Dancing With Woo

My Journey Into Ancestral Healing

Helping Mom climb down the Mayan Pyramid of the Magician in Uxmal, Yucatan, 1971

“When we heal ourselves, we heal our ancestors from wounds that run deep in our family. When we heal our ancestors, we heal the world from wounds that run deep in humanity.” - Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, Aboriginal Elder

Last Sunday, Mary Jo invited me to go to church with her and Perrin. She asked with a wry smile, knowing I would probably decline, which I did, with a wry smile back. While they went off to listen to a sermon, I stayed behind to watch a video about Ancestral Medicine, a practice that helps people heal ancestral burdens and embody the positive legacies inherited from their ancestors. Doing this work, as ritualist and cultural healer Daniel Foor explains, is “a systemic way to get really healed up with your people.”

As a licensed marriage and family therapist, a mindfulness devotee, and someone who has personally benefitted from a 12-step program, I am all for spiritual repair. But I knew nothing about the practice of Ancestral Medicine until I read Maud Newton’s Ancestor Trouble, which is both a memoir and an exploration into the impact that our ancestral lineage has on us. I don’t think it was an accident that I read this book when my IBS got so bad that I began to explore the non-medical interventions that improved my quality of life immensely. There was something about reading the book while simultaneously listening to my body that allowed me to tap into my intuition — and follow it.

After reading Maud’s book, I claimed her as my kindred writing spirit, and started stalking her online. When she announced that she would be teaching her “Writing About Ancestor Trouble” class, I immediately applied and was ecstatic when I was accepted. The class isn’t about the craft of writing, but rather teaches methods to access our ancestral inheritance in our writing projects. Maud incorporates practices from Ancestral Medicine into the class, such as envisioning ancestral guides from thousands of years ago and listening to what they tell us.

If at this point you’re scratching your head, I completely understand. Historically, I’ve embraced evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral strategies to reboot my spiritual hard drive. When given a choice between the tangible and the “woo-woo,” I picked the former every time. But after taking a few classes and noticing how grounded those already familiar with the practice were, my skepticism has ebbed. While I have not gone full “woo-woo,” I have embraced just enough “woo” to begin work with Banta Whitner, a certified Ancestral Medicine practitioner just a stone’s throw away in Black Mountain — a town in which there are more shamans than dentists.

I have had only my initial assessment with Banta, so I don’t yet have much to report. But from what I understand, I will be working with the four lineages of my two “blood and bone” parents AND the four lineages of my two adoptive parents, so it will be quite the crowded house! Banta explained that my first step will be to identify the most evolved ancestor to act as my guide. This ancestor will protect me from my dead ancestors who are still hot messes even in the afterlife.

Just as the sins of our fathers are visited upon us, so is our packed baggage dumped upon our children. There is a lot of mishigas I wish I’d worked through before I had kids, because I regret the impact my mistakes had on them. Part of my call towards Ancestral Medicine is to heal not only myself, but also the dysfunctional patterns echoing through both blood and adoptive lines that might cause more damage to my kids, and any children they might have.

Ancestral Medicine isn’t new; it’s an ancient wisdom practiced in other cultures, just not the Westernized one that most of us grew up in. It’s no surprise that a country founded on rugged individualism has grown so disconnected and divisive that we’re living out a Hatfield and McCoy dystopia. Maybe if enough of us commit to this kind of healing we could repair the planet. We certainly couldn’t eff it up more than it’s already effed.

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Me on top of The Pyramid of the Magician, circa 1971

My sister Allison recently sent me some family photos I don’t ever remember seeing before. The first one, at the top of this post, is of me at age nine helping my mom descend the Mayan pyramid at Uxmal in the Yucatan peninsula. Allison tells me Mom was scared of heights and closed-in spaces, whereas I was “fearless and proud of helping her.” One of the many benefits of having an older sibling is that they can tell you things you were too young to understand.

I always thought of my mother as a larger-than-life figure who shook off the conventions of Southern femininity to seek a bigger life elsewhere. If she hadn’t been a music teacher, she told me, she would have been an anthropologist — a lofty dream for a girl growing up during The Great Depression in York County, South Carolina. She lined our living room shelves with Pre-Columbian artifacts and books about Aztec and Mayan culture. My fourth grade year was spent in Mexico, where I accompanied my parents on their sabbaticals. My sister took a year off from college and joined us at a sprawling hacienda in Taxco, a town famous for its silver mines and a bar frequented by Ernest Hemingway.

My parents put me in a local school so I could learn the language. Nothing in my New Jersey private school experience prepared me for a Mexican mixed-age classroom packed with kids as old as 16; many of them had missed several school grades because they’d had to work to support their families. After a few of the older boys decided to terrorize this skinny gringa by turning their eyelids inside out, I begged my parents not to make me go anymore. My sister became my home tutor, and it’s entirely her fault that I never mastered long division.

