maria mison: integrated awakenings

Hi. Today we are talking about ancestral healing, from the absolute basics up to the advanced, multidimensional mechanics.

We have this profound malice in modern Western society where we constantly think about ourselves in a vacuum. We think healing is an entirely individualistic job. You do your shadow work, you set your boundaries, you cut off toxic family members, and boom—you are enlightened. We act as if we are orphans of the cosmos. It’s a very sanitized, isolated way to view the soul.

But you are not an orphan. Your trauma isn’t just yours, and beautifully, neither is your magick.

Ancestral healing doesn’t just mean sitting in a therapist’s office complaining about the dysfunctional cycles of your parents. It means understanding that your physical body is an almanac of massive, intertwining histories. In Mark Wolynn’s incredibly grounding book, It Didn’t Start With You, he explores how inherited family trauma shapes our core language and emotional set points. Wolynn dives into the epigenetic reality that the grief, fear, and unspoken taboos of our grandparents live actively in our cellular expression. The sudden bitterness, the irrational financial panic, or the gripping anxiety you feel might literally be older than you are. You inherited the muscle memory of a survival tactic that is no longer necessary.

But it goes even deeper than human DNA. If you look at the animist roots of our world, you have to acknowledge that your ancestors were also the land. If you are a constant shock-absorber for everyone’s pain—the ultimate kargador of emotional baggage—you might be carrying the ancient karma of a Water Spirit who tried to swallow the ocean’s pollution to save the fish. If you feel a constant, restless urge to move and run from intimacy, you might be carrying the timeline of a fleeing river. The land carries memory, and because you are made of the earth, you carry it too.

This is where the magic of intercession comes in. Because you are intimate with your family’s story, because you have lived inside their patterns and echoed their fears, you have the authority to speak to their karma. Resmaa Menakem, in his brilliant somatic workbook My Grandmother’s Hands, teaches that white-body supremacy and generational trauma are not just ideas; they are dense, restrictive energies lodged in the physical tissue. To heal them, we have to metabolize that pain through the body. We have to literally massage the history out of our nervous systems. Menakem shows us that when the most downtrodden, systemically oppressed people can metabolize generational agony through somatic awareness, so can you.

You do not have to be a formalized spiritual leader to do this for your bloodline. You are the intercession. You are the Hail Mary pass for your family tree.

Because you love them—even the deeply flawed ones—you have the power to offer a different ending. You can look at a pattern of scarcity or silence and say, “The curse stops with me. We are writing a new story now.” When you do this, you aren’t just freeing yourself. You are throwing a rescue rope backward through time, liberating the ancestors who didn’t have the tools, the safety, or the privilege to heal themselves.

But here is the catch: I want to invite you to domesticate this spirituality.

You don’t always need to go on a massive psychedelic journey or sit in a dedicated, smoke-filled temple to do this work. It can be so incredibly normal. Do you have a pot your aunt gave you? Every time you cook with it, actively invoke the women who fed you. Let that simple act of making dinner be a spell of nourishment for your entire matrilineal line. When you drink your coffee, bless the farmers and the earth that grew the beans.

If you want to understand how vital it is to honor local, indigenous roots without romanticizing them, read Grace Nono’s Babaylan Sing Back. She does the heavy lifting of honoring the systemic struggles of Philippine shamans, reminding us that local magic isn’t a dead historical artifact—it is a living, breathing lineage. We have to respect the Babaylans who held the line before us.

When you walk down the street, practice the Japanese Butoh concept of walking as if a thousand ancestors are flanking you, moving with you. You are not alone. You are a walking kaleidoscope of all the people, plants, and spirits who have ever supported you. When you allow your life to be populated by the loves that grew you, there is this massive, profound relief. You realize you don’t have to carry the weight of your healing alone. Your story is their story, and their resilience is your resilience.

We cover all this and more in the Intro to Shamanism course on Aeon. We dive deep into the Akashic records, building your travel team, and learning how to hold the query of your lineage without getting crushed by it. Step out of the isolation. Claim your roots.

See contact or my socials to book private session or attend a course.