ancestral healing, as I understand it
Japanese culture is rich with ancestral worship. Shinto is the indigenous, animist tradition that no doubt arose spontaneously across the country in accordance with respective needs in respective communities.
This form of worship is the thread and crux of *all* indigenous religion for a reason. It is borne of relationship to land and ancestry, which may equate to the same thing if we feel deep enough.
Buddhism is a more modern addition to the religious landscape in Japan, but it was fused with an extant understanding of the pantheon of gods, and the position of us as humans within that. Certain Buddhist traditions, in particular funeral rites, were combined with an animist perspective and cemented the practice of connecting with our ancestors.
As with all systematised traditions, the actual connections made with ancestral heritage today have weakened, typically performed with a sense of obligation rather than reverence.
Nonetheless, when held against a backdrop of what is likely millennia of solid ancestral worship, it means there is a powerful collective pool of wisdom that we can seek clues from — if we choose.
That we are bound to the land is obvious if we spend any length of time living in that way. We are made up of the molecules in the air that we inhale and exhale, an unending exchange through breath whether we are conscious of it or not. We are made up of the food that grows drinking Light from Sun and Waters from Earth. Our skin is clothed in material woven from plants, the mud walls and thatched roofs over our collective heads built from the land itself.
Simply by existing, we are in a constant state of interaction. These things are created, borne of the miracle that is nature. To live in reverence of nature is to live in reverence of ourselves, as the materials in our surroundings are alchemised into cells in our skin and eyes and bellies, and in turn, the materials of which we are made are released, dissolved or decomposed, back into the air and earth from which we are born.
And who are we? Just as the sunflower grows from a seed encoded with specific patterning that will grow to manifest specific leaves, petals and colours, so are we each encoded with a genetic patterning.
We are a product of our material physical environments — what we generally term ‘Nature’ — but also carry an essence of something unique, a combination of strands of genetic memory passed down through infinite generations of wombs. Although we are composed entirely of the material that our ancestors were made of, the way in which this material has come together in our bodies at this point of space and time is unique.
We are hybrids of hybrids of hybrids living at a specific intersection of myriad dimensions, in moments that will never exist again.
This moment now.
And now this one.
We are individually unique combinations of our ancestors vibrating with an orchestra of frequencies.
And yet we are simultaneously ancient. The elements have shifted into a unique pattern, but the nature of those elements are fundamentally the same, and have been since the conception of life on this planet.
This idea is hardly unfamiliar in terms of physical genetics and DNA coding, something that modern science can explain.
But I have a growing awareness that this coding encompasses the combined experiences and emotions of our ancestors. This is something that science increasingly has the capacity to explain, too — that DNA patterning is malleable, that cells can heal and express themselves in different ways depending on conditioning, intention, and belief.
Interestingly, this phenomenon is a widely understood notion in Buddhism, especially the Lotus Sutra, that to heal oneself is to heal seven generations preceding and into the future. The idea of living with the ‘seven generations’ at heart is also found in Celtic paganism, and in the native American Iroquois tradition.
For me, the findings of modern science serve not to provide us with reasons to believe in epigenetics and intergenerational memory, but rather to substantiate what I believe we already know in some way — because if we listen to and feel our bodies without judgement, the truth of cellular healing is abundantly evident.
An attempt by science to prove or disprove such embodied truth by default takes us out of our bodies and into our minds. Turning what is felt experience into an intellectual topic to contest casts doubt upon the innate intelligence of our somatic experience. Our bodies hold the memories, traumas, joy and grief lived through by our parents and their parents and theirs, and so on. These are emotional imprints and are passed down in reproduction, manifesting as physical, mental and emotional features and conditions.
The ‘physical’ model of how this might work is intergenerational toxic overload. When living in harmony with nature, consuming living foods drinking fresh water and breathing clean air, our terrain is healthy. From around WW2, the use of commercial pesticides became more widespread. So did food grown in artificial conditions, water chlorinated, symptoms over-treated with drugs, air pollution, and chronic stress from overworking, to name but a few.
Folk of my grandparents’ generation when first exposed to these artificial elements coped okay, because their terrain was strong. But they might have taken a course or two of antibiotics, or hormonal treatments, which upset the balance of their gut flora or the mechanisms in their reproductive systems.
Not a big deal for them, but a child conceived in that compromised terrain might not have such a strong system. And then they too are overloaded with alien substances, from birth. Digestion, endocrine, immune systems and detoxification channels stop flowing as nature intended. The children they conceive are born into even more toxic environments with even weaker terrains, and so on. This is largely why there are so many more children with allergies, behavioural and autoimmune conditions today than ever before.
A more cultural example might be the intergenerational impact of the war in Japan. The younger generations are largely unaware that the matrix they inhabit was woven with the direct resonance of Japan’s defeat in the second world war. But speak to anyone over the age of 70, who grew up during the war or its immediate aftermath, and the mindset inherited from such devastation is overwhelmingly visible. This is a generation framed in shame.
There is a cultural tendency in Japan to make oneself ‘small’ out of humility and respect for others, but this crushing defeat, at the hands no less of the physically ‘larger’ white folk, is not only symbolic. The Japanese really did shrink. Our spirits, our sense of worth, the validity of our existence, all shrank. We made do with less. We made do with *being* less. Scarcity mindset abounded. Scarcity and shame defined the entire generation.
The result of that mentality seems to have been a mass forgetting in the generation that followed, characterised by mindless and rampant consumerism. Amnesia is easier than confronting a generation’s worth of grief.
Anyone who has visited Japan will be aware of the layers of plastic wrapping everything comes encased in. Three plastic bags for three items at the 7/11 — one for the cold drink, one for the hot croquette, one for the notebook, and a handful of cartoon stickers and coupons. There is an abundance of shops lined by an abundance of material.
I didn’t know abundance could feel so hollow until I lived in Tokyo. The mindset is one of endless exponential financial growth, inherited from the American model. It was adopted in retaliation to the desperately frugal mentality of their parents, making up for the lack of self worth with an abundance of stuff.
The shame continues to be left unprocessed. This is why we cling so desperately to these models that the generation before believed were symbols of progress. I wonder what the next generation might do with this shame, what new warped ways it might find to express itself in if we continue to shirk the work of grieving.
This is why I say ‘we’, because that unprocessed shame and grief lives in me still. I believe we all carry a load of ancestral grief in some form or other, and illness, whether physical or mental, tends to be a very obvious way of that manifesting.
However just as we carry intergenerational trauma, we also carry and have access to an abundance of intergenerational medicine. After all, if we trace any lineage all the way back, we end up at Mother Earth, and before her, the Sun itself, as the centre of the solar system which birthed us. Their wisdom pulses in our bodies, robust and real, guiding us on our journeys of integration and healing.
