Your Ancestors Grieve Too: A Spiritual Look at Inherited Loss with A Look at Epigenetics and Ancestral Work
A beginning statement that you feel in your bones is true.
The Grief You're Carrying Might Not Have Started With You.
There’s a grief that arrives without an occasion.
It’s not triggered by a loss you can point to or even be connected to anything that happened in your own lifetime. Yet you feel its presence in your body with specificity and a weight that doesn’t feel imagined. Something that feels real that’s been here longer than you have, something you inherited rather than acquired.
This is what’s known as ancestral grief and it’s one of the most difficult grief presentations to name because it resists the framework that most grief support is built around. The framework of personal loss tends to relate to where something in your own life ending and the grief belongs to that ending whereas ancestral grief doesn’t fit that framework because that loss isn’t something that directly happen to you, and naming it requires a willingness to locate yourself inside of a larger story than the one that begins with your own birth.
I want to offer you a spiritual framework for understanding what ancestral grief is and how to begin recognizing it because the recognition is the beginning of the tending that begins to move what’s been stored in your lineage for longer than any living member of your family can remember.
What Ancestral Grief Looks Like in the Body
Ancestral grief doesn’t announce itself with the clear signal of personal loss because it’s disguised as something that looks like a personal pattern, a personality characteristic, or a chronic physical state. Its disguise is so convincing that most folks who are carrying it have never considered the possibility that what they’re living with is grief rather than simply who they are.
It shows up as a sadness with no clear source. A low-level mourning that’s simply always present. It intensifies at specific times of year, around certain family gatherings, or in the presence of certain people without any obvious reason for the intensification. It doesn’t respond to interventions that personal grief eventually responds to because those interventions are aimed at a loss that can be named and this grief is aimed at losses that were never named.
It shows up as a body that holds tension in specific locations such as a chronic tightness in major parts of the body: chest, throat, stomach, and hips. It’s not attributed to current stress and it doesn’t fully release even in periods of genuine rest, because the body is holding something older than the current life situation. It’s something that’s encoded in the nervous system at a level that precedes conscious memory.
Clinically this is known as epigenetics. Read more about this from this article by Dr. Robert M. Post, MD, The Epigenetic Connection to Black Disparity.
It shows up as a sensitivity to specific kinds of loss (police brutality, encountering police, Black bodies found lynched in a tree, laws that push for racial discrimination), because the immediate loss is activating a grief that is much older and much larger and that has been waiting for exactly this kind of trigger to finally have a channel through which to move.
It shows up as an exhaustion that sleep can’t fix. What would it be like to move through the world without it?
Signs That the Loss You're Grieving Is Inherited Rather Than Personal
The clearest sign that what you’re carrying is inherited grief rather than only personal grief is that this grief feels older than you are, like an inherent trait. Asked to carry without being asked whether it’s wanted to be carried.
Another sign that grief is inherited is that there’s a pattern in the lineage rather than just a pattern with you. You can see and recognize the same emotional quality or the same kind of loss appearing across multiple generations in ways that suggest it’s being transmitted rather than independently generated.
Lastly, if the grief responds to ancestral practices than to personal processing, you know, such as creating the intention to sit with your (healed) ancestors or through engaging in an ancestral ritual that acknowledges what came before you, know that you are dong the healing work to heal your ancestral lineage…. And it works.
A Spiritual Way to Begin Tending Inherited Grief
The spiritual approach to inherited grief isn’t the same as the clinical approach. It’s not better or worse but it’s a specific approach of what inherited grief requires, because clinical work addresses the psychological and somatic impact of the inherited grief on the individual. The spiritual work addresses the relationship between the individual and the lineage that produced the grief and both dimensions need attention, though not necessarily simultaneously and not necessarily by the same practitioner.
Here’s a ritual practice for you to try if you feel aligned to work with it:
Begin by finding a quiet space, light a candle, and then speak aloud to your lineage, not to a specific ancestor if you don’t know their names, but to the collective, the whole of what came before you, and say something like: "I know I am carrying something that did not start with me, and I am acknowledging that now, and I am asking my healed ancestors to help me understand what I am holding and where it came from and what it needs from me to begin to move."
Then sit in silence with a journal open and write whatever arrives, without evaluating whether it is accurate or significant. The act of writing is the act of giving ancestral grief a form it hasn’t had before.
Do this practice regularly rather than once because inherited grief wasn’t accumulated in a single session and it won’t release in one either. Remember the relationship you’re building with your lineage through this practice is more important than any single piece of information that arrives in any individual sitting.
You Don't Have to Tend This Alone
📞 Spiritual Consultation Call with Amber is a free consultation to determine your spiritual needs. Whether that be a spiritual reading (Mediumship/Intuitive Tarot Reading), Spiritual Counseling, or Spiritual Development. This 15-20 minute call helps to identify needs and if there’s an alignment to work together.
Schedule your consultation here
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is a space that provides ritual and meditation practices and a bit of psychospiritual information to help you understand yourself and your grief on a weekly basis. This space was designed to hold ancestral and inherited grief alongside personal grief, with women who understand the territory because they are navigating it too.
✨ The Inner Circle is for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support as the ancestral grief work deepens and asks more than the monthly container alone can hold.
With care and intention,
Amber
