If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.
Thich Nhat Hanh
I love this quote as it sums up how I feel about those who have come before and how their legacy lives through me.
I hold reverence for my ancestors who forged the way for my very existence.
Just as their DNA strands weave through the generations, the thread of their lives is woven into my psyche.
I feel them watching over me as I continue to craft the tapestry of our bloodline. There is comfort in feeling their presence as I make my way through life.
But I did not always feel this way.
As a White South African connecting with my blood ancestors has been a tricky process. I felt ashamed of the role my ancestors played – either through their actions or their complacency – in shaping colonial and apartheid South Africa.
I wanted to distance myself from their political ideology, gender roles and societal norms. I yearned to be different from my tribe.
In many ways I am different from my tribe, but the threads of their knowledge and drive run through me nonetheless. While I make different choices in how to be in the world, I am clearly a continuation of their experiences.
Part of my personal healing journey is to make peace with all my blood ancestors and the choices they made. Ancestral healing has become a core part of my healing process. I believe that as I continue my healing journey towards wholeness, I am sending healing backwards, over many generations, into my blood line.
As we enter October, when the veil between this world and the next thins, Crafting the Sacred will be holding sacred space for those who have come before with the blog series, Ancestral Threads.
I’ll be sharing more about my ancestral legacy and healing and have asked some special friends in my community to share theirs. Please come back over the month as we weave our Ancestral Threads through poetry, dreamwork, healing, art, ritual and remembrances.
Ancestral Threads posts will go up on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays until October 31st, 2011.
The photograph above is of my maternal grandparents, Sam Harpur and Alvira van Aardt, taken in Johannesburg, South Africa, circa 1958. I love the glamour of this shot. From their urban sophistication it is hard to believe that they both grew up in rural communities – my grandfather outside Omagh, Northern Ireland and my grandmother in the Klein Karoo of South Africa.
Hi, I'm Jo Crawford of Crafting the Sacred. I help creatives manifest the work they love with equal parts 
Hi Jo, Looking forward to participating and will be working on my post this week. I like your commitment and thoughts on ancestoral healing.
Thanks Sherri. I’m so touched that you will be contributing to the series.
Beautiful post Jo, and I relate to this notion of ancestral healing – this is powerful work, as painful as it can be. I’m really looking forward to this series and to learning how others are interpreting and integrating this important topic.
Yes, it is indeed powerful work! There are a lovely blend of posts coming up – can’t wait to share.
Beautiful idea Jo – this is a really powerful learning… I look forward to reading more! Ps was it Calitzdorp? – that is one of my favourite places in the world!
No it was Cradock, but also beautiful in that Karoo vista way!
Hi Jo! This is fabulous – I’m really looking forward to following this series. I had an amazing therapist once who was the first person to open my eyes to the role of my ancestors in shaping my psyche. It was so freeing and it made so much sense, especially because I’d never even considered going back further than my parents when it came to exploring what has influenced my patterns and beliefs. Can’t wait to learn from yoi!
It is truly amazing to realize how much of our psyche is made up of patterns set long before even our parents were born. It’s such important work and I hope you will chip in with your story along the way.
This is some of the work I’ve been doing in my personal life for the last 2-3 years. It is soo powerful when you can reach out and claim the goodness while clearing the poison from your ancestral line. I honor you for doing such important work!
Thank you Dionne – I honor the ancestral healing you are doing too. I feel it’s so important to see the patterns so that we don’t continually hand on the baggage to the next generation.
T’is the season to be connecting to our ancestors! This has always been my favorite time of year. My father passed away this year so it’s particularly poignant. Like you, I am not proud of every aspect of my ancestral legacy – I imagine we can all say that, and that is part of the beauty of family We take the good with the bad and learn to work with it in all it’s messy glory. Great post!
Sharon, I’m so sorry to hear of your father’s passing.
The more ancestral healing I do the more I realize that some of my most prized personal traits, e.g. resilience, have been handed down by the very ancestors I had trouble accepting. The irony of this healing path is not lost on me – but that’s for another post I’m working on…
Thanks for this Jo, it is brave and beautiful, complex and truthful, just like you!! I’m looking forward to following the rest of the thread.
Love Fran.
Thank you Fran for mirroring this to me. I hope you will feel free to share your path too along the way.
This time of year is one of my favorites. I am blessed with a rich heritage and this year I have felt even more drawn to honoring the legacy as well as the people.
