What or Who Are Ancestral Spirit Guides and How Can You Connect With Them?

In Episode 34 of The Intuitive Health Podcast, Dr Anthony shares what, or who Ancestral Spirit Guides are and how they can show up in your life to show what needs healing and support you on that journey.

In this important 'how-to' episode, Dr Anthony delves into three main types of Ancestors: Blood (Biological), Ancestors of the Land, and Spiritual or Soul Ancestors - exploring both the "light" (gifts) and "shadow" (trauma). 

Dr Anthony also explains how you can connect with your Ancestral Spirit Guides, whether that be through guided meditation, shamanic journeying, journalling, or just by asking them for help! Tune in to learn how to transmute inherited trauma into light, free your soul, and courageously walk the path of your destiny. Note, Spirit Guides can come in forms beyond Ancestors and Dr Anthony will deep dive on those in a separate episode.

Dr Anthony Rafferty is a doctor, reiki healer, shaman and intuitive healer based in Dublin, Ireland. Throughout this podcast series, Dr Anthony bridges the gap between science and holistic healing by combining evidence-based Western medicine with nutrition advice, lifestyle guidance and traditional energy practices.

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and share it on Apple or Spotify. Visit the Intuitive Health website to book a healing session.

Transcript

Welcome to the Intuitive Health podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anthony Rafferty, a medical doctor, a PhD, Reiki, and shamanic intuitive healer. I'm here to bring you on a journey of holistic healing that explores the science of the physical body combined with mental and emotional well-being, energetic, and spiritual health. And I am so excited today to be chatting to you all about ancestors. So, there's a lot of chat goes on these days about ancestral healing and it's one of the main themes of what I actually do in my practice and I really wanted to go into a bit more detail about what an ancestor actually is, the different types of ancestors that we have and how we can work with them to heal actually some of the wounds that are in our ancestral lineages. How our ancestors can work with us to heal our wounds and also how we can connect with them. So, I'm super excited to have you here today to be able to look at that. And, you know, as with all of the work that we kind of explore in this podcast and I do in my sessions, there's light and dark to all of this stuff. So, when we're exploring what an ancestor is and the different types of ancestors, we'll be speaking into the light and the shadow of that. So, the light is obviously all about healing and uh the gifts that we can actually receive. leave from our ancestors and then obviously we'll be taking a bit of a deeper dive into the shadow aspect of what needs to be healed and how we can inherit some of the wounds unfortunately that pass through some of our ancestral lineages. So let's get stuck in. So there are loads of different types of ancestors and I first uh got introduced to this theme when I was reading a book by Mark Woolen. and um he kind of talked about inherited trauma and how it comes down the family lineage and that we basically inherit trauma from our ancestors and my mind was absolutely blown away by this. I went through the book with a fine tooth comb and it really resonated with me and obviously that was many years ago and I've gone on a journey since as a shamanic healer and realized that we actually work with so many different types of ancestors through our healing journey.

Um, and there's quite a large spiritual context to ancestral work as well, which is just so fascinating and it blows my mind. And in the sessions that I do with people where we go deep into their ancestral lineage, the stuff that comes to the surface blows my mind. It it just blows my mind. Some of the sessions, even after doing this work for years, still leave me speechless with regard to what is held in the family lineage that um that can cause so much discomfort and dispute and despair um within our lives. So what am I talking about? Essentially I'm talking about inheritance through our biological lineage and I'm specifically talking about our blood ancestors. So these are our genetic ancestors. So they're our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents and everybody that extends um back along our genetic lineage. So they're literally the DNA that's in our blood. And uh generally speaking, I tend to find that they have lived experiences that then get transmitted through our our lineage down to us. And some of us step forward to be the change makers in our family lineage. We step forward to be the vessel for change to be able to sit into some of the trauma that's been passed down through the family lineage and to basically transmute it into light. Uh, and I know a lot of the people that step through my door are these change makers or the transmuters um of this uh inherited trauma that can move through the lineage. Um, you know, so some of us actually feel a lot of deep pain and fear and shame and all of these things that actually isn't ours. It's been inherited. So you know when I went through my medical training the scientific term that we uh used to look at all the time was kind of genetic inheritance and you know there's a scientific term called epigenetics where things kind of move down through family lines and are amplified um from one generation to the next. And there's been a lot of of studies especially in animals um or animal models that show that how certain um things are expressed within a family lineage um can be determined from a point of onset that's much furthered back in the family line.

