Ancestor Work for White People

How I learned to truly tap into the collective consciousness.

I do not think that it is a coincidence that my ability to consciously connect with the spirit world coincided with my commitment to decolonization work.

While I had grown quite conscious of racism in my world, white supremacy and colonialism were being freshly processed. I had heard land acknowledgements and read the blog posts, but the George Floyd murder really woke me up. I, like so many other white people, was forced to confront a reality that people of color had been shouting at us about for years while we ignored them.

During this time, my witchcraft practice had deepened a lot, but I did not consider myself “psychic”. I had a very rational Virgo explanation for my ability to see patterns and process them into predictions. I had material walls up in the shape of never ending mazes that would explain away paranormal activity and justify my woo-woo inclinations as an extension of my connection to creative and even imaginary reality.

Looking back, it goes hand in hand.

I remember telling a friend that I admired her connection to her ancestors and admitted I was afraid to meet my own. What I was learning about the deep roots of our nation, built on blood and oppression, kept me up at night. I had no doubt that my presence in this country was a product of colonization and white supremacy.

I did not feel absolved by doing land acknowledgements at the beginning of my events or adding BLM to my instagram bio. I felt utterly guilty, shameful, and hopeless for the future of our world. Not only because of the horrors occurring around us in 2020, but because I knew that I was complicit in and benefiting from the system. I knew there was blood on my hands, too.

The truth is, magic as I embody it has a lot to do with the liberation of the free spirit. My practice has a lineage that felt the pain of discrimination and oppression. In the spirituality I practice, it is blasphemous to ignore injustice.

When the universe came together to point my eyes to the truth, I did not insult the Gods by looking away.

When I began having paranormal experiences with my ancestors and guides, I noticed that I was entering another world. There is a lot of information about communication with ancestors online and some cultures even prioritize that kind of work in their practice.

When conducting ancestor work as a white person, there are some basic respectful steps to take:

• Research your genealogy and ask your family about your own lineage. Challenge any relatives that have stories about your way-back ancestors being non-white and seek genuine practices of your culture.
• Ensure that you are not using magic that belongs to another culture, religion, or lineage. Not only will that inhibit connection to your actual spirit team, you may cause harm by walking into the wrong energy.
• If you profit from practices that have been appropriated by white people from other cultures, consider halting the practice all together or set up a donation/monetary support plan for the culture you are taking from.
• Share, like, watch, and pay non-white creators for their spiritual work.
• Seek out anti-racism and decolonization education.

Here are some practices that you can apply in order to find true divinity and sovereignty within the story of your lineage as well as the world.

Reframing Guilt with Grief

To feel guilty does not liberate the oppressed and it does not fix our mistakes.

We as white people have been given the gift of guilt as a way to move our pain into a place that gives us the most self-sympathy. When we choose to feel guilt excessively, we make ourselves the subject of the pain.

It is totally natural to feel guilt in the same way it is totally natural to shout “FUCK” when we stub our toe. But, similarly, it is a reaction of shock and pain that detracts us from the reality around us. It is compulsive and moves us to urgently tend to our own pain.

Essentially, you will feel guilt- I don’t think you can avoid that and I’m not sure if you should.

But, in order to truly perform ancestor work as a white person, you must learn that there is a world beyond your own guilt. The place on the other side of shock, pain, and self is where you can truly connect to collective consciousness. Deep healing occurs here.

When you can sit with the guilt long enough to move through it, you may find there is a great well of grief.

You are connected to the people you contributed to oppressing. You are connected to the oppressors. Once you start holding space for that, you can start to have actual embodied empathy for all of the crimes that we as a human species are committing against one another.

Generations and generations of people have lived and died without ever processing the grief of their aliveness. There is a shameful reality that generations and generations of people have been programmed and influenced to believe that we must hurt one another and ignore one another’s struggles in order to survive.

If you are in this body and you are able to hold space for all the grief of all of those generations, you will be doing your ancestors and your defendants a great service. The benefits of taking time to grieve these wounds is immense.

To sit with grief, place your hand on your heart and allow yourself to feel pain. Feel free to set a timer for 5, 10, or 20 minutes or do this in your ritual.

Teach Your Ancestors

I can’t shut up about what I’m learning and will for sure fit it in to any conversation. Teaching is a natural extension of learning for me and when I am diving into a topic, I am engrossed in it. Podcasts, videos, books, articles, art. I want to TELL people about it ALL THE TIME!

This impulse aligns really poorly with a harsh truth: People of color don’t have to or need to hear about what you’ve learned about racism, colonization, and white supremacy. They fucking know.

Take that information to other white people.

And, while I fully believe that it is our responsibility as white people to try to educate those close to us, it may not always be possible. There are barriers to people (even very privileged people) being able to talk about these topics with their family and friends. That is a symptom of the system- Another injustice that only exists to perpetuate more and more of the same violence.

If you fear for your life or livelihood for speaking up: That is an access point for deeper empathy. People of color face that reality with life-threatening consequences. For those of you that can and do speak up in family and social settings, I bow to you. It is necessary.

