The Ancestors Within: Celebrate and Honor Your Sacred Origins

By Amy Gillespie Dougherty

Your ancestors have waited your whole life for this moment!

 

In this powerful book, the fourth in The Ancestors Within series, get ready to celebrate and honor the ancestors who came before you, in order to create the transformation in yourself, and generations to come. 

 

The 25-author cast, all experts i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brave Healer Productions
• Release date: Sep 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781954047716

Amy Gillespie Dougherty

Amy is a results-driven innovator, speaker, and bestselling author with more than twenty years' experience creating impactful self-discovery, awareness, and life coaching programs. As a 38-year old woman who had never traveled abroad or even learned a foreign language, she beat the odds in Mozambique, Africa, where she started a nonprofit with $150 and the idea that all children deserve the right to keep themselves and their siblings alive. Over six years, she became a finalist for CNN Heroes and received accolades from embassies and aid organizations.Thriving as a trailblazer, Amy created Irigenics™ Ancestral Eye Reading as a survival skills program for teens and young adults in an effort to reduce self-destructive behaviors and suicide patterns. Amy believes in the power of the ancestral pulse within each of us, and our ability to reach the best of our best. She emphasizes this connection to our gifts and our origin in her new series, "The Ancestors Within." The first book (Reveal and Heal the Ancient Memories You Carry) places emphasis on the repeat patterns that show up in your life and how they have ancestral ties, which can be resolved. Her second book in the series will publish in October of 2021.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Honoring the Intentions of Your Ancestors

Celebrating Who You Were Born to Become

Amy Gillespie Dougherty,

Founder of Irigenics® Ancestral Eye Reading

MY STORY

Two suicides. Two lives gone, because of—many things. It was the spring of 2016.

Perhaps one of those things was to inspire me to pick up my phone and call the man I met online dating a few months earlier to have this conversation:

Life is too short. We could spend a lifetime saying, ‘What a shame you live so far away.’ Wish we could’ve met. I wonder what would’ve happened if we’d met?

It was nearly a year later that we came to know how much our ancestors and angels played a hand in our meeting. It didn’t just start with two friends committing suicide in the same month, reminding me just how short and precious life truly is and that I needed to do something different with my personal life.

I needed to commit. I needed to commit to at least meeting one time. We just needed to see if there was true chemistry—if we had enough connection to want to make a full relationship.

Six weeks later, Dan flew to my place for a vacation. We fell in love pretty much at first sight at the airport. Over the course of that week, we explored many of the amazing experiences the front range of Colorado had to offer. Our love grew over the course of that summer, and within a couple of years, I moved out east to start a life with him.

That one moment of changing my actions to saying yes to at least meeting him in person changed our lives forever.

The funny thing is, unbeknownst to me, 99 years earlier, my great aunt, Agnes Towey (my genetic mother’s family name), married a Sheehan (Dan’s genetic mother’s family name) and moved to the west coast to build a life with her husband.

Welcome to my world.

Clues, coincidences, synchronicities, meditations, and moments recorded in journals and laptops—only to be validated later—oftentimes, decades later. Many of these incidents were initiated through meeting my ancestors in an interactive journaling experience.

Let me walk you through a recent experience to give you a taste of what it’s like to take 20 minutes or so to enter the world of your ancestors.

The Experience

I have colored pencils and a paper notebook. I sit on the front step, which is a little uncomfortable on my bum, but that’s okay. There’s a bit of a breeze from my left. Today, I’ve decided to consider my love for maps and puzzles.

I imagine being in our dairy barns as a child and seeing maps imprinted on the linoleum (that lined the hayloft floor for insulation). I was fascinated by them. They were old and slightly faded and cracked or torn in places. I recall pulling every map from National Geographic as soon as my mom finished with them.

My eyes are gently closed as I do this. At first, I see paper—nautical drawings and maps with fine print for navigating, but for some reason, it all shifts, and the images change.