And this absolutely blew my mind when I was actually in my very scientific head studying medicine uh and working as a scientist. I I found it all really quite fascinating. But now that I actually work on a very energetic and spiritual level with people, I see that, you know, some people come through to me and they're like, "Oh, I was told that this disease is not genetic.". And I look at them and I go through their family lineage and I'm like, well, we may not be able to explain it as genetic in medicine, but this is very much energetic. Um, and there's an energetic imprint or uh this kind of um distortion within the energy body that's been handed down through the family lineage. And we can actually heal these energetic imprints that are handed down through doing ancestral healing essentially. So, what am I kind of speaking specifically into here? Um, I'm speaking into the trauma that's been handed down through the family lineage and what might that look like essentially. Um, it could be a greatgrandfather who was in the war. Um, and kind of still echoes that within the men. Um, uh, this kind of energy of war and trauma that run through the family line. And obviously because I do a lot of work with the womb. Uh the womb is one of the places where a lot of this kind of energetic disturbance is held and particularly in Ireland um in which we had the Magdaleneerries there was a lot of issues and separation between mother and child that happened uh within our lineages here. So there's some deep deep wounding that I tend to to feel when I work with people on a very deep energetic or shamanic level. Um and And essentially it's about kind of exploring that trauma and removing the energetic imprint that's been handed down through the lineage. Uh however, one thing I love to say to people is it's not all about the shadowy crap that we've inherited. You know, it's not just about the addictions, the grief, the silence, the poverty, and the fear that we've taken on. We can also inherit the gifts. And this is the thing. It's it's all about kind of this lovely balance between the shadow and light.

We can also tap into these beautiful um energies and gifts of uh these beautiful skills that they may have had back through the lineage. Uh for example, your uh maternal grandmother may have actually been a healer, but she actually silenced her gifts and but you know, she could be really really have been quite gifted uh within her healing ability. So, you know, When we look at that specifically, obviously there was an issue with how she expressed herself. Um, and that's part of the wound that we heal while we work with her. Um, and her energy, but the healing energy that you receive as a gift is almost like um a beautiful um nod to to what you can inherit from a a more light side of things, which is really really lovely. So, this is um but one of the ancestor that I tend to kind of explore with people and that's our biological lineage, our blood ancestors. And you know, I often say to people, well, how do we actually work with our ancestors? How do we connect to them?. And I love doing this work. So, in practice, I tend to use um uh kind of healing energetics, hands-on energy work, where I bring people through guided meditation and shamanic journeying um to actually meet some of these souls. And uh through practices like family constellation work on a deep energetic level we can actually interact with these um beautiful energies or ancestors within your biological lineage to do some healing work. Um and the thing is some of these ancestors have carried such deep trauma that actually you know when we help them to heal uh during these sessions it frees their soul. We're doing um healing work with with souls that may not be actually in the physical realm anymore and you're relieving them of the burden of some of these energies that they carry in their um in their soul. So I I think it's incredibly incredibly incredibly powerful work. It's really quite amazing what I see in practice. Another practice that I tend to recommend for people if they really want to get deep into their uh ancestral work is to set up an ancestral altar. And I love working with the ancestors in this way.

Uh it involves like collecting some family photos or heirlooms and setting up a sacred place in your home where you offer like healing gifts. You offer beautiful flowers. Maybe you offer some uh kind of alcohol or tinctures that they they would have loved or some tobacco or or maybe if you're baking you're offering some food to the ancestors. I really really love this and having an ancestral altar can be such such a beautiful way to honor your biological lineage, your family lineage. Uh, and I should speak into this actually because I work with a lot of people who are adopted also. So although I'm speaking into biological lineages here, we can also work with the lineages um of the the family that we have been raised by. So I think it's quite fascinating when I'm doing this type of work because it's almost like there's multiple threads that feel it feed into the energy system of people. that have been adopted. And so, of course, they carry a lot of um a lot of shadow that they can actually heal on behalf of multiple different lineages, which is a huge undertaking. Um but also the gifts that they can receive from all of these different lineages is quite phenomenal as well. So, generally speaking, a beautiful ancestral altar in which you make offerings regularly and you set lovely intentions to heal on their behalf. and ask them for guidance and healing which they can support you on. Uh it can be really really powerful and I love I love love love doing this type of work with our ancestors. The next group of ancestors that I want to talk about are the ancestors of the land that you live on. So this can be kind of uh work with ancestors that are linked to the land but also the indigenous ways in which that land holds uh memory from people that used to live on the land previously. So I this is really quite amazing especially in Irish uh culture because some of the work that I do with people we're literally going deep into actually uh the the lineage of ancestors and the wounds that the land holds and we're healing that because you know land has memory too.