Yes, honoring the legacy is such a moving process!
This is such a powerful theme, Jo and I am looking forward to reading your posts.
Thank you for stopping by, Soul Gypsy.
Thank you for sharing this, Jo. I think everyone has these issues to deal with, regardless of whether they choose to acknowledge it. I’ve struggled for years with my paternal family line: on the one hand, educated, cultured members of the German nobility, and on the other hand, brutal, militaristic, unbelievably prejudiced bigots. While acknowledging that they were the products of their time and society, it’s still hard to reconcile with it. Why didn’t they object, rebel, speak out in some way? The same reasons we don’t – material or social security, fear, etc. It helps make them more human, more real, but it’s still a tricky emotional path to walk.
Brava to you for the courage to do this work, and to share your experience!
Thank you Anastasia for acknowledging the difficulty in finding compassion for our ancestors while at the same time as not sweeping the troubling history of bigotry under the carpet.
I am so looking forward to following this series. October is a very rich month for me and I am so blessed to see others honoring their ancestors in this way. Such Sacred Time.
It such a sacred time to honor our beloved dead – glad you will be joining us.
I wish I knew who my ancestors were. Bangladesh/East Pakistan/Indo Subcontinent didn’t exactly have the best record-keeping (even my dad’s official birthdate isn’t right), and my oldest living ancestor, my grandmother, doesn’t really remember much.
I have some basic clues: there’s Arab merchant travellers (probably explains our inherited penchant for travel), Uzbeks, Indians, Mongol/Chinese thanks to descending from Genghis Khan’s nephew. The guy was pretty prolific though so it’s not terribly unique to be related to him.
One grandpa was a Landlord, probably the British India Empire version of the feudal Lords. And…that’s all I know about them. The rest is a mystery.
I have a strong feeling that if my ancestors saw who I am they’d be quite aghast. Me, a rabble-rousing artsy type with a taste for the risque and erotic, fallen out of many generations of Islam, not being a proper Bengali lady? Is this what they died for, fought in the various wars that made up Bangladesh for, migrated overseas and worked years of hard jobs for? My parents are already complaining as it is.
I feel like my ancestors would reject me if they saw me. My family care, but they can only deal with a sanitised idealised version of me, not the real me in all its grit and glory. How do I work with my ancestral threads if I feel cut off?
Thanks so much for your real and complex comment Creatrix. Given the obstacles in recordkeeping, you seem to know a lot about your ancestry already – that’s impressive!
As I said in this post, I really did now feel, or want to feel, part of my tribe when I first began exploring my ancestral history. My political views, sexual identity and appearance have been at odds with my family of origin and extended relatives, so I had no idea I’d connect with any of my ancestry. As a Feminist I struggled to identify with the long line of women who were illiterate and bore as many as 12 children each generation with little agency…or so it seemed to me.
What was a turning point for me was realizing that I don’t really know what their secret dreams and passions were – just because their life choices were determined by gender, class and societal norms does not mean, given choice and agency, they would have led the same life.
I wonder in your ancestry if there were also rabble-rousers of a different – more subtle nature. I firmly believe that even the most deviant of us are living out the passions of our bloodline. Your life and beliefs may not look anything like what your ancestors felt they were fighting for, but the fact that you have freedom to choose the life you live, seems like their hard work paied off.
It seems to me that there are stories to be told through your radical creative and erotic self that are liberating to your bloodline. One suggestion I have is that you set up a small altar to your ancestors and begin a dialogue with them – sharing fully who you are (not the sanatised version) and see what comes through energetically. I also got this intuitive hit that wearing jewelry that has been gifted to you by family, when you perform is another way to connect.
I guess part of what I’m saying is that once our ancestors who have passed rarely hold the same judgments as they did when they were living. Our fear of rejection is often rooted in our own shadow self holding us back from being as weird as we want to be. If we can hold compassion for their experiences, surely our ancestors can hold compassion for ours. How does this sit with you?
Jo-
I love the metaphor of our ancestral threads being woven into our lives and psyche, and also the idea of the backward and forward flow of healing. Thanks for creating this beautiful series.
Thanks Anu. I love using craft metaphors to describe how we engage with our inner and outer worlds. To continue the tapestry/weaving metaphor, I feel that we are usually so consumed with the details of our particular thread that we do not always stand back to get perspective on the whole picture we are creating together as a human family. That’s what I’m hoping this series will do – give us opportunities to step back and admire it all.