Spiritual Instruction Module: Cynthia Winton-HenryDeath and Ancestor Technologies

Note from a friend when my mother died. “I like Meredith's idea best of all. She wants to design a lovely white on white flowery traditional sympathy card.

When you open it, it says, "Well, shit."

Contents

Tending our Ancest-TreeHonor the Dead and Receive their BlessingsDancing to UnderstandHow to Dance on Behalf of AncestorsFacing Death: Initiations to Regulate Fear

Tending our Ancest-Tree

How we dance with the dead is of “grave” importance to use a really bad pun. The human body ain’t nothin’. Our bodies are magnetic, fluid, electrical, organic, magical conductors of information. And although we are not sure what happens when energy leaves the body global cosmologies generally hold that “something does indeed happen!”

Honoring collective wisdom and my own experience, I would have to agree. Something happens. On a physical level I see each generation’s energy as a tree growing straight or crooked,

hacked or well rooted, watered or dry. Is the tree productive? The energetic body of a person, family, or generation grows best when conditions allow it to be as Betsey Rose says,

Standing like a tree with my roots dug down, My branches wide and open.Down comes the sun, down comes the rain, Up comes the life to a heart that is open.

I belong to a thriving individual, family, communal, and ancestral tree. See the SIM on Tree initiations. My primary act in relating to my ancestors is simple gratitude. In Bill Bryson words,

To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you had to be…extremely—make that miraculously—fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved,

stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly—in you.

Life, death and nature are pretty hairy. Why not drop the idea that life is safe? Instead, pray simply for the healthy alignment of your Tree across time and space. Don’t get too concerned about being the best or biggest tree. As Nathaniel Hawthorne wisely pointed out in The House of Seven Gables,

To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.”

We can all take care of the family tree and occasionally clear away dead stuff! This insures the healthy heart of life and a healthy future. Honor the roots, including your mother and father. Follow the wisdom on how to live and die well by learning to regulate fear of death using beauty and love. When this isn’t possible ask God to do it for you.

Here are some clues for paying attention to our Tree.

Accept that DNA offers key information across generations, unlocking meaningful attractions, anxieties and insistences. Once I felt an irrepressible need to take a stand against any Christian language or ritual that diminishes Jewish people. I only later learned that my maternal DNA relates me to Ashkenazi Jews.

Accept theological and indigenous wisdom that factors in the effect of actions on the Seventh Generation, understanding that events affect ones descendants, acknowledging that we may therefore experience the effects of prior actions. Sensing this I covenanted to end patterns of domestic violence in my family. It has been easy, but finding the right combination of tools and practices allows me to do a great deal to end this pattern.

Heed anecdotal dreams, images and memories even when they seem disconnected from the present context. Assume that more will be revealed. For instance, I dreamt that I was standing by a great body of water among Croatian women mourning the loss of their children. Years later I learned that my great grandmother immigrated from a German settlement in Croatia before WWII. I recently discovered that during the war villagers were murdered and displaced. (See the map.)

In my book Chasing the Dance of Life I describe sensations of drowning, a formidable resistance to wealth, and a visceral distancing from Christ. None of these feelings seemed grounded in my current reality. I believe that I allowed myself to update old decisions and wounds from previous lives. Modern therapy would not have been helpful. But I did seek help, including from the book Many Lives, Many Masters by psychologist Dr. Brain Weiss. As I cleared away a variety of aversions I found new freedom and choices restored. I now affirm that bodies can reveal the desire for past life healing.

Lastly, create rituals that honor the dead and offer respect by visiting graveyards, churches, and shrines when appropriate. As global indigenous wisdom suggests that honor be paid.

On behalf of your spiritual health you might ask, “Am I sensing information connected to DNA ancestry, a special spiritual lineage or grouping, or a random connection?”

Once we ask this we may begin to find answers. Teachers, books, and synchronous exchanges support our next steps. As answers appear we

may be guided to the support we’ll need to move forward. If it is difficult to move forward, and we feel stuck, we can continue to ask for guidance on to how to manage while awaiting a solution.

When it comes to the soul, imagination, healing, play, artful community, and ritual are key. Perhaps more so in relating to death and the dead.

Honor the Dead and Receive their Blessings

Lineage is bodily. Ancestry matters. It’s who we are. The New Zealand Maori say ancestral energy is an upwelling of life. Mexican Dios de los Muertas altars and festivities celebrate grateful relationships with the deceased. In Africa libations are poured on the earth to honor ancestors and many Asians ritualistically maintain respect for their lineage by making offerings to those who have gone before.

First peoples have an intimate connection with ancestor spirits. Native elder, Hunter Bear, said, “In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own inner being.” This is why indigenous people teach that how we treat our ancestors has everything to do with one’s prosperity, security, and

relationships.

