I advised a friend, who is dealing with a serious health issue, to call in the ancestors for protection, guidance and healing. I have explained that the ancestral spirits are always watching our backs, but that doing ritual or going into prayer is like exercising a muscle that we all have, but we have to exercise it or it can atrophy. We can see it as a muscle, but the ability to pray and do ritual is also in all of our DNA. But then he asked, “When you say “ancestors”, what do you mean? Do you mean our literal, blood ancestors?
The reason for confusion is, our blood ancestors might have been bad people or messed up or nothing special and that confuses people when they do shamanic work. Why would I call on Uncle Jim or grandfather Joe who was so stingy with his money and treated Grandma so badly?
I happen to have had a wonderful Great Grandfather on my mother’s side and my Nanny, his daughter, was special to me, so I can evoke them to watch over me, but ancestors are everyone who lived before us, which is quite a pool of wisdom and DNA. In intact shamanic / indigenous cultures, that are also ancestral cultures, the lineages go way back, but we of the “modern” industrial and post-industrial world have to learn what it means to live shamanically and let the dreamtime into our lives.
My friend’s question about ancestors is honest, but also, because I have been doing this work for 25 years, naive. I have had experiences where stones have “come to life” when I needed help, or old trees have helped me at critical moments in my life.
Once, after a vision quest I was waiting for my ride by a little stream and I heard a male indigenous voice singing in the stream (in an indigenous language) and then I saw the warrior standing with his back to me with long braided hair singing to a semi-circle of young warriors. His song of power was endless and it made me weep. When I returned to VT from the rainforest in Peru, the evening before I got sick, I was in our hot tub for a chill when a Native American medicine man climbed into the hot tub in full regalia to deliver a message. When I was a kid, when I was having nightmares and was scared, Popeye would get in bed with me.
Let’s talk about that one: Popeye. Was it really Popeye? No, but spirits (ancestral spirits) are energetic beings. They don’t have bodies, so they can assume whatever appearance breaks the ice, because we need a visual. Their appearance can be stable, so they assume the same appearance for as long as we need them or they can change their appearance.
Ancestral spirits don’t need us to see them to be present or “real”. They have their own life or viability and autonomy. Please understand that my Great Grandfather, (my favorite blood-ancestor) doesn’t look like my Great Grandfather anymore, but when he shows up for me, I see him as he looked right before he died. That is this ancestral spirit’s concession to me.
Fact: Dreams are a dimension, a psychic dimension. Since ancestral spirits are energetic beings they can enter our dreams, because psychic energy is a form of energy and so our dreams are accessible to them. But ancestral spirits can also come in or on the wind or they can appear as (or in) an emotion, because emotions are also energy. So, ancestral spirits might be ancestors that are related to us from hundreds of years ago or they can be a Great Grandfather or anyone who died, like the Native American story teller who helped me on my first vision quest. As soon as he died he was an ancestor.
How are ancestors ancestors? How can a tree be an ancestor? Or a wolf in a dream? Or a hawk that shows up when I am praying in our field? Because we are made from molecules of Earth (and stars) that are as old as time. We are made of very, very ancient molecules (and all manner of sub-atomic quanta). To the extent that we identify with the new part of us, the ego, we are disconnected from our ancient, timeless nature, but, in fact we are all very, very old souls. So when the ancestors are helping us, they must be very amused because we are also ancestors.
The water molecules in me might have been in the wine of the first communion. So ancestors are also beings who preceded us, like the stone who came to life for me on a mushroom journey or the tree I was sitting under who showed me my path that seemed to open in front of me and came directly from her roots. But my ancestor can also be that hawk gyring over my head because the hawk, or any wild creature, is at one with its ancient, timeless nature and that translates into wisdom or medicine that we can access through ritual and dreaming
One other point is that when difficult people (relatives) die, death is like a car wash, so the toxicity stays on the gross material plane. Of course there is a lot more to it!, as the much older Hinduism and Buddhism teach, there are planes of karmic evolution, but in general, the point is we are here on this Earth Walk, as this person, to work on something — that is our karma. My father was here to work through some very tough issues that went to the core of who he was. That was his karmic work. My karmic work is different from his, but I also have core work to do. When my father died I had the vision, at a shamanic workshop, of watching him standing under a waterfall and a black ink flowed out of his body, downstream. That was what was left of his toxic psychological / emotional / spiritual issues that were preventing him from passing on to a “higher” plane.
Something similar happens to almost all of us when we die, so all of those dysfunctional, broken people, by this paradigm, get plenty more chances, and, so, when they become ancestors, because of what they were working on karmically when they were alive, they can serve as guides for certain problems that we are facing. They might show up because we evoke them or they might just show up gratis, in a dream.
One last thought: We were born with certain ancestral spirits watching over us, watching our back. They never leave us. That would be my ancestral spirit who showed up as Popeye when I was having nightmares at age five. It is one of the benefits of shamanic work to realize this, that we were born with guardian spirits watching our back.
Gary Lindorff - Nine Waves 