land has an energetic memory and it's quite fascinating what we can actually tap into uh on this journey with the land and what we can heal uh and what we can inherit from going into legal agreement with the land um because actually we're we agree when we sign our contracts are legal binding agreements that we become energetically entangled with the land that we live on. So I have worked with some absolutely phenomenal land healers very very gifted individuals that use doussing rods and look at the lay lines and the water um lines that run through land essentially that people own. And some of these very gifted healers can tune into the energy of the land and can determine if there's any trauma there that needs to be released and healed. But also there's some beautiful energies that we can tap into on the land as well. And this is something I absolutely love working with and it's the elemental beings and the nature spirits that are there. So, generally speaking, I love tapping into the energetics of the elementals. So, these are these little beings kind of uh fairies and nymphs and other energies that are associated with the different types of plants, the different trees that might be there. Essentially, they're all these gorgeous um spirits of these beautiful, beautiful natural elements uh that can assist us with our journey of healing. And I always find it quite fascinating because one thing I've learned from kind of deepening my knowledge about herbs and herbal medicines is that a lot of people end up living on land um with uh herbs and different uh beautiful natural elements that grow locally based on what they elves need in their body, which I just find fascinating. So, really start to take note if you're living somewhere with some green space, what's growing locally, how can you connect with the elements, um the little elemental beings and the nature spirits that are there?. And also, do you know any history about the land? What was the um land used for previously? Because land holds memory. It has a spirit.

And you know, it's it's a really good idea to go into alignment um with the elementals, with the nature spirits and with the ancestors of the land um because honoring them helps us to live in right relationship with the land and to avoid spiritual disconnection. And living in right relationship with the land and with the beautiful world around us um is called ini. It's to live in right relationship um with the beautiful spiritual conction connection that the land offers us. So, tuning deep into that energy, how can you honor um those beautiful energies that live on your land? And usually what I tend to recommend is making offerings. So, that can be with water or flowers or like I said some beautiful um tobacco or different things that maybe you you h collect uh in the home. Maybe it's nuts and seeds to feed the birds and just connect with the land. You know, I tend to love the practice of grounding where I just walk barefoot and I ask for permission. I ask for permission when I enter onto any new land and also every day uh when I step into a green space and I'm grounding, I'm like, is it okay for me to be here and connect uh with the local trees and rivers and stones and it's such a beautiful and magical way to live life. When you ask for permission to be on the land and you know, we often get a deep sense of yes that's okay or no you can't be here and I find this fascinating when I go and and travel and do healing with people um or do healing on land um and just speaking to the land itself and the the energetics of these gorgeous um nature spirits and elementals you know I will always ask permission as well if I'm taking anything from the land I'll ask the land I will ask those nature beings and elementals whe it's okay for me to take what I'm going to take from the land. And you know, sometimes when I'm visiting some beautiful locations or some spiritual sites where the the land and the stones and all of these things hold energetic memory of kind of the these sacred sites. Is it okay for me to take this stone? Or maybe it's a twig or some trees or some berries or whatever that might be. And you'll generally get a good sense of whether you have permission to do it. or whether you don't.

