I’m taking an ancestral lineage healing class that has me seeing many things, including what I sometimes call our calling or life’s purpose, in a new light. It’s like I was standing there admiring a beautifully carved door when someone came up, led me around the corner, and showed me that the two-dimensional door is just a small part of an enormous, three-dimensional palace.
I think I can best explain with a story. It may not be accurate, but I believe it’s true.
A Possible History of Purpose
Long ago, humanity came into being.
Relational creatures, we were meant to do good in the world as bridges, connectors, synapses between far-flung and diverse forms of life—
Plant and animal.
Land and water.
Earth and sky.
Past and future.
Seen and unseen.
Such gifts were too big for one person to hold, so they were divided up and given to families.
Some tended relationships with the plants by foraging for them, cultivating them, making them into medicine, uncovering their wisdom, or honoring them with song.
Some nurtured connections with animals by tracking them, learning from them, tending them, hunting them, or revering them with art.
Others cared for our relationships with each other by leading, organizing, harmonizing, nurturing, teaching, healing, and more.
And still others spoke with mountains, storms, oceans, spirits, or other important beings.
These familial blessings and responsibilities were tended and passed down from generation to generation as the sacred gifts they are. Until something happened to interrupt the transmission of those gifts. Or rather, many things happened—war, disaster, displacement, abuses of power, patriarchy, racism, colonialism.
In other words, trauma.
As if the pain of that trauma wasn’t enough, most of our families lost something else—their ability to nurture the relationships they always tended—because the means to do so was far away or dangerous or forbidden. Or maybe because they couldn’t afford to focus on anything other than survival.
As a result, humans’ exquisite nervous systems, designed for attunement and interdependence, got overwhelmed. We lost our ability to feel the subtle energies and connections we used to. Eventually, many of our familial gifts and their underlying purpose were largely forgotten.
Cut off from our gifts, we wither. We feel empty and meaningless. We try to fill the void with greed, power, superiority, control, pleasure, achievement, status, or perfection.
We get anxious. We rage or despair or collapse.
We become engines of disconnection and destruction, cutting ourselves off even further and re-enacting the traumas that started the cycle in the first place.
This is generally where we find ourselves today—collectively and, for many of us, individually. On some level, we’re lost, separated from the wider web of life, and without a memory that anything could be any different.
Of course, not every culture has lost its connection to the wider, living world. Some people have—despite all odds, often at great risk to themselves, and with unimaginable strength—managed to keep their connective culture in tact enough to pass on. They are, however, the exception rather than the rule.
Far from leaving me despondent, this way of understanding our past actually gives me hope. I can perhaps best explain that with another story—one possible way this all might have played out in my own family.
What Do You Call a Group of Sensitive, Strong, Badass Women?
(A Family)
First, I need to admit I haven’t always been interested in my ancestors. In fact, for a long time I didn’t want anything to do with them. I associated them with all the things I don’t love about human beings and human society—disconnection, selfishness, prejudice, control, dominance, violence, etc. Being of European descent, I unconsciously added colonialism, racism, and the destruction of the earth to the mix.
I didn’t realize that if you go far enough back on any lineage, you find healthy cultures connected to the earth and each other.
Or that as much as some ancestors surely embodied human ugliness, others (and possibly even the same ones) also manifested human kindness, love, and wisdom. In fact, the fact that I long for something more than domination and destruction is also a gift from my ancestors.
Having had some help to overcome my prejudices and look more closely, I now see a more holistic picture, and what I’ve found is nothing short of awe-some.
My best sense is that I come from a long line of deeply attuned, quietly powerful, and profoundly respected women, especially on my mother’s matrilineal side. I believe they had healing powers that came from working with the wild energies found both around and within us.
The gift may have involved tending our connection with the untamed beings of nature and bringing their wisdom and powers to our human communities.
Or it could have been supporting the healthy, free flow of wild energies that move through people as emotions, longings, and creative impulses.
Quite possibly it included creating art that honors and deepens our relationship with each other and the more-than-human world.
Or maybe it was all of these and more.
I’m terribly curious what interrupted these blessings. Based on limited genealogical research and what I know of myself and my family, it was most likely invasions, war, displacement, forced conversion to Christianity, patriarchy, and/or a hundred other things.
What feels true to me is that when the interruptions did happen, my grandmothers’ gifts were either no longer valued or impossible to pass on, and they lost connection to the spirits of land and life. At some point, even the energies inside them became foreign and unfamiliar. Without their traditional way of connecting to others and a welcome reception of their gifts, they grew alienated. All of which led to greater fear, shame, and a sense of unworthiness.
Here’s the Hopeful Part
The blessings and responsibilities of our families still live in our bodies and souls. They call to us, offering hints in the things we love to do, our strengths and talents, what we care about, and our vulnerabilities, values, and visions.
The more we stray from them, the louder they call. They want to be remembered.
Our ancestral gifts leak out no matter what. Which is why we never need to feel pressure to identify what our purpose is. It’s not something “out there” we have to find or figure out. It’s already “in here,” an inherent part of who we are, and if we get out of our own way, we’ll fulfill it even if we have no idea what it is.
That said, there is a powerful shift that happens when we intentionally say yes to our purpose. Incredibly, we don’t even have to know exactly what it is to do that. We just need to recognize what saying yes feels like and follow that feeling.
We also don’t have to do it alone. Our ancestors can help us (they’re eager to). So can the entities we have age-old familial relationships with, whether they’re plants, animals, humans, or other beings.
One of the most beautiful parts of this remembering, reclaiming work of reconnecting with ancestral gifts for me has been learning that I’m not alone and, in the words of David Whyte, “not an accident amidst other accidents.” Rather, I’m a tiny but important part of something vast, ancient, and essential, and I’m supported in many ways and on many levels by that entire, magnificent web.
It’s yet another type of magic.