Healing History
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Ancient Healing for the 21st Century
Our personal healing shifts the entire Universe.
Profile of a Healer: Stephanie Alston-Nero
This is the story of my calling to do the work of ancestral healing.
In 2004 I discovered the path of shamanism, a practice and way of life that honors the spirit of all things.
Everything has a spirit. Not only people: trees, rocks, rivers, the land where we live, all have spirits too. As a shamanic healer, I have come to meet the spirits of many people, places, things. I am filled with the essential knowing that Nature has endowed all things with spirit. As an artist, I've met the spirit of things that arise from the sacred space of imagination – poems, plays, novels, paintings, music—and am certain that all things created, by the hands of the Goddess-Creator and the Artist-Creator, are inspirited. The shaman drums, sings, dances, rattles and poets, until she has gathered enough power from her Art to see the spirits of an illness and heal it, to connect with the spirits of a place and bring harmony, to partner with the spirits of joy and well-being to bring balance and peace. Acting prepared me for shamanic healing and, more specifically, for ancestral healing. Twenty-five years as a professional actor taught me to search for the spirit of characters conjured in the playwright’s imagination. Much like the work of the shaman, acting is spirit-finding work. The same is true for writing. I enjoy looking at theater and writing shamanically. Follow me through this lens a little while. Both the actor and the playwright interact with spirits. The actor is given only a script, the spirit’s story, as told to the playwright. She must summon spirit from the bones of the script if she is to portray the character with credibility, and once this is gleaned, the pulse awakens. The actor allows the spirit a space in her being to birth, breathe, speak. She offers her body as a house for the spirit to inhabit to tell its story for approximately two hours every evening or matinee performance.
Shamanic healing is the oldest form of healing on Earth. It has been practiced by people all over the world. Many anthropologists assert that there has never been a time in human history when shamanism was not around. In indigenous shamanic cultures, the shaman was responsible for the health and happiness of the tribe, the shaman was the teacher, preacher, therapist and doctor.
The shamans were the first Artists—the original poets who healed with words spoken in a sacred manner.
I was trained in shamanism by Sandra Ingerman, an internationally-renowned teacher and healer who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and by Malidoma Patrice Somé, elder shaman of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso in Africa. I honor and greatly respect both of my teachers.
First I will backtrack to my beginnings and what led me to the healing path: I was born in the shantytown of north philadelphia, profoundly impacted by a childhood spent among the under-privileged (as opposed to the over-privileged), a Baby Boomer born in the mid 1950s, on the wrong side of the liberty bell, across the tracks from betsy ross and the resounding myths of brotherly love. I use these phrases and this punctuation not to disparage north philadelphians, righteous, hardworking folk as they are, but rather, to evoke the emotional resonances of my childhood suffering.
I left philadelphia in 1972 to attend Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Alma Mater of Coretta Scott King, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) and found myself in a thriving student community of highly creative, politically active, and socially conscious people. I was exposed to yoga, meditation, theater, art, healing methods of transformation, tools for self-reinvention, and eagerly sought out practices and healing modalities to help dismantle the damage poverty had done to my sense of self. I enjoyed learning the ancient and innovative, the indigenous and modern methods of reconstituting the natural imprint of prosperity within my psyche. My college years fertilized the soil for innate healing instincts to flower. The village of Yellow Springs was filled with spirits. Native burial mounds dotted the landscape, and in the 1800s, Yellow Springs was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Many Africans fleeing slavery traveled through this village. Nature and many Ancestors were very much alive, aligning themselves for the time when I could hear them.
Spectacularly, on Antioch’s campus was Glen Helen Nature Preserve—a thousand acres of woods, wildflowers, waterfalls, 25 miles of footpaths, 153 species of birds, honey locust, moonseed, spicebush, sweet gale, black cherry and plum trees galore. I walked and walked in the Glen, sensing for the first time, the power of nature, the presence of spirits of the woods. I was a city girl, unaccustomed to the ways of nature, but the Glen was a refuge to my city-worn soul, a reminder to my spirit to return to the silence, listen, prepare. In the Glen I was able to observe the abundance of Nature, how the birds, rabbits, trees all lived in plush abandon. There was no poverty of leaves, lack of wind, no scarcity of flowers.
