This is NOT about the Emotional Work on El Día de los Muertos
🤨 How honoring Cultural Traditions and Ancestors will support your wellness
Do you ever wonder how to honor your ancestors and their cultural traditions?
In this blog, you will learn about the importance of holistic ancestral honoring by valuing cultural traditions, embracing the shadow work, and the emotional labor required for genuine healing and a more authentic connection with your heritage.
Early October 2021, a client in distress came to me for guidance on how to pay tribute to her family's history, filled with long-buried secrets and a desire to honor only one side of her family's ancestors. She felt the other side had a dark past (whose family doesn't, right?), and she wanted to connect with her roots in a more meaningful way.
Choosing a Different Path
📕 In our first consultation, my client, a single expectant mother in her mid-30s, shared her desire to create altars and pray for her deceased family members in a different, "a more effective way," she said! She felt disconnected 🥹 from her family's traditions surrounding life and death, which were not in sync with her evolving perspectives on life.
Her mom mostly raised her, and his dad was absent and emotionally 🚫 unavailable for her and her mom. Her mother's side of the family represented to her the love and ❤️ care someone needs in life, while her father's side was stained by violence, additions, 🤬 and high expectations to reach social status and financial stability. She wanted to focus solely on her mother's side.
We had a conversation about the importance of honoring both sides of our family ↔️ when it comes to addressing intergenerational wounds and paying tribute to our ancestors. Neglecting one side of our family's history is not the same as not knowing it. Purposefully dismissing one side can hinder the healing and reconciliation process 🙇🏻♀️ with our ancestors ✨, which is a crucial part of the journey toward understanding and healing our past.
If you are one of those who, for some reason, don't know your heritage 🌳, and maybe you were adopted or separated from your family of origin (diaspora across the world), please keep reading
Neglecting one side of our family's history is not the same as not knowing it.
But how can we balance the opposites in Ancestral Healing?
The best way I understood this was by following 🍃 Pacha Philosophy. My family and ancestors, people from the Andes, believe in the principle of correspondence 🔁, which teaches us that every object or phenomenon can be comprehended by analyzing its two corresponding opposites.
Just as the night 🌑 cannot exist without daylight 🌞, our spiritual DNA is a fusion of both sides of our family. We cannot simply pick and choose what we like and ignore what we don't. So, it is on us to determine when the good time ⏰ is to embark on the profound exploration and authentic connection with our heritage, who we are, and where we come from. Now, that is a 👍🏽 valid choice, but to pick and choose to work with one side of the family, not so much!
Just as the night 🌑 cannot exist without daylight 🌞, our Spiritual DNA is a fusion of both sides of our family.
The Ancestral Work in Modern Days
Honoring our ancestors is a practice that has been around for a long time and is gaining 🌎 popularity worldwide. Different cultures have unique ways of celebrating death, from China's Hungry Ghost Festival to Western cultures' All Soul's Day; these customs bring families 🏠 together to pay tribute to their loved ones and embrace ancient traditions.
Yet, the colorful and exotic aspects of Hispanic celebrations have attracted many to explore these traditions. Even Disney capitalized on this interest with the controversial movie "Coco." But what harm can a cartoon movie create? You may ask, 🧐 so let me explain.
El Día de los Muertos: A Celebration Beyond Borders
Many people assume that El Día de los Muertos is only a Mexican tradition 🙈– Thanks! Multimillion-dollar advertisement companies- but in plain truth, this celebration is embedded in the open roots and wounds of numerous Latin American countries. This celebration holds significance from the coast of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Caribbean Oceans to the High Andean mountains. It combines pre-Columbian and Catholic rituals, observed on November 1 and 2. People visit cemeteries, decorate graves, sing, dance, and create colorful and beautiful altars.
But do you know 🤔❓that in many regions of the Americas in our modern days, there are people enduring marginalization, inhibited, and called country bumpkins for practicing these embarrassing superstitions? Yeap! Rough reality... ⏸️😮💨 Please take a pause and reflect on my last statement.
El Día de los Muertos, a multimillion-dollar celebration, along with other rich cultural traditions and customs, are paradoxically viewed as low-class customs in the very territories from which these traditions originate by the most “sophisticated and educated individuals in higher social strata.” — — Do you see the irony of this?
Admiring Cultural Traditions
In the enthusiastic trend of honoring ancestors and the charm of traditions like El Día de los Muertos, we must question 🤔 whether we're doing a disservice by steering people away from their own traditions related to birth and death. Celebrating and honoring death is a profound spiritual journey that requires deep awareness, compassion, and introspection.
Celebrating and honoring death is a profound spiritual journey that requires deep awareness, compassion, and introspection.
Instead of simply adopting external traditions, I suggested to my client that we could work together to rediscover and revive her family's customs of honoring and paying respects to the dead. This process required significant ❤️🩹 emotional and spiritual ✨ labor, and by the end of our sessions, my client was in a much better place. She found peace 🕊️ with her family's history and legacy, and she even started teaching her daughter how to honor, respect, and maintain a responsible relationship with those who passed away.
Choosing the Right Path
When it comes to honoring our ancestors and embracing cultural traditions, we must be aware of not dismissing the wisdom of the past or only focusing on the enjoyable aspects. The Shadow 👥 work, which involves diving into the uncomfortable 🤯 parts of our history, is essential. It's about understanding our traditions, healing process, and making meaningful connections rather than adopting practices because they seem trendy or "cool."
For those of you who are adopted 🙇🏻♀️🙇🏻 or separated from your families of origin or have limited knowledge of your ancestors, there is one universal truth: Nature is your/our ancestor. The water that runs through our body belongs to the ocean. The skin that covers us is made of primordial stardust. So, even if we do not have the immediate stories of our family, the story of nature and the universe lives in our DNA.
So, what type of ancestor do you want to be?
My beloved friends, in this exploration of ancestral honoring and cultural traditions, we've unwrapped the profound journey it is to 🔗 reconnect with our family's past, the crucial lessons of holistic ancestral honoring, 🙏🏽 respecting traditions, and what it means to embrace the 👥 shadow work from the core of death.
My sincere and loving invitation is that you reflect on your journey toward embracing your family story and traditions holistically. 🤨 Here are a few questions to start your inquiry:
✴️ How will you honor your ancestors?
✳️ What cultural traditions will you explore or reconnect with?
✴️ Can you embrace the emotional labor of the shadow work for a more authentic connection to your heritage?
Your ancestors and your story await your recognition and connection. The path is yours to forge, and we encourage you to embark on it with respect, depth, and authenticity.
By acknowledging our past, we can find meaning in the present and ensure a richer, more balanced future.
With tender love,
Lorena
If you liked this content, please let me know by 👍🏽 👍 liking it below, ⬆️⬆️ upgrading it, and sharing 📤 📩 it with your inner circle and those who are looking to reconcile with their past. Please comment with "helpful" if this helped you!
Now you know exactly where you can start to embrace the shadow 👥 work, but what about being present with your emotions? I've got the perfect introspective exercise for you to practice next to help you with that.
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