Ep 19: Unlocking Ancestral Wisdom: A Path to Joy, Healing, and Empowerment
In this episode, Asha Wilkerson introduces a new group container for ancestral healing. She explains that ancestral healing is about identifying and releasing the rules, admonitions, and trauma passed down from generation to generation. It is also about tapping into the joy, love, and positive emotions that our ancestors want for us.
Asha addresses common questions about ancestral healing, such as what it is, how to engage in it if you don't know your ancestors, and whether it is all about trauma. She also shares personal stories and examples to illustrate the importance of ancestral healing.
Asha then provides details about the four-week ancestral healing container she is offering, which includes breathwork sessions, support via a WhatsApp group, journal prompts, and individual tarot readings. She encourages listeners to join the container and emphasizes the significance of experiencing joy and living a life that makes us happy.
Key Points
Ancestral healing involves identifying and releasing the rules, admonitions, and trauma passed down from generation to generation.
It is important to tap into the joy, love, and positive emotions that our ancestors want for us.
Ancestral healing is not just about trauma; it is also about experiencing joy and living a life that makes us happy.
Engaging in ancestral healing is possible even if you don't know your specific ancestral lineage.
Living ancestors, such as parents, can also be part of the ancestral healing process.
Asha is offering a four-week ancestral healing container that includes breathwork sessions, support via a WhatsApp group, journal prompts, and individual tarot readings.
Chapters
(00:00) Introduction to the Ancestral Healing Container
(02:35) What Is Ancestral Healing?
(07:31) You Don't Need to Know Exactly Who Your Ancestors Were
(14:08) Ancestral Healing Isn't All About Trauma
(17:55) The 4-Week Ancestral Healing Deep Dive
Resources
Join the Ancestral Healing Deep Dive!
To learn more about starting your healing journey, head to ashawilkerson.com!
Interested in working with Asha? Click here to get on her calendar for a discovery call.
Follow Asha on Instagram @AshaWilkersonEsq
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Asha Wilkerson (00:02.688)
I'm launching a new group container for ancestral healing. And I'm so excited to tell you all about it. This container is for you if you've been leaning more and more into the spiritual side of life and have discovered that there is more to be done with healing within side of you. This is also for you if you've been talking to your friends and family about breaking generational patterns, or as the black community says generational curses, and behaviors that keep you stuck,
struggling and wishing for something different, but you're not quite sure where to start. This program is also for you if you are ready to see the fullness and the beauty in your family's history so that you can draw on the strength and wisdom of your ancestors instead of always focusing on what you think is broken. I'm really excited to give you all the details about this four week container, but first I want to answer a few questions about ancestral healing
that will help you decide whether this container is right for you.
Asha Wilkerson (01:08.438)
Here are three things that I want to clarify for you today before I tell you more about the healing container. First, I'm going to answer, "What is ancestral healing?" And this is what I have come up with after one, just living, two, traveling to different countries, and three, doing a little bit of reading from the so-called experts about ancestral healing. Two, I'm going to answer, "What do you do if you don't know your ancestors?" That's particularly important, I think, for Black people in America.
And maybe black people in the Americas because we arrived in the Americas via slave trade and there aren't records that tell us exactly what countries our families are from. So we don't have that connection like some other folks who are recent immigrants to certain countries or born in the home country. And lastly, I'm going to answer the question, "Is ancestral healing all about trauma?" I'm going to give you the short answer right now because I just can't wait. And that short answer is no, it's not all about trauma.
But first, let me answer what is ancestral healing? So here's the thing. We consciously and subconsciously take on the fears, the advice, and the warnings of our parents, our grandparents, and everybody else who came before us. And it's only natural because our brains are doing everything that they can to keep us safe. And it's happening in the background. And so we remember that we're not supposed to walk down this certain street, but we might not understand why we're not
allowed to walk down a certain street. And as smart as our brains are, they don't realize that when the safe advice is no longer applicable, that it shouldn't pop up in our heads. But because our brains are running on autopilot and running in the background and our subconscious, and they're just trying to keep us safe, we'll remember the advice and the safety admonitions without understanding that the context has changed. So the warning that your great grandmother gave you
or gave to your grandmother about making sure she keeps her husband happy no matter what was given in the context of survival because women couldn't survive on their own 50, 60, 100 years ago. And blindly following the same advice and rule today and sacrificing your happiness, your wellbeing and your dreams is unnecessary because the situation and the context are different. So ancestral healing allows you to identify and think about the past without judgment
Asha Wilkerson (03:30.51)
to see what's actually true for you, what you need to let go of and what you should continue to carry with you. I'm thinking of a two stories actually, I remember listening to this probably on some NPR podcast and this lady was so adamant about not eating garlic and she said that her mother had told her not to eat garlic and her grandmother had told her not to eat garlic and it just became this family rule. So much so
that when she was dating someone who would then become her husband, she said, you got to choose me or the garlic. We're not doing it. My family doesn't do garlic. It was at some point like years later, maybe she went back to, I don't remember what country they were from, but maybe went back home to visit her grandmother and asked about this garlic thing. And her grandmother was like, what do you mean we don't eat garlic? And what she said was, "Oh, honey, I gave that advice to your mother before she went out on a date because I didn't want her breath to smell like garlic!"
