The Path Lit of Animism and Ancestral Light
The Path Lit of Animism and Ancestral Light
I grew up in Northern California, where the redwoods rise like cathedrals and rivers carve their own songs into stone. My earliest teachers were not people, but places. My earliest teachers were not people, but places.
My family ancestry is Scandinavian and Scottish. My mother came to the U.S. from Denmark; my father’s people left Scotland for Turtle Island centuries earlier. These lineages live in my blood and bone, yet what claimed me most directly were the other-than-human kin of California. Bears, birds, stones, winds they adopted me, tended me, raised me as one of their own. My gratitude for this is bottomless.
Like many, I inherited more than stories and songs from my people. I inherited trauma, knots of pain and silence woven through the generations. For the past 25 years, I’ve been unravelling and reweaving: healing from complex PTSD, navigating anxiety and depression, and learning how to see myself as whole and alive instead of broken.
Then I understood, when we heal, we don’t just heal for ourselves. We heal for those who came before us, and for those who will come after.
During my 300 hour VBY Sri Vidya Tantra training, in the depth of vichara (a practice of discernment) I wrote a Sankalpa without fully understanding it:
“I reclaim my energy and ancestral power.”
At first, the words felt foreign, almost too big for me. But then came the vision:
Day after day, I wander beneath the trees. I listen and speak with the spirits of the stones, the birds, the bears, with the wolves, the waters, the ancestors, and the unnamable alive. I follow roots into the dark soil and climb branches into the vast sky. Sometimes I reach my fingers toward the stars, brushing their surface as if it were water. I return with stories, impressions, wisdoms. I walk out from under the canopy, my path lit by the sun and the new moon.
I didn’t realize then that I was describing the path I would spend my life walking. But here I am, still wandering, still listening.
Ancestry is not just a list of names or a country on a map. It is a relationship between the living and the dead, between humans and more-than-humans, between the self and the vast web of life.
“We” that holds it all. When we step into ancestral ritual, we step back into that “We.” We remember that yoga, ritual, and life itself have never been about “me.” They have always been about us.
And so I keep walking Scandinavian and Scottish in blood, Californian in spirit, endlessly in awe under the trees. Listening to the land, the animals. Listening to the ancestors.
Join me this September for VBY’s premiere of Ancestral Rituals of Belonging Workshop.