Seven: What’s Ours, and What’s Theirs?

As preparation for healing the ancestors, here’s a powerful practice, as best I remember it, that I encountered when it was led by Hilda Massoud at a weekend healing workshop organized by Dr. Fatima Hafiz Muid and Onaje Muid. It comes from the Indigenous Tools for Living work of Dr. Shirley Turcotte.

Take a blank piece of paper and think of something that has been traumatic for you, or a core belief that’s a serious hindrance on your path. Ask: How much of this belongs to me, and how much comes from the ancestors? Tear off as much paper as seems to represent how much of the issue belongs to your ancestors.

Now sit with the trauma or core belief for a bit, feeling it where it is now in your body, and ask again: How much of this belongs to me, and how much comes from the ancestors? Again, tear off enough paper to represent the ancestors’ part. Repeat the process until all of the issue that belongs to the ancestors has been torn off.

I can’t say what happened for other people, but the trauma that came up for me was obviously generational, since it began with the memory of my paternal grandmother’s account of an episode that involved the very unkind imposition of an identity on her. One day when she was about eight years old, which would have been in 1890 or thereabouts, my grandmother was walking down the road cheerfully whistling when she encountered a man she didn’t know who said, “Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to some bad ends.” She ran home crying, and was still talking about it in her old age.

I’ve been on the receiving end of some gender-expectations policing myself, but by the time I was done considering what belonged to me and what belonged to the ancestors, I was out of paper. And then I was suddenly struck by the realization that the imposition of a fixed identity, even by oneself—this is what you are; therefore this is how you’re supposed to be, and this is how you’re supposed to behave, and this is how other people are entitled to see you—is a form of violence.

Pretty great for a torn-up piece of plain paper.

Your experience is bound to be different. Whatever it is that belongs not to you, but to the ancestors, we’ll get to them. Their healing matters, too. Meanwhile, you can decide in what way to dispose of the paper that will further the healing process. Burn it? Bury it? Flush it? Scatter it to the winds? You can let your intuition be your guide.