Part of the path I walk involves a deeper sense of metaphysical belief and requires more of an understanding in the super~natural as well as a strong sense of comm~union with the natural world. It’s important to me that people find their way to create a personal relationship for themselves with their ancestral spirits and the death that affects their lives. So I differentiate in the way I speak about my practice between worship and work.
Worship is accessible to everyone. I also call it honor, reverence and remembering. At its simplest, Ancestor worship is the act and mindset of honoring your family lines, known and unknown to you. It’s the act of remembering them as living and breathing people who paved the way for you to be. It’s the way of thinking of them as a greater whole, one entity that is Those Who Came Before. This is something that everyone can include in their lives, regardless of religious beliefs. In this model of thought, the dead are dead, and what you are remembering is a name and the history of the life beneath it.
That has tremendous worth in itself, and is a way of finding connection in uncertain and unsettling times.
As I’ve said before, in Ancestor work, you must be open to the possibility that there is more to the world than we comprehend. In my Work, I am developing a personal relationship with what happens in death and what kind of transformation takes place during and after. I understand spirit as passing on from its physical body and reincarnating into… something other. I also see spirit as a residual echo of the living, in the way that we know the star light we see in the night sky flickered in a past long gone. Both exist simultaneously.
Organic beings have spirit. We leave organic residues that can be traced, even after the signs of life have decayed. Our spirits leave behind energy residues that those who know how to recognize them and connect to them can use for other purposes. Some residues still ring strongly with persona, so much so that you can call on individual or specific spirits to work with- ones you have connections to. I do that. I’m hoping that through the thread of this blog I will be able to show how the work I do translates into understandable concepts.
What I mostly do involves energy work and energy manipulation. I break up elemental energies into qualities of earth, air, water, fire, and ancestor, striving for some kind of equilibrium between them, depending on what the moment calls for. If you can be the centerpoint of the juggling, you can learn to walk through any maelstrom as if you are the eye of the storm. You can also learn to move the edges of where your spirit begins and ends, making your presence larger or smaller than your physical body. You can make your energy more intense and noticeable or more diffuse and invisible.
Energy is energy. I broke them up as a tool for my brain to understand and work them and help me to understand the qualities of the differences. What I came away with was an understanding of the unity and the sameness of all living things. Everything that grows and decays is connected, depending on each other for the space to grow and flourish. I seek my own growth in this one, the next one, and all the worlds seen and unseen around me.
May we all find our way to peace, compassion, wholeness and openheartedness.
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