Spirit Report: The Importance of Ancestral Spirits-Part One
The purpose of this Journey is to travel to the Upper World and request the Spirits give me guidance, general guidance around the topic of connecting with one’s ancestors.
So I’m starting out on my usual mountain ledge, calling down the energy beam or thread that I use to climb and ascend to the Upper World. And I’m going up and up, very efficient going up and up. I get the feeling that the Spirits of the Upper World, the teaching Spirits, the Spirit Teachers who appear in human form are quite keen for me to come up with this topic, with this request.
And I’m going up and up, and I sense higher up are the pink marble-like steps that I’ve used frequently in the past. And they’re very wide, very spacious, and I go up. It’s like a grand, but in a subtle way, a grand entrance to the Upper World.
And I see a circle in the woods, which I find a bit confusing because this reminds me of where I have gone to the lower World and met Spirits as well. I’m in this circle, and I want to specifically call in my Spirit Teachers of the Upper World. So I go through them in terms of their identities, the names that I use to connect with them.
And I call in WU, a Spirit Teacher who does appear in animal form. I call in RF, full of energy and vitality. I call in SJA with her power sword embedded in Tourmaline. I call in IL on her carpet of shifting forms that coalesce to reveal information. I call in RC. I call in EFWB.
And I say, as they know in advance that I’ve come, to please request guidance about the importance and the manner of connecting with ancestral Spirits.
And the first thing that they say is that there are, of course, countless ancestral Spirits. They’re the immediate ancestors that one might have actually met or heard of. And then going back further and further and further, there are ancestral Spirits that one can only talk about in terms of the theory that, of course, there were maternal ancestors going back thousands of generations and paternal ancestors going back thousands of generations.
And they say that’s the value—ancestral Spirits are a resource to connect with that can give insight and guidance, going back to as long as there’s been a version of a human. And that there’s a collective wisdom, a huge collective wisdom, a huge amount of experience that has been gathered that the Spirits can draw on to give us guidance.
And as always, it’s most useful to go with a question or a request to one’s ancestral Spirits. And they remind me of this very important thing that was always taught by my Teacher, Michael Harner, that when one connects with ancestral Spirits, one has to specify benevolent Spirits of one’s ancestors.
Benevolent in that, in the sense that these Spirits really want to help us. A, they’re not disinterested. They really are interested in, almost in the sense, dedicated to wanting to help us, and that their motivation is compassion and benevolence, and you could put it under the umbrella of love—that they want to help us as much as they can out of love and kindness and compassion.
And not all ancestral Spirits necessarily fit into that category. Out of the countless ancestral Spirits that we have, there are, of course, going to be many who are, you could just say, simply disinterested, at least at any one particular time. So one wants to call upon benevolent, compassionate, loving ancestral Spirits that are really wanting to help.
And part of connecting with ancestral Spirits is for us to gain insight into our history and what we’ve come from, and where there is a collective unconscious experience. And they’re showing me an old man, and he’s a woodcutter, and it is very interesting because the image that they’re giving me is very much like on the cover of one of the Led Zeppelin albums. I can think of the name of this old man bent over, carrying a huge load of wood. I guess it’s for firewood, maybe it’s for building a house or a roof.
And they’re telling me what the insight is—to appreciate that our lives now, not that we don’t have suffering, but of course, we do, and in some cases, absolutely terrible suffering, but to have a general appreciation of how easy our lives are compared to what some of our ancestors had to experience.
In this instance, they’re showing me manual labor and manual labor of somebody who seems to be fairly old, although I’m getting the age of 45, which nowadays is not old, but back then, and I think this is like around the 1700s. Back then, lifespans were much shorter, and you didn’t get to retire in comfort when you got to be old. You pretty much, for the most part—at least in this ancestor that they’re showing me—you still had to work manual labor even as an old person.
And the point being, just to really appreciate just how fortunate in some respects we are, that we have relative ease. And the big theme here is appreciation of our lives and not taking things for granted.
They’re also showing me another scene, going much further back of ancestors. And this, I guess, could be Neolithic times in a cave-like setting, where there’s a little group and there’s a pile of tinder, and they are striking some kind of stones together to create a spark to make a fire.
