Ancestral Hands: a 3-Day Somatic Journey
You are at the heart of your life; your experiences, your body, and your wisdom. And you hold the wisdom of not only your Self but generations back. This practice is designed to unlock the door to your remembering. In this three day journey you’ll begin your return. As a Woman of Flame you are not becoming something new. Like the fiery phoenix rising from its own ashes, you are rising in remembrance of your own fire.
This practice is a sampling of the work at the heart of Remember Her. Built for the overwhelmed woman and designed for simple integration. You need ten to fifteen minutes a day for three days and nothing else. This is just you with your Self, your breath, your hands, and a willingness to feel.
Before you begin
This practice was inspired by somatic approaches to self-awareness and regulation, as well as ideas from the Polyvagal Theory about the relationship between perceived safety, the autonomic nervous system, and our capacity to connect and regulate. Touch, including self-touch, can be a simple way to bring your attention back to your body and create a felt sense of presence and care. In working with the tools that you already have (your body, your nervous system), you can learn to trust your own responses again.
Look at your hands. I know you see your hands, but these are also your mother’s hands, your grandmother’s hands. These are the hands of generations. They have been used to knead bread, to comfort a crying child, to wipe her own tears in times of difficulty. These hands carry the wisdom of your lineage. This practice is an invitation to remember that lineage and welcome it back to you.
For three days, find a quiet ten to fifteen minutes for yourself each day. Maybe this is in the morning before you begin your day or at night before you go to bed. If you’d like soft music, you are welcome to play it quietly in the background. For this practice, sit or lie down in a place where your body can be unguarded. We are welcoming safety into your nervous system.
A couple of notes
This practice may bring emotions or awaken vivid images. Or it may just feel quiet and uneventful. There is nothing specific you need to feel or goal you need to reach. The practice itself is the goal.
Journaling is a powerful way to process emotion or create clarity. After doing your practice, journaling is recommended, though it is optional. You may feel pulled to journal a whole page, or you may find that a few lines is all you need. The act of journaling itself can help you see patterns and unlock wisdom that you may not see otherwise.
If you feel the need to repeat a day, do it. You are your own seat of wisdom; your body knows what you need. If you feel a day brings something unfinished, repeat it. This is a practice, not a goal with a finish line. Listen to your body’s needs and repeat as much as you feel to.
Day One: Arrival
Why we start here: before you connect with your ancestral line, before you choose to set something down you no longer need to carry, before you take any thought-driven action, your body needs to experience and believe that it is safe to be still. With your arrival practice, you aren’t warming up before the real work. You are doing the real work of signaling safety to your body and your nervous system. This is foundational to any subsequent work; it makes the rest of your work possible. Arrival is telling your nervous system: I am safe. I am present. I can listen.
Practice: The Resting Hand
1. Sit comfortably. Let one hand rest, palm down, over your heart. Let the other rest on your belly.
2. Simply notice. Don't try to change your breath. Feel where it's already moving. Fast or slow, high or low, it's all information, not a problem to fix.
3. Take three slow breaths, and on each exhale, let your shoulders drop a little further than you think they need to.
4. After a minute, ask silently: What does my body know today that my mind hasn't caught up to yet?
5. Sit with whatever arises. You may see an image, a word, a memory, or nothing at all. Nothing is required of you here except presence.
6. If a sensation shows up anywhere in your body such as tightness, warmth, heaviness, or ease, place your attention there for a few breaths, without trying to change it.
7. Close by pressing gently into both hands, saying (aloud or silently): I am here. I am allowed to arrive.
If stillness feels difficult. Many of us struggle with stillness. We start to feel within the stillness and we reach for our phone, start running through the endless to-do list, anything to distract ourselves from the work of simply Being. This is not a failure. This is the pattern you are beginning to interrupt. You may hold the belief that stillness is wasted unless you are producing a set outcome; you may hold the belief that stillness is dangerous. Only action brings safety and results. Whatever your belief, this is the pattern you are interrupting.
Why this works:
Hand-over-heart contact has physiological, psychological, and social benefits. It is a soothing gesture and signals to the vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system that you are safe. This simple action can release oxytocin and endorphins and reduce cortisol levels, counteracting the fight-or-flight stress response and putting the body into a state of calm. In this state of calm, reflection becomes possible. Combining both touch and breath sends a signal to your nervous system in multiple ways that you are safe. We often try to talk ourselves into a state of calm, with varying results. This action sends the message to your body and it begins to calm in response.