But this piece of advice had lost the context and it became this unwritten family rule that we don't eat garlic, but it was completely unnecessary. Ancestral healing is kind of like that, right? It's pulling up the rules and regulations that we live by. Some of them may be seen as helpful, but might be keeping us stuck. Others are more punishing in their effect. Like you have to give all of yourself otherwise
you won't have a job, otherwise you won't have a relationship. But that often comes because the situation, the context required somebody to over give. I'll give you another example. My mom and my uncle are very, very proud and prideful about never having missed a day of work, never taking a sick day, right? And I remember when I was coming up and now we're in the age and era of self care and mental health and taking care of yourself. And when I would on occasion,
because I am my mother's child, so I rarely miss work. But when I would on occasion say I'm sick, I think I'm gonna stay home today, she would get really worried. And that fear would come up that she had learned as a kid because for black people in America in the 40s, 50s and 60s and even before that, if you didn't show up to work, you were likely to lose your job. But that turned into
Asha Wilkerson (05:44.76)
being very prideful and showing up every day for work, which is an accomplishment, right? To show up every day, but it lost its context. Now I'm not at risk for taking a sick day, right? I'm not at risk for taking a vacation day. It is my right. It's a part of my employment contract. That's something that I can do, but it's the admonition of you have to show up every day or else that can be,
that is that trauma that needed to be resolved. So now, because I understand where it came from and how it came about, I can say, I'm going to take a day off and understand that I don't have to feel guilty or scared about it because my context has changed. I'm not at risk for losing my job for taking one day off. So this is why ancestral healing is really important. It's not just
all the trauma and the drama, although it can be, but it is to help you understand what things that have been told to you and passed down to you are still important for you to carry and which things you need to let go to actually live the life that you want to live. The second question I'm going to answer is what if you don't know your ancestors? And this was a big one for me, especially as
I'm selling the Ghana retreat and returning to Ghana and thinking about connecting with my ancestors. The reality of it is, I don't know that my ancestors actually came from Ghana and they probably passed through Ghana and so that was enough for me, but I don't actually have any records dating back past like four or five generations in the United States because again, history of the slave trade, right? So the question was,
"If I don't know where my ancestral lineage has come from specifically, can I still engage in ancestral healing? Is there still stuff to heal?" And the answer is yes, absolutely. I started reading this book and listening to a couple of podcast episodes with this woman named Nancy Hendrickson. And she wrote the book Ancestral Tarot, Uncover Your Past and Chart Your Future. And she talks about three different types of ancestors.
Asha Wilkerson (08:03.288)
She talks about ancestors of blood. So those are our family members, our grandparents, great grandparents, and so on that we know are a part of our family that we can trace. She also talks about adopted ancestors. Now, those are the people that you just really feel connected to. People in the past, people in history where you're just like, man, I really admire Toni Morrison, right? Or I really, really admire
whoever it is that has come before you, maybe one of those connections that you're like, why do I just love this person so much? Maybe you have posters of them on your wall, right? Those people aren't necessarily connected to you by blood, but they can be considered your adopted ancestor and you can still connect with them as well. Maybe the civil rights leaders, maybe scientists and inventors. It could be anyone that you want or that you connect to, maybe musicians, right? And then she describes a third,
category of ancestors and she calls them ancestors of time and these aren't necessarily people but these are places and spaces where you feel really connected. So I'm actually now that I'm saying this because I feel so at home in Portugal and I can't really explain it. There's a lot of people that do. I wonder if in a past life I had been in Portugal or if there's something familiar
over a different time space continuum that feels really comfortable. I also feel that way in Cuba also. And I would say jokingly, I think I was Cuban in a past life because there's just something about Cuban culture, Cuban music, Cuban people that just resonates with my soul. And I'm wondering if I have some past experiences in either of these two countries because
there is such a thing as being connected to ancestors of time. You just show up in a space and it just feels so good, or maybe you feel really connected to a certain movement in history or a certain time period in history. So for Nancy's explanation of ancestors, she says ancestors of blood adopted ancestors and ancestors of time.
