The Ancestors are waiting for us everywhere

At AromaGnosis, we speak a lot about finding our personal myth. This is our unique signature and way of weaving ourselves a life story. It’s not the actual dramas, traumas, stories and successes of our lives that equals our personal myth, it’s more the underlying network of symbols, visions and way of perceiving and interpreting our stories that make up our personal myth. Connecting and living our personal myth comes as we pass through the doorway of our dark night of the soul or underworld journey. In a way we could say it is the gift we get when we face and go through our core wound(s). The other side of our wound is our gift and our gift is connecting with Self, with our unique soul’s purpose and way of being in the world. Our soul and the ancestors are waiting.

Even the way we approach and work through the terrifying feelings connected with our wounds can have a flavor of this personal myth before we embody it totally and viscerally. It’s in the way we see the signposts, symbols and experiences of our lives. Everything has a meaning on many different levels and there is a magic in the way our deep feminine experience of the psyche weaves its way through life’s experiences.

We need to open to the magic, believe in the magic, live the magic. Beware of the colonizer within, the patriarchal, dominant aspect of the psyche, In women it’s often found in the animus (inner masculine). In men it can come through in their false belief of what it is to be masculine. This is the part of us that says that the magic, the synchronicities, the symbols have no meaning, they don’t exist and we don’t have the right to live them. This is the part of all of our psyches that killed thousands of women and some men during the witchcraft trials because they knew what it was to travel in these realms. This is the part in all of our psyches that judges, looks down upon and stays silent as racism escalates in the world. This is the part of all of our psyches that is disconnected from our ancestral clans, from the ancestors in all of our lineages that were deeply connected to the earth in order to survive. This is the part in all of our psyches that has separated from this wisdom of our original people that the planet is crying out for now. The ancestors are waiting for us.

Within us, we all need to track those parts of us that stop us living with the cycles of nature and our own cycles, the parts of us that cut us off from our personal myth, from our unique ways of weaving life’s experiences into our own stories. It is sovereignty that has been colonized. It is our own deep knowing and mysterious inner way of being that is being gagged and bound from within.

I say this because as I work on my book, I realize how much I edit myself from this place of inner judgement of the feminine. Much of the work I am doing in my writing is finding the right relationship within, identifying the colonizer and making him step down so what wants to come through me can – unedited.

Yesterday, I went walking with my love. We live in ancient lands, lands where indigenous people have lived for thousands of years and still do. I have often wondered what brought me to these lands at the end of the world. I spent the first five years here healing on a mountain top. I remember lying for ten days on a sofa nestled into the walls that had been dug out of the mountain in our cave home healing from an operation I had to remove cancer. The day I got up, I looked at the mountain walls and I felt the power, the way they had held me, the strength they had supported me with so my body could heal.

Five years later, we are living one mile further down in a beautiful ancient, agricultural valley. I am part of the life here. It has welcomed me. Recently, we decided to walk in our neighboring village lands, where we had heard there were a series of waterfalls. The track to the trail head took us into alpine scenery as we rose above the village and wound our way into the sacred mountain. I find myself walking in a way that suits my soul, I stroll and smell every plant, harvesting conifer shoots and tree resins that the trees want to let go of. (I only use my fingers and take what comes easily.)

My eyes scan the earth, trodden by humans for thousands of years. I collect a stone that catches my eye. I feel the whole landscape enter me and I feel myself a part of it. Yesterday, I felt my ancestors telling me that this land where the indigenous people held ceremonies and honored the birds, the animals, the plants and the rocks was a way for me to connect with my indegenous ancestors. My great-great-grandmother was from a tribe in Northeast India, an adivasi, which means original people of India. The Anasazi, now called Ancestral Pueblans, were known as the original people of this land. My ancestors came from a different continent, but that doesn’t change anything, the indigenous knowledge and magical way of being in the world with nature is like a network of mycelium where all is connected. I heard them telling me that I should honor this place, that it’s sacred and a place of ceremony. The ancestors are waiting for us.

After trekking along a tiny mountain trail, difficult to see but intensely beautiful, we were winding our way into another realm, another world, stepping through a portal. Finally, after scrambling up on rocks, we arrived. Caves high in the huge rocks cradled the waterfall on each side.

I made my way into the right hand cave, the ceiling was striated with white and brown stone and we could feel the presence of ancients that had been at home in this natural cathedral. I sat on the earth in the cool of the cave looking out and down onto Florian below.

I put my hands into the earth and realized I was touching an ancient fire pit. I sat there on the ground in the position of the ancient women that would have sat there a thousand years or more ago and tended the fire. I felt them in every cell of my body. The gift is in the connection. I had sensed them, heard them within me and here I was being shown that the inner connection is strong, is alive and is vitally needed in this world.

I know the ancestral healing work we do at AromaGnosis in the Ancestral Healing online class and our consultations is very important for individual and global healing, but yesterday the message was that we need to help as many people as possible reconnect with their ancestral clans, with their people, with the ancestors in their motherlines that lived close to the land, that understood nature and how to honor it in order to survive. We all have these people in our lines. Some of you may need to go back further than others. It doesn’t matter, as long as we reconnect. The ancestors are calling and the world needs their wisdom. Wherever your ancestral clan come from, be it Eastern Europe, Celtic lands, the Mediterranean, India, Germanic soil, here in the US, Africa, Nordic mountains, there is wisdom, mythology, plant medicine, magic that is your birthright and that will connect you to the indigenous mindset of the world. I believe we cannot move forward towards a healthier, more peaceful and less destructive world if we continue to cut ourselves off from our ancestors. Their knowledge and the energy they bring to us through our DNA is not only our birthright but our responsibility. They are part of our personal myth, we need to honor them, listen to them and feel them. They bring magic and a wisdom that if we continue to ignore and destroy will be our downfall but if we connect to it and honor it will light up our cells with our own unique signature that like the bees in a hive connects us to the whole.