In December 2019, I began studying ancestral lineage healing, a method of ancestral work that powerfully enlists your bright thriving ancestors (often pre-agrarian and pre-patriarchal) to bring healing to any troubled ancestors between them and you, resolving blockages and restoring the channels of ancestral blessings and support so they can finally reach you.
In this work, we focus on our four primary ancestral lines: our father’s father’s line, father’s mother’s line, mother’s mother’s line, and mother’s father’s line. I began with my father’s father’s line, which I knew had been riddled with addiction, depression, and deadly cultural and interpersonal violence. The process was powerful and poignant, emphasizing ritual safety by asking the thriving ancestors who lived before the systemic cultural harms of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonization to do the heavy lifting.
The difference in my somatic experience of life now that both my father’s father’s line and my father’s mother’s line are well is remarkable. It’s like wearing a jetpack of ancestral blessings instead of a heavy anvil of ancestral burden. I have more life energy and joyful momentum than I’ve ever had before.
With this unprecedented life force, I’ve embarked on two harmonized projects this year: completing practitioner training so I can facilitate this life-and-world-changing ancestral lineage healing for you (I’ll begin offering sessions beginning in summer of 2023), and directing my first feature-length documentary film (production began in summer 2022, when we completed 70% of filming during an exhilarating three-month, 11,000-mile road trip).
In the Wake of Our Ancestors follows my 78-year-old father and me on that cross-country reckoning with our 400-year history of settler-colonizer ancestry, exploring the question: When you’re born on land your ancestors stole, can you live here with integrity?
Watch a sneak preview of In the Wake of Our Ancestors today! And stay tuned for ancestral lineage healing sessions coming this summer.
Much love and empathy,
Angela