Last Samhain, when we celebrated our ancestors during a cacao ceremony and also during some Fool Expression play, I had a moving and deeply honouring insight.
I have always felt somehow remote from my connection with my ancestors. Even though I loved the idea of connecting with them and receiving their support, the experience stayed somehow foreign, conceptual.
At Samhain, suddenly I had this feeling that what I was perceiving inside of me; feelings, emotions, beliefs that I knew quite well, were not only mine. I realised that my emotions were, and had been for so long, a way of connecting with my ancestors. A direct, palpable experience of the intimate experience that some of them would have had at the time.
Even though they died, the emotional pain, Eckart Tolle would call it ‘ the pain body’ and the beliefs that comes with it stayed alive, like an entity, passing down through the blood line.
Suddenly, what I was feeling became a doorway, an invitation, a way straight inside the core experiences of my people. I could feel the loneliness of some of them by feeling the loneliness in me. I was travelling through time doing so. I could feel their fear of scarcity and of everything suddenly going wrong by feeling this in me.
I could feel the pervasive jealousy that they have been feeling, despair, mistrust in which some of them lived their all lives in. I could feel heartbreak, devastation, anger.
My inner experience became like a ‘web’, allowing me to travel through space and time.
I can feel now that I can choose to stay with these experiences to help myself, maybe help them, but most specially to feel and connect with them.
Whatever emotion a trigger rises in me becomes a blessing, an occasion to feel the experience of those people, the way that we are intertwined in ways I can only just about perceive.
It becomes an occasion to grace my presence by their presence, to let my heart swell with honour, empathy, acknowledgement and love. An occasion to feel what they felt all those years and maybe tried their best to push away to survive.
What an amazing playground life becomes once we truly practice acceptance of what is, and learn how to dance with, play with, and connect deeper and wider. We are maybe after all also playing for our ancestors…?
Artist credit: Es_luzdivina