The dead aren’t always cozy visits from your favorite grandmother. Or the cousin you used to smoke cigarettes with outdoors while the rest of the family silently judged you from indoors.
Some don’t show up quickly when you call. They awaken slowly as if they’ve been in stasis for hundreds of years, forgotten, their names no longer spoken they seem to fade from easy accessibility. Some awaken and wonder why you’ve bothered calling. They thought they were unwanted forever. They assumed they really were dead to you.
Some come slowly because they suspect, rightly so if you’re doing this kind of work, that the time for a reckoning has arrived.
They know it’s time to admit their secrets and tell the stories of their wrongs, some so severe it has taken all my training and determination to stand steady, open-hearted, and hold the transformative space of love for their heinous acts and cruel attitudes.
Perdita Finn, author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with The Unseen World, call these ancestors the Difficult Dead.
My great x4 grandfather fought in the Civil War. On the not right side. He had fought in the Hungarian wars but ran away, a turncoat, a coward and stowed away on a ship to America. There are few documents to support this of course, but mostly I know just from his own disclosures.
I am often acting as the confessional booth for the Dead, the same way I am for the living.
After a career like mine nothing they share scares me, unsteadies me briefly yes, but then the training kicks in and I open my heart to this cowardly and callously cruel man who spent his life as a mercenary. Fighting when it was convenient and served him, leaving when times got tough.
When the Civil War came to Texas he saw another chance to raise his status in this new land. He signed up and went off to New Mexico to fight the Union soldiers until he was wounded and left at the hospital in Sante Fe. Side note - my only overnight in Santa Fe involved me being so sick in a hotel I wanted to go to the present day hospital.
His history as a warrior isn’t what needed healing though. It was his secrets, his dishonor, his abuse of others. He was cruel to the small ones. Animals, children, women; the ones he could get away with hurting. Other men would've killed him so he saved the expression of his own pain for times he could inflict it on the voiceless.
Our DNA carries all the things. All. The. Things.
We do the Shadow work of our own. We assist the Shadow work of our Dead.
In 2017 I took several energetic plant journeys with Ayahuasca. This mother of teacher plants put me through the ringer more than once but one night in particular it was truly awful. Intense visions of several men being cruel to animals, my worst fear, my most avoided topic in life because for me it’s even worse than child abuse. Children can grow up and heal, recover, live a meaningful life. Animals don’t have those same opportunities and also I have to own that I am projecting here, I don’t really know what their experience of post-abuse life is like.
Ayahuasca took me past the abusers hideousness and into their interior. She showed me the depths of pain that someone is in for that capability to be awakened and acted upon. It’s a state I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Afterward I cried a lot, and also, I grew my capacity for compassion.
Loving people unconditionally, living or dead, doesn't mean you approve of, and doesn't excuse them from, the consequences of their actions.
What I didn’t know until I began inviting my Dead to tell their stories is that those experiences, those visions facilitated by connecting to and asking for education from Ayahuasca, included him. This horrific Hungarian grandfather was a player in that show. Had I not worked with Ayahuasca I sincerely doubt I could've called this Ancestor and allowed him to unburden himself in a loving space of transformation in February 2021.
I used to joke that we can’t ever judge the worst people because a little Jeffrey Dahmer lives in all of us. Now I know that’s actually true.
So why do the work of challenging yourself to look at what you judge in yourself and others? Why bother growing the ability to love the worst of these that cause harm to the least of these?
Freedom. Wholeness. A deeper connection to however you define All That Is. To gain the ability to turn poison into medicine.
If everything we see outside is Us refracted and prismed as Us, if Oneness exists, if Indra’s net is a thing, if All That Is exists, then to reject anything is to reject a full experience of everything.
All of life comes to me whether I like it or not.
I can't pick and choose which particles of air I breathe; I am by necessity required to breathe it all in and trust my lungs to filter out what's toxic.
I trust my Heart, the ultimate Alchemist, to take lead and love it into gold.
Our DNA carries all the things. All. The. Things. Freedom and loving power comes when we can love them all.
XO,
LMW