That same year, we took a trip to the Yucatan, home of the ancient Mayan people. An advanced society, the Mayans developed a sophisticated writing system, along with one of the most accurate calendar systems in human history. The Pyramid of the Magician in Uxmal got its name because it was supposedly erected overnight by a “magician-dwarf.” According to Smithsonian Magazine, the upper temples of the pyramid feature cut stonework that represents “some of the finest architectural sculpture found in the ancient Maya world.”

The early Mayan settlements date back to 2000 B.C., with population peaking around A.D. 250. By the end of the Classic Period in A.D. 950, almost all the major cities of the Mayan civilization had been abandoned. No one knows exactly why the Mayans disappeared, but scholars suggest that various factors led to their downfall: environmental degradation, warfare, shifting trade routes, and drought — the very same issues currently plaguing modern America.

Looking surprisingly well-informed about Mayan stonework

Although I never understood why my mother was so obsessed with Mayan culture, it makes sense to me now: she, like the Mayans, considered herself to be part of a superior civilization — hers being Scottish and Southern aristocracy. While I often felt different from my family, I felt more connected to them that year in Mexico. Perhaps the proximity to ancient wisdom connected me to the universe as well.

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“Don’t fight the mountain.” - Perrin Wright

These days, I’ve traded pyramids for the mountains of western North Carolina. I feel fortunate that I’m staying in Montreat with my cousin Perrin, who not only has hiked every trail in the area many times over, but has even helped build one called Lower Piney.

Lower Piney Trail overlook

Last Sunday after church, Perrin led me on a two-hour hike along Lower Piney, giving me a history of the trail and a work-out. The idea for the trail came from an 80-year-old Montreat resident who lamented that all the hikes in this resort town were steep; what if there were one easy enough for people with bad knees and heart problems?

Everyone else in Montreat thought this was a great idea too, so Perrin and two other men volunteered to build the trail. They spent six months studying topographical maps before they figured out which mountainside could yield a gentle path. Then they spent another nine months actually building it: moving boulders, hacking through earth, and do-si-do-ing with the occasional rattlesnake. Sometimes they came across a boulder too big to move and had to carve switchbacks into the hillside to go up and around it.

“We learned that you don’t fight the mountain,” said Perrin. “You have to work with it.”

Which pretty much describes my philosophy now that I’m sixty. Walking past gullies, moss-covered slabs, and rock springs, I realized how much more I appreciate my life since I’ve (mostly) stopped fighting mountains.

Every so often we paused to talk to people along the trail. If anyone got too show-offy about their Lower Piney knowledge, I casually mentioned in a VIP-adjacent tone that my close, personal cousin built the trail.

When we returned from the hike, Perrin shared that he noticed that I “keep a pretty good clip,” which I interpreted as evidence of my hardiness and moral superiority —until he followed up with:

“If you slow down a bit, you might notice more of what’s actually on the trail.”

As far as I’ve traveled on my mindfulness journey, I apparently have miles to go before I sleep.

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I’ve learned more about my parents as people since I’ve been staying with Mary Jo and Perrin. I learned, for instance, that all the Montreat girls had a crush on Dad and rushed to sign up for the horseback riding lessons he gave during the summer. I learned that my parents used to drive through the gate in a convertible I never knew they owned, looking like the cool, sophisticated northerners they were soon to become. I learned that Barefoot Boy With Cheek was one of my mother’s favorite humor books, and she stuck a copy in Perrin’s hand, insisting he read it. (This was one of Mom’s signature moves, forcing literature on unsuspecting people, and I credit her tenacity with turning me into a precocious reader).

A couple weeks ago, Mary Jo brought out their wedding album and showed me this photo. My mom, far right, was pregnant at the time.

L to R: Mother-of-the-bride Daisy, Mary Jo, sister-of-the-bride Peggy, my cousin Margaret, my aunt E.G., and Mom.

“I remember her putting her feet up on the couch a lot,” said Perrin, “and there was talk that she was trying to keep from miscarrying.”

Her efforts were unsuccessful. She was almost 43 and it was the seventh pregnancy she lost after Allison and before she and Dad made the decision to adopt me. I came into the family a year-and-a-half later.

Mom always seemed to be hovering around me, as if she were trying to ward off impending disaster. Of course, if I’d had seven miscarriages, I’d probably have been a hypervigilant parent too. She and I were so tangled up in each other’s emotions, neither of us able to tell whose was whose, that I eventually fled to the opposite coast so I could figure out what I thought or felt apart from her. It was a lot of pressure to worry that she wouldn’t be okay if I wasn’t okay in the way she needed me to be.

Although my mother died in Asheville in 1995, I feel her presence in Montreat today. I know she’s relieved to have me home because she no longer buzzes around me like a busy bee. Now she gazes down from the hillside, whispers in the breeze, and floats along the current of the creek, with all the ancestors who came before her.

“I am the call of my ancestors. I am the change and transformation propelled by the harms and cultural wounds and trauma of generations past. I am the reclaimed and powerful embodiment of the highest conscious expression of those who have come before me.” - Quote attributed to Anonymous, from Banta Whitner’s website.