And I see somebody has—it looks like a rabbit spread out on like a wooden frame—that is going to be cooked over the fire that they still have to make. And this ancestor is striking these stones together, actually very adept at it. It’s not a struggle, but it’s still not quite the same as just flipping the dial on my gas stove and the skillet warming up.
And they’re saying that again, the real thing is we’re so used to the relative luxury and relative ease of our lifestyles. And we take it for granted, and that’s understandable because we live with these comforts day in and day out, and it just seems normal and ordinary.
And they say, remember how just a couple of weeks ago you had this power outage and no electricity for 48 hours, and how much of an inconvenience that was, and how much that threw you out of feeling normal and at home.
And then they show me another ancestor. Also, this is going way back, and because this is an ancestor, some kind of scholar reading some sort of manuscript or book, but with candles. It’s a candle-lit scene. And again, it’s a repetition of the great luxury and convenience and ease that we have now, which we take for granted.
But the point here is to understand that our ancestors—some of them at least—had great wisdom in terms of actual knowledge of the times. They were wise people for the times, both in terms of scholarly aspects. At least this ancestor was a scholar, and in those days, scholars were generally scholars of everything. It included philosophy and included science, such as it was, practical matters.
There wasn’t this absolute specialization that we have now, where somebody is an academic in literature or philosophy and somebody else is a scientist knowing some highly specialized aspect of science. In those days, people were all-rounders and were highly, not just respected, but they were consulted as sources of information.
And a message that they’re giving me here, the Spirits are giving me, is that we must be generous with the information that we have. We’re probably not in any way all-rounders like some of our ancestors, but we do have knowledge. We are able to help our families and our communities, and we should be willing and generous to share and give our information and not hold it close to the chest. It’s not like secret information. And we should be Teachers as much as we have something to teach, we should be Teachers, and we should take advantage of Teachers.
We should teach ourselves, and we should draw on others who can teach us. And they’re laughing, and they’re saying it’s astounding what access to teachings one has today, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence, the ease with which one can access information. Phenomenal.
And they’re saying, though, that the most important teachings are to do with how to live a good life, how to be a person that is constructive and helpful and inspiring to others, and leads a life of morality and integrity and constructiveness. And they say that countless ancestors of ours have striven with all their hearts to improve the wellbeing of society.
And it’s a tradition amongst benevolent, compassionate ancestors. And we must realize that we should be carrying on that tradition of doing what we can and utilizing our experience and our knowledge and our insights to help others—to help ourselves and help others. And we should be learning. We should be wanting to improve ourselves in whatever ways we have interest and time for.
And they say that’s what another really important aspect of connecting with ancestors is—to see the actions and attitudes of ancestors who were extremely loving, particularly in their family situation.
And while some of us may feel that we haven’t directly experienced the kind of love that we theoretically would have liked to have experienced—maybe we have, but maybe we haven’t—that we’ve got role models. That’s the point: our ancestors are role models, our benevolent, compassionate ancestors are role models.
And while we might not have been shown or taught things directly by our own immediate parents or grandparents, that doesn’t mean we can’t access those lessons and those teachings. And the great advantage of connecting with ancestors is we can access their examples, the example that they set of being loving and being kind.
And we can invite them to show us and to teach us and to love us. And just as there is that what’s become almost a glib, unfortunately, saying, but it’s meant to be a profound guidance for us to ask in a situation, a tricky situation where we’re trying to decide the best course of action where we ask, “What would Jesus do?”
So similarly, we can have a favorite ancestral role model, where we ask, “What would such and such an ancestor do?” And it could be a parent, it could be a grandparent, it could be an uncle, it could be an aunt, it could be a grandmother.
And they say that in contemporary societies that are more connected with their Spiritual path, like, for example, the Navajo, just to give one example, but other shamanically connected societies, there’s an unbelievable reverence for the ancestors and appreciating them and making and gifting them—having an altar where we could now have photographs of ancestors or even just their names.