Whether that kind of healing is on the table for you or not, I recommend also speaking to your dead relatives about the cycle of oppression that has stolen and destroyed land, extracted the Earth of its resources and ecosystems, and murdered lots of people.

You can educate your ancestors by sitting with them in ritual and having a conversation with them. This can look different ways for different practices: Lighting a candle/incense, putting on some light music, turning down the lights. Making tea and sitting a cup for them at the table. Laying your head on a garment or book that has been passed down generationally and resting there.

It doesn’t even have to be woo-woo. You can label these rituals “hypothetical conversations with hypothetical people from the past”. You can treat it as a thought experiment.

My conversations with my ancestors have a very “back and forth” quality, but your experience can look any number of ways. If you are not ready to speak out loud in an empty room, you can do it in your head or by writing in a journal. Whatever gets your gears turning and your heart engaged.

The spiritual benefit of this exercise is to expand your perception of time to include your ancestors’ perspectives, support, and wisdom.

Very few of my ancestors have held onto their racist and homophobic beliefs after death. It is more common that they see now the error in their thinking and, while they empathize with the person they were on Earth, they are in support of healing wounds and abolishing the system that they came up in.

Talking to your ancestors about politics and current events is indeed ancestor work. It was these conversations in the depths of 2020 that built my spirit team and created massive shifts in consciousness and abilities.

Mindfulness Around Whiteness

I remember a time when I was less brave about speaking up. I was self conscious about stirring the pot and even afraid of being harmed for calling out racism when I saw it. I was spiritually weak and making excuses out of fear.

The number one thing that gives me courage to stand up to oppression is being consistently aware of the ways I benefit from whiteness.

I can find many examples each day of my life being easier because of the color of my skin. If you are white and you only think about the benefits of whiteness when you are talking to/sitting with a person of color, you cannot call yourself anti-racist.

I refer to this practice in the context of mindfulness because the mental mechanism is very similar. It requires practice. It requires patience. It requires mental energy. Another key similarity is that it uses your mind’s most magical tool: Awareness.

Awareness is a quality of attention. Where your attention is, your awareness has the opportunity to follow. Awareness is something that can you can move around you body and around the world. It is a key aspect of practicing all kinds of magic.

When you are taking the divine path of living out justice and equity for all people, it is important to understand how you use your awareness. Being reckless or ignorant about you awareness can cause and perpetuate harm. Being “unaware” is dangerous in magical workings.

To practice mindfulness around your whiteness, it is important to start to train your awareness to notice racism, white supremacy, transphobia, pretty privilege, ableism- Essentially, all of the systems that create “privilege”.

Interestingly enough, you actually don’t have to know too much about the interworking of these concepts for you awareness to catch onto your intentions. Once you set the magical intention to heal these societal wounds, you will start getting clearer and clearer downloads and opportunities to learn.

Of course education is important and will come, but the first step is awareness. If it is overwhelming, you may need to spend more time sitting with grief as outlined in the first exercises.

Links will pop up, people will you send you articles, situations will occur around you that you simply cannot ignore! Just like any other magical spell, this practice will bring you Synchronicity as a tool to teach you about reality.

The heartbreaking thing about this is that it highlights a very hard truth: We as white people have the choice to notice white supremacy in action. People of color do not have that privilege.

When I am able to stay present for my mindfulness and awareness around this, I get fucking mad all the fucking time. The spiritual benefit of this practice in my life is sacred rage.

It takes me absolutely NO time to call out my boss who is saying obviously white supremacist things or speaking from an ignorant place. I am writing emails, interrupting men, and compassionately defending my friends of color. Is it perfect? No. It is messy and sometimes embarrassing and always scary.

But because of my love for humanity, I don’t ever forget that those actions are sacred. They are a part of the healing of this planet.

The act of being mindful of my whiteness and the privileges it affords me has a direct healing impact on my community, my ancestors, and my descendants.

In conclusion

There is so much to unpack about white supremacy and I am certainly not an expert, but what I want to highlight is something that radically changed my perspective: White supremacy does not just uphold whiteness as the standard for privilege.

It also functions to reject the existence and validity of people that are non-binary, people that live with disabilities, and people with alternative political ideas.

It is an ideology that protects itself with camouflage because White actually means Straight Cis Able Bodied Wealthy Capitalist.

This is why white people can feel the painful oppressive effects of it even in the midst of their whiteness.

White Supremacy controls white people into “falling in line”. In the same way that the patriarchy also oppresses men, we too are limited in how we can show up in the world because we are brain-washed to believe that behaving a certain way will earn us a reward or keep us safe.

Part of realizing that we are oppressors is understanding that we have been trained to oppress. It does not come naturally, it is programed. If you continue to believe you are not oppressive, you will keep that cycle going on that much longer.

Our loved ones of color need us.

It is not ethical or safe to practice magic without being conscious and considerate of the ways our society is killing, limiting, and discriminating against people of color.

My perspective as a woman raised in the south is that of anti-black racism and indigenous oppression but I understand that white supremacy exists not only against the Black and Native American population but all over the world. In the Unite States, all cultures suffer It is spread imperialism-style with petro-dollars and cultural programming.

You may not feel like you have the power to end this, but that is exactly what your immense magical power is for.

Love and light, y’all.