Ancestry meditation
Stand where you can move several feet in any direction. Find a comfortable posture and close your eyes. Take a step backward and imagine you are stepping into the body and the being of your father if you are a man, or of your mother if you are a woman. If you were adopted, make a choice between your biological parent or your adoptive parent for this experience. Then take a few moments to get a sense of what it must have felt like to be in this body and this personality.
Take another step backward, and step into the body and being of your parent’s parent, your same-sex grandparent. After sensing this grandparent for a few moments, take another step backward and enter the body and being of your same-sex great-great grandparent.
Physically assume the posture that you imagine might have been a typical posture for your great-great grandparent when he or she was your current age. Dramatize this posture until it begins to symbolize what you know and imagine about this person’s life. You will be reflecting upon the person’s perceptions of self, environment, and purpose.
Even though it is unlikely that you will have access to the facts that would allow you to answer these questions with certainty, the answers your great-great-grandparent gave to them shaped your family’s mythology and echo in your psyche. Assume that these echoes are registered so deeply in your being that the answers your intuition offers now will be it not factually precise, at least instructive as a metaphors for further understanding your heritage. Confactually precise, at least instructive as metaphors for further understanding your heritage. Consider the following questions as if you were your great-great grandparent near your current age.
What are your major concerns?
What your primary sources of satisfaction?
How do you understand your position within your society - its limitations, privileges, and responsibilities?
If you look to a nonhuman authority to explain human destiny, what is its nature? (pause 60 seconds)
Once you have answered the four questions, take a step forward and assume a posture that you imagine to be typical of your great-grandparents. Dramatize this posture until it begins to symbolize what you know and imagine about this person’s life near your current age. Consider the above four questions, then pause 60 seconds and repeat the instructions above for your grandparents and parent in succession.
Journal your experience when finished. Is there anything you want to say to God about this ancestors’ prayer? Is there anything God is saying to you?
Journal about how you see the spiritual relationships and images in your life as they have been influenced by your ancestors.
This is a guided imagery prayer that will make it possible in the next few weeks to understand your forebears and the mythology they passed down to you. Read the instructions several times to familiarize yourself with them well enough that you can perform the ritual with only occasional glances at the meditation.
This meditation was written by Dr. Nancy Kate Dunkerly. She is a trained spiritual director, retreat leader and adjunct professor at Perkins School of Theology in their Certificate in Spiritual Direction program. Learn more about and/or contact Nancy Kate.