Not everyone is called to do ancestral healing, but if you’ve done work on yourself, your personal trauma, and your relationships, there’s a good chance that you’ll eventually be drawn into this kind of work.
Here’s why:
We work with sacred medicines like Ayahuasca in Mexico under a model of trauma that’s based on Dr. Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems Therapy. According to this model, trauma (which has a broad definition involving anything that is experienced by a human as overwhelming or terrifying) causes people to become psychically fractured. These fractures cause us to develop sub-personalities, which might also be viewed as soul parts according to shamanic medicine. These soul parts / sub-personalities haunt us. They possess us sometimes and take control over our lives. Also, soul parts that we need sometimes go absent and we then live a half-existence, lacking vital energy and feeling unable to solve specific problems. The use of sacred medicines like Kambo, Ayahuasca, Sapito, psilocybin, and more are used to retrieve soul parts that have been lost and also to integrate soul parts that play an adversarial role in our lives such that we are no longer dissociated, haunted, possessed, or psychotic.
If you have worked intensively with one or more of the sacred medicines, ancestors take notice. After all, most of us come from a long line of ancestors who lived without access to the sacred medicines and without any wisdom regarding the loss of soul and how to restore the soul to its proper place of integration. When a soul part is lost, this part dissociates into the future or it may get stuck the past. The soul part may go to a realm that’s negative and toxic or it may hang out near people in the family or near the person themselves, only popping in to create havoc from time to time. Soul parts must be integrated or else they go missing or run amok in the hinterlands. When we die as a fractured being, the soul parts must somehow find peace after the body passes in order to move on in the cycle of life.
But if a person’s soul parts have been psychically scattered after receiving many traumatic wounds and that person never does any work to re-integrate those soul parts, the soul parts may remain in dark, toxic places, or in some unreachable realm of the future or the past after an ancestor dies. These soul parts need to tell their story to the incarnate generations who are living on earth because they each have some form of wisdom. The wisdom exists in a container of emotion that can be experienced by our bodies as a story when we’re able to channel these ancestral soul parts through the human body. Channeling ancestral soul parts usually involves some kind of spiritual detoxification (where you work on your own trauma first) in regard to the issue in question prior to working directly with the ancestors.
Often, people are drawn to work with ancestors when they begin wondering about whether they can heal a family member by working on oneself. So many people today have given up on themselves and their lives, their health, and their happiness that they aren’t willing to risk having hope. But when someone in the family begins searching for hope, and finding it, a new paradigm emerges for all of the members of that family. Often though, the paradigm shift happens through serendipity rather than through any kind of concerted effort or plan on the part of the family member who is working on the ancestral trauma. Anyone who endeavors to heal a family as a whole has to let go of all preconceptions about what that might involve and let the sacred medicines guide the process.
My own experience working on ancestral trauma is the only guide that I can present here because I only have one group of ancestors that I can experience in this lifetime. But every family tree, in theory, is different. The “technology” that I might use to heal ancestral trauma in my family may not be the same “technology” that another person would use. Still, I present the idea of soul parts, sub-personalities and Internal Family Systems thinking as a way to view the problem of ancestral trauma. It can be a starting block for people who have been unsuccessful using systems like Constellation Therapy, for example, to heal ancestral trauma. Constellation Therapy is only as powerful and wise as the person facilitating it, so people who seek to heal ancestral trauma using Constellations Therapy are at the mercy of their therapist. My own experience with Constellation Therapy has been underwhelming when it has been done without psilocybin guiding the process and allowing participants to feel the ancestors, their stories, and their trauma so as to release them. That being said though, I’m sure there are some incredibly inspired Constellation Therapists out there who can help with ancestral healing, I just have not had the privilege of meeting them yet.
Getting back to African Dream Root / Silene capensis for ancestral trauma, I have to say that this is a powerful medicine that does in fact work, in my experience, to contact ancestors to release them so that they can cross over to another realm. African Dream Root can be administered either by chewing a small bit of the wood or as a tincture. My experience has been that, if there are a number of ancestors waiting to cross over, African Dream Root may cause a fever to develop within a few days of taking it. The heat of the fever is like dead leaves burning so that they (the souls that are leaving) can pass into a realm that eventually leads back to our origins.
Sometimes, the African Dream Root fever is good and even a relief though it’s usually a very uncomfortable type of fever. When there are many ancestors waiting to be released, either because there’s one soul part in the ancestral group preventing passage of a number of soul parts, or because one powerful ancestor is not able to move on because of fear, the fever marks a new beginning in the family. If you’re working on a specific family issue using Silene capensis, the fever will predate a noticeable change (give it a little time to manifest though).
That being said, start with a very low dose of Silene capensis / African Dream Root if you have a specific intention that you’re working with. Most people who work with African Dream Root for lucid dreaming don’t necessarily encounter ancestors because that isn’t their intent, but if you’re actively trying to heal a family damaged by addiction, mental health issues, or any kind of historical trauma to change an entrenched negative pattern, start with perhaps just 1 drop of the tincture in the morning and at night on the first day. Increase the dose slowly by 1 drop each day up to the maximum dose if you have a bit of time to work on the family problem in question. If you’re in a hurry to create change in a family to heal addiction, a major health issue, or any toxic pattern, give the maximum dose a try. Just be aware that a fever may result after you’ve had the ancestral dream telling you the story of your family so that you can feel how the ancestors felt.
In my experience, African Dream Root works very well to communicate with older ancestral soul parts that might be “trapped”. Indeed, Silene capensis is a very different experience in comparison with Ayahuasca as an herb that promotes dreaming.
If you are looking for alternative ways to heal a relationship or a family, contact us to schedule a “health coaching” session around the use of African Dream Root to speak to the ancestors. We’ll advise you on how to avoid or lessen the fever-effects and how to work through the fever to release the ancestors that are ready to cross-over.
Contact us at info@medicinassagradas.com to schedule online psilocybin therapy or Ayahuasca therapy or in-person sacred medicine sessions to overcome personal and ancestral trauma. When one person in a family system makes permanent, lasting changes, the entire system experiences a shift. Click here to learn more about the sacred medicine ceremonies that we offer.