Photographed by Victoria Ruiz
In Ancestral Clearing, you inherit more than your family’s physical traits.
Our bodies hold not just nerves and cells, but stories. These are passed down from your parents, your parents’ parents, and beyond, resurfacing today as symptoms that are physical, emotional, social, and spiritual. This is one of the initial things I understood from my first session of Ancestral Clearing.
“In a spiritual perspective, it’s a belief that our soul chose our parents. We choose them to match their frequencies,” Ana Reyes, the practitioner, tells me. “This means inheriting their history, traumas, and emotional baggage. This is needed for the soul to evolve.”
We were at the Healing House, which was located in a somewhat nondescript building along a relatively quiet Makati street, in between Poblacion’s party central and the Guadalupe riverside. After signing in and meeting Reyes, I was led to one of the rooms, where she sat by a desk on one side and I parked by one of the chairs near the door.
Ana’s job as a practitioner, she says, is to strengthen her clients’ awareness of their traumas, how this is rooted back to their ancestors, gain lessons from their stories, and cut the unwanted patterns inherited. “On the other side of the spectrum, there is a study called epigenetics. It believes that our DNA holds all the information of our ancestors’ experiences up to 17 generations back. This information is so important because it will help our offsprings and future offsprings to survive,” she explains.
After encouraging me to take a moment, she asks me how I was. This is a question that could be answered in volumes. My past few years have been marked by sickness, isolation, death, and other losses, and a family situation that could be best defined as teetering. Ana asks me what I feel when I talk about my family and, curiously, where in my body I feel it the most. I answer “guilt” and somewhere below my rib cage, respectively.
“I ask the client where in his body he ‘feels’ the story because wherever the client points out in his body is where the emotions and traumas are suppressed. It’s a grounding experience, in a way attaching the head where the story loops to the body,” she explains. “Emotions are meant to be expressed, not suppressed.”
To which, Anna pauses, looks me straight in the eye, and then tells me, “you did enough,” a sentence I did not expect would cause me to instantly well up in tears.
Getting highly emotional and going through a big release during these sessions are not unusual, Ana shares. But, people’s reactions can vary. “Some will get a physical detox, like a cold or digestive issues, which is normal as the body assimilates with clearing,” she says. “Whatever it is, it’s really about trusting the process.”
Throughout the session, Reyes would ask me questions about different parts of my life. Always referring to the “how do I feel, where do I feel it” pattern, mixing in insights on why this might be the case, and where it could be traced as stories that persist through your ancestral line.
More than once, she brings up the importance of “holding hands with your shadow.”
A “shadow” is a psychological term for everything we can’t see in ourselves, blind spots. “We may want to show our strengths and gifts, but we are completely unaware of our poor qualities because we don’t want to see it. This is very normal,” Ana says. “Shadow work” is how to get to know, access, and integrate your dark side. “When you start making peace with your shadow, then you are actually embracing your authentic self. The journey of self compassion and self trust begins.”
People see Reyes when they are going through a crisis whether it’s related to their career, family, money, relationships, or body. “I get clients who expect me to ‘fix’ the situation or the person who is giving the problem to them, who they blame. Or to make hula [guess] what their future will be,” she says. “I make sure they understand that in a clearing, my job is to strengthen all influences that weaken them and it’s up to them to do the real work.” This could be done by mindfully making the right choices and using techniques and tools that can help you process on your own.
However, it is possible to get triggered and re-traumatized from an issue that has previously been cleared. “You can call this a loop. This is where they are challenged to dive into these triggers on their own with awareness and process it mindfully.” According to Reyes, abandonment is the most common trauma people have, stemming from experiences that leave them feeling they could not rely on others to take care of or be there for them. “We are wired for connection, and if we experience this we will have a hard time trusting others.”
Her main goal is to make you feel less reactive and more neutral toward issues, helping you find the strength to move forward and deal with them. Being neutral is easier said than done. As Ana explains, people are “conditioned to suppress our emotions. Traditionally, expressing how we feel is a weakness, especially for men. No one really taught us how to cope and we ended up with unhealthy ways to self-regulate. It’s also hard to be neutral if we get stuck to the story. We get stuck when we have unprocessed trauma.”
The practitioner herself needs to make sure that she is as neutral as possible before working with anyone in a session. “I do this by making myself strong by tuning into other’s energy without any judgment. I also do a quick pre-clearing before the session starts. It forms a guide for the session and helps the client let go and be ready to commit and accept change,” she says. Reyes recommends doing these sessions frequently, ideally once a month. “After the pandemic, things are very uncertain and we get easily triggered consciously and unconsciously.”
At the end of our allotted time of one hour, I felt a little drained, both physically and emotionally. Ana had mentioned at the start that it was to be expected. And perhaps, welcomed, as it was a sign of a burden being set aside. I feel I could allow myself to move toward some sort of goal post for healing: in hearing the words told to me, in taking a step back to see the complete picture, and, more importantly, in understanding that while stories can be passed down, they can be rewritten for the better.