Asha Wilkerson (10:17.28)
I'm going to add one more for us. I'm going to be talking about our living ancestors. I don't think that we need or should wait until people pass on into the other realm to begin healing their relationships and the just experiences that we have with people. So I actually put this into practice myself and actually worked with a client of mine about healing the relationship
with our fathers. So for myself, I knew that my dad was, every parent dies, right? We just can't get around it. But my dad had been diagnosed with a recurring prostate cancer experience. I don't know if you, I messed up on how I said that. My dad had been re -diagnosed or his prostate cancer had come back. And that was about 2016, 2017, when he started going through chemotherapy again. And so I knew that at that point in time,
there was a time limit. I didn't know exactly how long, but I knew that there was a time limit for him. And we had a very challenging relationship to say the least. And so I decided to get into therapy because I wanted to make sure that I could heal as much as possible within our relationship and heal as much as possible of our relationship before he passed away. And so I began to do more work to understand him, to
figure out new coping strategies, to figure out how to speak to him in a way that he could receive, to learn how to let some of the hurtful things that he would say just roll off my back, because I wanted to begin to heal that relationship before he actually passed away. And a client of mine, her father is still living as well, they have a challenging history where he has been in and out of her life and has made her really independent because he wanted her to be
independent but also because he just wasn't able to support her in the way that she needed and wanted. And he had come back around and wanted to meet her children, his grandchildren. He had not met them before. But because they had been estranged for a period of time, she was not comfortable with just letting him in to see the children, which is totally understandable. So we began to work together to reimagine a relationship and to put practices
Asha Wilkerson (12:39.422)
and actually conversations into place that she could begin to heal that relationship with him to be able to allow him to interact with her children and to reestablish a relationship for herself with her father. So we have living ancestors as well. They will, They are the people who have come before us as hard as it is to see and to recognize that our parents are just
hurt human beings also, they really are. And it doesn't mean that they didn't affect us. And it doesn't mean that we should just forget about some of the things that we have experienced. But it does mean that there's an opportunity to understand where they're coming from. So then we can re-associate and reinterpret our experience with them. So if you don't know your ancestors, can you still engage in ancestral healing? And the answer is yes, absolutely. There are ancestors of blood. There are adopted ancestors.
There are ancestors of time and my fourth addition is living ancestors. You can begin to work with them as well. And you don't have to tell them this is all what we're going to do together in this group. Now, the last question I want to answer for you today is, "Is it all about trauma? Is ancestral healing all about trauma?" And the answer is no. One of the things that I find really challenging, especially in
maybe it's worldwide, but especially in America when we talk about black history or mainly black history, it is this retelling of trauma. It's this retelling of all the challenging experiences that we've had along the way. And when we think about ancestral healing, it is often bringing up and releasing some of those traumatic experiences that have been passed down from generation to generation.
That is important, but what I'm also going to make sure that we do in this container is to tap in into the love and joy and other positive emotions that our ancestors want for us. It cannot be true. Like I refuse to believe that our ancestors want us to continue to suffer and to be in pain and to go without like we think about their experience. That's not it.
Asha Wilkerson (14:56.142)
So one of the reasons why this came up, this always comes up for me, but a couple of weeks ago, I was co-leading a retreat and I was participating in one of the experiences and this was a brain spotting exercise where we were asked to think about something that brought us joy and happiness and to notice where we felt it in our body. That was fine, that was easy enough. But then we had to hold that experience for five minutes. The first minute was like, okay, I got this. Minute
two to three I was like, okay, I'm getting fidgety. I don't wanna be here. Not I don't wanna be here, but like this is hard, right? Minute four, I just started crying. Four to like five. And then after we came back to the group, I was just crying because after I sat with joy for four minutes and happiness for four minutes, it became really uncomfortable in my body. And then I realized that sometimes, a lot of times as black and brown people,
as first generation, as eldest daughters, as only children, people caring for aging parents, as people wanting to move locations after our parents have fought for us to have such a good life, we often feel really guilty and often feel like we're not supposed to be experiencing joy and happiness. Now, we would never tell our children that we don't want them to experience joy and happiness.