I began to think that the concept of lack is a lie to the logic of the Earth, a spell cast over the spirit.
Deprivation is violence to the seed-sense of the soul, all this learned from the nature spirits of the Glen.
Through the many years to follow, I learned how to restore myself to my birthright abundance through Art and Ritual. My teacher, Malidoma, says:
"Art and Ritual transcend language and enable us to dwell in the metaphoric and symbolic regions
of human experience. This is where the soul and spirit reside. Ritual is necessary because there
are certain problems that cannot be resolved through words alone. Art and Ritual offer opportunities
to relieve a tension from which words alone can no longer release us."
Through Art and Ritual I found a door into ancestral healing.
This journey to my Ancestors began seven years ago, the same year I was called to shamanism. My husband and I bought property in upstate New York on three-and-a half acres of land: a modest house, a small pond, a bit of woods—a perfect refuge from the city. Only days after we arrived, on a cold clear winter’s day, I felt drawn to the woods. The pull was a felt-heard-sense. It led me into a new dimension of reality—the ancestral realms of the natural world:
I entered the woods, greeted by ice-thick silence, then a wind through the bare branches, small brown birds appeared, faint presences flickered like snowflakes, a small grouping of “breathing,” beings, winged men and wizened grandmothers began to walk with me. Children slowly entered into my field of inner vision, propped up on rocks, then families appeared to be sitting by the pond, boys resting near the roots of trees, babies nesting in their mother’s laps—beings of great beauty—light beings in tattered rags, trapped in the Middle World, un-free in the un-seen world, un-dead—beings whom I learned to call my enslaved African ancestors (not of my bloodline but of my spirit lineage).
"Runaways," they said, "We be Runaways."
“How can I help you?” I cried. “What can I do?”
"Re-member us, honor us. Send us home to our Homeland in the sacred vessel of your Imagination."
I remembered the words of Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, who noted:
"Upwards of 50,000 Africans had run away from slavery every year."
I knew that many runaways perished in the woods, north, south, east, and west of slavery. The wooded places of this country must be inhabited by a nation of Runaways, lost between this world and the Hereafter.
That is what I felt-heard-saw that day. That is what I said. That is what I remembered. That is where I stood, in the woods of New York State, in an area west of Hurley (Sojourner Truth’s birthplace), south of Auburn (Harriet Tubman’s final home) and north of Cornwall (where Harriet Jacobs wrote much of her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl). That is the moment that my Art was called into service by my Ancestors.
Like a whispering breeze, the voice of Toni Morrison began to blow through me:
"The consequences of slavery, only artists can deal with, and it’s our job."
I am certain that Imagination is sacred space. When I engage in the creative act, I gain access to knowledge beyond my conscious knowing. I lose track of time, feel myself beyond the bounds of my body, without borders. I recognize this territory of exceeding possibilities, this quantum field, in the elucidations of the poet-author Ben Okri: “There is a place that is not a place, an ancient tradition that exists in the universe, in which the total
knowledge of everything exists. We have access to this through dreams, intuitions, inspirations,
methods of storytelling—access to the totality of knowledge, the secret compendium of the universe.”
From the woods, I began to access pathways through that secret compendium of knowledge to the spirits of my Ancestors, and outwardly, began a rigorous gathering process. In libraries, on websites, at the Library of Congress, I found photographs and research on the lives of the enslaved Africans in this country, and took slave narratives to bed. I surrounded my work space with their faces. I slept with photographs of the enslaved, made welcome their voices in my dreams. I was not afraid of their stories, bloody and horrific as they were. Growing up in the violence of north philadelphia prepared me for this work. Inwardly, I frequently daydreamed and found myself stargazing into the eyes of the photographs lining the walls of my workspace. On one particular day, I was called into the eyes of an African woman, the most brutalized face of all, sad, resolved to die or to murder, or to walk the bottom of the ocean back to her homeland. That face called out to me to rescue her. And that is when I entered my newfound gift of Artmaking. I began to transfigure into a visual artist.
