Who are the Ancestors and Why is Connecting with Them Important, For All of Us, Right Now?

When many of us hear the term “ancestors”, we think of our grandparents or great grandparents, but "the ancestors" goes beyond the recently departed, dead or passed/past. Although commonly connected with our lineal kinship, ancestors can also include non-lineal or collective ancestry, which extends beyond flesh and blood, and even human nations.

Whatever your socio-cultural background, you won't be hard pushed to find rites, beliefs and practices that honour ancestry.

Most cultural and even religious practices on some level values ancestry, identity, memory and remembering.

But who are "the ancestors"?

Ancestors in Bungoma worldview and practices are often understood to be wise or elevated souls that have risen in knowledge and capacity in the ancestral realm.

Ideally, they have positive interrelationships with each other, and engage with the living to bring about awareness and betterment for "their children". Ancestors assist, support, protect and guide the living as well as their family--and possibly community, clan, nation or folk--in the immediate, and for generations to come. He/she/they help to guide--if we let them--our choices and life path, and in the case of Izangoma, (should) work through us for the harmony and betterment of all.

Some suggest that we should think of ancestors like "angels", but ancestors and our interrelationships with them goes beyond this two-dimensional western paradigm.

Not all ancestors are angelic! This is particularly the case when an ancestor/s are unattended to. They may be unsettled, disrupted, disruptive and out-of-order.

If unattended, this out-of-order-ness will be exasperated over time and across generations and can imbalance various areas of a person's life, their family relations and success and those of their progeny.

Here are just a few examples of what causes ancestral disturbance or imbalances:

1. If ancestors and ancestral-based worldviews and practices are abandoned, neglected shunned or repressed.

2. If ancestral work is misused and abused to attain results for a person or persons. Expect hazardous results as well as opportunities to experience accountability and responsibility for your choices and actions!

3. If family and/or ancestral presence, pain, trauma, gifting--includes but is not limited to the calling to heal--is unacknowledged, ignored and/or unaddressed.

4. If ancestral requests and guidance aren't heard, valued or adhered to, including doing necessary individual and/or collective rites i.e. funerary rites or fulfilling appropriate socio-cultural practices.

Ancestors require us to hear, feel and know them. We must care for them as we care for ourselves, ultimately with love, respect, discipline, trust, diligence and surrender(ing). We must also be willing to follow through with their guidance.

Tangible offerings--specific to them-- and direct and ongoing engagement, listening as to heed and other forms of interchanging are pivotal to this process and in these sacred interrelationships.

Ancestors are in us. We are of them. We are not separate. Ancestors permeate not just our genetics and characteristics; they influence our gifts, flaws, desires, preferences, callings and specific ways of knowing and being in the world (and beyond), every day.

Ignoring or avoiding our ancestors or coming to believe that they cannot be valued or engaged with because a church, synagogue, mosque or temple "doesn't allow it"; is a fallacy.

The Old Testament and New Testament clearly illustrates the importance of ancestry and even ancestral veneration (never mind trance processes including Moses on Mount Sinai in a deep trance state receiving God's messages). Honouring your ancestors is not placating "false idols".

Stepping into ancestral healing and knowledge to embody our truest capacity and power is how we can begin to address and mend intergenerational pain and oppression, colonial abuses and repressed and lost identities.

Most of us carry the paradoxes of oppressive and oppressed ancestors – some more than others. Ancestral work is where this can get “taken up”, individually and collectively. Where pains and wounds that aren’t easily vocalized, dreams that seem nonsensical, and even individual and collective repeated patterns of behaviour can be examined.

Talk therapy has a place but embodied practices and ritual helps us to more fully access places and spaces in ourselves and others, beyond our day-to-day cognition and to experience our fullest being/s.

This is where truths can be experienced and memory, identity and learning are untangled and revisited. When you open yourself up to interrelating with your ancestors, you open up to hope, forgiveness, lovingness, and repair. You are loving yourself, you are caring for yourself, and you are doing the work for those before you who couldn’t do it, those in the present who cannot or won’t do it, and for those to come. You are doing intergenerational healing work on deeply somatic, heart medicine and spiritual levels.

Through ancestral work, we also discover our important place in the world (and beyond) and the gifts we have been given, as well as how to use them.

How we talk, behave, think and conduct ourselves are reflections of this. We come to truly learn and understand that one day, we may also be an ancestor too.

Why is connecting with ancestors so crucial right now?

Our survival, both tangible and otherwise, is dependent on our interrelationships with each other and our ancestors. Their wisdom is available to us. It lives in us. It is us.

Ancestral veneration also involves coming together, preparing and sharing food together, sharing ceremonies together and sharing ourselves -- together. Isolation from togetherness is at our own peril. Our ancestors knew/know this. Think of your granny and her granny, what methods they used to “get by”? Maybe bush tea in the yard, maybe a regular and heartfelt prayer, maybe visits to the sea to “clean up”...as well as empathy and giving to others. Community and seeking to live with an open door and open heart….This all lives in you too.

Your ancestors want to see you shine and want to see your gifts explode! They want to work with you towards your needs (wants are another matter) as well as to keep you purposeful.

Our way back is simple…community, togetherness and faith--of all loving kinds.

For those suffering from real or perceived life struggles and hardships, as well as a heart and spirit that feels diminished, or “beyond tired”; the answers, the power, the salve, and the necessary healing lives in you. It hasn’t gone anywhere! It's just about finding your way back.

Ancestral work, spirit work is also important for moving us through neoliberalism. We are deeply affected by the ongoing consumption of resources. Capitalism gobbles up hearts and souls --it’s a system that is never satiated and deprives people of wholeness whereby systemic poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy etc. is normalized.

Ancestral work can offer us a place and space to feel and be safe. To be cared for, guided and reaffirmed. A place to be together, in a good way. To see each other, and to honour, respect and care for one another. We need this now more than ever!

My personal work with the ancestors, as well as ongoing facilitation of ancestral work with people for over 25 years, has taught me many things, mainly, I’ve learned that if I make, maintain and regularly visit a place of ancestral connection i.e. in nature, an altar (as well as a place of connection within me)-- I find myself, I find us, again. I am reminded that in togetherness and in being-ness with ancestors; I learn, a lot, and I am home.

#Gogo Nomadlozi

Ancestor Speaks- FB Page

©Rebecca Rogerson 2022