But for some reason, we think that we're not entitled to it in the same way that we want our children and our nieces and our nephews and our friends' children to experience it. And that's just a holdover from trauma. You being your ancestors' wildest dream has nothing to do with you living a life of self-sacrifice and being miserable just to have a corporate job or just to do what other people tell you. Their dream for you is to actually be as free as you can be.
wherever you want to be living a life that makes you happy. But in order to do that, you have to get comfortable holding joy. You have to get comfortable holding love. You have to get comfortable holding excitement and not let it make you feel guilty because you are experiencing more and better than the people who came before you. So part of what we're doing in this healing container is not just calling up and releasing
Asha Wilkerson (17:16.26)
trauma and hard things. We will do that. But we're also going to call up and bring in joy and love and happiness and success and get used to holding that so that we can actually move forward and experience the life that we've been working towards. So now let me tell you about this container that I'm so excited to bring to you. This is a four week ancestral healing container.
And it's the quick deep dive that you need to uncover parts of your lineage that need healing and release so that you can live your fullest life. In this container, you will identify the rules, admonitions and trauma that have been passed down from generation to generation. So you can begin to heal and release them. And you will tap into the joy and power of your lineage and recognize that you are whole and complete and capable of carrying out your ancestors wildest dreams, which
are for you to be free. You will begin to experience freedom and power that you never thought imaginable because you will be connected with your ancestors, guides and spirits that walk with you every minute of every day. They're already around us. We just have to tune in. So what I want you to do now is head over to ashawilkerson.com/ancestral-healing to save your spot.
There's a limited number of spots available because I want to preserve the trust and intimacy of this group. The investment into this container is $444, 4-4-4, and this is a great opportunity for you to invite your friends and family members to join you. So what does the container look like? We are meeting on Sundays beginning September 1st for 90 minute breathwork sessions. And these breathwork sessions will be focused on...
First, we'll be connecting with your ancestors. Second, we'll be identifying and releasing the trauma that we need to let go of. Third, we'll be connecting to joy and love and other positive emotions that they want for us. And the fourth week will be really tapping into and listening to what advice they have for us moving forward, because they want us to have all that we want. In between time, you will get support via a WhatsApp group, a private WhatsApp group.
Asha Wilkerson (19:35.3)
and you will get journal prompts from me and every person who signs up will get an individual tarot reading from me about your ancestors. I want you to understand what was going on with your ancestors, where you fit into it, what you need to heal and release, and also what message they have for you. And I've done this ancestral pull a few times and I really love it, especially if we're not used to...
connecting just on our own or through meditation with our ancestors, the tarot cards can be a really, really good guide. So that's what this four week container looks like. I would love for you to be a part of it. If you are in the podcast app listening, click on the registration link below. Otherwise head over to ashawilkerson.com/ancestral-healing to save your spot. Now, before I let you go today, I just have one more question.
I'm curious about whether you've done any ancestral healing practices before. am admittedly, I probably should have told you this in beginning. I'm admittedly new on this ancestral healing journey. I guess I've been doing the work for myself for a little bit, but a couple of weeks ago when I was talking to my co-facilitator about at the retreat and after the retreat, I was saying I really wanted to do some ancestral healing, but I felt like I needed to get another certification or do something. She's like, no, you have it. You have everything you need within you.
And part of me knew that that was true, but of course I was just scared. This offering, this package is an exercise and me trusting my intuition. I felt like I was very clearly instructed to create a group healing container around ancestral healing, around not just releasing trauma, but around specifically calling in joy so that we can really express ourselves as the free people that our ancestors want us to be.
So I am curious about whether or not you've done any ancestral healing before, what your practices look like, maybe where you've done them. And I would love for you to send me a message on Instagram about it. Or if you're listening in Spotify, you can click on the little survey button in the Spotify app where you're listening to this podcast. All right, so I can't wait to start working with you. Our first breathwork session is September 1st, and we'll be working to release trauma and old stories.
Asha Wilkerson (21:54.648)
but also bring in an experience. All right, I can't wait to start working with you on September 1st to release trauma and old stories, but also to bring in and experience more love and joy. And before you go on about your week, I want you to remember that it's because I've healed that I've been able to repair old relationships and start new ones from a different perspective.
It's because I've healed that I've been able to leave expectations behind that no longer serve. And it's because I've healed that I'm currently living my dream life out loud with no regrets. See you in the container.