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Story time

In grade school we had heritage days where the class was encouraged to share cultural beliefs and activities. When I asked my dad about our heritage, he reacted with an angry, “We’re Canadian!”

That’s it. That’s all.

My ancestral lineage was limited to Canada. (Substitute America, Australia or any of the commonwealth countries and you may have a similar cut off experience.)

Welp, that’s not nearly good enough.

The idea of our existence being limited to this small tiny moment, in this small, frail body is sad and scary and insufficient.

It’s also not evenly remotely true.

Immigrants to Turtle Island are suffering from a disconnect and alienation of roots that makes it hard for us to feel safe, embodied and present in the world. (This work isn’t limited to European descendants, but the work for me, has developed with this experience in mind.)

We have a lineage of cut off. We have a disconnection and dislocation that prevents the development of deep spiritual growth and transformation. We cannot embody our Soul Self fully when we don’t have strong roots to support us - strong roots that support us physically and connect us to continuity from the ancient past, into the eternal future.

We cannot express authentic Soul Self when our ground is not connected to the continuity of our existence in the world of form. We cannot embody our full expression of Soul Self in the physical body when we are disconnected from the ancient and ongoing lineage of our physical inheritance.

None of us suddenly sprung into being on Turtle Island when our family came to this land. If there wasn’t already a deep and ongoing sense of identity and connection to our ancestors, culture and the beliefs of our lineage, we experienced cut off. Often times our ancestors came to this land to escape trauma, shame and oppression at the hands of colonizers on their own lands. They often participated willingly in disconnection from their ground and ancestral roots.

This is a deeply damaging dislocation and disconnection from our ongoing ground of physical being.

Not one of us can make a lasting, nurturing, enriching and satisfactory ground from roots that are cut off from our ancestors, cut off from our source of being in the world of form.

Cutting off from our Ancestors and our ancient wisdom makes us small. Ancestor cut off cripples us from developing a Self and a world view that is integrated into the ongoing wholeness of the fabric of being. We cannot spring up as “Canadian/American/Australian” and cut off the past and expect to form a future that is whole and sustaining.

There are deeply damaging cracks in the cut off ground of European descendants. Connect to your Ancestors and Re-member Self. Begin the process of integrating your ancient ground and the ancient wisdom that is your inheritance. It’s literally in your body to know. You unlock it through connection with your Ancestors.

What you’ll find are roots and a ground that is deeply meaningful, rich and filled with nourishing support that resonates deeply in your body and connects you, in your body, to an ancient and ongoing expression of Soul through Form. Connecting with your Ancestors is stepping on the path of integrating your entire ongoing lineage of soul wisdom expressing Self through form.

We are still connected to our Ancestors, both those who have gone before us, and those who will go on after us. We are all still evolving and learning and growing together. Connecting with your Ancestors is saying yes to that Universal access, saying yes to the infinite available in your unique body, and saying yes to being open to receiving wisdom and seeing the world and your place in it, in an entirely new way.

Connecting with Ancestors is an opening up of our mundane lives to the mythological and living our regular lives with one foot in universal meaning. When we connect to Ancestors we connect to ancient unbroken links of love, power, wisdom and guidance.

We are not alone.

Ancestors are our crew of Guides and Guardians. They have always been here with us - we just lost touch for awhile.

 The Expression of Authentic Soul Self

If you’re a descendant of European immigrants, maybe you connect to an identity of ‘whiteness’. Maybe it feels very simple and obvious to think “I am white”.

This is not a real or nourishing identity and it prevents you from connecting to the deeply rich and actually nourishing ground of your roots in Ancestral cultural heritage. Connecting to my own Ancestral heritage transformed my understanding of ‘whiteness’ and my identity as a descendant of European immigrants on Turtle Island.

Most European descendants are disconnected from their roots through immigration cut off from ancestral source and a re-alignment with ideas of ‘whiteness’ as a group identity. “White” isn’t an identity that can nourish because it doesn’t actually have connection to ancestors or cultural ground. There is nothing available in ‘whiteness’ except ‘not being black, brown or indigenous’. This becomes really obvious when European descendants adopt the cultural and spiritual beliefs of others without understanding that we do this because we lack grounding in our own roots and our own ancient cultural beliefs.