Without knowing what I was doing, I found a pair of scissors and cut her body out of the photograph, away from the shack, dirt floor, burlap dress. I found images of Nature, lovely things like flowers, fruit, dawn and dusk, stars, full moons, hills, and waterfalls—intensely lovely things crafted by the hands of the Goddess—leopards, hawks, horses, jaguars, peacocks, eagles.I cut-and-pasted the African woman into a new, transcended circumstance—enthroned in a natural waterfall, frangipani in her hair; enfruited amid guava, melons, and passion fruit, haloed in a galaxy of stars, great being of beauty and Light inhabiting a radiant Universe, an ancient world, wondrously African—a woman nowhere near a slave.I looked at the finished collage and welled up with sorrow. For the first time I saw the great distance she and all the enslaved Africans had come—across the Universe, across the waters, from the spirit world. All things sacred washed over my eyes and I began to perceive the depth of the deeds done to the African ancestors. And then an extraordinary thing happened. I found myself filling up with a feeling so unexpected, it was dizzying. I felt like my heart was learning a new language. The familiar range of emotions related to the enslaved experience was expanding, overtaken by a feeling so surreal it made me giddy—joy, joy, joy was coming into form from a wellspring deep inside. I heard the voice of the transfigured African woman speaking out of the collage: "You have been carrying the wrong memories."
Once these words were sounded, the ground shifted, new earth was exposed, and the words that followed would change my thinking about slavery forever. We survived the unsurvivable, endured the unendurable. What does that make us? What does that make you? Of what was our strength composed?
Reverend Michael Beckwith once said:
There are certain advanced souls who volunteer to come to Earth to help us evolve into beings of greater humanity.
Could the enslaved be among those advanced soul volunteers?
This information download continued as the transfigured African woman and the Runaways guided me in an ancient process of healing through Art. They said to honor them with Poetry, in the ancient way. So I walked through the woods to my sycamore tree, calling out to the radiant beings and watching as they gathered. From earth, bones, roots, memory, arose phrases and feelings that were not mine yet flowed from my hands. These poems became a book that was assigned the name Kiss Me on My Face of God: Ancestral Poems (iUniverse, 2006).These Ancestral beings insisted that the living be re-taught about slavery, not through the head, but through the heart. Thus began my journey of creating “Healing History Workshop: Transforming the Wound of Slavery and Oppression for People of All Races” (now called “Healing History Workshop: Transforming the Wounds of Social Injustice”). This is the work of creating safe space to ask the right questions about slavery; to become conscious of the injury to the human spirit that slavery caused and to heal that injury through Art and Ritual. This workshop provides a healing space where African descendants can wash their wounds in cool waters and meet their African Ancestors on higher ground, asking the right questions and receiving sacred insights. It also provides a sacred space for European descendants of enslavers to atone, wash their specific wounds inherited from their Ancestors and, most especially—to remember. “I come from a tribe that has lost its memory and the loss of memory is the root of oppression.”
-- Gloria Steinem.
THE IMPACT OF THIS WORK IN MY LIFE:
In my work with private clients, I have found many times that what appears to be a personal issue of chronic pain and suffering often has ancestral roots. Once cleared, a surge of radiant life force energy becomes available to quicken the client’s healing process. And the Ancestors are set free.
When I was called to create Healing History Workshop, I assumed that I was being shown how to heal my African Ancestors and heal myself from the spiritual residue of slavery. Much to my amazement, many people of European descent were being called to this work and their ancestors were showing up asking for healing too. I have seen that when we create a safe space for healing, many are drawn to the light.
I have been particularly moved by the universality of the work. A “Healing History Workshop” participant wrote these words to me: ‘I am a Jewish woman who has long been trying to unite practices of peace with an understanding of the holocaust. In your workshop, I found an opening that allowed me to reach a place of forgiveness previously inaccessible. You have helped me to reach back in history in a way I had not believed possible and see my ancestors in a way that restores their wholeness.’ This is the sacred work given to me by my Ancestors
This essay was written for Network, a publication of International Women's Writing Guild.