I begin to imagine my love for putting together jigsaw puzzles as an early teen—the more complex, the better. I even got to the point of doing puzzles upside down, having only the cardboard and shape of the piece to put it together. Knowing this is not a normal teenage activity, I smile as I know it must be ancestral.

I begin to imagine in my mind a wooden bench and feel that slightly uncomfortable feeling of sitting on the hardwood for too long. I sense there’s a man sitting at a wooden table, with a separate wooden bench seat, like a picnic table.

There’s a candle on the table—a small glass of oil, and a fire in the fireplace to my right, but my feeling is it’s not my right—it’s as if I’m a fly on the wall behind this man, who’s my ancestor. I don’t know that, but I feel it strongly.

He’s holding something in his hand, sanding the edge of what seems to be a wooden shingle. I get the feeling this is his evening pastime. (As I imagine these things in my mind, I’m taking notes in my paper notebook on the still slightly uncomfortable front step of my home—opening my eyes only enough to keep the words on my paper while I write the impressions I’m receiving).

It’s as though I can feel what he feels and all the sensory experiences happening around him. My senses interpret the sound, smell, and warmth of the fire, like in a lucid dream. I can hear younger girls getting ready for bed—homework, prayers—they have fair hair, lighter in color, but I can’t make out their details. There are two or three of them in another room, and the sound of their mother talking with them as she tucks them in.

He’s content.

This is his favorite time of day.

The world’s problems are outside.

I write it down—still holding my energy in the space of what’s happening in the room during my meditation, not opening my eyes too much as I write each impression.

He’s using a cloth to sand, and there’s the smell of oil on it (I’m given the word linseed—but I don’t know what linseed oil smells like to compare. I don’t try). I keep with the vision. I smell light sawdust mixed with the oil. (Briefly, I remember, as a child, I adored going to the hardware store, I loved the smell—as he does).

This man feels content—the end of a pleasant day, and the world’s troubles are always outside of his home at this time of day.

I begin to hear his thoughts: Puzzles are my passion and my gift. I don’t plan the puzzle ahead. I have a skim board (his words), and I begin to draw on it and then carve it with a small knife (he has a different word for this tool that I can’t quite understand).

It was as if he knew I was there. Within his thoughts he began explaining to me exactly what he’s doing. What a gift!

First, I draw a design or write a message. I imprint it by dipping heated steel in the oil to form the words or shapes. After the design work is done, I begin to cut it into puzzle pieces that snap together. The wood-burning imprint will last for years.

He holds one up (that hasn’t yet been carved) to inspect it, and I see it’s slightly larger than a greeting card that would need a second postage stamp in America.

He begins to intricately cut the pieces of the actual puzzle to take it apart. The whole thing is a placard (his words)—his work becomes a gift. (I see him in a brief scene, handing it to someone wrapped up in a colorful cloth).

The man begins to take shape in my mind: He’s about 30 years old.

The details are now becoming clearer—I’m getting more information—Dear reader, you can do this!

His hair is dark—he’s about 5’10" and about 185-190 pounds. He is fair-skinned, strong, and muscular (but I don’t yet know his vocation). He has piercing blue eyes and a slight shaving shadow at this time of day. His jaw is chiseled, and he has a slight dimple on his chin. He has a bold laugh but gentle words—not a big talker. He tends to run his hand through the top of his shiny black hair that could use a half-inch trim in the bangs.

Now I’m getting greater and greater details of him.

It’s so unlikely I’ll ever see a photo of this man. He is before the time of photographs (is the impression that comes into my mind). I write it down.

I run through a few names of the ancestors I know, my great grandparents—and the answer I get is that he is before their time—and he is east, across the water. I run through my head, trying to feel where he is—Wales? Scotland? Ireland? France? England?

I write the words as I go: England. I circle where I wrote it on my notepad. He’s in the countryside, not far from the coast. Westchester or West Cheshire. Brindley. I get the name, Brindley. I write it down. I’m not sure it could be Brinley. I also write that on my paper.

