Ancestral Healing Circle
Your Medicine AncestorA guide to what happened
and what comes next
For those who have journeyed to meet the ancient healers in their line
What you touched
This guide is here to help you understand what happened in the circle, tend it carefully, and begin to build on it. In your own time, at your own pace.
You travelled through your lineage, not to the recent ancestors who often carry the accumulated weight of what was done to them, but further. Past the centuries of suppression and loss. Past the displacement and the silencing. To the ones who came before all of that. The ones who were whole.
These are what many traditions call the well ancestors: the healers, the herbalists, the midwives, the bone readers, the seers, the fire readers, the ones who walked between worlds and were not ashamed of it. They carried medicine as a birthright rather than a secret. They existed in every lineage, however fractured or obscured the recent history appears. Every line has them. They are not passive. They want to be in relationship with us. They have been waiting for exactly this kind of reaching back.
You do not need to know your family history to do this work. You do not need a name, a photograph, or a family tree. The connection runs deeper than recorded history.
This is particularly important for those who are adopted, or whose family history has been lost, obscured, or severed through displacement, migration, or colonial violence. The line still exists. The medicine people in it still exist. They can be reached. They want to be reached.
Many in the circle described something strongly somatic in the journey: warmth in the hands, tingling, energy moving through the body, a sense of receiving something and feeling it land. This is not unusual in ancestral work, though the depth of it in this circle was striking. Our bodies carry our lineage. The soma is where ancestral material is stored, held, and eventually moved through. When we make contact with the well ancestors, the body often recognises something before the thinking mind has words for it. Somatic experience in this work is not a side effect. It is the medicine arriving.
The body does not lie about what it has received. Trust what moved through you.
The wound and the medicine
The patterns we carry from our lineage are not failings. They are not weakness. They are what the people before us had to do to survive, and they were passed on not out of harm but out of love, out of the only knowledge available at the time.
But ancestral healing work holds this to be true: the wound and the medicine are the same thing. The gift was always there. It just got bent into a shape that could survive.
Some of the most common patterns, and the medicine inside them:
The wound: the voice that learned to stay quiet. The knowing kept to oneself. The insight offered once, not received, and then swallowed. The gradual shrinking of what is offered because it was not safe to be fully heard.
The medicine: a voice of real power. Why else would it have needed to be so thoroughly managed for so long? The gift is speech that changes things, and a whole lineage of people who knew things they were never allowed to say. That knowing did not disappear. It went underground. It is still here.
The wound: giving endlessly, taking nothing in. Deflecting acknowledgment, minimising needs, refusing help even when running on empty. Keeping moving so nobody sees the cost. The person who shows up for everyone and quietly disappears into the effort.
The medicine: a love so fierce and so structural it kept families alive through impossible things. An extraordinary capacity to tend, to nourish, to hold others through difficulty. The gift is devotion, not the self-erasing kind, but the deep-rooted, I-will-not-abandon-you kind. The work is learning that she is also someone worth that devotion. Learning to turn that same attention toward oneself.
The wound: reading every room, tracking every mood, anticipating what is needed before it is asked. Never fully at rest because something might shift. The body as an instrument permanently tuned to others.
The medicine: an attunement so finely developed it borders on seership. This person knows what is present before a word is spoken. They sense the undercurrent. They read what others miss entirely. That capacity belongs entirely to them. The work is learning to use it by choice rather than compulsion.
The wound: anger that was never safe to name, rerouted into grief, illness, over-functioning, or depression. The feeling that something was deeply wrong, with no safe place to put it.
The medicine: a capacity for moral clarity so precise it became dangerous. The people in this line knew exactly what was wrong and why. That knowing is still here. It has not softened with time. It was never confusion. It was always accurate.
The wound: the seer who learned to doubt what she saw. The dreamer who stopped reporting her dreams. The healer who performed ordinary competence over her actual knowing. The gift managed down until it was almost invisible, even to herself.
The medicine: a seership that went underground rather than disappearing. Still functional. Still running. It has been running beneath the surface the whole time.
