Bridger of Worlds
The Bridger of Worlds podcast is an in-depth walkthrough between the world of matter and world of spirit. I struggled with porn addiction for close to fifteen years, and all of this led me to discovering some very crucial and beautiful things about not only the physicality of my existence, but the spirituality of it as well. Since then, I‘ve been building bridges that have served me in feeling more whole and well-integrated. I’ve now made it my mission to share with you whatever it is I’ve learned.
Themes, topics and healing modalities such as spiritual embodiment, psychosomatic practices, Shadow Work, Masculine/Feminine energetics, conscious sexuality and archetypal meanings are brought to the forefront in order to raise awareness around what is out of sight because it is only from there that new life can ever emerge.
The greatest paradox of the human condition is to live amongst duality as we seek unity. This is a podcast honoring both and in doing so, creating the loving connections and honest-to-raw conversations we so desire in our lifetimes.
Bridger of Worlds
From Tradition to Transcendence: The Journey of Ancestral Healing
In episode six of the Bridger of Worlds Podcast, host Ioannis Kokkinos dives deep into the transformative practice of ancestral healing, a modality he has explored extensively since moving to Greece seven years ago. Kokkinos shares his personal journey of connecting with his ancestors and the profound impact this has had on his own spiritual path. He discusses the importance of meditation, intuitive practices, and the powerful role of cultural heritage—through song and dance—in the healing process.
This episode also explores the interconnectedness between personal grief work and ancestral healing, illustrating how honoring and working with ancestral experiences can foster personal growth and profound healing. Kokkinos highlights the ways in which ancestral wisdom and energy can be harnessed to heal past traumas and break generational cycles.
Listeners will gain valuable insights on how to move beyond the physical realms and connect with both bloodline and spiritual ancestors. The episode also discusses the poetic transformation of ancestral trauma into healing energy, or “medicine,” and offers practical steps for integrating ancestral healing into one’s spiritual journey.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bridger of Worlds podcast. I am your host, Ioannis Kokkinos. Thank you so much for joining me. If you're watching on YouTube, thank you for tuning in. If you're listening on one of the hosting platforms, thank you for tuning in as well.
Reflecting on Episode Five: Grief
So today is episode six. I do want to elaborate upon episode five and episode five wasn't the easiest topic to talk about. Right. Grief is never easy to discuss, to unpack, to, you know, unload.
But we have to do it nonetheless. This is why I've started this podcast. It is about bringing tough topics to the table. It is about going deep. It is about getting more raw when it comes to our conversations and what ultimately we seek and we desire as part of our humanity, which is connection and meaning And truth and love.
Ancestral Healing: A Personal Journey
So speaking of all of these beautiful things, uh, today I actually do want to talk about one of my all time favorite modalities of healing, uh, topics, and that is ancestral healing. This is a modality of healing that I've been practicing for the last few years. I'm actually living in Greece, the place of my birth, my homeland, my motherland.
This is where I was born, but I was raised in Montreal, Canada. Even so, I went to Greek schools there. I was in Greek dance troupes. I was very much immersed in the Greek community. I was coming here almost every summer. I was raised to love my cultural heritage and I felt very, very much connected to it from a very young age.
So I did move here seven years ago. It'll be seven years this May. And this modality of healing actually came into my field a few months before moving to Greece. Uh, that was the time when I was really seeking more unconventional spiritual, uh, schools of thought, teachings. I was going to workshops, I was doing retreats.
And one of the workshops that I went to, there was someone that had mentioned that what you heal for yourself, you heal for your bloodlines. And I remember a spark go on within me. I remember a light bulb turning on.
And ever since I heard that.
Understanding Ancestral Practices
I started to read more about ancestral healing. I started to, uh, read about the cultures around the world that still practice ancestral veneration, which is ancestral healing. It's not practiced everywhere. It's not every culture that condones it. It's not every religion that supports it.
But, But at the end of the day, you need to do what you need to do for you when it comes to your healing and your seeking and ultimately realizing your truth. So ancestral healing is not at all something that was in my field growing up as a boy, as a teenager. It wasn't in my home. , it's not something really that Greeks in general.
You know, we don't like set up altars and give thanks to our ancestors. We don't, you know, provide offerings and so on and so forth. The ancient Greeks used to do that, but those traditions subsided throughout time and history. And here we are. I do believe ancestral healing and practices of ancestral veneration are making a comeback, , regardless of what your cultural background is. Our ancestors used to.
Honor their ancestors, which happened to be our ancestors as well.
But the thing with these practices, you know, from when I was reading, I remember not everything resonated. Um, so what I ended up doing is taking bits and pieces of practices and teachings that did resonate and also I put my own intuitive guidance into it as well. This is a highly intuitive practice because we cannot really commune with our honorable dead logically.
Like, we are hyper obsessed with reason, rationality, and logic. which have their place, for sure, but that is only one portion of the brain, right? Like the left portion of the brain is the analytical mind, the logical mind, but we also have the right hemisphere of the brain, which is the creative, the artistic, and the intuitive brain.