Something about the Moors is where the woodworking comes from. Ebony and woods of varied colors (for the puzzle making) are with the crafting tools he keeps in a leather roll-up pouch near the fireplace. I can’t seem to pick up his name (unless it’s Brinley).

He’s pleased with our connection.

It fades. The experience is over.

I give a few more minutes to see if more comes to me. It does not.

I stand up and go to my computer to type this all up while I can still read my notes. The entire experience was 22 minutes, much like a lucid dream.

By the way, after I finished, I Googled Brindley England. Brindley is in the county of Cheshire, Northwest England.

Whether you know your ancestors or not, your ancestors live on within you. They are the blood in your veins, the pulse within you. They are the impulse in the things you love to do, experience, smell, taste, and discover.

They are the extra impact in the trauma or drama that happens to you. It’s as if each dramatic moment is a check-in with your physiology.

Is this experience still a threat to us? Does this still create drama and trauma in the times of today that we should re-imprint this warning system in our DNA? Should our body have a visceral response at the sound of a mosquito, whereas the next person ignores it and never gets bit?

Two years into our relationship, I was living with Dan in Midlothian, Virginia, where we wrote The Lost Scribe together. Dan wove in the fiction aspects, wrapped carefully around my non-fiction experiences of traveling in and out of Guatemala. A year later, we bought a small farm, and we got married, only to discover the farm we bought in Virginia was on a tract of land that has ties to an ancestral land grant of my genetic line. The stories go on and on.

I could spend a day telling you tales of connection points I’ve discovered from my ancestry. Along with it, I have equally amazing coincidences in my adopted family. Even now, I continue to uncover connections between my genetic and adopted family lines.

My experience working in ancestral discovery and connection leads me to hypothesize that all adopted and foster children would or could find a tie to their genetic line from their adopted line somewhere. That could be a person who saved their adopted ancestor’s life in the 1600s or even an actual lost genetic connection from hundreds of years earlier. My experience from interpreting the markings in our eyes also says that for some ancestral connections, there are no records.

In 2012, BridgeAnne d’Avignon traced the 43 presidents’ male and female family lines and discovered that 42 were linked to King John Lackland. As surreal as that may sound, it’s not surreal in my world of ancestral connections, where I find these kinds of coincidences more and more every day.

For all people, adopted or not, your impulses, fears, likes, and inherent talents come from your genetic line. Your interest and drive to do certain things (puzzles, crafting, dancing, fishing) not only builds on that initial DNA imprint but then gains and expands as you repeat the actions of your ancestors, moving your hands in the same ways, smelling what they smelled, hearing what they heard, touching what they touched. The visceral responses that happen inside you (your physiology) build on your original blueprint.

Like a blueprint of a home—where you choose the location and add the color, textures, and materials—you choose your life experiences, choosing the hobbies, people, vocations, and locations.

If you’re adopted like me or, for some reason, raised in the home of people other than your genetic lineage, you’re being handed an amazing opportunity to explore yourself, your gifts, and the inner workings of you. Your new family will give you opportunities to resolve old ancestral patterns with new approaches or to revisit old patterns for an experience that may not have occurred in your genetic family—for example, the opportunity to take classical music lessons or specialty athletic training.

One thing, if you’re raised in an alternate family, there’s the story of how you got there and how you came to know you weren’t in your family of origin. This is also part of your story, part of the experience of you, and what you do with that part of your journey is totally up to you.

Victim? Victor? Teacher? Sage? What you do with the story of the experience of your life is completely your own. And from here is where you really get to discover, connect, engage, and understand, as well as celebrate and honor the intentions of your ancestors as they live on within you.

THE TOOL

If you can do this exercise in nature, it’s even better, as you will be receiving sensory inputs that will connect you with your ancestors. For example, the feeling of sunlight on your face, the sound of the breeze, trees, birds, the fragrance of flowers, and the sound of a nearby bubbling creek, are just a few possibilities.

