module 7 ancestor veneration IiI
Please continue to move at a pace that is responsive to your body. Consider signing up for Flow Movement Meditation, Thursdays at 6 pm EST, sign up 24 hours in advanced. Flow Movement Meditation can assist you in building a movement practice to support easing joint inflammation. Keep listening for the medicine in your dreams. Be sure to make the turmeric and clove oil, and look into gathering some black walnut powder for your feet. The article about nettle and iron intake is here.
Additionally, let’s expand spiritual hygiene regarding technology and limit screen time 10-30 minutes before sleeping and after waking. Please also begin to draft the words with which you want to begin and end your days.
I sent a Google calendar link for a recurring 30 minute meeting every other Friday at 2:15 PM EST.
You are flowing. Now to dig deeper to find the direction that you could flow based on ancestral guidance, your roots and a bit of entrepreneurial know-how tossed in.
In this third module of ancestor veneration, let us seek to move our dreams more consciously. We have been documenting our dreams for 12 weeks, tending to our bodies and spaces, and have activated our ancestral altars. As we continue the practices of the first six modules (including hydration, dream journaling, and maintaining cleanliness of ourselves and spaces), let us begin additional protocols for increased awareness while dreaming and awake. We will explore what some call “lucid dreaming.” This can be described as the ability to recognize one is dreaming while dreaming or the ability to manipulate one’s dreams to one’s desires. If our dreams are messages from our ancestors, we must be very careful about manipulating their messages before understanding our individual and lineage dream language/medicine.
Assignment 1: Experience Your Medicine
Be mindful of the drums in each of the ancestor veneration videos. How can you apply what you see in the videos to your ancestor altar upkeep and ceremonies?
We must breathe deeply and relax into our ancestors arms. A friend of mine shared with me a Peruvian belief that when we sit with the rocks we are sitting with our ancestors. Our ancestors are all around us and within us. We are experiencing them all the time. We are dreaming with them all the time. They are looking for ways to communicate with us. Keep developing your relationship with you ancestors at you altar (indoors and outdoors) and the language of your dreams.
Note: In many African traditions, including Sangoma tradition, dolls are only used for non-consenual witchcraft. The doll in this video was constructed during TBN’s time in art school as a self-portrait of their own fragmentation. In the video, the cord cutting is representative of severing from an old pattern. What patterns or socialization might you what to sever from your present and future?
Assignment 2: Cord Cutting Protocol
“The use of string and knot tying in the traditional healing process found through West and Central Africa as well as throughout the African diaspora; it would appear throughout the black belt South as well as in northern urban black communities until the mid-twentieth century.”
-Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’ The Old African American Hoodoo System
Review Cord Cutting Protocol
Consider the ways that healing oneself is also healing your ancestors. To let go is always an invitation to be bring something new. Focus on nourishing the self (eating richly, luxurious baths, joyous laughter, sweetest naps, freeing sex with self, etc) whenever doing cord cutting work.
Assignment 3: Lucid Dreaming I
Listen to C.C.D. recording ft. TBN, a child of Haitians, and a Black therapist.
What does lucidity mean to you? Is it connected to sobriety or a heightened state? How do you experience clarity? What does clarity feel like in your body?
Assignment 4: Schedule your One-on-One
We will be discussing your questions, dreams, goals and final project. Since we are already working one-on-one and there has been some expression of your final project as a living collage (full time cultural work), let’s discuss in our next meeting about how to document your journey and how to stand in the opportunities that are unfolding.
Assignment 5: Rest and Reflect
How do you experience lucidity in waking realm? Have you experienced lucidity in dream realm? Lucidity can be awareness - is my dream more tactile, more liquid, more emotional? Lucidity can be experienced through memory - Oh I dream about…
Reflect on what lucidity means for you in the below form through the lens of being a full time cultural worker.