I am not suggesting that we don’t learn and grow from the cultural and spiritual beliefs of others - we absolutely do. It is precarious to do so when we are looking to replace the lack of ground and root in our own ancestral identity.

Story time

I have always had a resonance with Indigenous cultural and spiritual beliefs. It resonates very deeply in my soul and permeates my world view and belief system. It has been a weird struggle for most of my life because I am not Indigenous. Feeling so strongly pulled to Indigenous ways of life left me feeling uneasy because there was no ground or root in me from which to interact with these ways of Being. It felt like fully embracing Indigenous world view and belief as my own was a misstep - it felt like a taking something that didn’t belong to me. It felt like an appropriation and a donning of identity to which I do not have legitimate access. This was a great confusion and dislocation for me… until I connected with my Ancestors. Indigenous identity does not belong to me. Celtic identity does.

I am Celtic. The Celts are Animists.

My pre-Christian Celtic Ancestors hold cultural and spiritual beliefs very similar to Indigenous world view. My resonance with Indigenous belief was real and true, but it was a calling from my own roots and ancestral ground. Now I can be taught by the Land and Indigenous world view without a grasping to own and take for myself and make mine. I can approach Indigenous world view from the strength of my own common ground. I can work to transform my world in resonance with Indigenous world view from the root and nourishment of my own ancestral cultural identity.

What is your cultural identity? How can connection with that identity give you access to supportive ground and power to express your Authentic Self?

I know this story is very ‘meta’ and ethereal - but that’s what it means to work with the Unseen. There are great and mythical energies working Unseen in the physical world. You can make use of the energies, and benefit yourself and the whole when you can understand what’s actually happening and understand what your needs are actually saying to you.

Connecting to Ancestors and finding your own roots is powerful.

To me, it is an essential step to trusting your expression of Authentic Soul Self in the physical world.

Lack of roots means you have no ground, no place of physical identity of your own. No ground means no space to grow, no legitimacy in the physical world. Reconnecting with your Ancestral cultural roots gives you ownership and authenticity of your body in the physical world. You are re-connected with the Ancient and ongoing lineage of your physical body and you have the right to take up space and place in the world.

The Unseen support everything we want to make real. Our ability to walk in Creation is changed completely when we accept and own the legitimacy of BEING in the physical world. When you accept and own your right and authority to be here, and be here as you are, you can finally change your world to align with your Authentic Soul Truth.

None of this happens because we think it or we will it. This is accomplished through the alignment of our Spirit expressing authenticity and authority of Being through Form.

Stand for your truth.

Support your boundaries and how you allow yourself to be treated. Act to change life situations that don’t honour you.

Roots once found are a foundation to build solid ground in wholeness and connection. Roots align us as Kin with all the physical world to BE AS WE ARE in the world of Form.

Connecting with Ancestors leads you back to your roots. Roots lead you back to solid ground and back to a foundation strong enough to support your dreams moving from the realm of Spirit into the world of Form.

 We make the meaning.

A strictly physical life on this planet is devoid of meaning. Survival focus is intense, but reflects only a small sliver of the experience of being alive. Pursuing the accumulation of things and power is exciting for awhile, but can never be ultimately fulfilling. Placing our worth and value in externals is a hamster wheel of failure.

Life on the plane of physical existence alone is a struggle for survival and subsistence living. There is no room there for being in a larger world of meaning and relationship to a bigger sense of purpose or connection. A strictly physical plane of living is lonely. It is separate and isolated and has woven into it a deep fear of lack and a sense of competition and aggression against others for pieces of a supposedly limited and scarcity pie.

Alternately, religions and spiritual world views that minimize the body have cut us off from our ground and our spiritual home on the Earth. Our source may be Soul, but our home on the planet is our body… and the Land Themselves. Holding the body and the Land as separate from, and anything other than our Spiritual ground is a grievous and traumatic wound to our well-being.