The Power of Offerings
Offerings…
…It’s like sending a text message to your people, a kind of spiritual emoji, that lets them know you hear them.
The practice of offering gifts to our ancestors has been a feature of human cultures around the globe throughout time. While this practice has fallen away from many parts of western civilization in recent centuries, it remains a viable pathway for deepening into relationship with our wise and well ancestors, a helpful practice when the more recent ones were troubled.
A gift of flowers, a nourishing gesture of food and drink, an exchange of song, a precious stone, a handmade craft, unique symbols, and animal totems are examples of offerings we can make to let our ancestors know we care about them. Just like in the living world when we give someone a gift, they usually feel acknowledged and appreciated. This is how we build relationship with people who we can’t see or talk to because they lived in a different place, in a different time, and spoke a different language. Despite these differences, the power of such offerings gets the attention of our ancestors, resonating deeply in the DNA of our cells and activating the flow of information from them passing down through time.
In the past, ancestral wisdom helped humans survive in a nature dominated world. Today we need their wisdom to help us navigate the complexities of life dominated by humans, who may think they are well and wise but judging by the current state of human existence, we sense that we really aren’t. Part of the reason for the disconnect is that we live in a left-brain dominant culture, a supremacy system that values logic and reason over intuition and imagination. Our divine creator did not give us a brain with a division of labor so that one side could reign over the other. Our challenge in modern times is to reclaim and rebuild the right brain skills that may have atrophied in the effort to conform to analytical scrutiny. More on that in a future blogpost.
Ancestral work requires us to use our right brain skills of intuitive perception and creativity. Offerings can make the information perceived this way that seems esoteric, metaphorical, or symbolic become very concrete in the material reality of the living world. It’s like sending a text message to your people, a kind of spiritual emoji, that lets them know you hear them. When they know you appreciate their presence, they become very active in your psyche and the energy matrix of the world around you, perhaps you start to take notice of synchronicities happening in your life or your living family. This is where deep transformation of intergenerational patterns occurs.
Offerings can be simple like a glass of water, a bit of food from the geographic region of your ancestor’s ethnic group or lighting a candle and speaking a simple prayer of gratitude. One example of a powerful offering practice is the artistic process, which opens the right brain’s creative flow state and allows creation to be guided by the presence of your ancestor’s energy field as my friend and colleague Lisa has done.
As a visual artist, grief coach, death doula, and shamanic practitioner, Lisa brings her skills into alignment with ancestral energies by allowing the information she channels during her sessions to guide her hands into crafting representations of her people to adorn her home. Their collaborative creations become a daily reminder of their gifts, blessings and guidance flowing in her life.
Lisa’s mother died when she was 15 so she chose to begin her journey with her mother’s mother’s lineage, a relatively well and supportive presence in her life. While the feeling that our departed loved ones are supporting us can be very healing for us, it is important to remember that the purpose of ancestral healing is for us to support their healing. For Lisa, despite their caring presence, she felt nagging worries about whether her mother and grandmother approved of her choices. Exploring that nagging feeling in ancestral healing sessions brought touchstone images that could guide her artistic craft into deeper levels of understanding that our analytical minds often block.
The sun, the color yellow, bees, honey, yellow brick road, and the Sun Goddess Amaratsu showed up in her sessions, so Lisa focused her offering practice on planting yellow flowers, crocheting a bee spirit animal, stuffing it with wildflowers and a vial of honey placed in its heart. She painted a silk scarf with flowers and bees and painted a ceramic honeypot with her daughter.
The effect of these offerings came back from a friend who took her to visit the inside of a bee hut and gifted her a “Sunshine Drive” street sign. Before this, Lisa notes that she didn’t have much institutional memory or physical proof of her people. Now she experiences her mom’s presence as a part of something bigger, “I see a bee and think of the whole line as a collective, it feels like all of them not just my mom and grandma,” she says.
Later a living uncle whom she hadn’t had much contact with circled back into her life and she was surprised he was able to receive the messages she delivered from her grandma and mother when he expressed his gratitude. Lisa says it feels significant not be haunted anymore by her concerns for these family members relationship.
Her next lineage focused on her Mother’s Father’s people, their name was Fox so she crocheted a fox. Many images of evergreen forests in ancient Germany came through in her sessions, to acknowledge this she made Black Forest cheesecake and a pinecone garland necklace. She took great pains to bury the necklace as her ancestors had instructed with layers of soil and water and pine needles, symbolizing a proper burial for grandfathers who had fought bravely in battle but were unceremoniously left for dead alongside the heaps of felled trees in their forested homeland.
A few weeks later she attended a training program for end-of-life care that included a “veteran recognition program” where she was randomly selected as a volunteer to receive the recognition of service ritual given to service members in hospice. She was gifted military honors, a gold star and honor pins. As the navy hat was placed on her head, she felt the ancestors were honored, flowing through her to them, finally giving them the proper military burial honors they deserved.
Turning to her Father’s Mother’s people brought a whole new artistic direction with multicultural images of women’s mythology, Isis and Cleopatra emerging from the stark plains of middle America spinning straw into gold, the color red, the star of David, and a mysterious silencing of their voices contained inside it. She started to make a hexagon shaped paper quilt and added the triangle configuration she’d seen the Goddesses make, realizing that the 6-pointed star lived in the geometry of the hexagon.
By creating this container in the living world, her ancestors found purchase to heal the persecution they received from their counter-culture activities. She drew a connection from the rejection they suffered to her own struggles with a rare physical condition, feeling like it’s now easier to manage with this awareness. Allowing their flamboyant performance energy to flow beyond the constraints of persecution brought Lisa confidence and a willingness to put herself out there more.
“As I talk more about these offerings and their effects, I get direct feedback from people as a validation of my purpose here,” Lisa says of her ancestral journeying and artwork, “the more I do it, the more I want to do it.”
And that, my friends, is the power of physical offerings, the reciprocity is not only healing, you sense you’re not alone anymore. You belong to a people.