Reuniting the Waters: What the Colorado River Is Teaching Me About Ancestral Healing
One of the beauties of feeling reconnected to the gifts and blessings of your people is that you can invite them into your life on a regular basis, often with surprising results. My daily gratitude practices and altar offerings have helped me trust the influence of my ancestors in my life, and I am watching my intentions grow tenfold in unexpected ways.
I am rolling into the autumn equinox season as the trip leader for a project called Reuniting the Waters, a source-to-sea prayer journey to help heal the Colorado River. It truly feels like my ancestors are driving the bus.
Reuniting the Waters
In the lands of the American Southwest, where I am a first-generation immigrant of my lineages, the Colorado River is dying because of human supremacy thinking. The mighty Colorado River, who carved the Grand Canyon, no longer reaches the sea. Her life purpose has been stolen.
Restoring her to wholeness is the ultimate plan and purpose of our mission.
Fourteen women have committed to making this ceremonial journey along the 1,400-mile river, traveling through the heart of the Grand Canyon to help clear an energetic path. Our goal is to inspire a shift in human consciousness from a mindset of domination over these waters to one of interconnection, reciprocity, and balance.
From Ancestral Healing to Earth Healing
This is the way our indigenous ancestors would have understood our other-than-human relationships before capitalism, colonialism, and caste took over our own indigenous cultures.
This is how ancestral healing becomes cultural healing, and cultural healing becomes earth healing.
Most of us carry diasporic DNA, and our ancestors know exactly how we got here. The magic lies in the healing between our own lineages and the indigenous wisdom of the lands we now live in.
Great changes are needed to bring us back into right relationship with our fellow earth dwellers. For me and my people, it starts with acknowledging the Colorado River as a whole, sovereign, living being with an inherent right to exist the way Mother Earth designed her.
Fortunately, her natural design is also one of the most important tools we have to buffer the climate change and ecocide we are currently experiencing.
Healing the burdens of our ancestors not only unhooks us from intergenerational trauma, but also brings a sense of belonging that helps us show up in the world more whole and less needy. We can finally shift from a taking mindset into a true receptivity to what is being given.
What the Waters Are Teaching Me
Resourced by my ancestors and directing my intentions toward reuniting the waters from the mountains to the sea, I was recently able to conduct three ceremonies.
These took place at the headwaters of the Colorado River in Rocky Mountain National Park and at her two largest tributaries: the Green River in western Wyoming and the San Juan River in southwestern Colorado.
Each headwaters ceremony exposed a deeper layer of understanding about what human minds need to shift.
Join Us in Prayer
Our all-women crew will launch into the Grand Canyon on the Autumn Equinox, September 22, bringing the headwaters to our ceremony with the oldest exposed rock on earth, the Vishnu Schist.
We will emerge from the canyon on October 15, carrying the Colorado River waters down to the dry riverbed on the Mexican border and finally back to the Sea of Cortez.
I invite all of you into this prayer ceremony with me by following the journey on the Ancestral Streams social media accounts:
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You are all invited to pray the dams down with us.
