What is Ancestral Healing? (8 Approaches You Can Take)

So why would I be saying that ancestral healing is important and what is it anyway, right?

Ancestral healing really comes down to our need for all humans to have belonging, love, purpose, understanding, and ultimately, healing, to be regenerative, to be more connective, and to increase the quality of our lives as the generation moves forward.

I'm Ash Johns. I'm an ancestral healer and certified psycho-spiritual life coach.

I work with women like you to identify and heal unseen generational patterns and ancestral trauma and wounds that are stopping you from finding your freedom, going after your desires and living in your destiny, whatever those things might look like for you.

But when we don't do healing, that ain't happening, right?

Tapping Into The Past To Heal and Empower Your Future

So perhaps you've realized you've been repeating some patterns in your own life that are not giving you the most joy and happiness, or they are not even serving you at all. Perhaps you even realize that you're limiting beliefs that you've been working on with a therapist or through coaching, or even through any other programs of personal development and fulfillment, aren't really landing, like you might be getting a little frustrated. And the reason being is because we have to go further back than just you or your parents if you want to really have lasting healing and empowerment in your life.

Lucky for y'all, I've already prepared a nice little freebie that you can download at any point in time.
It is called "8 Paths to Freedom", the lay of the lands.

It gives you a nice overview of ways that you can start to explore ancestral healing, and the link will be provided at the end of this blog. The purpose of this video is to give you a nice overview of what it is and why you should explore it a little bit more. You can kind of break it into four different categories if you will. 

The First Step To Ancestral Healing: History, Archives, and Genealogy 

So number one, the easiest way to start ancestral healing that you might want to explore, and I talk about this further in the ebook, is looking at the history, the archives, and research genealogy.

Before you even go further, I know the first thing you're probably thinking, right? Because again, humans being human in this world is like oh, my family had to immigrate, or my people were enslaved, or we had to run away and change our names, or we barely survived, only one family member survived this famine or this catastrophe in the world. Because again, history is history, right? So when you think about history and archives and research, normally it brings up some pain or some sadness or this idea that things will never be found again. Or so many things were lost like in a fire or in a ship or something like that, but the truth is nothing is lost in this world and in this universe.

The Second Step To Ancestral Healing: Let’s Talk Lifestyle 

So the second approach, right? Of the four buckets, if you will, of ancestral healing is looking at the lifestyle of your people, and this one tends to be really, really fun for people. When we think about the songs, the music, the dance, the food, how they live their lives, the arts, the traditions, all these types of things that make up lifestyle, and we start to remember them, explore them, maybe go and take classes around language, or wearing the garbs and the traditional clothing of our people. We start to research and understand why they did the things that they did, how they connected with the stars, or how they worked the lands and were agriculturalists or whatever it might be, and we start to adapt those things into our own lives. There is a healing component to finding simplistic or even complex ways of living that your people did before you.

Now you can imagine how doing research and doing the archives that we talked about in category one could bring you into a deeper lifestyle exploration and modernizing traditional ways of being in your life and how connective and healing that might be. So starting from category one of history moving into lifestyle is a very common thing. You'll definitely want to explore that in the ebook because it's really delicious to think about all the things that you could spend your time and actually create hobbies connecting to old ways of being that serve you in modern day. That can be very, very healing for you, your ancestors, and your lineage.

Before I go forward and talk about the third category that I place all of these different ways into ancestral healing, I'm going to ask you a question, right? Because I get super juiced up about this. I've done years of work around ancestors and healing and breaking generational patterns and working with people all over the world, and I've lived in other places in the world, and I want to pause and ask you a question. I'm curious, which of these two that I've already talked about, category one of history and archives and genealogy, and then category two of lifestyle, language arts, food, recipe, dance, garbs all those things, are you most drawn to? Or maybe you've already started exploring. Let me know in the comments. I'm curious if one of those two are things that you've already tapped into or you feel called to and you just needed this little nudge, or if you're like didn't even think about them, and also tell me more. I'd love to know in the comments.

The Third Step To Ancestral Healing: The Bucket of Sciences  

Category three, we start getting really juicy up in here. I'm just going to call this the bucket of the sciences. This is psychotherapy. This is DNA testing. This is genetics, right? All these things where we can see what our DNA says, where our people come from, what type of tribes and villages we are associated with, what our different mixtures are, and what our DNA coding tells us about our health and our wellbeing. Out of nowhere in the last couple years, we won't go into all the conspiracy theories about it, but a lot of people have been exploring DNA testing and the sciences, both social sciences of psychology and what we've learned by nature/nurture, and also the actual physiological sciences.

There we go. What have we inherited inside of our bodies, our physical bodies and our minds, and I think this is a really fun way to explore as well, because you can start to kind of genetically modify through lifestyle, thoughts, practices, foods that you're eating in order to pull out some of those gene expressions in ways of being, and alter your body for health or wellness or optimize your body.  This brings another level of healing, of connection, and also opens the door to things like somatic therapy.

The Fourth Step To Ancestral Healing: Spiritual Practices 

Lastly, and this is my area of most expertise and that is all around spirituality and religion, practices of respect and connectivity and relationship, and obviously, veneration and honoring. So if you look across the lands, regardless to your race, your background, how long you've been in the country that you're in, or whatever your nationality, when we go far, far, far back in time, all of our people have specific practices of reverence, of honoring spirit and what is not seen, of communicating across realms, and all of the woo-woo things that make our science folks get uncomfortable.

But what we know is that energy is energy, whether you're looking at it from a woo perspective or you're looking at it scientifically in a measured, evidence based way. And so we can unpack this category as things like indigenous spiritual practices, which also kind of connects back to way of life. How do we honor the land? How do we work with the divinity? What is our relationship to the elements of this earth and this planet? In what ways do we honor the cycles of life, death, birth, and death again, right?

We can also unpack this and look at cultural religions and our way of relating to each other and entities and beliefs and prayers and all of these things. Practicing things that your ancestors did coming back to that unseen, knowing that phenomenon, if you will. And also, literally being able to connect with your ancestors, which is the work that I do, not as a medium, but in teaching you the ways that you are always connected to your people within you and around you can be incredibly, incredibly healing. There's people who do mediumship. There's people who know how to communicate to the other side. There are many, many different ways of just honoring our folks, and through honoring their lives, whether we knew them or not, we can get insight, we can have support in our lived life, and we can start paving the way for generations to come.

You Are One Step Closer To Ancestral Healing 

These are just four categories, if you will, that invite you into what ancestral healing is, which in my definition is truly all about looking at and honoring the past in order to inform your present so that you can create a lasting legacy that is full of wealth, love, connection, belonging and moving forward. As we heal backwards, we're allowed to then go forwards, and we need our ancestors with us in order to do that. It's not a one person or one band show.

If you'd like to explore your own entry into ancestral healing, I hope that this blog is a nice little teaser, into this world of ancestral healing, how you can approach it, and the different levels of exploration that you can get into.

I invite you to download my free ebook "Lay of the Lands". It's going to talk more in depth about eight ways into ancestral healing, and really invite you into my own practice that I lead in my life, but also professionally with my clients all over the world, all different walks of life who are learning how to connect with their ancestors and heal their lineages so that they can be the generational pattern breakers that we need to see in the world.

with love and trust on my path,

Ash x

Get the behind the scenes of making this video: https://bit.ly/insidersprivatepod