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Ancestral Lineage Healing

Everyone has accessible, wise & loving ancestors who can offer insight, guidance and healing. Relating with our ancestors provides greater understanding of the intergenerational blessings and burdens we carry, illuminates a sense of purpose and cultivates connection with spirit. Generally, the ancestors are the collective dead of human history. More specifically, ancestors are the well, elevated rather than troubled dead. While we have ancestors of vocation and spirit tradition, working with our blood family ancestors is foundational and accessible. Working with our wise, well ancestors can support the troubled dead, shift the vibration of the lineage, transmute patterns and trauma and brighten the energetic influence of our ancestors on our lives.

For many, this idea of a spectrum of wellness for the dead is quite foreign. In the Western world, we’ve often grown up with a binary story of eternal heaven or hell for the dead. With decreased faith in these traditions, many have thrown out all related concepts of continued consciousness after death and thus their worldview cannot contain a concept of ancestors who may have an active impact on the present. However, whether we believe in their potential impact or not, it is there. While we may not remember how to or trust ourselves to sense unseen energy, it is generally accepted that intergenerational patterns of trauma, addiction, abuse can be passed along the blood line. Whether you “believe” in the ancestors as an active influence or not, ancestral healing techniques can support shifting these troublesome and painful patterns and reclaiming forgotten gifts.

Many Indigenous cultures have ways of tending the recently dead to help them become seated with the ancestors and practices for continued relationship. Yet many, especially European-ancestored folks, have lost the ways of their ancient ancestors and connection with the land whose body is composed of the dead. Stifled grief, unresolved trauma, changes in funerary practices have made it so that the dead and the living can often get stuck after a loved one transitions. In some cases, the dead may have unfinished business or concern for the living which keeps a part of them close. Alternatively, the living, with very few effective ways of tending their own loss and grief, sometimes cling to the deceased. Both of these can keep the deceased from resting in peace, or as a Native saying goes, crossing the river to the land of the ancestors. With centuries or millennia of lost ritual, migration, war, trauma, there is the potential for an immense back-log of unresolved emotion in our ancestral field/matrix.

Ancestral lineage healing offers techniques for:

  • dropping into the body & cultivating intuition
  • sensing the specific, present impact of our ancestors upon us
  • learning how to discern helpful from harmful energy
  • knowing how to create boundaries
  • gaining insight into and freedom from destructive patterns
  • connecting with well, helpful ancestral allies or guides
  • facilitating the healing of the unsettled dead
  • bringing forth and maximizing the blessings of the ancestors into our lives
  • supporting the transition of recent dead or preparing for your own transition
  • feeling greater connection with and support from Spirit
  • maintaining relationship with ancestors through altars, practices and offerings
  • receiving the upgraded version of our ancestors at the bodily level

While this modality is oriented towards the healing of the ancestors, it also creates space for your own emotional process. Whether tending the ways these patterns show up in your own life, grief over a lost one or deepened compassion for the struggles of others, the work offers a witnessed, held space for feeling and expression. In such volatile, polarized times, engagement with this work also offers a non-judgmental space to reckon with both the harms enacted by and on our ancestors around issues such as race, colonialism, gender and sexuality. As we begin to ritually acknowledge and tend these past wounds, we create space for the expanding complexity of our human existence and for evolutionary possibilities. In these times, our global community of beings needs us to remember the gifts of the ancient ones and weave them in revolutionary ways in order to reestablish harmony with the earth and the waters and to reclaim ways of healing and relating for the future of life on this planet.

 

Private Sessions

Available by phone, zoom or in-person in Saxapahaw, at The Flowjo in Carrboro or in alignment with travels.  Write Julia@AncestralDance.org to book an appointment.

75-90 min initial session — $135

60-75 min followup session — $100

Also see Ancestral Dance or Upcoming Events for trainings and embodied group rituals

“Julia has an incredible gift for holding space. Diving into ancestral work can feel very vulnerable, and I felt 100% safe and cared for with Julia. This work is pivotal for anyone longing to deepen their connection with…… everything. I never knew I had such strong allies in my ancestors. I feel through this work that I am way more supported than I ever knew, and Julia so beautifully teaches me tools to connect in my own way. I can’t recommend her and this work enough.” ~Kaitlin

“The Ancestral work I have participated in with Julia and Jonathan has been a very potent vehicle for me and has deepened my connections to the the seen and the unseen realms.  I have had many rich opportunities to work with deep traumas in my own system and have also been able to connect more deeply with support and health in my lineages which is then reflected in my  body and world.This work has offered me many tools and resources that have been and continue to have a profound effect on my life. I so deeply appreciate the way in which Julia and Jonathan so reverently hold the space for this work.  The trust and safety of the container that is co-created in their sessions and rituals allows for deep, transformative healing work.” ~ Mary