting what you see and being clear about who you're inviting in, and then noticing what happens.
So we welcome them in. Maybe we journey and meet them and start developing a relationship. Maybe we make an altar if you want to, and we watch what happens. We look for signs, themes that keep coming up. Is there a general smoothness to my daily life that wasn't there before? Is there material support coming in that I didn't have before?
You can ask for help regularly notice what happens and say thank you. I. And over time you will develop your own language with them. The ancestors are blessed by us doing our work. There is a relationship between this world and theirs. So when we. Are supported when we receive a message from them and respond in alignment with that, or when we ask for help and say thank you.
When we keep showing up and trying to do our good work and live into our callings and be helpful, loving people in this world, they are blessed by that. So you don't have to approach this as a transactional. Relationship, it's okay to ask for a lot, a lot, a lot of help. You need a lot of help, okay? The people in your line who lived thousands of years ago had a lot more help than you do today.
So it is okay to ask for help every day, multiple times a day, and it doesn't mean that you have to pay them back. It's true that our ancestors are not a vending machine or an ATM, but they are absolutely eager and able to help. They're fully in their power. They don't need anything from us. It can be a sort of one way direction of support.
And then as we take those steps and grow, they are delighted to see that happening. So make sure you ask clearly. Again, be clear what your intentions are. Use your words clearly and trust that they have power. Notice what happens. Say thank you for what you receive, and then do your part. I do believe that the ancestors are absolutely excited and able to help us.
And I'm sure you've had the experience of what it's like to help someone who never says thank you or who never changes. And I think we're given a lot of grace because the ancestors know how hard it is to be human. But you know, if you're trying to help someone. Who keeps asking for help and you give it and they never say thank you or acknowledge where it came from, and then they're never doing their part to pick up after themselves or, you know, do the repair work that they've been asked to do.
That doesn't nurture the relationship. So this is a relationship and most people that I've worked with feel bad about asking for help and try to overcompensate or like, don't ask for help if they haven't, you know, uh, made an offering to their ancestors in a while. And I just don't think that's, we, we don't have to be so cautious or guilt-ridden in this work.
It's really just about. Developing that relationship over time, spending time with them is the best way to develop that relationship with your ancestors. Think about how long you have lived without working with them, or how long your lineage has not worked with them. This is a long process of reweaving and reconnecting, so it can take time, but you can absolutely just start with an everyday practice of welcoming them in.
Being clear about the help and aid that you would like to receive and thanking them when you notice something or thanking them whenever it feels genuine. If you want to, you can of course also do research on your ancestry and what your heritage is, but I find that I often feel really drained in this because my recent ancestors were people so subjected to trauma and colonization and white supremacy and capitalism, that there's not quite.
So much strength to pull from and it, it's a, it can often feel draining. So again, if that feels valuable, you can absolutely do research to learn more about your. Peoples from long ago who are coming from a place of strength. And your ancestors can also be your primary sources of research as well. You can ask them and talk to them about this.
Oftentimes people will see something in their visions and their journeys with their ancestors, and then it sort of comes true in their research, or they find something that confirms what they saw. So I really trust your innate spiritual connection. To your ancestors. Again, this isn't something that is separate from you.
The ancestors became the earth and the earth is you and they live in you through your DNA, and the connection to them is very close. I. So I hope you will welcome them in daily and be explicit about working with your wise and well ancestors for a time. I hope you will ask for the help that you need, ask for the witnessing that you need, ask to be guided.
And again, just like we talked about in our tracking episode last week. You're probably not gonna get like a full plan, or, you know, not everything is gonna be solved overnight. The ancestors can't fix everything, but they are absolutely there to help us hold what we have to hold and find our way with more grace and ease and support than we had before.
My life has been profoundly impacted by working with my wise and well ancestors. I feel, you know, the day to day of my life is a lot smoother, just less like annoying mishaps or things breaking or falling apart. I feel I. Connected to the richness of my heritage of people who did really live close to the earth, that I have access to their wisdom now, they've shown me the more than human beings that we had relationships with and who I can cultivate relationships with Now.
They guide me in my teaching and writing work. They guide me in this podcast episode. I feel their love and protection every day. I ask for them to protect my children. It just is. It goes on and on how profoundly supported I feel by them, and I really hope that you can feel that too, whether through this practice, if it resonates with you or through some other practice with.
Spiritual helpers and beings that love you and don't need anything from you, or don't pull from you, pull your energy or life force from you. So I really hope today's episode has been a blessing to you. It feels like not enough, and there's more I wanna say, but I think we'll leave it there for now. If you want to know more.
Like I said, this is material that I teach in my small group and one-on-one work. Also, if you would like to read. Some about it. There's not like a full book that I could recommend with my whole heart, but there are pieces of this in Malidoma Patrice Some’s autobiography and in his book The Healing Wisdom of Africa.
Daniel Foor is a practitioner that a lot of people know of and he wrote a book called Ancestral Medicine, which I think is a, a nice primer as well. But really the best way to learn about this is to start yourself. Learning from your own wise and well ancestors directly. And I know it can be much more satisfying to be like in a class or reading a book or getting a certification around it, but the truth is this is work that many of us, well, maybe I can just speak.
As someone with European heritage, this is work that's having to be reclaimed and recreated and connected with anew. So there's not one correct way to go about it or a place to begin. I think wherever you feel called, and as long as you're being clear about inviting in your wise and well ancestors, you will be guided into what is right for you.
So that's for today where we'll wrap up next week. I'm gonna talk about the five elements, these forces of life that we can align with and learn from these forces that make life so beautiful, that have a lot to teach us about different options and strategies we have for how to live. Well, again, our class that's sort of helping all of this come together is on July 29th, the first harvest, and we will be harvesting all of this material in your life, and I will lead a journey where you can meet someone from your wise and well ancestry if you would like to, so you can learn more about that and register at a wild new work.com/events.
If you would like a little bit more through this. Series on the summer of Support or Hear from Me in another avenue. I hope you'll join the weekly newsletter that I send. You can do that@wildnewwork.com. Of course. Thank you again to Eagle Creek members who are helping to fund this project and make this work sustainable for me.
I hope all of you take such good care and that you feel loved and held by your wise and well ancestors this week, and I will see you on the other side.