The Ancestral Altar - connecting to the Dísir

There’s something I want to share with you, a truth that came to find me when I wasn’t expecting it.

Not long ago, I sang myself into trance, to sit with my Dísir, my female ancestors. To listen to them. To feel them. To learn from them.

I thought I knew what would come. I know the stories that run through my blood, the stories so many of us know, even if no one ever says them out loud. Stories of women who swallowed their rage because there was no safe place to pour it. Women who were silenced, shamed, violated. Women who carried burdens they never chose. 

So I sat down expecting to feel all of that. The grief, the heaviness, the old wounds humming under my skin. But what they gave me instead was something I didn’t know I needed…

They told me they don’t want me to carry it.

They don’t want us, the daughters and granddaughters, the ones who came after,  to feel all the pain they had to hold.

They don’t want us to keep bleeding for them.

They don’t want us to stay bound by stories that were never meant to be our whole story.

They told me they are strong enough to hold what is theirs. That their suffering was their path, not ours to live again.

They asked me to remember it, yes, to name it, to honour it… but not to sit in it. Not to suffer.

Not to keep my body shackled to theirs through wounds alone.

They reminded me there was a time before the pain and silencing.

A time when women were celebrated. Our intuition trusted. Our bodies honoured.

When we were leaders. When our cycles were sacred. When our wisdom shaped the hearth, the family, the land.

That is what they want us to reclaim.

After my journey I shared with Rachel what I was given and she agreed it’s a powerful prayer to weave into our next Ancestral Altar.

That every woman who joins us knows, you do not have to feel it all to heal it all.

You do not have to suffer to be loyal.

You do not have to keep re-living what they survived.

The Ancestral Altar is not about drowning in what’s heavy, it’s about acknowledging it, tending to it, and handing it back to the earth, to the spirits, to the vættir, to the healed and well ancestors who are strong enough to hold it.

During our next altar we will weave a despacho, prayer bundle, for liberation. For freedom from the loops that bind us to stories that are not ours anymore.

We will breathe, move, sing, not to go digging for wounds, but to let what wants to rise come up gently, to release what’s ready, to let our bodies remember what freedom feels like.

Because I believe this with every cell in me.

When women free ourselves from the pain of the past, we heal the world.

We don’t heal it by staying in the wound, we heal it by opening our palms and saying, I honour you. I thank you. I set you free.

If you feel that knot in your belly when you think of the women who came before you. If you know in your bones that it’s time to break the cycle and reclaim what was once sacred, you’re welcome here.

Bring your untold story. Bring your hushes. Bring your hope.

We will remember together, and we will let it go.

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