So, how does a 21st century mystic far, far away from these practices reconnect to her ancestors? Is the mass movement away from honoring ancestors partly why we have so many walking dead zombie and vampire movies. Maybe the dead are haunting us, reminding us we are getting away from the tree. Where are the helpful dead?

For years I felt secretly ashamed of my ancestors although I didn’t know why. Many stories were silent. Honor my elders? Respect the dead? What is the cost of moving away from home? We can say the past doesn’t matter, but my heart knows different.

I took my questions about my ancestors to God, already believing that I should honor those I knew about and forgive any who did harm. When a seer suggested that I go into the forest and sit on stump I thought of my maternal great grandma Elizabeth Stumpf. She had lived in Denver and was the family backbone. From my vantage point 1,000 miles away in Los Angeles she was still the ground. “Great” grandma seemed the right name for her. She was strong even at 4 foot eleven inches, with a potent work ethic and a no nonsense way of delivering the truth. She took flowers to the family graves on birthdays and holidays. Eventually, I wrote this poem in her honor.

You flew to LA to help when the baby was bornand talked to her with German on your tonguetelling me, “Children needto hear real voices.”

You re-ticked down pillows, knitted wool booties, rolled scratch noodlesfor chicken soup plopped donuts in noisy oilwith hands that knew everything

Your fingers wiped house dust, garden dirt, flour onto 50’s

floral aprons knuckles bulging, plunging the dough andlacing it paper thin across thedining room table leaves.

When the seer told me to go intothe woods and sit on a stump.your name. Elizabeth Stumph Hug,became my prayer rug.where I bow and repose,still feeling your hands knead my heart warm and open like a poem.

When Masankho Banda and I began to teach “Cultures of Peace” together we wondered about ancestry, prosperity, and peace. The work of Malidome and Sobunfu Some of the Dagara tribe in Africa gave us guidance. In Chasing the Dance of Life I wrote:

“He and I both lived far from our family origins but believed that ancestors still guided us, lifted us, and caused us to stumble when we were foolish. Even though I couldn’t tell you who my grandparents were, I intuitively agreed with Masankho when he said, “The largest group of unemployed is our ancestors.”

Modern people seemed to use machetes on their own tree, giving no thought to hacking at the roots of family wisdom. Some treated their families as dead wood. Were we a nation of walking stumps? Is deforesting the planet parallel to our treatment of ancestral lines?

A New Zealander told Masankho and me that Maori people see ancestry as a fountain. Descendants ride it at the top. The Maori warn that those who make decisions far from their family tree, who forget the stories of grandparents, and don’t connect to the dead, often find their life force diminished. They have only governments and employers for accountability; institutions that can cut you off in a minute.

Sitting on my own stump, I meditated on fragments of family history: the jail time, alcoholism, gambling, “unwanted

pregnancies,” domestic violence, and endless immigrations, some of us arriving when America was a “new world,” others coming in the 1900s. I knew little of ordinary or good times.

In my thoughts I tended my stump and honored its limits. Finding a rotting stump on the street, I dragged it home and used it as an altar. I confessed the role of my people in collective misconduct and grieved the ways we were not able to stand up to forces that cut us down. I clung to the promises of the prophet Isaiah who sang, “You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations and be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.” (Isaiah 58:11-12)

Masankho and I began using dance, drum, and imagination to travel into the intuitive caverns of memory. When he danced on behalf of my ancestors he found a few women who just wanted the best for my lifework and me. They gave him the message, “You are not required to heal the past. Go on.” They helped me surrender the burden of healing generational shame.

Without knowing anything of my prayers, my mother’s companion, George, a devout agnostic, began to research my mother’s family tree. George quietly pulled up and documented Wentworth family roots extending back through laundry workers, laborers, mayors, pioneers, early governors and across the ocean all the way back to England’s Doomsday Book and the largest castle in England, the Wentworth castle. With his aid, I reunited my story with Wentworth’s, Winton’s, Stump’s, Hugs, Mossman’s, and many others. The stump was no longer a stump. Like the stump of Jesse, it burst with green shoots. When you can say that your lineage extends as far back as people can remember, you stand taller.

Having learned even more about Wentworth history, I take particular pride in belonging to the same family as Anne Hutchinson, the first outspoken Puritan woman teacher to be outcast in the “new world” for her views on grace and personal devotion to God.

