“Going Backwards to Go Forwards.”

Ten years ago, I found myself catapulted into years of obsessive research on my motherline. At the time it seemed like the only option I had to not only understand myself, but escape a never-ending pattern of toxicity and victimhood that had dominated my life.

To be more precise, I wasn’t really catapulted, but rather pulled gently yet firmly into a place in my psyche where past meets present, where ancestral spirits are real, where I couldn’t ignore the presence of what turned out to be my great-great-grandmother.

I’m not going to go into the details here. I’ve nearly finished a memoir about my ancestral healing experience and decolonizing my motherline. I want to talk about a certain flavor of disconnection that I see many women experiencing and how to reconnect with an indigenous energy that is every woman’s birthright.

Indigenous means ‘born from the land’, ‘to be born within’, and even ‘to give birth.’ Everyone comes from a lineage that, depending on its story, at some point was born from and lived intricately from the land. The word “human” roots back to the Latin word humus, meaning “earth, ground or soil,” and relates to ‘humility’ and ‘humble.’

The motherline is unique compared to our three other ancestral lineages, because through it we carry and pass on mitochondrial DNA to its members unchanged. Through this maternal DNA, we resonate together, like a tuning fork. Each member of the motherline, male and female, carries the same maternal inheritance passed on though the mother’s egg. The motherline is our clan, our earth, our embodied ancestral belonging. It is a channel that connects us like one living organism of which each generation is a part – a matrilineal psyche!

The disconnection is that we have become separated and isolated from this living, soulful flow of feminine energy that goes back through the motherline. An energy that is fed by a connection to Mother Earth, to the stories, the medicines, the wisdom, the foods, the magic and the soul of the land our ancestors grew from and were a part of. We look despairingly to the outer world, a crazy, patriarchal, power-hungry outer world for sense, for belonging, for soul, but what we are searching for, knowingly or not, can only come from within. From the inner place that connects us to those who went before us and whose gifts we carry within, if only we would turn our perspective towards them.

In the mentorship program where I teach women who want to become menopause midwives, we work closely with the sacred symbology of the labyrinth, a universal feminine archetype. When walking a labyrinth, although there is only one path, which will always take us forwards, one often gets the impression of going backwards. By following the path backwards, we are going forwards. We are also walking the steps of those whose shoulder we are standing on. When we connect to the ancients, the ancestral grandmothers, the load is shared, the wisdom of past generations, too. When the center of the labyrinth is reached, the journey outwards begins. The labyrinth is often considered an ancient symbol of the womb or the birth canal of the Great Goddess, where walking to the center represents a return to the source, and walking out represents a rebirth and integration of this source energy into life.

As I accompany women in my programs, I see the transformation when they finally reconnect to the existence and reality of their motherlines, to their songs and stories and through that to a deeper sense of self. The connection to the land of our foremothers is still a part of us and in the same way as our ancestors are in the lands, they are also in our bones and our psyches.

“… the collective unconscious is in no sense an obscure corner of the mind, but the mighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated over millions of years, the echo of prehistoric happenings to which each century adds an infinitesimally small amount of variation and differentiation.“ Carl Jung, Collected Works 7, Para 729

So, how do we get started in reconnecting with our ancestral experience? As long as you know where your motherline originates from, you can begin. My great-grandmother was born in Assam in North-East India. Her mother was from the hill tribes of that region. I have had such a wonderful time researching the ancient ways of the Assamese people—The religious beliefs, the magical beliefs, the rituals, sacred instruments and ceremonies, foods and plant medicines. You don’t have to know the details or have personal documents to understand your ancestors’ lives. There is plenty of historical and ethnobotanical information online for every corner of the world, as long as you know the land they came from.

Recently, I started hand-spinning again after thirty years, triggered by some research on the northern European female shamans or Volvas. I then remembered the women from the hill tribes of Assam are world re-known handweavers and spinners of the most gorgeous silks and cottons. After a few minutes of research, I was being nourished by the stories of my motherline and their deep connection to weaving and spinning. According to the Indian Institute of Handloom Technology, Mahatma Gandhi once eulogized the Assamese women for their weaving skills saying, “Every woman of Assam is a born weaver, and she weaves fairy tales in cloths.“

There are ancient stories of Assamese women weaving in just one night ’kavachkapur’, sacred talisman cloths believed to protect soldiers in battle. The process was a magical ritual where the cotton was collected at midnight, cleaned, spun and woven into cloth before dawn.

As I spin raw wool with my drop spindle, which is such a universal, ancient, feminine tool found in the same simple form all over the world, including Assam where it is known as a ‘takuri,’ I connect with my own ancestral mothers, but also the unbroken lineage of women past and present across the globe. Women from Mesopotamia, the Andes, Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America who used the very same spindles in the very same way. I feel the soulful energy of generations in that meditative, rhythmic motion that transforms raw fiber into the thread that has spun the world. It is this ancestral energy that I connect with, that nourishes me, that gives me the power to move forward, to turn up for life.

I’m not saying we all have to take up hand spinning or weaving, although they are beautiful crafts, but I am inviting you to sew the broken threads back together by discovering the heritage that is rightfully yours. The ancient ways that come from the land of your foremothers and are in your blood, bones and DNA. What were these magical ways of your people, the songs and chants, the rituals and crafts, the medicines and foods? Don’t forget, the route backwards helps us to reconnect with what is precious—our instincts, our rootedness, a sense of peace from connecting outer to inner, conscious to unconscious, past to present. These are the things that can nourish us from within, and if we listen carefully, we may even hear the voices of our ancestors guiding us forward.

Model of Saffron Walden Maze, the ancient turf maze in the town I grew up in from 12 years old.