Ancestral Healing – Chapter One: Ancient Calling
By Anna Marie | Ancestral Healing Series on Dragonfly Rose
Intro:
Welcome to the first chapter of Ancestral Healing, a sacred series exploring my journey into ancestral memory, divine purpose, and the deep wounds passed through generations of women. This is a story not only of healing but of remembering. A call from the spirits that walk with us, from the voices of those who came before. I invite you to read with your heart open, as I begin to share the visions and truths that have stirred within me for years.
Preface:
I stood at the edge of the plateau, the winds pulling and playing with my hair, the scent of the Mother permeating through every fiber of my being. I gazed out over the lush lands, saw where the oceans touched the rich greens and the colored scatterings of plants and flowers. This is my home. We are the stewards of this land. A peace fell over me, and I closed my eyes and chanted my gratitude to the gods of old. But these thanks would soon be pleas for mercy. Our future, the future of our lands, was forever to be changed. I look back on these simple, blissful times as a reminder of what humanity needs to return to. My spirit now haunts these grounds. My soul is tied to my descendants until one finally heeds my call. Our story needs to be written. These deep wounds need to heal. I will linger until one of them awakens to their divine purpose. I will linger until these ancestral traumas are healed.
Chapter One: Ancient Calling
I sipped my refreshing iced coffee, homemade of course! Who has the money for anything else? Even if I did, homemade always tastes better. Making things from scratch has always come easy to me, like I was built from a cloth of ancient times and woven with strands of the future. Even technology made sense to me. I was an enigma, and I loved myself for it.
I have gone down many paths to get where I am today and have endured some of the most tumultuous healing a person can go through. For me, the greatest and most effective healing, comes from paths that work directly with our Mother Earth. I could never understand why someone would say they ‘own’ a piece of her. That is like saying you own another person. It is an impossibility. We do not even own our bodies. They will fade away, as we all do, fade into her, become part of her forests and wilds. No, we don’t own shit. She holds all the cards at every end and at every beginning. We are nothing without her.
As I sat at my desk, trying to work, and trying to focus on what I needed to do to survive man’s rules and regulations. I found myself lacking the focus I needed. The stress was starting to take its toll on me. If you don’t work, you don’t make money, and then you don’t eat or have a place to live. Simple as that, and just as idiotic. It’s madness, really.
I felt a call to take care of the Earth, to be a steward, but this is not the reality of man in these technological and ego-driven times. No, today is all about control and domination. We are, and have been, in the era of abuse, destruction, and control. I can’t help but think of ancient times, before men stole power from women. What was our world like back then? Or have women ever truly held power? I feel there was once a balanced ruling between men and women, but I feel women were the main stewards of all. We are the creators of life, literally and spiritually. In nearly every species on Earth, the feminine brings life forward. Yet in the world shaped by men, we’ve been treated as subjects of control rather than honored as sacred vessels of creation.
These philosophical thoughts poured through me as I drank through my morning caffeine addiction. I reflect on our current state and see so many angry, ego-driven, mad men trying to control everything, even down to what a woman can and cannot do with her own vessel. How does humanity move past this? The thought is almost too much to bear. Lately, I have been turning to social media to give my mind something better to look at. Sometimes it works. Sometimes, no matter what I do, I cannot escape its grip on me.
Why do I fight what I am naturally drawn toward? Herbs, plants, animals, magick, the spirit world. Why do I resist so much? Perhaps it is because I have been conditioned from a young age to do so. All women have. Don’t make waves. Stay quiet. Do what you’re told. Look like this. Talk like this. Think like this. Play like this… or pay the price.
There is so much fear surrounding women speaking up for themselves, for defending our right to be women. Our rights to be the true-born women that have come to this planet. Why do men seek to destroy and control us? Why do they seek to take away our power? The answer ebbs into my mind like a gentle wave: they are jealous of us, for they cannot create in the ways we can. They want our power, so they wield us like swords. It makes me think of every man I have let touch my body, every man I have let enter the sanctuary of my soul. All have used me in some way or another. Every one of them has left a mark upon me that has caused trauma. Every one of them has caused damage. Every single fucking one.
What does a woman do?
I don’t want to give up on men. The true divine masculine is what is lost in today’s times. I am not sure they will ever have the desire to get it back, to face themselves and heal. Their egos are too damn big, and their anger at themselves, paired with their greed, is vaster. It saddens me, really - saddens me to the depths of my core. There is supposed to be a divine balance between men and women, but it has been lost. My mind is swimming in these thoughts today.
I took myself to my journal and wrote out my thoughts and feelings. Through my blood and manifestation, I burned the bay leaves to release and call in what my heart is yearning for. During my connection to Spirit, I was given a vision. The same vision I have had since my early twenties. It was a gift from my ancestors during a Spirit Journey I had with a Shaman.
I was standing on a cliff, a plateau, overlooking a barren land. It looked like a desert in Arizona. An old Native American woman was looking at me and pointing over the barren lands. A younger Native American man stood next to her and also looked upon me. She wanted something from me, but I never knew what. Her eyes full of woeful memories of an aching for me to see. I could never see what she was trying to say. I decided to do something different, I instinctively grabbed my drum and started beating. Slow and steady, my mind lifting, and then an intensity of the vision grabbed me. My drumming sped, my energy pulsed, I could feel everything within me changing.
The vision became fast and forward-moving. From my feet, water surged, and before me, what was once a barren land was now a vast and beautiful jungle oasis. The plateau was the brink of a falling curtain of water that raged life to the lands below. The woman and the man were still gazing at me, and the look in their eyes showed me that I was finally seeing what they were trying to tell me.
Another vision pulled me in. It was a vision of a woman, standing at the edge of a cliff, overlooking the ocean. This woman who has haunted and lingered on the ancient grounds of my mind for as long as I can remember. She was standing there before me. Looking at me. Connecting every storyline. Connecting every terrifying nightmare I have had since I was a child. Like the woman who ran from demons on horses in a village in some faraway land. All of them linking together into a story of pain and suffering.
My ancestral line has been carrying this pain through every generation. Heeding the women in my line to heal it. Heeding us to step back into our power. Heeding us to call in a revolution. Heeding us to use our magick. To heal our suffering, anger, pain, and anguish.
The task now lies with me to complete. The mission is now at my doorstep, and I can no longer run from it. The life of the curse-breaker, the trauma healer, is the hardest. I am met with the pain and suffering from not only my own life but from the lives of all my ancestors. From their life force begging to be healed.
I take a deep breath in and then out, focusing on the woman who has stood at the edge of the cliff in my mind’s eye for my entire life. I felt a natural flow to work with her first and the vision came to me like a swift breeze on a chilled air.