You may not recognise your own pattern in this list, or you may recognise several. These are illustrations, not a complete map. The medicine ancestor you met knows your specific line far better than any list can. That is why the relationship matters more than any framework.
The recent ancestors too
Working with the ancient medicine ancestors does not mean abandoning or bypassing the recent ones: the grandmothers, great-grandmothers, the ones within living memory. It means understanding the difference between them, and what each relationship requires.
Recent ancestors often carry wounds that have not yet been resolved. They are not always well. Some are still caught in the patterns of their own lives, their own fears, their own unfinished grief. This is not because they did not love us. It is because they were human, and they were living downstream of wounds that began long before them. When we reach out to them without discernment, we can inadvertently pick up more of what they were carrying rather than finding the medicine.
The ancient medicine ancestor you met is resourced in a way that recent ancestors may not yet be. They are whole. They are not asking anything of you. They have waited a very long time for this relationship and they are not in a hurry.
One of the most profound possibilities in this work is that the medicine ancestor can help with the recent lineage. They have the perspective and the strength that those closer in time often lacked. You can invite them to extend their medicine to the generations between you. Not as something you orchestrate, but as a relationship you ask them to tend.
Some of you named this in the opening circle: the sense that by doing this work, you are healing the line backwards as well as forwards. That instinct is accurate. The medicine flows in both directions when you open the channel.
For now, the most important thing is to tend the relationship you found. The work with the recent lineage will unfold from that foundation in its own time.
Building the relationship
What happened in circle may have been your first meeting with this ancestor, or it may have deepened a connection already forming. Either way, what is here now is an ongoing relationship, not a one-off encounter. A real presence, available in daily life, in healing work, in whatever is being navigated. Like any relationship, it asks for tending.
The practices below are invitations, not tasks. Begin simply. Choose one thing that feels genuinely possible and start there. None of this needs to be elaborate to be real.
The object you received
Many of you received something in the journey: a stone, a crystal, a carved piece of wood, a locket. Sit with what that object means. What does it carry from this ancestor's line? Where in your body did it want to land?
If it feels right, find or make a physical representation of it. Hold it when you want to reconnect. Place it somewhere you will see it. It is a living point of contact.
An altar is not a shrine to the dead. It is a living space for an ongoing relationship. It says: I remember you. I am in contact with you. You are present in my life.
It does not need to be large or elaborate. A small corner of a windowsill, a shelf, a flat stone outside. Anywhere that feels dedicated will work. What matters is the intention behind it.
For the ancient medicine ancestors, you might include:
- Natural objects: stones, shells, feathers, wood, moss, dried herbs or flowers
- Anything that feels ancestrally located — something from land connected to your lineage, however loosely; even soil from a garden carries this
- A representation of the object your medicine ancestor gave you in the journey
- A candle, a small flame kept for them
- Water, fresh and changed regularly
For the recent ancestors, if you choose to include them:
- A photograph
- An object that belonged to them
- Something that represents their particular gift, not only their wound
The altar is a working altar, not a display. Speak to it. Tend it. Let it change with the seasons.
In most ancestral traditions across the world, the ancestors are fed. This is one of the oldest and most consistent human practices there is: offering food, drink, and nourishment to those who came before.
It does not need to take a particular cultural form. The gesture itself carries the meaning.
Simple ways to offer:
- When you cook a meal, set a small portion aside on the altar first, before you eat
- Pour a little of whatever you are drinking, tea, water, something stronger, into a small cup on the altar
- Prepare a meal specifically for them from time to time: cook something that feels ancestrally resonant, lay a place at the table or on the altar, and eat alongside them
- Flowers, herbs, or anything fragrant are also offerings
When you offer, say something. It does not need to be formal. "This is for you. Thank you. I am thinking of you." That is enough.
This act of feeding is also an act of remembrance. It says: you existed. You matter. You are not forgotten. And in saying that to them, we often find we are saying it to ourselves.
The connection found in circle does not require a full drum journey to maintain. These small daily gestures keep the thread alive between more formal practices.
