Ancestral Work: Getting a Second Opinion
It’s been ages since I’ve mentioned ancestral work, so I thought I’d share an element that I recently added to my practice after doing some ancestral work with a friend (this is shared with her permission).
When I do ancestral work, I generally use a combination of tarot cards and pendulums for connecting with ancestors. I have one pendulum that I use for working with my own ancestors, and a separate pendulum that I use for working with other people’s. During this reading, my friend’s ancestors gave some advice that struck me as a little “off.” It wasn’t bad, per se, but it reflected something that she has been working through for a while — namely, that several of her ancestors had a lot of earthly power and accrued some karmic debt on account of that power. During this reading, her ancestors were encouraging her to pursue more power of her own, but at the expense of several very dear relationships. It struck me that this might be them encouraging her to do the very sorts of things that had accrued the debt she was working to pay off in her own life and that she might not actually want to take their advice. So I asked my own ancestors for their sense of the situation, and they backed up my own, disagreeing with her ancestors about the best course of action for her to take. My friend’s ancestors felt like power was the most noble goal, while my own were insistent that love should reign supreme.
Working with the two pendulums in tandem, we eventually managed to triangulate in on a solution that satisfied everyone — my friend, my own ancestors, and her ancestors, as well. The solution was one that allowed my friend to develop her own personal power at the things that she is most gifted at while doing so in a way that maintained the importance of her close relationships. This solution honored the values that my friend’s ancestors possessed in their life while also tempering them in a way that insisted they honor the value of human connection, love, and brotherhood that they may have set by the wayside in their pursuit of that.
The value of this approach was immediately obvious to me — a huge part of ancestral work is identifying the ways that we can honor our ancestors while striving to do better, rectifying the mistakes of the past so that we can provide a better future for our descendants. This requires being able to know when our own ancestors’ judgments might be flawed. Having a second opinion is thus an excellent way to identify areas where the answers might not be as clear cut as we thought, or where there might be room to dig a little deeper and ask questions about whether we want to follow in their footsteps, follow someone else’s, or set an entirely new course of our own. I definitely intend to make more use of this technique going forward, and I’m looking forward to playing with its edges and thinking more about the ways that we can harmonize competing judgments so that everyone comes out satisfied in the end.
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