Um, and just try it a couple of times. Tune into your intuition and and just begin to listen. And if you get a sense that no, you shouldn't be taking something, well, then put it back. And if it's okay to take some of those things, you can potentially offer them at different sites, which is really beautiful. I carry a little sacred satchel, a little purse almost, um, in which I have some of my sacred offerings. I work a lot with my ancestral um, uh, guides, my shamanic ancestors, which I'll speak into in just a moment. But, uh, they really like tobacco. So, I carry loose tobacco. Um, and I also carry little stones and berries and gifts that I've received from some of the other sites that I've visited. And I offer them anytime I visit a new location as a little offering to the to the spirits of the land and to the energy of the land um, for welcoming me into that space. You know, it's really really important. When I moved house recently as well, I made sure to really connect with the with the energetics of the land I was moving on to, with the energy of the house. And I made offerings. I did deep energy clearing. And now what I do is I grow vegetables. I've put in a little um a beautiful little wildlife pond out the back. I grow so many beautiful flowers that honor the space. And I've created loads of biodiversity in that space by simply just turning up and kind of cocreating with the land um to bring beautiful harmony and just abundance to the space. So, you'd be surprised when you tend to start tapping into these things how much um how much the land will speak back to you uh when you begin healing on its behalf and honoring um the land that you are on. Really really so special. So, we have spoken a little bit about our blood ancestors um And we've spoken a little bit about the ancestors of the place or the land that we live on, but also uh I'd like to speak into a little bit with regard to your spiritual ancestors. So you're outside of your bloodline uh you can connect with your soul lineage.

So we are beautiful, gorgeous beings of light and we come into this human body um which consists of blood and bone um but the light of Our soul carries a special understanding that extends far beyond just this physical life. So it our soul is eternal. It's lived many lives before and we can really connect and tap into the just the magic that our soul holds. You know what I tend to see through my shamanic work is that our soul comes with a beautiful army of spirit guides of different dietes. We can connect to ascended beings. Um, and we can connect to to teachers and healers um that exist beyond the veil of what we see as reality in our physical world. And this is one thing that I adore about the shamanic work. The deeper I went into my meditation, the deeper I went into my shamanic practice and I began to use my third eye, my vision beyond what my physical eyes could see. It's almost like you're seeing Being beyond the veil of physical reality, you begin to be able to connect with your guides and your ancestors that are more linked to your spiritual and soul lineage. And I just think this is such a precious and magical ability that we can all tap into. So what are these kind of soul and spiritual ancestors? They are essentially beings of light and they walk with you as protectors and teachers. and they guide you back to your soul path. So, you know, when I was on my shamanic training, I heard a lot about fate and people talked a lot about fate. But one of the teachers that I uh have learned a lot from, he speaks into fate being fatal because essentially fate is what we're handed down through our ancestral lineage. Um, and this is our blood lineage, what we've inherited and that's the trauma um that we walk daytoday in the shoes of the ancestors. However, we can actually heal that. We can take the shoes that we've inherited off and we can step onto the path of our destiny. So, if fate is fatal and that's based on all of the conditioned beliefs and the basically the the footsteps that we're walking in through the conditioned um behaviors and lives of the people who came before. for us. What does it look like to step off the path of fate and onto the path of destiny?.

Well, destiny is what our soul is here to achieve. It's about going on the path to actually free ourselves from all of the conditioned behaviors of our human existence and to tap more into the beautiful predestined soul path that the eternal nature of our heart and our being is here to live. And that means tapping into our divinely unique gifts and the light that we hold. And it means that we actually have to journey through a lot of the wounds that have been imposed upon us that keep us small, that suppress us and prevent us from sharing our authentic light with the world. So what do these spiritual and soul ancestors do? They essentially help us to reclaim the gifts from our past lives or any unfinished work from other versions of uh ourselves. So, from other realms of existence and from past uh traumas, it's about working through these things to reclaim the light and the gifts of our soul and allow us to walk the path of our soul in this lifetime, the path of our destiny, not the path that has been predetermined by our ancestral trauma um from our more blood and bone ancestors. Um it's it's not to do what that's been fated to us. It's about our destiny. So, you know, one of the most magical parts of this journey that I've been on is the path of connecting with my guides, the path of connecting with ascended masters. And if you want to kind of hear more about what an ascended master is, I really recommend tuning into uh the work of Kyle Gray over in the UK in Scotland. and uh he has some fantast fantastic books that have taught me a lot about what ascended masters are and just begin to set intentions about who you want to work with. Um and there's some lovely activations in some of his books that activate your energy and really clearly define um intention to work with specific ances an anc ascended masters. So generally speaking um with my womb work I will tap into, you know, some beautiful um ancient midwives come to work with me. Um I'll work with the energy of the shamanas, uh the shamanic womb healers, um that come before me. And also the guardian of the womb. And I see her as this beautiful energy shrouded in red robes.

