Ancestral Spaces

What if our patients who “feel too much” aren't just poorly regulated but are sensing something more that needs to be told? What if our patients who have been called “too sensitive” really are resonating with a more collective grief than their own? What if they have capacities and sensitivities that overwhelm them because no one has believed them and trained them how to use them? What if they feel “different” from others, not just because of trauma, or neuropsychological differences, but because they are carriers of old truths, of memories from before their time?

What if we are only seeing through a very narrowed aperture of possibilities? What are we missing? What if the closed-off portions of the psyche-soma don't just contain trauma's rubble, but beneath this rubble, deeper still, are miraculously preserved remnants of knowledge from other times, other spaces, other species, other dimensions of knowing? What if something else altogether is arising?

What if, as we find ways out of the imprisoned minds and disconnected/devitalized bodies created through colonization, we also bring ourselves and our patients into another experience of being? A space where we validate and participate and discover something else altogether? A way of being that recognizes not just the haunting of ghosts who carry the closed luggage of transgenerational trauma, but also the guidance of ancestors who exist within us and whose ways of knowing carry wisdom waiting to be unlocked and opened?

I have heard from Cherokee, Tibetan, and Jewish teachers that wisdom teachings have been hidden in undisclosed places and dimensions, melodies and alphabets, boulders and birdsong, by those who came before us. I am certain that this same understanding of hiddenness can be found in all wisdom and healing traditions around the globe, including psychoanalysis and transformational bodywork. These hidden teachings will become available to us when we, as humans, are ready to receive.

This kind of understanding is