- A candle and a breath. Light a candle at the altar. Take one slow breath. Say something to them, however briefly. This takes less than a minute and it is one of the most effective ways to maintain a living relationship. Tending it is part of healing the line.
- Contact with land. The medicine ancestor was rooted in the land in a way most of us have largely lost. Barefoot on earth or grass, hands on a tree, standing in rain: these are not trivial. They are a form of remembrance. Let yourself feel what they felt.
- Somatic noticing. When a pattern arises this week, the over-giving, the silencing, the making yourself small, pause before moving to change it. Put a hand on the part of your body where you feel it. Breathe. Ask: what is the gift inside this? Just ask, and notice what comes. Notice the sensations in your body as you witness.
- Morning contact. Before the day takes you, take thirty seconds at the altar or simply where you are standing. Acknowledge them. Ask for what you need. It is a relationship. Use it.
- Use your voice. Voice was a strong thread through the circle, the speaking of truth, the being heard. Voice is one of the most direct ways to work with ancestral medicine. Toning, humming, singing, speaking aloud to them. You do not need to know what to say. Start with sound.
- Grief, if it is present. Some may find grief moving through in the days after the circle: for these ancestors, for what was lost, for what was carried so long. Let it come. It has a right to be here.
If you have not already, take time to write about what you experienced: not as a report, but from inside it. Their face, the quality of their presence, the object, what happened in your body when they saw you.
Write it as though you are telling it to someone you trust. Let the details matter.
Then over the coming days, notice what else surfaces. Dreams. Memories. Moments in daily life that feel strangely resonant. Write those too. The medicine ancestor often continues to communicate in the days after a journey. Keep recording what comes through.
Returning to your medicine ancestor
The pathway is open now. You can return at any time, with or without a drum, with or without music.
The drum helps. If you have one, use it. A slow, steady heartbeat rhythm of around four to five beats per second is traditional for journeying. Free drumming tracks are also available online: search for "shamanic drumming journey" and choose something around fifteen to twenty minutes with a callback at the end.
If you have no drum and no recording, breath and intention are enough. The journey state does not depend on the drum. The drum simply makes it easier to drop.
Sit or lie comfortably. Feel the weight of your body. Take three slow breaths, letting each exhale go down into the earth beneath you. Let the earth take your weight completely.
Inwardly, or in a whisper, let the recent ancestors know you see them. You have not forgotten them. Then, with compassion, ask them to step back. Not away from you. Just back. You are going further than they can take you. Ask them to rest.
Feel the earth beneath you. Begin to travel: down through layers of soil and stone and deep time, and back through the centuries simultaneously. You are looking for the same landscape you found before, the ancient land before walls and roads, the place where they are.
Do not force the imagery. Let the landscape come. Feel the ground beneath your feet when you arrive. Notice what your senses are telling you: smell, temperature, sound. They will be there. You already know how to find them.
Spend time with them. You might ask something specific, or you might simply be present together. Ask what they want you to know. Ask what they need from you. Ask how you can continue to tend the relationship. Receive what comes: in words, images, feelings, or simply a quality of presence.
When the drum callback sounds, or when you feel complete, say thank you. Bring back anything they have given you. Travel back up through the earth, through time, into this body, this room, this day. Feel your feet. Open your eyes slowly. Shake out your hands. Drink water. Write immediately if you can.
Not every journey will feel as vivid as the first. Sometimes the connection feels thin or unclear. This is normal. It often means the mind is more active than usual, or that more grounding is needed first.
If it feels like nothing happened, write anyway. Sometimes the medicine was there and the thinking mind could not register it in the moment. It surfaces in the writing.
If a journey brings up something that unsettles you, come back to your body, your feet on the floor, the room around you. You are always in charge of the journey. You can open your eyes at any time.
Questions to sit with
These are invitations, not tasks. Take what calls to you. You might use them alongside a drum track, write with them, or simply let them live in the body and see what quietly composts over the coming days. You do not need to prepare answers. Just bring whatever has been moving through you.
- Since that meeting, what has shifted that you cannot unfeel?
- What do you know now that you cannot unknow?
- They found you as much as you found them. What did they recognise in you?
