Ancestral Impressions:
Exploring Your Ancestry Through Creativity, Imagery, and Intuition
Life is like a book still being written—the future is nothing but blank pages, but the past exists in rich volumes written through time.
Although they may depart physically, ancestors etch an indelible mark with a powerful influence over an individual’s life. This influence holds insight into many of life’s puzzling aspects. Are the secrets, fears, and superstitions of ancestors responsible for modern beliefs? Have long-lived family patterns emerged into daily life? Perhaps most importantly, how does it all make an impact today, and how can it affect the future? Tapping into this knowledge is the key to personal growth and discovery.
Ancestral Impressions is an interactive guide to a journey into the four realms of ancestral memory through the creative process. With narrative, personal reflection, and activities such as collage, writing, drawing, and painting, readers will explore the personalities, culture, and impact of genealogy on life today.
Every individual owes existence to someone from the past. The tales of those ancestors are still waiting to be told to all who are willing to learn how to listen.
“Audrey’s book is playing a unique role in my personal journey. Simply reading it seems to have opened a floodgate of synchronicity in my daily life. Distant relatives have suddenly found me online and sent photos of shared ancestors. Seeing my mother’s favorite flower in bloom produced a strong compulsion in me to take a day trip to a cemetery, where I conversed with her and my grandmother- something I had never done since their deaths in 1975. Audrey’s willingness to share her own shadowed family aspects provides encouragement as well as demonstrating the therapeutic value of this work. I am looking forward to working on several of the suggested art activities and I know this will continue to be a very fulfilling process!” – Libby Schmanke, art therapist
My Path to the Ancestors
I love to wander through vintage stores. When I enter the realm of trinkets, gadgets, porcelain angels, bone china plates, and cut glass bowls, I enter the realm of the everyday life of generations past. I can remember the toys we played with, the ceramic trinkets that decorated my grandmother’s house, the dishes that were brought out for special holiday dinners. I slip back into childhood, and even beyond to a time before I was born.
As I reach out and touch these solidly real relics, I feel a connection to something that I cannot name. It is a yearning to touch the people that I loved and wondered about with intense curiosity. They were my grandparents, aunts, parents, uncles, great aunts, and second cousins. As I pick up a stoneware mug that seems like one my grandfather may have used, I feel a connection to him and I long to know him better. I feel a deep desire to retrieve a life line to the people, the time, and place of my ancestors. I want to know more about who I am, where I came from, and how I fit into the larger story of my lineage. I believe that knowing the truths, stories, and experiences of my ancestors can help me to know myself.
I have learned, through my own recovery from childhood trauma, that my family was full of dysfunction. There is much in my ancestral history that I am not proud of, and that I don’t even want my children to know. Yet, I know all of it is significant. I have had moments of deep anger and dread as I thought about approaching the work of speaking with family members that have left this world. But I find that when I do access the stories and the lessons that my great-great aunts and grandmothers want to share with me, I leave the session feeling the power and stunning grace with which these women and men carried the burdens of their lives. I am awed by their desire to live and find beauty wherever they could.
This book has been designed to facilitate your own journey into the ancestral realms. It is meant to be an interactive workbook. There is narrative for each section which is followed by a collection of suggested exercises. The “Personal Reflections” are stories about my own personal experience which are interspersed throughout this workbook. These are meant to give you examples and to evoke your own thoughts and feelings about your personal recollections and experiences.
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