Scroll down for a transcription of this episode.
Through a gentle ancestral meditation, discover how grounding in your roots can open the door to healing, meaning, and a deeper sense of belonging.
How To Do This Practice:
- Settle Into Your Body: Notice whether you’re sitting, standing, or walking, and gently bring your attention to the natural rhythm of your breath.
- Ground Yourself Through the Earth: Feel the weight of your body supported by the ground beneath you, and let any thoughts drift by like passing clouds.
- Sense the Ancestors in Nature: Expand your awareness to the sky, the earth, trees, and mountains, imagining them as ancestors who have been here long before you.
- Connect With Your Heartbeat: Place a hand on your heart if it feels comfortable, noticing the steady drumbeat within you—a rhythm shared across generations.
- Cultivate Compassion for Your Lineage: Envision compassion as a color or texture in your chest and let it gently radiate outward, offering it to your ancestors and to yourself.
- Offer a Wish for Healing: Bring to mind a simple wish for the easing of suffering—your own or others’—and breathe it through your body from sky to earth before slowly opening your eyes.
Today’s Happiness Break Guide:
SARÁ KING is a neuroscientist, medical anthropologist and educator at UC San Diego.
Learn more about Sará King here:
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Transcription:
DACHER KELTNER: Hi, I’m Dacher Keltner, and this is Happiness Break, where we share short, science-backed practices to help you connect with yourself, and the world around you.
Today we’re exploring ancestral connection.
It’s one of the ways to remind ourselves that we’re a part of something larger. Studies have found that reflecting on ancestral stories can make life feel more meaningful, and strengthen our ability to cope when we’re overwhelmed by stress.
This connection can also give us a stronger sense of identity, continuity, and belonging—essential elements toward better mental health and self-esteem.
Here is Dr. Sara King. She’s a neuroscientist, medical anthropologist and educator at UC San Diego. She’s going to lead us in a meditation for cultivating compassion for our ancestors.
SARÁ KING: Wherever you are in this moment, you can begin by noticing how your body is in space.
Here, the invitation is to bring your attention to the bottoms of the feet. Or whichever area of the body is meeting with the earth. Noticing the weight and the feeling of your body being held by gravity.
Whatever quality the thoughts are that are arising in the mind, you can notice those too.
See if you can relate to those thoughts, much like you would relating to clouds in the sky. They might be big, poofy clouds, or teeny tiny, wispy clouds. They might be moving fast or moving slow.
In moments like this, we might remember the sky as ancestor too. As well as the clouds and the earth beneath our feet. We are surrounded by living ancestors. All the time.
Trees, mountains. Perhaps you might take a deep breath in here. And sending that breath into the belly.
And if it feels supportive and compassionate, you may also choose to place one hand on your heart.
Bringing your breath to a natural cadence and rhythm and noticing the beat of the heart like a drum.
All of our ancestors used drums to tell stories, to transmit information, to bring a sense of connection, aliveness, play to their communities. Even healing.
The same drumbeat of the ancestors lives inside of you. Every day of your life.
So as we’re breathing in here, inhaling and exhaling, try sending a feeling of gratitude. Maybe a feeling of well wishes. Suffering is a human experience. So is love. So is joy. Begin to tap into feelings of compassion for our ancestors, no matter who they were.
And if compassion has a color that you associate with it, any color, begin to slowly and gently breathe this color into the center of your chest.
And you might imagine that the space around you is completely filled. Suffused with this color, energy, texture of compassion. Sending compassion to the ancestors and to ourselves who are ancestors in training.
Send one more deep breath here in through the shoulders. Perhaps allowing the shoulder blades to melt gently down either side of the spine.
See if you can soften and relax the muscles of the face. Even just a little bit.
And here we will sit for just a few moments together. Continuing to connect as best as we can. To compassion. This feeling that we recognize the suffering of others.
And we feel compelled out of that state of recognition to feel for them. Compassion is, yes, about recognizing the suffering of other beings, but it is also about action.
So in these last moments of this practice, with your hand still connected to your heart, is there some dream that you would like to bring to mind, that represents the alleviation of suffering? For yourself, friends, family, or even the planet.
Whatever that might be, even if it’s just a feeling. Calling it to the center of the heart.
Taking one last deep breath here, sending it all the way up through the top of the head to reach the sky, our ancestor. And exhale down the backside of the body, down through the bottoms of the feet, or whichever part of your body is touching the earth, connecting with earth as ancestor.
And whenever you are ready, you can begin to very gently bring the hand down from your chest, down into your lap, or by your side.
You can slowly blink, open the eyes if you had them closed, and just gently take a look around you. Maybe there’s some quality about the world around you that seems to have subtly shifted since this practice.
I thank you for your practice, and wish you well.