And we need hemispheres. I'm not so much about the conversation that people are left brained and right brained. I could see why that comes up. No doubt. Obviously there are a lot of people that are more prone to logic and other people are more prone to intuition, but we need both.
Every single human needs both. And again, this speaks to the bridging of the masculine and the feminine, which I talked about in previous episodes.
Connecting with Ancestral Energy
So ancestral healing, ancestral veneration is a highly intuitive practice because first and foremost, it requires meditation. It requires being with the quiet, it requires being with the silence.
And of course it also requires that you question that you get curious about your relationship with the afterlife, which again, It's not a topic that we grow up really, like, conversing about, right? Like, death obviously is a part of life. Our ancestors were once here. They're no longer here with us. We are here now.
We are their offspring. We are their seeds that came to fruition. So there's something there. There's a connection there. , and we see this with so many generations that have come before us that move through these practices, right?
If we look to Africa, like today, even if we look to South America, if we look to Asia,. If we look to the tribes around our world, they are so deeply connected to their ancestors because they know that what gets passed on, whether it's trauma
or a blessing, is to be witnessed, is to be looked after. And when it comes to ancestral healing, obviously, we're also talking about ancestral trauma Because traumas do get passed on in the bloodlines. This is the nature of blood. This is the nature of DNA. That is where genetic information is. So we can say, like, on the physical level, Just by our blood coursing through our bodies, our ancestors are with us, but we can also say on the energetic level that even though they're no longer in body, their energy remains because energy does not die and we can call this soul, we can call this spirit, we can call this consciousness.
So even though our ancestors are no longer here with us, their energy remains. Their genetic information is in our body, but their energetic information is also with our energy. So when we find ourselves to be stuck in certain patterns, you know, when we're trying to move on, we're trying to heal something, we're trying to let go of something, but we, we keep coming back to like the same story.
We keep coming back to the same thing over and over again. This can be a very strong indicator of a certain ancestor or group of ancestors or ancestral trauma. that really needs to be brought to the light. Because when it comes to healing, no matter what modality we're talking about, it is about making the unconscious conscious. It is about transmuting that shadow, which resides in the unconscious, and transforming it into light, into consciousness, into love. Now that's more of a poetic metaphorical way of saying that, but really that's what it is. The shadow resides in the unconscious. We go into the unconscious to witness the shadow. It's within the unconscious where the shadow transforms. That shadow transforms into light, which is love, which is consciousness, which is the higher emotion.
Right? It's quite poetic. That's the metaphor of it.
The Role of Meditation and Intuition
So, I know when I started to practice, I didn't even know if I was doing it correctly. I thought that I maybe had to see somebody, or I had to hear somebody. Um, I had to know a really specific story.
But really, our traumas tell us everything. Whatever trauma we're trying to heal, whatever trauma we want to hold space for, that trauma would tell us the story of an ancestor. Because most likely, this trauma got regurgitated. This trauma got passed on, so we don't even necessarily have to know the name of the ancestor.
It might be an ancestor from a different culture, right? We have thousands of ancestors, and it doesn't mean we're gonna take on all of their baggage, but certain traumas, certain loads do regurgitate. So when we're meditating and we're connecting to our body, we're connecting to our breath and emotion rises, emotion surfaces, we can actually also just have an awareness, keep an awareness around our ancestors.
And the connections will come. The intuitive downloads will come because as I mentioned, this is highly intuitive work. have to trust yourself here when you're doing this work. And this is what I've been doing. This is how I've been implementing these practices.
Cultural Heritage and Ancestral Connection
One very, very powerful way to connect with your ancestors is to listen to the songs or even dances, if they exist, of your cultural heritage.
Now, I incarnated as Greek in this lifetime, and I'm highly fortunate to have thousands of songs and dances, Greek folklore. To listen to, to dance to, and this is a very, very potent and powerful way to connect to my ancestors. Being in Greece these last seven years, moving from Canada to come to Greece, , it wasn't in my rational mind that, oh, I'm going to Greece to move through ancestral healing.
And at that point I was more spiritually open. At that point I was more spiritually aware. . So when I came here, I realized, Shit, I'm here to do deep, deep ancestral healing and ancestral veneration. I am in Rhodes. , I've lived in Athens.
I've lived in Skiathos. I've lived in Corfu. Bits and pieces of the country have called me to work with specific land. It is important to work with the ancestors of the land as well. We all have like bloodline ancestors, but we also need to commune with the ancestors of the lands that we visit. So, again, it's not really a matter of knowing the full story.
It's what you feel when you are somewhere. It's what you feel when you go in the sea, when you are walking on the earth, when you're around certain trees, right? Like our ancestors used to be deeply, deeply connected to the nature world. Prayer was always done. Outside, they knew that nature, matter, the material world was just the manifestation of the spiritual world.
They knew that. There were and still are a lot of practices and traditions that even include singing and dancing, singing and dancing. are , very powerful forms of prayer, literal prayer, to pray to the ancestors, to pray to
God, source, spirit, the higher force, the higher energy, the great infinite intelligence. , dancing is prayer, singing is prayer. We still see these practices, we still see these traditions in , many tribes, in many cultures around the globe.