Find something to write on. If you can write on paper with a pencil, you will be recreating a sound that’s familiar to one experienced by your ancestors and the feeling of hands around a writing utensil that will match your ancestors. Remember, your goal is to plug into as many sensory enhancers as possible.

Make a list of ten things you believe to be true about you. (The first ten that come to mind).

Note: if you can choose something that is quirky, unique to you, or different from your siblings, all the better. You get extra points for choosing something people who know you think is weird or exceptionally unusual about you, such as turning puzzles upside down to put them together.

If you aren’t sure, you can even prepare by doing a social media post or poll to ask, What are the top three things you think are unique about me? and use a few of those as your guide.

Some of my examples:

Hair color

Love of puzzles

Adopted from birth

I love the sound of the wind

I love to explore old buildings, especially churches

I won a safety poster award as a child and had a poem published at age 11

It’s your turn. Write on your paper:

Ten things about me I know to be true. Leave an extra line or two after each one. If you can do this with a notebook (pad of paper), then you can even have a full page for each one, so you have room to draw, write, or scribble whatever comes to mind.

Note: Take a moment to visualize each as you write them down. For example, visualize your hair color:

What do you call it?

Are there other tones in your hair?

What have other people said about it?

Is it lush?

Or thinning?

Or wavy?

Really get into what your hair color is.

Now, take a deep breath, make sure you are comfortable, and that you won’t need to get a jacket or answer a cell phone.

Settle in with one example. You can either just sit and feel the experience or take notes as you go.

You can go back to The Experience above to follow my example of doing exactly this exercise and a few of the clues it revealed to me.

Do I know if I have relatives in Brindley, England? No. But if I wanted to take a day online, I’m certain I would find it. I’ve had enough exacting experiences of journaling, taking a question, or pondering into an interactive ancestral meditation, and being able to absolutely validate pieces of the information afterward. Sometimes the validation didn’t show up for a decade or more.

Therefore, it’s important for you to keep an ancestral journal of these experiences for yourself. You will find examples of these experiences with my free PDF download, 7 Ways to Meet Your Ancestors Today©, at: www.illuminationStation.org/resources

Each time you do this kind of meditation, your ability to get deeper access and your potential for an experience that is as real as a lucid dream will become greater.

When I’ve gone back into my journals, I’ve validated thousands of clues. While some were after I located my genetic family and began digging deeper into records, I know other doors opened (lost records suddenly found) because of reaching out to my ancestors through interactive meditations such as this one. When I’m reaching back to ancestors, I contemplate my adopted family as well as my genetic one.

Celebrate and honor your ancestors by getting to know them. They are within you. They want to heal the unresolved traumas of generations past. They want to celebrate your wins. They are with you in your greatest moments—and they’re with you, holding you in love and compassion, in your deepest traumas.

The Ancestors Within (six books in 600 days) was birthed from a 20-minute journaling experience.

Your ancestors have waited your whole life for this moment. . .and your next!

Learn more at: IlluminationStation.org/resources

Chapter 2

Flow Like Water

Opening to the Ancestral Power of Sacred Sites

Dr. Ahriana Platten

Three sticks of incense represent the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, she said. These are the three treasures of Buddhism. Go to the altar and light three, then sit with your intentions.

That seems simple enough.

Standing outside the temple, looking in through the doorway, wispy smoke rises in gossamer spirals around the golden statues of Buddha. It’s an ordinary overcast day in South Korea, and there’s nothing visibly unusual—but the telltale butterflies in my stomach inform me there’s more here than meets the eye.

MY STORY

Crossing the threshold of the ancient temple, the sands of time pour backward. I pass through a portal to a place that remains today as it was a thousand years ago. Unlike the flat metal strip that marks a threshold in the United States, I had to step up and over a tall wooden plank to enter this holy and ancient place.

The dark timber interior gave a hint of the temple’s age, and the air was filled with the smokey fragrance of sandalwood, frankincense, and a pungent blend of Asian spices. On the altar sat three golden statues looking into my soul. One could see how the visceral sacredness of this place easily seduced its visitors to surrender to its potent mysteries. I could feel it working inside me even before I entered.

