ANCESTRAL HEALING WORK AND UNRAVELLING INTERGENERATIONAL IMPRINTS
Post #2 In a series exploring powerful healing practices
MY ANCESTOR GALLERY
About ten years ago I followed an urgent prompt from spirit to call my elderly mother in the Netherlands. I asked her what she was doing. She was shredding a shoe-box full of photographs of ancestors (family members long dead) because , she said, (she had assumed) that no one alive today knew who they were nor had they any interest in finding out. I said: “MUM! PUT ALL THOSE PHOTOGRAPHS BACK IN THE SHOE BOX AND I WILL COLLECT THE BOX NEXT TIME I VISIT THE NETHERLANDS!” And that is what happened. I still have those pictures and I put some in my Ancestor Gallery. PHEW! That was a near-miss!
In some ways my Substack account represents “one of my personal forms of spiritual activism”. I actively try to present an alternative perspective, on many contemporary issues, that is informed by two decades of shamanic practice and years of tending souls. I put quite a lot of time and energy into this.
I started my shamanic practice in inner city London (almost) accidentally. I had enrolled in a shamanic practitioner training program (in the UK) because the spirits were urging me to seek professional training, but (in truth!) most of all because I wanted to make mind-blowing paintings! I wanted to learn all about accessing other worlds in a more deliberate way, because I had already been doing this, since early childhood, using my own ways (but I’d usually wait for the spirits to contact me).
As explained in a previous essay, completing the required case studies for my training mushroomed into a thriving shamanic practice with a long waiting list. Doing so much intense one-to-one work, I soon discovered that vital pieces were missing in the training that I myself had received. The most glaring omissions were that I had not been taught shadow work, nor was I taught ancestral healing work. (The third missing “biggie” was de-possession or spirit release work - what the Church calls “exorcism”, a horrible word!)
SHADOW WORK was discussed in a previous essay. Just click on the link! Today we will focus on ancestral healing work and unravelling intergenerational imprints.
In shamanic practice all our work is guided by the spirits (our own team of spirit allies). We do something called diagnostic work, before any session. This means seeking guidance from spirit about what needs to be done, and on how it is to be done. Shamanic work should never be directed by our waking everyday mind, let alone by our human ego (because our Shadow will act up and we will end up serving our own needs or notions of what our client needs, and become karmically entangled with them. NOT GOOD!)
Working with clients, in my early days, I diligently used the established practices I had been taught (such as extraction work, soul retrieval and psycho pomp work). However, very early on my diagnostic work indicated that many people needed ancestral healing work, de-possession work or generational imprint unravelling work. The spirits would literally say to me: when people do not actively work with ancestral imprints, those imprints will run their lives and they will not understand WHY. They will come in and say: why does this keep on happening or repeating? I am not consciously doing this!
MY MATERNAL GRANDFATHER IN THE NETHERLANDS (WHO WAS THE VILLAGE TEACHER, IN HIS CLASSROOM)
They taught me that whatever we have not resolved (or healed, balanced, transmuted) at our time of death, pools in our ancestral field. In other words: the soul of the person concerned (who becomes an ancestor after death) will move on in the Afterlife, but their unresolved issues linger and will not go away. What will then happen is that a person in another generation (and to confuse the situation even more: often, but not always, serious issues skip a generation!) will “pick that up again” and carry this in “their spiritual backpack” at birth, into their current incarnation. They will then encounter these issues repeatedly, in ways that really affect them, for their entire lives. Or rather: that is what happens if they do not accept the invitation to heal these matters (which requires a lot of courage, time and energy!) These patterns will remain unconscious and even “die with them”. Only meaning that a person in a future generation will pick “the generational backpack” up again.
That is is an important point that I make to my clients all the time: this does not originate with you (you don’t cause it!) and you are not being punished either (“is this bad karma from past misdeeds? NO!”) BUT you do carry the responsibility for healing it, because the issue is now with you. It has accompanied you into this life and you probably made a soul choice to do so, before your present incarnation or birth.
The spirits then started teaching me ways of doing ancestral healing work and unravelling these imprints. I do not teach courses on Substack, only in classrooms, but essentially you call into the room all the people (even those long dead) who are connected to a specific issue and you do the work of unravelling. And that sets the living person free. It means that they can live a more self-directed and fulfilling life, where these issues do not wreak havoc on their relationships, peace of mind and (limited) supply of life force.
Next I teach all my clients very basic forms of communicating with ancestors and honouring their gifts. (Let’s face it, we are all only on this planet today because our ancestors made choices and performed actions that created the circumstances for us to be conceived!)
If you are feeling brave enough: take a moment (in a place where you won’t be disturbed for a while). Take some deep breaths. Then time travel to 100 years from now: the year 2125! You won’t be alive but a new generation of people will be. They may, or may not be, your personal descendants. They could also be offspring from “other branches of the family tree” (children of nieces or nephews, cousins so many times removed etc. Take the broad view!) Imagine that you are observing them from a comfortable place in the Afterlife. Then ask yourself: what do you most want from these people? In my personal experience (working with both groups of adults and a group of children) ancestors want to be remembered.
Often they also want justice and acknowledgment of their suffering. Many people died under unjust or poorly understood circumstances: relatives with disabilities or mental illness where hidden from sight in “homes”. Gay people were forced to lead double lives. Before the modern technology of DNA testing (etc.) many crimes went unsolved. Some murders were interpreted as normal deaths by misadventure. People died young in wars or down coal mines. People were affected by pogroms or persecution. Poor people were made the fall guy for evil deeds committed by wealthy people. The list goes on!!