And grief work, which ties back into what I was saying in the previous episode, is very, very much connected to ancestral healing because our ancestors didn't get to mourn it all. Our ancestors lived through very harsh, difficult, challenging times. There's probably a lot of unmourned life , that got passed on to us.
So when we're doing grief work, when we're mourning from our lifetime, When we're mourning things or people that we've lost in our lifetime, that touches base with also ancestral grief because we're family. And even though I lost, let's say a specific person or a certain thing from this lifetime, grief is grief.
So let's say there's an ancestor that lost someone or lost something in their lifetime. , it's still grief. So their grief ripples into my grief. So when I'm mourning and I'm grieving, this is a , very powerful way to honor the ancestors as well. Because really when we hold space for their trauma, we're holding space for our trauma.
And the trauma transforms the trauma becomes the medicine. And that's ultimately what they wanted. What we want in our lifetime is what they wanted in their lifetime. Whatever healing, , whatever success, whatever prosperity, whatever health we dream of, they had the same dreams and, you know, just knowing that.
Many of them, most of them live through wars and loss and genocides and poverty and scarcity and, you know, no heating during winter, no air conditioning during the summer. I mean, that can bleed into our livelihoods, and, you know, it's not constantly about thinking if we're going through a hardship, oh, you know, this is my ancestors, this is my ancestors, it's really about your intuition, your intuition will tell you how ancestral it is.
But just offering that awareness around your healing process to kind of invite your ancestors in can really make all of the difference. to think about moving forward if you'd like to start implementing this kind of work, uh, in your healing journey. Obviously, meditation is a must, connecting to the ancestors is going beyond this realm. So it is important to have a certain awareness around what that can mean when we are leaving energetically this plane.
Now we don't fully leave when we're meditating, right? As it is important to be in our body, to be very rooted and grounded when we are meditating.
But we are moving up the energetic channels, which are chakras. We have seven main chakras in our body, seven main energy centers, which I will definitely be talking about in other episodes. But basically when we're meditating, we're up here, right? We're like into the third eye, we're up in the crown chakra, and this is where we open Into the realm of the ancestors, into the realm of the afterlife, into the realm of deities, archetypes, gods, goddesses, frequencies, energies, messages. This is where everything comes from. But for today, obviously we're talking about the ancestors. So just knowing that. Yes, they are in our body through our blood and genetic information, but also their energy is accessible through meditation, through intuition, through connecting in this way.
If you do want to start implementing this practice, all you need to do is just hold space for this knowledge just have an awareness around this process. You don't have to see anybody. You don't have to hear anybody. It's just a knowing. And if you do come from a cultural background where there are songs, where there are dances, you don't even need to understand anything. You don't even need to even maybe even enjoy them.
Listen to the songs. If you know the dances, dance the dances, but if you don't know the dances, just play them and Just try and connect to the joy that your ancestors might be feeling when they're hearing these dances and these songs. Just try and connect to how they used to celebrate, or how they used to mourn, or how they used to enjoy life through these songs and these dances.
As I said before, growing up in Montreal, I was involved with quite a few dance troupes. So, even from back then, I remember some form of channeling happening when I was dancing. There are certain dances, there are certain areas of Greece, certain songs, certain music. That , really hits deep for me. Now I did say there are thousands of dances and songs from, uh, Greece. And depending on where you're from, depending on what area of the country you're looking at, you're looking at totally different dances, totally different songs, even different instruments.
So it is a , very culturally rich, a very potent heritage when it comes to song and dance in this part of the world. So I do remember channeling back then when I was dancing, and I didn't even know that I was channeling. I remember entering like a trance like state, and I didn't know that I was doing that.
And then I just made the parallels. I came to that conclusion because I've done workshops, I've done retreats, let's say, the Afro Brazilian tradition, where they're literally dancing, and they know that their ancestors are dancing through them, they know their ancestors are channeling through them.
, it's the exact same thing because dancing is a universal language. Song is a universal language. Dancing and singing are universal prayer. So it is something that can definitely be experienced. From anybody no matter what your cultural background is no matter where you come from if you have songs and dances And if you don't there are of course traditions in your culture that your ancestors used to practice that you Can also bring to the table now for your personal healing just by holding that space Just by providing that awareness and see what happens
Concluding Thoughts and Call to Action
So I will leave it here for today. If you have any comments, if you have any, you know, information that you'd like to give surrounding this modality of healing, please comment below. If you're on YouTube, , if you're watching on YouTube, please hit that like subscribe button. Also share the content. If you so feel called, if you are listening on one of the podcasting platforms,
thank you for tuning in as well. You can find me on Instagram with my full name. If you have any questions for me, , if you'd like to know more about my journey through Greece and know more specifics about ancestral practices and ancestral healing
That I've implemented in my journey. Please, please reach out to me whether that's on YouTube or on Instagram. So I do have some other things cooking. I will be making those announcements when those are ready.
So I will leave it here I will see you next week and as always please remember that you are the medicine and I am just the messenger Thank you very much