Are you your own ancestor?

Four months ago I moved to a new home, and after initially responding slightly antagonistically to two crows stealing papayas from the tree in my garden, I realised that the crows had been there much longer than I had, and that forging an amicable relationship with them was in my best interest.

Within twenty-four hours, the pair had a new habit of assembling on my back fence to be fed. Soon after, I sensed that I had been adopted by them, rather than the other way around. They weren’t MY crows in MY garden. I was THEIR human, allowed to inhabit THEIR space. I looked deeper into the message that the crows were sharing with me, and they were showing me how to forge a relationship with my ancestral lineage.

Tuning into my ancestors has always felt ‘hard’. I have no direct experience of ancestral assistance – living or dead, my relatives have not felt supportive. I have no knowledge of ancestral resilience on either my paternal or maternal side. Though to persist in the face of trauma shows adaptive resilience, so it must be there on my maternal side at least…even if trauma persists along with the genes. But on my paternal side, my genetic heritage has been weakened by trauma, and my lineage is dying out.

The first time the crows accepted my offering of food, only one of them came to the ground to take it, and the other missed out. Without knowing their personalities (crows have big personalities), I assumed I was seeing evidence of greed and was concerned about the crow that didn’t have anything to eat. Actually what I was seeing was resilience and adaptive survival at its finest. I shouldn’t have been worried: the crow that had eaten regurgitated some of its meal for the more timid bird. I was struck by how much they cared for each other. Over the course of the next week I saw their care in other ways too, but that's another story…

When doing ancestral work, it’s possible to call in a resilient ancestor, even without knowing who they are, or how far back to look. You don’t have to know their name, or which century they lived. You can go back to the point in your lineage before the trauma and call in the support of a healthy and resilient ancestor.

Ancestral healing doesn’t have to be just about trauma in your family line. I’ve used this process in sessions to work on the epigenetic level and inhibit the expression of a genetic disorder and to call in support for a baby waiting to be conceived… Asking for the support of one’s ancestors for the conception of a child is sacred work indeed.

When I first started as a specialist in nervous system work I wanted to focus on trauma prevention, and building resilience for the future is the most effective way of doing that.

Ancestral work doesn’t just work on the past trauma, we are connected to our lineage by a gossamer thread that transcends time and weaves past, present and future together so that we come to know ourselves as our own ancestor.