What does ancestral healing have to do with property readings? The spirits of the land are so amazingly supportive and loving and aware of how we are stewarding the land. But there are also patterns that I notice from property to property no matter where that land is located.
I tend to refer to them as “the ancestors” and often that’s exactly what they are.
The energies of the people who lived on the land 100 or more years ago. They aren’t necessarily the actual spirits of the people (although they can be) but are more like an energetic imprint they left behind.
In many cases I come across the ancestors doing the things they did in their lives – hunting, gathering, fishing, caring for their families, and they often share messages of a love of the land and specific things we can do to work with the land. But there is also another kind energy that I regularly encounter with the ancestors: fear, pain, sadness.
Many of these ancestors were pushed from the land they loved, separated from their families, lied to, deceived, and attacked by early settlers. And that energy remains on the land. Furthermore, the Native people of North America were not the only ones who suffered in this way. The culture and tradition of slavery generated even more of this energy and embedded it into the earth and our collective fields.
Think about this on an enormous landscape like North America – and really, around the world over many generations – this fear, pain, and sadness of millions of individuals is radiating from the earth every day.
Add to that our lack of care in our culture (by and large) for caring for our dead. In not energetically preparing for our own eventual end and in not helping others transition gracefully into the light, we have created a real problem of generations of spirits stuck in the middle world – which is the world we live in – still attempting to carry on with their bad habits, addictions, or grudges from their life. It’s just that most of us don’t notice their presence.
Simply dying doesn’t make us healed from our lives. We must cross over and review our lives before we can truly become ancestral helping spirits. Until that happens, your angry drunk uncle is still the exact same dude in death that he was in life.
So, if we add a whole bunch of ghosts to hundreds of years of pain and trauma held in the earth and our collective energy field – most of which people aren’t even aware of – we have the perfect recipe for much of what we are seeing in our current events in the US and around the world.
Feels a bit overwhelming, huh?
How can these energies influence us today? There are two main issues at play:
First, our unhealed ancestors. While our personal beliefs and actions day to day do matter, whether we like it or not, we still have the energy of our unhealed ancestors in our fields and within the fields of our family members and they can influence us. When you see a generational pattern of abuse or addiction or some of the deeply ingrained hate that is currently bubbling to the surface of our collective awareness at the moment, that can typically be traced back to our ancestors.
The sins of the past are still here in the present. And it is our job as shamanic practitioners to work with healing our ancestral lines. These may not be family members we knew in life and we may not be aware of how they are affecting us now.
But our healed ancestors are there, waiting to be asked for their help. And each of us taking the responsibility for healing our own lines would have a profound effect on our collective energy on the earth.
This work is not my specialty but there are many practitioners who work exclusively with ancestral healing. There have been two recent episodes on this topic on Why Shamanism Now with Daniel Foor who has written a book called Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing if you’d like to explore this topic further.
Another way these energies in our collective field influence us is through time spirits. Time spirits are a force that motivates people to do something specific at a certain point in time. They rise up from the life force of humans, or the earth, and are specific to the time they are created in.
They can be positive (everyone in awe and experiencing last week’s eclipse, for instance) or negative (the idea that a group of people is somehow “less than” others). Our time and energy that we invest in these ideas keep the time spirits alive and well. If we are unaware of these spirits, we can be easily caught up in their vortex of energy. This is what can create a mob mentality.
Simply knowing and being aware that these forces exist is helpful to avoid them. Setting good energetic boundaries is also critical. And to ask ourselves – are we allowing ourselves to be swept up in a moment of group consciousness?
And is it something positive or negative?
Because time spirits like racism and sexism are so big and beastly that it can be difficult to realize how much the energies surrounding you are influencing you when they aren’t something you can see or touch.
But simply knowing these issues exist doesn’t excuse any of us from the personal responsibility we each have to heal these energies. It’s not someone else’s job. I cannot heal the wounds of the past one at a time, property by property. It’s not my work to do alone. This is our collective work.
Sometimes my guides tell me during readings that I’m not allowed to heal something that I can see is a problem – I have to leave it alone and just send loving energy to the trauma that is present.
If there is an upside to the current disruption in our collective culture, it’s that so much ugliness that has hidden under the surface for so long has been pushed up into the light to be seen and healed. This is our opportunity to do our part. It may simply begin with your own personal path of healing.
But as you continue down the path, you will begin to encounter these spirits outside of yourself. Our ancestors, the ancestors that our ancestors oppressed, and many more, and that is how we begin to see that we are all one and all connected. Everything we do to others, we also do to ourselves and to the collective.
So, do the work you are called to do. Start with your own healing.
Ancestral healing is needed so those spirits can be free to return to provide us all more support and assistance. And then look around to see how your gifts can be used for the collective good in the world.