And we offer tokens of appreciation, and in traditional Spiritual societies, it could be salt, it could be tobacco, it could be sweet perfumes, could be chocolate. The point is just that we are in some way making the effort of expressing appreciation and, in that way, connecting. The point is connecting with ancestral guidance.
And it’s a way of—it’s a very powerful way of bypassing or limiting our egoic selfishness, selfish natures, where we are governed by fear and governed by greed and governed by a sense of lack, maybe. You know, where we’ve got our emotional baggage that is influencing how we make decisions.
And to again say, “You know, what would grandma XX do? What would great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather do?” How can we be guided by their wisdom?
And then there’s, you could always call it a version of entertainment, but there are lessons to be learned there as well, of just doing a shamanic Journey and observing ancestors. And it could be observing them appreciate and enjoy, observing them cope with adversity.
And knowing that we belong in this long, long, long chain of ancestors, that we too will take our place in the chain of ancestors. And we have an opportunity for the generations who hopefully will come ahead of us that we can be compassionate, wise ancestors.
You know, do we want to step up to our progeny, our future generations, viewing us as benevolent and wise and compassionate, or will future generations who may connect with their ancestral Spirits feel that we maybe don’t have that much to offer because we didn’t really emphasize living lives of integrity and kindness?
So like it or not, we are in this chain of ancestors. We are ancestors to be. And they say there’s another aspect that we can connect with ancestors and give them our love and give them our appreciation. And this could be very immediate ancestors, like parents who, maybe when they were alive, we didn’t really express our most heartfelt appreciation and love.
Maybe we just didn’t appreciate how much they had cared for us. And connecting with them is an opportunity to, in a sense, address that deficit, to go and tell them how much we really appreciate what they did for us, how they cared for us, how they loved us.
And also, in some instances, it may be to express our forgiveness. There might be aspects of their experience with us where forgiveness from us to them is going to be constructive. And we certainly know how we would like forgiveness from future generations for aspects of our own lives that have not been as constructive as we would like.
And we would wish to be understood and forgiven. We recognize our shortcomings, and we ask for forgiveness. And so we can express forgiveness to ancestors as well, where we might feel there was a shortcoming. And it’s not just forgiveness. Forgiveness is in the context of understanding.
We have a better understanding of why they behaved in the way they did. So forgiveness is easy. We have insight into their situations.
And there is wisdom. We might be—an example could be we’re wanting to cook something. This might seem a very mundane but practical aspect, where there is a recipe that we’re not sure about or we’re uncertain of, and we can call on an ancestor, like maybe we have a great-grandparent who was an extremely good cook. And we can call on them to give us insight in how to prepare a dish, what to add, what to leave out. Very interesting.
Or we’re doing an artwork, and we’re at a point where we’re feeling a little bit stuck or lacking in inspiration, and we call on a particular benevolent ancestor to give us guidance and an ability to move forward where we might be feeling stuck.
So these are just some ways, some benefits of connecting with benevolent, compassionate ancestors. And my Spirits tell me what a phenomenal resource—to have thousands of generations of experience to acknowledge and draw on and appreciate.
And again, they say, “Don’t forget the responsibility that we have to play our part in being a constructive link in the ancestral chain.”
Wow.
So… I thank the Spirits, and I’m seeing grandparents of mine, and I just want to kiss them. I see my maternal grandmother, and it’s very moving to me, and I kiss her cheek. And I see my maternal grandfather, and I kiss his cheek. And I see my paternal grandfather, and I kiss his cheek. And I see my paternal grandmother, and I kiss her cheek.
It is very moving and brings tears to me for this opportunity. And you realize that they’re not gone from my life, far from it. I say, “Thank you, Spirits.” And I feel I’m going to return now to the lower World.
I say, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” And I go back down the steps, down the pink steps. I have tears in my eyes from this experience, and I go down the energy beam, energy thread, lower, lower, lower, back to the middle World here.
And this was a very powerful experience, and I really hope it will be of benefit and inspirational to everybody who hears this Journey.
Thank you, beloved Spirits. And thank you to my Teachers, my Teachers who taught me shamanism, introduced me to shamanism, for giving me a way in this powerful, powerful experience.
Thank you.
