Releasing The Fear of Death with Ancestral Veneration

Transcript:

When I was just an infant, I was actually initiated into a branch of magical practice that emerged out of the African diaspora. And this branch of magical practice relies heavily on divination. So when you get initiated into the tradition, you are given a very long form divination about your life, about how to live more righteously, and how to engage with the different roles you might encounter in order to breed good fortune in your world.

These divinations are often very useful and can be really beautiful additions to a person's world. When I was initiated and I was given this long form divination, something emerged out of it that was a little bit scary and difficult for my family to integrate. And that was that I had the possibility of dying young, of dying before my time and of not being able to fully live out my life.

What ended up happening with this was that it created a lot of fear for my family and it marked a very powerful initiatory experience with this fear of death for me. So I actually grew up really afraid of the idea of dying. And it wasn't something that was made any easier by how my family handled it because as it caused fear for me, it caused fear for them.

And they reinforced it constantly. There was always this fear around me, dying in some form or fashion before my time. And as I got older and I started to part ways from my family to live my own life, I realized that this fear was with me and that it was strong and that it was something that I couldn't shake.

And it stifled me in many different areas of my life because this fear was always there. Death was always watching over my shoulder in my own mind, telling me that if I became fully alive, if I really engaged with life, that I would lose it. So many times there were actions that I wanted to take.

There were projects that I wanted to release. There were trajectories that I wanted to follow. And I was stifled by this profound fear of dying before my time.

And even though I did a lot of soul searching and a lot of trauma work and a lot of reframing of this aspect of my childhood and even of relating to my own mortality and death itself, it really wasn't until I started to engage with ancestral practice that that really started to shift in a more profound way. And that it has continued to shift even more powerfully the longer I have engaged with the ancestors and the deeper that I go into relating to the dead. And today I want to discuss my perspective on how ancestor veneration is in fact a form of death practice and a way to relate to death as an ally and to remove the fear of death so that we have a healthier ongoing relationship to death as a whole and to our own mortality so that death becomes an ally in our life and not an enemy.

Of course, many, many people in today's modern world have the fear of death. My story in and of itself is not necessarily presenting a unique set of circumstances for the individual in the sense that just because my fear of death was put into my face because of this and then reinforced constantly by family dynamics doesn't mean that other people don't experience it. In fact, death is one of the scariest things for most people in contemporary Western culture.

Indigenous cultures tend to have a healthier relationship to death than we do in our world. In fact, many people today have never even seen something truly die. In the past, when our family members were dying, they were in a household that was generational, so we would see them part.

These days, people die in sanitized rooms and hospitals, often separate from the family. And in the past, we would also hunt and or we would be involved in the butchering of animals. Everybody would see death up close and or you would be actually someone delivering death directly to something's life.

Our culture tends to be obsessed with perpetual youth and the perpetual oneness, even death at the level of becoming quiet and still and moving towards the deep spirit within is stifled in modern Western culture. We try to keep everything busy, busy, busy so we don't have to face the quiet. And this is coincided with the loss of ancestral veneration practices as a whole.

We no longer have this continuous, ongoing relationship with ancestors. In fact, many of us don't even really know who our ancestors are just a few generations back. We don't have shrines anymore that honor the dead.

We don't bury the dead close to us. They live far away in cemeteries. And in this way, we are no longer tending to the dead.

The dead, if it were an ecosystem, that which has come before us, this spirit world that is still very much present, is in a sense growing with weeds in most of our lineages and most of our lines because the dead have become unconscious. And we try to keep the dead unconscious. We don't have truly healthy ways of relating to death, to the afterlife.

And the mythology of death in our world is either colored by religious fanaticism and or dogma, or it's just not even paid attention to. Death becomes this scary, cold, dark place that we don't want to move to. Well, why would we if it's truly that way? And what I have discovered in my own practice with ancestor work is that as we begin to continuously engage with the ancestors and as we build a shrine for them and as we give offerings, that it not only helps to improve your life here and now through the tending of these critical relationships, but it also changes the relationship to death itself.

Because regardless of how you perceive it, if you're engaging with the ancestors, you are engaging with the dead because they have died. And so these are beings which are no longer in physical form, who were in physical form and who have now, through the process of death, come out and are here either present still or have come back as ancestral helping spirits that are vibrant and willing to assist you in your life's journey. And this is a big part of why ancestor work is so important in Indigenous cultures.

It's not just because it's important to tend to this garden of the dead, as it were, but also because it keeps our relationship to death as individuals very present and very alive. Because if I go to an ancestor shrine every single morning and call upon the dead and then give offerings to the dead, then I am literally creating a touchstone with death every single day. And so why is that important? Well, there's a lot of reasons why it could potentially be absolutely life changing and life affirming.

For as we have created a culture that is afraid of death, we have also created a culture that is afraid of life. For to fear death is to fear life and to fear life is to fear death. To quote Carl Jung, not wanting to live is synonymous with not wanting to die.

Becoming and passing away are the same curve. Whoever does not accompany this curve remains suspended in the air and grows numb. And what that means is that physical death is a big death.

Yes, but we must be willing to die every day to the new person who we are becoming. We must be willing to accept that death is a possibility for us on any given day. And that becomes an important reminder that we do not have the time that we think we do.

So it prompts us to want to engage more fully with life. How many stories have you heard of people who have had near death experiences and or survived the potentially terminal disease to then come back more rich with the desire for life and whose lives are permanently changed and transformed by the experience, showing them how important it is to engage with life. And at the same time, those people often lose much of the fear of death that they have.

As we recognize this, we notice through ancestral veneration practice that death leaves a legacy, that the way that we live our lives today, what we end up doing leaves behind systems and behaviors and perspectives and an inheritance that we give those that come after us. So if there is not this ongoing awareness of death on a continuous basis, we lose out on that. This is an enormous part of why I suggest that people have an ancestral veneration practice.

It's not just to tend to the dead, but it's also to have this consistent touchstone with the reality of death. And so the death becomes an ally. There is something that I noticed in my own interaction with the ancestors over time that my shrine was this expression of beauty.

This is one of the reasons that you see ancestral shrines and or ancestral veneration practices full of color and full of vibrancy, a tradition that you can notice in those Dia de los Muertos traditions from Mexico or even in the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, how color and many different colors are brought into the fold. In fact, this is not at all exclusive to these two cultures. You often see that ancestor shrines are beautiful and lively and rich.

And on top of that, you also notice how there is often a lot of aliveness in these traditions. There is the giving of flowers and of foods and of artifacts that bring this sense of true wonder and beauty to the relationship that we have with ancestors. And why is this the case? Well, in part, at least in part, is because it changes the relationship that we have to death.

Instead of death being the dark, scary, cold place, as we often envision it in Western civilization, no, death becomes a lively, wonderful aspect of creation that we are cycling in and out of. The death and birth and life and the dying are feeding into one another, creating this beauty that we call existence. So every single day as we show up to an ancestral veneration shrine, we engage with the dead, we call the dead, we give offerings to the dead, we sit in front of this beautiful shrine, we ask for help, we tell them what our problems are, and we engage with these beings who are still present with us.

And then they actually assist us in life. And we see things shifting and changing in our worlds. So death becomes an ally, death becomes an assistant, death becomes a friend that we are consistently tapped into and aware of, and that we make readily conscious every single day.

Not something that might happen way in the future. Please let it happen way in the future. No, it's something that we bring to the forefront of our daily life.

And so instead of being afraid of death and seeing it as the enemy. No, we come and we come to know it as an ally.