Celebrating Ancestral Lineage Healing!

Belated Happy Lammas - here in the northern hemisphere, at least. I hope this finds you well and I wish you and your kin much abundance this late summer. I’m celebrating having just finished the taught part of my training as an Ancestral Healing practitioner with Ancestral Medicine. The timing’s perfect, as it is such rich, abundant work, reflecting this late summer season. I celebrated by making this mandala or despacio offering for my ancestors and for everyone who I was taught by and studied with, and their people and places and kin, too.

In the spirit of abundance, and celebration, I am called to share 10 things I love about this work… 

1. Accessibility

Anyone can give this work a go. It probably helps if you are at least a bit curious about your ancestors, or curious to understand them more, or frustrated by less welcome life patterns that regular therapy doesn’t seem to budge. Folk with adoptive as well as blood family lines can find it helpful, as it doesn’t rely upon knowing anything about our birth families, as we are learning from and healing with the whole lineage and elder guides, rather than focusing on the last few generations. Having said that, this work is not for everyone, and sometimes the timing matters, too. On a practical note, accessibility is a core value for Ancestral Medicine as an organisation, so there are practitioners who offer low cost and/or free places for one-to-one work. Folk can also learn the process through Ancestral Medicine’s online courses and/or in person intensives or through the Ancestral Medicine book authored by Dr Daniel Foor, founder of Ancestral Medicine, the network of the same name.

2. Clarity

Ancestral Lineage Healing is really clearly structured, making it not only easy to grasp, but helping to demystify what can look complex, and, maybe, a bit unknown or somewhat daunting. And even though the approach is clear and clearly offered, how our different lineages respond can look one hundred different ways. This means that the particular lineage of focus can heal in line with its own qualities, traits, blessings, countries of origin, affinities etc. There’s no sense of ‘one size fits all,’ despite the very clear protocol.

3. Ritual safety

I grew up in a household where revering the ones who had gone before was commonplace, as was revering deities. Unfortunately, that respect and receptivity wasn’t matched by a framework for knowing how to communicate with the unseen safely. There was also no recognition of the need for linear repair, instead assuming all those who had passed were well, which was far from the reality. As a result, I was very familiar with talking to ancestors and researching ancestry, without very simple – I know now – ritual safety measures. Having now completed the basic repair work with my first eight lineages (my parents through to the lineages of my great grandparents) it’s a daily delight to connect safely with and be guided by the wise and vibrant ones.

4. You don’t have to belief in anything

I mean, you can if you like, but you don’t have to. For example, I happen to be a long-term Buddhist (yet find myself having fewer and fewer beliefs....) so I find myself blessed to have a team of buddhas and bodhisattvas with whom I commune and lean into in this Lineage Healing work – from the many forms of Tara, to Vajrasattva and Prajnaparamita. Others lean into their supportive helpers – whether that’s the essence of Oak, Mother Mary or Ma Kali. Ancestral Medicine’s lack of dogma is refreshing and means it’s accessible to folks of no faith or a particular faith, or multi faiths.

5. Anti-supremacy

My ancestors are no better or worse than your ancestors. Engaging with healed guides to do the Ancestral Lineage Healing work is personally and familiarly helpful. It also rights and repairs cultural ripples on a family level and beyond. For example, in escaping difficult circumstances in Scotland, Germany and Ireland, some of my grandfolk moved to India and were caught up in the colonising of that rich, beautiful land and its beings, including my grandmothers there.

Tending to our lineages, healing the pain that has happened – as both oppressed and oppressors – reminds me/us in this lifetime to care-ful with what I do with my power and potency. Reminds us that stealing other peoples’ land and killing their people causes trouble for those beings and for numerous generations – an horrific scenario unravelling too vividly at this very moment on earth. Healing our ancestors kind of ‘right sizes’ us, reminding us, to live in a way which now honours that we’re no better nor worse than anyone else, including other than human and more than human kin, of course, under so much pressure in the anthropocene.

6. The healing goes beyond the personal

This point is probably a slightly obvious one after what I’ve said for so fair. Feels important to say it regardless, though, as healing in 2025 in the Global North is so often focused upon the individual, the personal, and commoditised and packaged and sold as such. Ancestral Lineage Healing is truly a team effort, in all sorts of ways and it benefits way more than the individual client, too.

7. Antidoting

Ancestral Lineage Healing helps me keep my balance, feet on the ground, head slightly closer to the heavens, at a time in this precious planet when it is easy to lose any sense of still point or feeling of being gathered. Being in contact with the wisdom of my different lineages is an antidote to the oppressions of late-stage capitalism, the devastation of climate emergency and the 6th extinction crisis and the prevalent sense of isolation. It also encourages me to act to do what I can, within my field of influence, to skilfully oppose those oppressions, having seen and felt humbled to witness the healing of the trouble and harms on my various lineages.

8. Other honouring

This isn’t all about humans, thank goodness, great as many humans are. Ancestral Lineage Healing honours the other-than and more-than-human, recognising personhood way beyond just human people. For example, in meeting my now healed lineages I also meet the affinities and elements which mean so much to each of them – for example, fire for my Mum’s lineage, earth and water for my Dad’s - I am reminded that I am made of the same stuff. That feels like another form of ‘right sizing’ – remembering how this intricate, delicate, enduring web of life includes humans as only one facet and species.

9. Healing plus

Despite not being a beer drinker, this point reminds me of the 1970s beer advertisement, ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach,’ (I’m showing my age, here, too). That’s how Ancestral Lineage Healing seems to me – there are ways in which it can go further and be more multi-faceted than conventional psychotherapy and other similar healing modalities. Personally, that’s quite a realisation, given that I’ve valued practicing as a psychotherapist since 2004. I don’t say it to diss psychotherapy, which is powerful and timely for some folk some of the time and, of course, therapy and Ancestral Lineage Healing can complement one another as modalities.  

Healing with our different ancestral lineages, easing the burdens that have remained unaddressed, embodying the blessings that might have been a bit dammed up stream until recently, can resource us – and the ancestors - in the present day. From what I’ve witnessed so far and notice personally, it can also put us tangibly in touch with why we are here, perhaps with a sense of new alignment, given that we are newly ‘reclaimed’ by the gifts and characteristics of our lineages in their new, healed state.

10. Kindness

Kindness, kindness, kindness. It’s gladdening to study and practice with a network/body of beings that has kindness as one of its core values.  Ordinary, everyday kindness seems in short supply sometimes lately. Like we need to re-learn it. To re-member is. To drink it in, to offer it up, full heart. Simple kindness and simple, everyday tending are vital in Ancestral Lineage Healing. Vital and often more powerful than I – maybe we - realise.

Thanks for reading. Drop me a line if you’d like to learn more about Ancestral Lineage Healing – I offer free 20 minutes conversations for this work. I am particularly looking to work with one or two local-to-Bristol clients, in person, at the moment. Meanwhile, enjoy the remaining fruits of summer…