Ceremony For the Ancestors
Friday, October 19th, 7 PM
Sold Out
In many spiritual traditions, autumn is the time of year to honor the ancestors. It's easy to honor the ancestors you love, and the ones you know nothing about. It's harder to send blessings to the ancestors we despise, the ones who hurt us or brought wreckage. But however you approach this ceremony, the ritual sending of blessings to the ancestors is a fundamental act that empowers, blesses and heals our own lives, and releases us from negative ancestral influences. This is a one-evening ceremony, but if you want to work more deeply into healing and blessing the ancestors, consider this 5-session class.
Questions? Email me: [email protected]
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At Jaime's Midwest Center for Shamanic Experience, otherwise known as my house:
4227 Lyndale Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55409 |
Some ideas about the Ancestors:
One of the keys in working with negative ancestors is that we are not honoring or blessing their behavior, nor pretending to forgive them when we really don't. We are honoring that every life that has ever passed across the skin of the Great Mother Earth has been a hard life, full of turmoil dilemma, joy, grief, yearning for love, and painful choices. We are honoring the fact that our ancestors, no matter how wise or awful, brought us into this life. We can ask beloved ancestors to help us make decisions, and we can ask them to help us not be like the despised ancestors. And for those ancestors who disappointed or horrified us, we can ceremonially heal what was unhealed in them during their life. In that unhealed state they perpetrated things on the earth that were wrong. That succinct phrase, "Hurt people hurt people" applies here. Ancestors can continue hurt us long after they are gone, and this is why we heal them too - to break that energetic pattern that reaches us even from the other world. Just as the ancestors have embedded physical patterns into your DNA, they have also embedded spiritual patterns that can disrupt your life. These patterns can be re-written through shamanic work, including this ceremony. Another angle of ancestor work is to remember that you have more than one kind of ancestor. We have our human ancestors, but we also have our nonhuman and pre-human ancestors: the earth, the rocks, the winds, the stardust, the tides, the lightning, the creatures great and small - all of these are our ancestors. That phrase, "we are stardust" applies here. We also have what my teacher calls "milk ancestors." They are not blood relatives, but human beings who nurtured or inspired us, or guided us to live with more love or courage. - in other words, nourished us with the "milk of human kindness." We can also honor these ancestors in this ceremony. One of my first shamanic teachers said that creating beauty in this world heals the ancestors. So the simplest thing you can do for your ancestors - known, unknown, despised or beloved - is to make beauty. You make beauty anytime you consciously bring your love of the Great Mystery into a physical form, in any way. All art making, from a mural on a wall to dancing silently in your living room, to writing a simple poem, can be created as healing for the ancestors. Merely sending simple prayers to the beloved and despised ancestors can be effective: "Dear ancestors, known and unknown, I remember you now, and I thank you for opening the doors so that I could jump up and live in this mysterious, beautiful world." Neuroscience has shown us that making rituals can generate the brain chemicals that make life happier. This is the scientific explanation for why we do ceremony. But we do ceremony because we are ceremony-making creatures, and because ceremony makes life mysterious and beautiful. I welcome you to this experience! |
Cost: $25 per person.
Reserve your spot by paying online. (Click the drop down arrow for multiple tickets): |