I recommend Sobunfu Some’s interview on cultivating ancestral support http://www.sobonfu.com/articles/interviews/interview-by-randy-

peyser/

Also five ways to honor your ancestors by Daniel Foor at http://www.ancestralmedicine.org/2011/five-ways-to-honor-your-ancestors

What is your family tree? Does it matter? Ra Ifagmewi Babalawo says, “Yes; they are “Hidden Hands, Healing Spirits…”

How do we employ our ancestors? Our ancestors are “on call.” Their current work is to support the souls of the living. Engage them. Tell their stories, sing their songs, dance with them, and give them a place of honor when you

Visit their grave Make an altar to honor them. Speak of them with pride from time to time. Display their pictures. Invite their help by lighting a candle or saying a prayer. Treat all elders with respect. Put them in God’s hands and pray for them. Dance, Sing, or Sit in Stillness to receive their guidance.

In my book Dance: The Sacred Art: Discovering the Joy of Movement as Spiritual Practice I offer templates for how to dance to increase understanding about ancestors and to do a“Dance on Behalf” of a partner’s ancestor like Masankho did for me, taking turns witnessing one another dancing.. I include them here.

Dancing to Understand

You can “Dance to Understand” any aspect of your being: your emotions, your thoughts, you at a certain age, your family role, your ancestry. Anything you can imagine, you can probably “draw out” and dance.

Place your hands on a sensation or body part where you feel concern.

Select a piece of music that might support this sensation. Prayerfully, pull the feeling to the outside of your body. For the duration of the music, in stillness and movement, dance

with the image or energy that you have before you, lifting it, relating to it, exploring it.

Are there images or insights? Notice shifts in energy or any new information that comes to mind.

Is there anything to release? Transform? What information or insight will you bring back inside you?

Gather what you want into your being. After sorting out your understandings, dance where you are

now. As you conclude, bless your experience, whatever it is. This

dance is part of your spiritual journey. Take time to write about the dance. Was there a highlight? An

insight? Learning?

How to Dance on Behalf of Someone

Part of the mystery of prayer is to know that we are powerless and that, as dancers, we seek intervention from a greater source. When we dance on someone else’s behalf, one gift we give is our faith, offered in a dance with love. This does not require great dancing or great dances. Our role is not to try to heal the person or to heap their concerns on our shoulders. Our act of dancing on someone else’s behalf is an act of giving them over to the care of God. When I do this, I imagine bringing my pictures of concern into the focused place between my eyes and releasing them up in the air. I take a deep breath and shake out attempts to understand or help. My only job is to dance for the person and myself, to take care, to enjoy myself, and place the person in God’s hands.

I was initially surprised at people’s willingness to dance on behalf of others. Ironically, many find it easier to dance for others than themselves. In a large assembly I attended, worship planners had fashioned a service that gave people simultaneous access to multiple forms of prayer. Children and adults offered spoken prayers into a microphone. People lit candles. Some sang songs. Musicians played on instruments. Healing stations offered “laying on of hands.” Dancers offered movement prayers onstage; thirty or more of us danced on behalf of the collective concerns as they were voiced. The spirit in the room was palpable. This group of normally rational religious folk hardly recognized themselves. Afterward, many said that it was the most powerful experience of prayer they’d ever had.

I invite you to give this movement form of intercessory prayer a try.

Dancing on Behalf Of … Bring a person to mind for whom you feel concern. Take a deep breath and release the need to personally

intervene or heal their pain. If need be, shake out your own concerns. Put your fingers on

the focused place between your eyes, and toss your own worries up in the air.

Using prayerful music such as keyboard or flute, or even something upbeat, imagine something you like about this person.

Imagine blessing them with your hands. Gestures of blessing may lead to shapes, as visible prayers. Or you may sense the kind of energy and dynamic that you see missing in this person and dance it as a portent of things to come.

As you dance for this person, you may be surprised at movements that come. Gracious communications will arise. I have never seen it fail.

Now go one step farther. As you move, let this dance serve you, too. Connecting to your own desires can also bless you with wise, intuitive, healthy results. This might seem paradoxical. “Can a prayer on behalf of someone else also benefit me?” On a body level, yes, it does. The biblical command to love your neighbor as yourself is not theoretical; it is how the body works best.

Facing death: Initiations to regulate fear

“Hello my name is Cynthia and I am going to die.”

Part of honoring ancestors is learning to face our own death. How we honor Mother Death makes a difference. She is the great initiator. Fear of her is primal. Will we face and dance with her or run in the opposite direction?

Life’s imperative is that we set our dial to Survival! Fear is how we know this imperative. That is a good thing. At the same time, fear can override the magic and joy of life. So part of living literally requires learning

to play with fear of death. It helps us immeasurably if a) death is made as beautiful and enjoyable as possible, b) death is part of everyday life, c) group assurance is present to the grieving d) dependable, ritualized support happens regularly to help everyone’s grief keep moving. Religion does its best to help with the above. Judaism for instance offers some of the most attentive wisdom when it comes to honoring the dead and the grieving.

