How to Connect with Your Ancestors

The sunflowers have dropped their heavy heads and gone to seed. Soon the frost will arrive with a frigid predawn kiss and the chill will wilt vegetables to black. The berries will freeze on their stalks and wither. Everything will die back.

Organic matter disintegrates and decomposes and returns to the soil. This is true for all things eventually. Everything will return to the dirt, including us.

We will feed the maggots and worms on our body until it decomposes into fertile soil. The fungi and bacteria will disintegrate our bones until they crumble to dust.

This composted soil will create the perfect conditions for fallen seeds to grow again in the new season.

If suddenly all beings stopped dying back, the soil would no longer be nurtured with rotting nutrients and there would be nothing to feed the soil and nothing new would ever grow again. Life without nourishment or newness would be dull and stale.

Because of the beautiful cyclical nature of earthly existence, death is necessary for birth. I don’t want my loved ones to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want my forest to burn to the ground. I don’t want my house to collapse to dust. I don’t want to grieve ever again.

I have been well acquainted with grief in my life. It wrenches at the heart and once it gets a foothold in there, it never leaves. Grief is a wound that heals but leaves a dark scar. No one who lives, can ever escape the grips of grief. The longer you live, the more you will be forced to befriend it.

The human resistance to death is natural, of course. Losing what we love hurts, it hurts bad. No amount of logic about the life cycle can create a salve for deep grief.

Autumn is a season for remembering the importance of death in our lives. Because the natural world around us is dying back, we cannot deny the inevitability of our own death. I hope when I die (at the age of 99!) that it is in autumn.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, meditating on your own death is encouraged. In this way, we can accept the impermanence of all things and embrace that existence is ever-changing. This is also meant to encourage non-attachment to material existence and instead to focus on the true essence of our own being, the essence that will transcend death, “the pure and luminous consciousness.” Death is not considered the end, but a new beginning, a new realm of existence.

As in eastern philosophy, animists also believe that our spirits transcend our bodies in death to a new realm of existence. Those we grieve are still with us in spirit.

We would not exist without our ancestors. They opened doors for us, invisible and visible, to walk through, to become who we are. Our ancestors are still with us, looking out for us, and watching our backs. Now is a time to thank them, remember them and rejoice in the love they created. It is also a time to forgive those ancestors that made mistakes.

Many northern cultural holidays (holy days) exist in northern autumn to remember and commemorate ancestors and those that have passed on, such as the pagan Samhain, the Mexican Day of the Dead, the Jewish Yom Kippur and Sukkot and the Japanese Higan.

If your culture does not have a specific tradition of honoring the ancestors, you can connect with your ancestors in different ways depending on what interests you.

1. Learn more about your ancestry through a DNA test, history books, and asking your elders to tell stories about the people they knew in childhood and the stories, songs and traditions that were passed down to them from generation to generation.
2. Create an altar with pictures of people you knew and didn’t know, those you were related to and those you weren’t, that have passed and you would like to honor. Light a candle for them when you want to connect.
3. Do a ritual where you call your spiritual ancestors in. Ask to connect with only those that come in love. Meditate and use your intuition transmission to tune into the wisdom of what comes through.
4. Look for symbols in nature that remind you of those you grieve who are sending you messages from beyond.
5. Connect with the earth, especially rocks and mountains. Our ancestors bones are beneathe the ground. Their bodies fed the earth we walk upon. Spend time on the ground remembering.

One day, we will all be ancestors. This is inevitable and we want to be honored for our humble lives by the people we helped in simple and big ways, blood related or not. Honoring our ancestors is a way to honor the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

    If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
    For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one…

… For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
    And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

    Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
    And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
    And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

“On Death” by Kahlil Gibran