As I cleared the threshold, and before my second foot fully hit the surface below me, I was energetically pulled to my knees. The room was thick with the influence of the ancestors who prayed there for thousands of years. Soft tears fell spontaneously, leaving wet droplets on my jacket, and I impulsively opened my arms wide as the wisdom pulled me into a time outside of time.

Blank. My mind went blank. The screen behind my closed eyes seemed to explode with light. It was as if all the armor I’d built around my heart over the decades of my life was stripped away, and I was left unshielded and blasted open on the well-worn floor.

Breathe. I have to breathe.

I suddenly realized my lungs were hungry for air. The shock of the ancestral blast left me breathless and drunk with energy. The unexpected sobs that followed my first deep inhale can only be described as soul-racking. My entire body shook as what felt like a lifetime of pain and struggle was lifted from me.

This wasn’t the first time I had this kind of experience at a sacred site, but it was the most powerful. I could hear soft chanting but could see no source of the rhythmic discourse. The heavy pounding of my heart against my ribs made me wonder for a moment if I might have crossed into some other dimension. It was otherworldly.

The temple was an ancient place of prayer, and I visited for that very reason. This was a business trip, not a vacation, and while I try to see sacred sites whenever I can, it was not part of the agenda for my trip to South Korea. However, this trip was different from the many other times our development team traveled together. We were noticeably short a member. For nearly 20 years, I traveled as part of a multidisciplinary collaboration of specialists who worked with innovators and entrepreneurs in the tourism and leisure industry. My missing colleague, a lovely German architect who was masterful at her work, had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing treatment. It was odd and uncomfortable to be without her. She was on my mind everywhere we went. In her absence, the team worked together to fill in the presentation spaces she normally led. It was her absence—and my desire to pray for her—that led me to ask if there were any sacred sites we could visit.

We’re very close to an ancient Buddhist Temple, said our soft-spoken South Korean client. She clearly held reverence for its history and was anxious to tell me about it. I think it’s about 4000 years old and so beautiful and comforting. I’d be happy to take you there.

We drove about 45 minutes, parked the car, and walked about a mile to the site. When we first approached the temple, I was struck by the beauty and grace of another South Korean female, a monk dressed in crisp white and gray robes, standing in front of the temple’s center door. She smiled warmly as I climbed the steep stairs. Do you pray for someone? she asked in a whispered tone as I approached the elaborate entrance. I nodded.

I’m here to pray for a colleague who has cancer.

She nodded in return and gave me a few instructions for lighting incense at the altar; then, she made a sweeping hand gesture that led me to step across the tall threshold. I have no idea if she noticed me fall to my knees or if anyone else noticed. The outside world instantly melted away, and it was just me, the eyes of the Buddha, the rising smoke of the incense, and the ancestors.

When I regained some sense of my body, I crawled across the floor to a cushion where I could sit in meditation. No one questioned my tears or rose to assist me. I was a ghost moving amongst them. I barely saw them at all, and I don’t think they noticed me. Everyone in the temple was immersed in the ancestral energy.

For thousands of years, people have prayed in this small wooden structure. Each prayer made the palpable, overwhelming energy of love and dedication stronger. I opened my mind and my heart to the spirit of the ancestors. Almost immediately, I felt the familiar pulse of their presence, as close as my own breath.

It was as though I returned to a location I knew intimately but had never visited, at least not in this lifetime. I experienced a spiritual familiarity that spoke to my raw and open soul and allowed me to slip into a depth of peace and in-the-moment-ness I’d never encountered. To this day, I have no idea how long I sat in meditation. Five minutes. Two hours. Who knows? There was no awareness of time, only an awareness of the many souls in the room who were invisible yet so present and who were healing my heart at the same time they were reaching across continents to answer my prayer and help my colleague. As I sat there, I could feel the energy of lifetimes moving through me to her.

When I felt the inner directive to rise and take