And you know, it's just so powerful when you can tap into all of these different guides and dietes and masters to work with and All of us are going to be on a journey with a very unique spirit team and you know sometimes um it really calling on with intention um some of these guides can be really amazing. So for example uh some of the guides that I tend to work with that are more spiritual um and soul related would be uh Bridgdess Bridg. I work with her for womb work. I also work with um Bastet uh the god goddess of fertility. She is an Egyptian uh goddess. But also with regard to some of the priestesses that I helped to awaken in my practice, we'll be working with Mary Magdalene and the energy of Mother Mary. So, there's a lot of different ascended masters that we can work with. And usually when I'm opening sacred space in my practice every day, I'll call on all of my spirit team, all of my guides, all of the ascended masters that I'll be working with for that day. And I will set very clear intentions that I want specific guides to step in and help me to do specific work for the greatest good of myself and the greatest good of my clients. And I love it. It's almost like a ceremonial ritual uh in which I invoke the energies of these different soul and spirit ancestors to work with me every day. I have a specific ultra setup that I keep my messa or shamanic medicine bag on with all of my different essential oils, all of my different herbs with my sage, all of my um beautiful incense and um I have sacred wellwater that I keep there as well. So when I open my sacred space every day, I will always call in these beautiful soul or spiritual ancestors to work with me for the greatest good of myself and the clients that I be working with today. Uh I will also call in my blood and bone ancestors um to help me remember my gifts, my gifts as a healer and to help me um essentially channel the gifts that have been running through my family lineage. Uh so that's usually what I will do in the opening of my sacred space every day before I begin to work with people.

Now one thing I will just speak um briefly into as well is working with um the more blood and bone ancestors because you know although they can have um some gifts and it's been so uh beautiful to help people step into channeling um these beautiful gifts and kind of connecting that energy so it runs clearly through the family lineage. We also have to remember that um some of the ancestors have had uh uh unresolved trauma and like I mentioned things like addiction, violence, grief or the burdens that they carried that may have manifested um through certain cyclical karmic patterns through specific illnesses in the body or energetic blockages that exist uh existed within their bodies. Some of them will cross into the healing sessions from beyond the veil and they'll basically want you to assist them in healing. And this is really it's such a powerful session when this happens. Um you know because actually we can be that um catalyst for change. We can be those channels for unresolved trauma. Uh that we can help the ancestors heal and rest in peace uh beyond the veil. And it can bring a real sense of warmth and safety and peace. to the ancestor. Um, and it also helps to settle any emotional heaviness or repeated familial karmic patterns that continue to keep showing up within the family or within your life. So, that is essentially um what I kind of wanted to touch into today. It was mainly just to clarify um the three main groups of ancestors that I tend to work with. The blood and bone ancestors linked to our biological lineage, but that's not necessarily linked specifically to our biological lineage. It can also include the lineage of people who raised us even if it is adoptive. And especially we're creating such beautiful modern families these days of shared parenthood and all of this sort of stuff. So there's some lovely energetics to explore there and loads of different ways in which we can heal along these lineages but also reclaim gifts from all of these beautiful ancestors. In addition to that, we spoke into the ancestors of the land and the indigenal ancestors or the indigenous ancestors that lived on the land previously.

What it looks like to connect with nature, spirits, elementals, and um really to honor the land that you're that you're living on that you're you're you're uh you're taking part in on the dayto-day. And of course, we also have the spiritual ancestors, the soul ancestors that help us on our journey. And they're things like spirit guides, ascended masters. You can work with your shamanic guides if you're into shamanism. You can work with Reiki masters that came before you. You can literally call on all of these beautiful healing energies um to come and work with you. And you can do this with anybody with any um group um or community that you connect with. You can absolutely tap into the ancestral um energetics of these gorgeous souls that came before and you can honor them for the sacrifices and uh what what journey that they went on contributed to how you live today. So it is absolutely an amazing journey to go on to connect with your ancestors and you can really tap into um going on a journey with them through kind of ritual invoking their energies calling um them to be with you by setting up ancestral altars and all also by setting intention through potentially some shamanic journeying and also some dream work uh in which you call certain ancestors to be with you before you go to dream and ask them to work with you to help you heal uh when you're in your dream space. So that is me today talking all about ancestors and some of the fascinating work that I do um with ancestors and how you can begin to tap in to um the energetics of healing trauma within your ancestral lineages uh but also calling on and uh reclaiming the gifts that these ancestors can help you to embody. So with love from my heart to yours and all of my ancestors sending love Dr. Tony.