- What does your medicine ancestor need from you to stay in relationship?
- How do they want you to tend them?
- What did they ask of you that you perhaps have not fully heard yet?
- You are the medicine person in your line now. What does that feel like in your body?
- What does your line need you to carry forward?
- What gift were you given in this circle that belongs not just to you but to your lineage?
Words to carry with you
Read these slowly. Let them land in the body rather than the mind.
Remember — Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo is a Mvskoke Creek poet, musician, and former US Poet Laureate. As an indigenous woman, her relationship to ancestors and land has never been severed in the way many of ours has been. It runs unbroken through her tradition, her language, her ceremony. She uses poetry as ritual, as a way of calling in what is ancient and what is well.
Her poem Remember is an instruction. A calling back to relationship with every living thing. Each line asks you to remember something that was never truly forgotten, only pushed beneath the surface of a life that had no room for it. What she is pointing to is the same consciousness we are going back to find in our own lines: the people who came before the wounding lived inside this kind of remembering as their ordinary daily reality. The land was alive and speaking. The ancestors were present in it. Everything was in relationship.
Read it here: poets.org/poem/remember-0
Notice what happens in your body as you read it. Where do you feel it? What does it open?
Two poems from Medieval Ireland
These were written by monks in the margins of manuscripts in the ninth and tenth centuries. They are among the oldest vernacular poems in Europe.
These monks lived in a world already changed: Christian, settled, agricultural. They were not pre-agricultural people. But the Irish monastic tradition carried something unusual within it: a quality of relationship with the natural world that went deeper than most of medieval Christian Europe allowed. The land was alive and worthy of attention. The blackbird was a fellow creature, almost a companion. The cold wind and the red bracken and the cry of the geese were not backdrop. They were the news, the thing most worth saying.
That quality of radical presence, of the living world as sacred and speaking, is a thread running back through the Christian centuries to something much older underneath. These poems are not from before the wounding. But they carry a memory of it. A trace of the consciousness we are going back to find.
The little bird lets a whistle go
from the point of a bright yellow beak.
A blackbird sings above Belfast Lough,
from a gorse branch, a golden note.
I bring you news: the roaring stag,
Winter flooding, Summer gone,
wind cold and high, the sun low,
its course short, the sea in spate,
the bracken red, its outline gone,
and every day the cry of geese,
cold catching in birds' wings.
An icy season and that's my news.
Four lines. Eight lines. A person so fully present to the living world around them that nothing else needed to be said.
Read them again. Let the images land. The stag, the cold wind, the golden note of the blackbird, the bracken turning red. Feel the land they were standing on.
One question to sit with: where in the land do you feel your ancestors most strongly? A place, a landscape, a quality of earth or weather or light that feels like them?
A note on support
Ancestral healing work can surface things that were not expected. Grief that has nowhere else to go. Memories. A sudden recognition of something in the family line that had not been fully seen before. An emotional response that feels disproportionate to what seemed like a gentle journey.
This is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is often a sign that the work is going deep. But it does need to be tended.
Ground yourself first. Feet on earth. Hands on a tree or in soil if you can. Water: drink it, stand near it, put your hands in it. The body needs to feel safe before the material that has surfaced can be integrated.
Move. Walk, shake, dance slowly. Ancestral material lives in the body and it needs to move through physically before it can settle.
Do not journey again immediately if you are feeling destabilised. Tend what has come up first. Sit with it. Write about it. Talk to someone you trust.
If you have an existing therapist, somatic practitioner, or support person, let them know you are doing this work. Just a note that you are working with ancestral material, so they have context if anything surfaces in other spaces. If what has come up feels like more than you can hold, please do seek support.
And if you are simply feeling full, moved, or like you need time: that is exactly right. There is no hurry. Let it settle at its own pace.
The ancient healers in your line have been waiting for exactly this kind of reaching back. The relationship is yours now. Tend it.
If anything comes up as you sit with this work, the Centre for Shamanism community circle is a good place to bring it. This is living material and it deserves live conversation.
With care,
Ruth
Starshine Roots