MY (MATERNAL) GREAT GRANDPARENTS
It has been said that “we only die when no one alive remembers us and our name is no longer spoken”. Once you meditate on that, you realise that we can be the one, in our family, who takes on the cloak of Memory Keeper and Ancestral Keeper! The person who records the names of ancestors and recites them on special occasions. Who talks to the ancestors and gives them updates on people and family affairs.
Not only that, but I have consistently observed that some ancestors volunteer, in the Afterlife, for the role of Compassionate Ancestors. (I am simplifying things here and I will spare you the full lecture on how Norse Cosmology presents this. I will keep that for class!) The point is: some ancestors make a soul choice, in the Afterlife, to stay involved with life here on Earth and watch over families. Those Ancestors (and I capitalize the word to honour them!) want to be a consulted and are willing to offer help and guidance. (For instance, in ancestral healing sessions I consult them to understand those inter-generational imprints I was talking about. I ask them to show me where they originate and who is affected by them. And then we unravel them!)
The word “ancestor” has become a bit tricky in modern society. There is a general attitude of “who cares about them, after all they are long dead!” Some people who write about this topic (in the popular domain) take great pains to talk about “toxic ancestors” and how we need to shield ourselves from them. Other than in classroom settings, where professional training occurs, I don’t think that is overly helpful, because it breeds fear and reluctance to engage in ancestral healing work. (But presumably it attracts attention on social media platforms).
There is also confusion about the word ancestor. Some people define it as “only decent people who die will become ancestors”. To them it is an honorary title. Other people definite it as “everyone who came before me and who passed things onto me is an ancestor”. That makes even our (living) parents and teachers ancestors! Someone thanked me for “being their spiritual ancestor” in an email recently!
There is a reason why, in my own shamanic practice and courses I teach, I use both the word ancestor(s) and Ancestor(s). To me ancestors (lower case) are people in my family (or connected to me in some other way) who have passed into spirit. But they need to actually die first before they become ancestors (in my personal world view!) So I cannot be an ancestor yet, because I am still alive right now (to my best knowledge I am not an AI Chatbot!)
My take on “not so decent individuals” is that if Uncle Harry was not pleasant in life, he is not going to turn into a benign otherworld presence immediately after his death. Having said that, I do believe that people continue to evolve after death and that otherworld beings work with them on issues. So a notorious ancestor from three centuries ago may well appear as a reformed character (wishing to make amends) in shamanic healing sessions today. I see this all the time.
I teach my students safe ways of working with all this (because the situation is far more complex than I can convey in one essay - compare this to a five day intensive course, as part of a two or three year practitioner training!) but “the long and short of it” is that the word Ancestors (capitalized), in my work, denotes compassionate ancestors who perform an act of service on behalf of families and individuals. And we short-change ourselves and our children if we do not accept those offers of help and guidance! Remember: they can access the higher perspective on things. They are no longer confined by Time or the limitations of a human body, or specific location!
I hope that this provides a very basic and, somewhat, helpful introduction to a very complex topic. Please let me know in the comments!
I try (but sometimes fail) to get out at least one essay a week (sometimes more), due to travel, international teaching commitments and family care responsibilities (our family lives with Alzheimer’s and I have written several posts about that). If you would like to see regular posts about about Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch (and of course short videos of all the wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!
Imelda Almqvist, London UK
BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST
Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) was published in June 2022.
The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.
Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.
Imelda currently has a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) in production (it will be published by Moon Books in 2026) and the book after that will be about Inuit culture and mythology. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time.
Website:
http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/
YouTube Channel: youtube.com/user/imeldaalmqvist
Online School: https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imelda.almqvist/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/almqvistimelda/
Thank you for this post Imelda, a subject very dear to my heart. I love your ancestral photo wall, I have made a book of ancestors, with photos, their names and dates of birth and death so my children will understand who these people are after I am no longer here. They are currently too busy bringing up their own families.
I also do an annual ceremony of saying ancestors names and also one for the “forgotten women”.
I usually do it in the autumn on the Julian calendar date for Samhain (currently 13days after our calendar), rather than have it tangled up in the Gregorian Samhain with all the extra trappings that go on there.
They are the spinster aunts and my great grandmother’s who died when their children were infants and were quickly replaced by new wives and the erased from the scene, well in my family anyway.
Both my Grandfather and Grandmother never knew the names of their birth mothers and they died not knowing but our family does now, sadly no photos though.
So please remember the forgotten women in our families - there are invariably one or two from the past who have been overlooked, they love to be remembered.
Much food for thought, thank you. I have a long standing interest in mediumship and have trained to be a medium. It is a very humbling experience when connection is made and helpful information can be relayed. I used to get messages from a soldier, but mediums never told me who he was. In the end, I decided to just ask him myself and immediately received an answer. The name didn't ring a bell, but when I checked he was a distant uncle. I asked my dad about him and was told that this uncle and his wife had experienced traumatic events on the earthplane. I expressed my gratitude to him for contacting me and sent him and his wife love and understanding. I feel this has calmed things down a bit.
I also received messages from my maternal grandmother who I never met when she was alive. Apparently, she wants me to meditate with her. I'm very chuffed about that. Grandma lived in the former DRG (former Eastern Germany) where any mention of mediumship would have had serious repercussions. I don't think anyone knew grandma was interested in this. Other female ancestors have shyly peeked around the veil. I'm working on the connections and speak to my late husband and parents every day.