Honoring the Ancestors

This month brings us Samhain (sow-wen), the ancient Celtic festival marking the midpoint between the Equinox and the Winter Solstice. Samhain recognizes the thinning of the veil, the time when our ancestors’ presence feels especially near.

Creating a simple ancestral altar is a powerful way to honor this connection. Place a photograph, heirloom, or symbol of your lineage on a small table. Anything that feels like a remembrance to the lives that came before you, the beings that brought you into this body. Add seasonal offerings such as apples, bread, a bowl of water, and light a candle in gratitude. Speak their names. Share a story. Invite their wisdom to walk beside you in the months ahead. In remembering them, we remember ourselves. Their wounds and their medicine. 

Ancestral Medicine

There is so much power in connecting to our lineage, recognizing not only the people and their experiences who brought each of us into this world, but also the medicine that they carried. Even within histories marked by harm, there have always been ancestors who resisted, who prayed, who healed, who kept the embers of wisdom alive. As we descend into the time of the thinning veils, the liminal spaces between worlds of spirit and matter, those ancestral connections feel palpable. They carry both the shadow and the light, the wound and the remedy. But what if you feel resistance toward connecting with your predecessors?

What we have seen take shape on this earth, those events where extraction and suffering were caused at the hands of those who sought false power, domination, and control, echoes through the lines of those who were carrying these stories within their bloodlines. We all carry the memory of this corruption and have all been touched by the darkness that attempts to destroy the soul consciousness within us at the core of our being. It’s a tale as old as time.

It’s time to look more closely at what it means to inherit the influence of predatory forces that have left their mark on human history and consciousness.This did not start here. There are so many layers around this concept of one group preying on another. There have been forces at play here on this planet that thrive on division, destruction, and the manipulation of the power of generative human emotion. Emotion means energy in motion. When we generate the fields of fear, chaos, and destruction, it feeds these predatory forces that have been present on this earth for millennia. When we begin to connect back to the power of our Love – not in the floofy “love and light” sense, but in the deep recognition that all life is connected – we connect with the divine creator within. We begin to remember that we have the power to live from a soul-level consciousness. We have to come back to the Truth within our humanity.

There were times I felt waves of resistance to being in this body, to belonging to the lineage I was born into. Yet within that discomfort, I began to discover medicine. Could it be that my very awareness, my choice to live differently, to bring more care, to do better, is itself part of the healing? This work does not end with me; it becomes medicine for my ancestors and a gift for those yet to come.

If we cannot accept the wholeness of who we are, if we sit in resistance, we will not be able to fully step into the fullness of our own being. If we cannot accept the darkness of our own shadow, we cannot see the brilliance of our own light. There is a reason for being born into this body, with this family, at this time. The paradigm is shifting, and we are here to shift it. We have to be able to take the good with the bad, to fully feel into the uncomfortability, and to own it, and to know that we are not tied to the karma if we choose to do more, to bring awareness to the woundings in our histories. To bring resolution and reclamation.

I have found that so much of my inability to feel rooted in community is a direct correlation to me not wanting to connect to the parts of my lineage that I feel resistance to, and that carries within it a tone of shame. It even inhibits the ability to feel rooted into the community of the Earth and the natural world. But shame keeps us trapped in a state of powerlessness and disconnection. Disembodiment.

So today I am saying hello to all of the people who came before me. Asking them to be here, to acknowledge them, to illuminate them. I am done hiding from myself. They are a part of me, regardless of their personal stories. And I am here to honor the parts of my lineage, too, who did the work – the women who were the outcasts of society but held the magic of transmutation in their bones. It is written in my DNA as well: the folk healers, the wise women, the wortcunners. I don’t have their stories, but the genetic memories linger in the map of my body and soul. As I honor both the wound and the remedy, I step closer to wholeness, and to the living medicine of my ancestors that still moves through me.

If you are curious about exploring these ancestral connections, join Ally October 29th at 6:00 pm for an ancestral remembrance journey. Click the link below to learn more.

Space is limited for group experiences. Pre-registration required.