Healing Ancestral Trauma with Plant Medicine

In these days of DNA tests one gets through websites to trace your family tree … Is it truly appropriation of traditions or culture if the DNA of your ancestors come from Nigeria, Romans that conquered Germany, Britons, Eastern Europe, North Africa, etc. Skin color maybe white, but the ancestors that traveled to colder climates were not. Those ancestors often provide guidance to practice their indigenous traditions. Through many of the traditions of my ancestors, I have learned to revere and elevate ancestors that had been ignored for generations. As anthropological research and DNA tests trace our origins back to the area of ancient Egypt … As ancestor reverence once again comes to the forefront and people learn to listen to the messages from their ancestors, it is my hope that terms such as cultural appropriation become obsolete because it’s not appropriation, but a rediscovery of our ancestral roots.

Ancestral Apothecary

By third year Cecemmana student, Kara Wood.

Several years ago I had a lightning bolt message from my ancestors that I needed to live my truth and combine all the things that I care about (plants, ancestors, genetics, herbal medicine) and really live who I am. That is when I found Ancestral Apothecary School and the Cecemmana program. I am in the third year and what I have learned and experienced surpassed any possible expectations. So much of what I had always been doing, that I didn’t yet recognize, was preparing me for this.

In this life do any of us really escape trauma? It can affect us at any time in our lives from in utero on. We also experience ancestral trauma, sometimes referred to as transgenerational trauma. This trauma is the one that inhabits each of us in some way. Each generation before us imprinted information and trauma…

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Honoring the Ancestors of Land, Tradition, and Blood

The Druid's Garden

As the world (where I am at, at least!) gets bathed in frost, as the plants wither and die, as the trees bathe themselves in color and then drop their leaves, as the cold wind blows and as the darkness sets in, we in the druid tradition–and in any other traditions–turn to think about the ancestors. In this post, we’ll explore the global traditions surrounding honoring the dead that tie to August-October and honoring the dead to see similarities, we’ll discuss three types of ancestors the druid tradition recognizes, and then we’ll explore ways to honor the ancestors.

Food for the Ancestors!

Global Ancestral Traditions

When you start digging into ancestor traditions around the world, some striking similarities seem to emerge.

The Mexican Day of the Dead, which is a blending of European traditions and Aztec honoring of the dead, goes from Oct 31 – Nov 2. As part of…

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Did You Know?

Good Witches Homestead

During the period beginning on the first Friday in October until the second day of November, the veils separating spiritual realms are extremely sheer.

A History of Spirit Keeping

Spirit Keeping, in the sense of how you keep spirits today, is nothing as it was even 120 years ago. Modern-Day Spirit Keeping is the by-product of the marriage between spirit conjuration and para-technology. Spirit Keeping, in its origin, is quite different. While those who were considered sages, psychics, or medicine men, would contact spirits for information, they were often sought for counsel through specific rituals performed to gain information for a specific person, or for personal awareness. Often times the person who had the ability to conjure the spirit was the only one allowed to converse with the spirit. The person coming forward to ask for guidance, or to ask for…

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Are You Grounded? A Clairvoyant Technique

I’m always amazed at the number of people that ‘work’ in the spiritual realm that have no idea about grounding themselves.

Salem's House

Being grounded is that feeling you get when you walk barefoot on dewy green grass, sensing the breeze tickle your skin and the deepness of your chest expanding with every inhale. It is the feeling common to children, one of connectedness to the awe and wonder of simply being.

In an age where we find ourselves buffering our true existence with technology, the consequences run deep. You could experience everything from chronic crankiness, mental fatigue, and poor memory to lacking inspiration for a project or motivation for mundane tasks.

Ok, great, but that does seem pretty general in nature. Right? I mean…

You’re right! We will be dedicating plenty of content on chakras, energy healing, grounding techniques, psychic development, being an empath and how to cope. For now, I want to enable you to have the ability to know when you’re grounded and, if you’re not, get reconnected. And that…

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Finding and Working with Ancestral Traditions

The Druid's Garden

Grandpa's field Grandpa’s field

When I was a child, my grandfather took my cousins and I to a wild area we later called “Grandpa’s field.” It was a field on the edge of the forest below our houses, the edges rich with crab apples, hawthorns, beeches, and maples. Grandpa had a rusty red tractor, and we’d go into the forest riding on his lap. When we got to his field, we would park the tractor and look for wild mushrooms, wild ginseng, and other wild edibles. He would point out plants and animal tracks and teach us about the forest. After that, we would lay in the field and watch butterflies. When I was only 8 years old, Grandpa died after a hard life in the steel mills. In time, these memories faded and I didn’t remember where Grandpa’s field was. Later in my 20’s, some of my cousins came to…

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Slowing Down the Druid Way: Part III: Time-Honoring Strategies | The Druid’s Garden

This past week, a friend and I were discussing options for starting seeds for a new joint major gardening project (more on that in an upcoming post). We talked about several options, and deciding we wanted to stay away from plastic ready-made planting pots, opted for a paper pot maker (a little wooden device that makes it stunningly easy to create paper pots from recycled newspaper). This choice, of course, is an excellent one from a permaculture perspective: it takes an extremely abundant waste product and turns it into a resource. Of course, in order to make these pots, you need the time to collect the paper and the time to create them. This simple choice–paper or plastic–along with the investment of time illustrates an underlying principle that seems to me to be near-universally true in my experience: the further away from fossil fuels we get, the more time things take. And here, of course, is the crux of this entire blog post series: if we want to do anything beyond our work (practicing permaculture, developing deep relationships with the land, developing bardic arts, or whatever it is we want to accomplish), we have to find the time to do so.

In my previous two blog posts, I explored the nature of work both historically and in the present age, which helped illuminate some of the current unbalances we have with our work–and opened up the door for us to consider revisiting our relationship to it. And it is this spirit that today, I talk about re-negotiating and re-envisioning our relationship to work and hence, to our time. As I explored over the last two weeks, historical data suggests that we worked a lot less in ages past, which allowed for more leisure time, feasting, merriment, and the learning of crafts and skills. It also gave our ancestors the necessary time to live without fossil fuels–to do work slower, with more intention, and live at a different pace. In the present age, our time is owned by our employers and continued increases in productivity have occurred with increases in work hours, meaning that we are working more than ever before. It seems that, in some cases, fossil fuels and the myth of progress is speeding us up so much–and most of sustainable living practices focus in the opposite direction. The tension between them is many things, but one of them is certainly time and different ways of working.

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Entirety of article at the Source: Slowing Down the Druid Way: Part III: Time-Honoring Strategies | The Druid’s Garden

Mental Meanderings – blackmadonna-juju: “Ancestor worship is tenable…

https://yanzadracan.tumblr.com/post/154892149593/blackmadonna-juju-ancestor-worship-is-tenable

Mental Meanderings – Have you elevated your ancestors? When is the last…

https://yanzadracan.tumblr.com/post/154892182923/have-you-elevated-your-ancestors-when-is-the-last

How to Communicate with Spirits in 5 Steps

Don’t forget the Spirits that are your Ancestors. Always have personal protections in place for those Spirits such as Abiku and others that are not the best and brightest …