But, on a body level fear has no other agenda other than to get us to

“Stop and Survive!” Similarly, only thing the body understands when it comes to fear is the word Stop. Once the amygdala fires it won’t negotiate. Holding up a big red stop sign in your brain is the best approach if you can catch your fear right away. If the fear has planted itself and ignited your nervous system, it helps to draw your attention elsewhere. Recently, on a flight, hitting some bad turbulence I felt afraid. Looking to my inner sight for support I saw an image of the roof of my mouth. I began to touch my tongue to the roof of my mouth and concentrate on it. It was a helpful, concrete distraction. In times that I can’t move past the fear I go straight to God, literally placing my need in God’s hands. Frequently, the fear lightens and signs of hope appear.

Grief Anxiety is another challenge for us, the fear of losing someone or something we hold dear. The most serious issue in Western civilization according to Malidome Some, African Wisdom teacher, is our lack of grief rituals. Without opportunity to mourn and release grief our human energy backs up and hardens. This has consequences for our empathy and vital connection to the living and the dead.

Sharon Pavelda hosts Death Cafes, a global movement of leaders that invite people for coffee, cookies and to talk about dying. Sharon starts her café’s with the 12-stepper introduction, “Hello, I am “so and so” and I am going to die.” The unspoken joke is that we would ordinarily never admit powerlessness over death. This is followed by time to share concerns about death and dying without worry that someone is going to change the subject.

Hello Death!

At my house everyday has a touch of Dios de los Muertas. I live with Stephen, a hospice chaplain. We joke that I help people get into their body and Stephen helps them get out!

Stephen faced death as a child. He was seven when his mother began her breast cancer journey and twelve when she died. He and two younger brothers barely remember the memorial. There was no wake or old country “visits to the grave.” Their social work mom donated her body to science at Loma Linda University. They never knew where she was buried. Thus, her disappearance gave no choice. Their lives and

home became tombs, the only way to memorialize her. Her death became a family wound, a trauma that still informs family conversations.

Stephen’s early acquaintance with loss made him a courtier of the Dark Mother. Like monks in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying he had to pass by many demons in order to live. Today he walks with the dying with the compassion of one “who knows.” Does he like death? No. He says his relationship with death is “complicated. I can go from hating to fearing, from contemplation to appreciation to gratitude for death, from having great wonder and questions and amazement to being very sad.”

There are no short cuts or easy answers for the dance of death. For humans the best we can do is what Sharon Pavelda suggests in her role as Mortina Decay, chant along singing, “Decay is OK!”

In the meantime there is a lot we can do to prepare for our closing act. Stephen shared five tasks of dying. To say–

1. Thank you.2. Will you forgive me?3. I forgive you.4. I love you.5. Goodbye.

Being up to date with those we love is one way to water and strengthen our tree. If I am unable to forgive someone I ask God to do so on my behalf, an acceptable alternative solution.Beyond such practices, following one’s intuition, dreams, and heart with art and improvised ritual is the truest source of wisdom for dancing with death. Here are some instructions I followed after my mother died.

How to dance with death

Buy a scull on a five-foot pole.Glue negatives to the eye sockets.Tie a cascade of film around its throat.Crown it with bone beads.Safety pin your mother’s hospital band

To the brown net atop a golden hem adorned with blue beads, red bangles, and green feathers.

Then wait.

When the time comes jump up.Implore another death dancerto join your improvised ritual.Plant the scull-stick between you.Take a deep breath.Shake, moan, and bow.Upturn the staff andturn death on its head,birth it like an unbornon a soundless drone untildeath becomes a divining rod,a navigational gyroscope,your life force pressing out of an axis your death force pressing in on anotherComplex forces spinning life in cycles.

Dance to disambiguate death.Materialize death’s finality.Find a truer balance.Trust the hole in the heart.Do this delicate dance thenSlow down.Teach, tame, tremble, humbled.

This is how you stay wild.

*A gyroscope is a device for measuring or maintaining orientation, based on the principles of angular momentum.[1] In essence, a mechanical gyroscope is a spinning wheel or disk whose axle is free to take any orientation….its orientation remains nearly fixed, regardless of any motion of the platform on which it is mounted.

Ritual and art put creative power in the hands of the maker. Creativity is life. Anytime we use creativity we uphold our relationship with Creation and the Divine we can maintain honest spontaneity and soulfulfulness. This is success! And anytime we get stuck our body wisdom is faithful. We will know that movement is needed. The great mysteries will be there to help us out. I recommend Warrior Mother by Sheila Collins, InterPlaying social worker, an inspired narrative on struggling with the death of adult children and how she danced with life each step of the way.

Taking a deep breath and letting it out with a sigh, I gratefully conclude with this Lakota Sioux prayer:

Aho Mitakuye Oyasin....All my relations. I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer....

To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.

To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.

To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.

To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.

To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.

To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages, I thank you.

To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.

You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.

Thank you for this Life.