Tomorrow, you will use your hands to hold the presence of your ancestor, and the next day you will practice setting down a burden that has completed itself with you. But today, these hands hold you. You get to experience your own sacred touch. Today, you learn to believe that your own hands are a safe place to land.
Journaling prompt, if you choose: What did ‘arriving’ in my body actually feel like today?
Day Two: Ancestry
Practice: The Remembering Hands
1. Return to the same seated position. This time, turn your palms upward, resting open on your knees or thighs.
2. Bring to mind a woman from your lineage. She may be known or unknown to you, by blood or by choosing. She doesn't need a name. Let her presence simply arrive.
3. Imagine her hands. What did they do? What did they carry, build, hold, release?
4. Notice if a specific memory, image, or even just a feeling-tone comes with her — don't force detail, let whatever arrives be enough.
5. Slowly turn your palms to face each other, as if holding something, an object, a weight, an offering, between them.
6. Ask: What did she survive that I no longer have to? What did she want for the women who came after her? You are not looking for the “right” answer. You are listening for the truth that your body holds within. There is no ‘right’ answer here. It is simply the act of learning to listen.
7. If it feels true, silently offer her something back. Maybe you want to offer gratitude, acknowledgment, or simply the fact of being witnessed by you now.
8. Let your hands close gently, as if closing around an answer, even if no words come.
9. Take one more breath before you open your eyes, letting her presence settle rather than rushing back into the room.
Why this works:
This practice draws on somatic and reflective approaches to ancestry. You are using your body, environment, imagination, sensation, and personal story to explore what you may have inherited from the women that came before you.
You may have a deep connection to your feminine line. You may experience it as a spiritual connection or a cultural bond. You may also feel as if it is a connection you’d like to create or deepen into. Regardless of where you hold your female ancestors, you may find it empowering and spiritually enhancing to explore your own patterns, strengths, beliefs, and stories by consciously turning toward the women who came before you.
Asking the question, “what did she survive that I no longer have to?” creates a connection both to her wisdom of what she experienced and her wisdom of what you are allowed to put down. She lived what she lived. You can honor her story without making it your burden to carry.
The second question, “what did she want for the women who came after her?” opens the door to possibility. You get to shift from survival to creation. She carried what she carried. You get to choose what continues through you.
You aren’t doing this practice to uncover a hidden ancestral truth or to ‘fix’ yourself or connect to the ‘right’ story. You are creating stillness within such that the wisdom of our ancestral line has the opportunity to shine through.
Journal prompt: What did I inherit from her that I want to keep? What did I inherit that I'm ready to set down?
Day Three: Offering
Practice: The Giving Hands
1. Sit once more, hands resting open, palms up, in your lap.
2. Take a moment to mentally scan what you're carrying right now. Maybe it’s today's weight, this week's, or something much older.
3. Slowly turn your palms downward, as if setting something down. This could be anything you've carried today, this week, this lifetime, that isn't yours to hold anymore.
4. Let the setting-down be physical, not just imagined. I want you to feel your palms actually release toward the floor or your lap.
5. Then turn your palms back up, open and empty. Stay here for several breaths, resisting the urge to immediately fill the emptiness with something new.
6. Notice what it feels like to have open hands with nothing in them. If that feels uncomfortable, that discomfort is worth noticing too. It’s not something to fix.
7. Bring your hands together at your heart, and say: These hands are mine now. I decide what they carry forward.
8. Ask yourself: If I could choose one thing to carry forward instead, starting today, what would it be?
9. Notice what feels different in your body compared to Day One. You may be able to name it precisely, or you may just notice that something has shifted. Just notice that something has moved.
Why this works:
The physical gesture of setting down makes the practice tangible; it brings it out of the cognitive and into the physical. You make it live in your life by welcoming your body’s participation in the act.
Opening the hands after is just as important. In the act of releasing, you are performing a ritual of letting go. In so doing, you are creating a space within your life and your psyche that something gets to fill. This can be uncomfortable. Instead of rushing to fill the emptiness, you are invited to sit with it.
Notice it.
Breathe and allow that breath to fill your body, to fill the newly emptied space, and experience what it feels like to no longer hold that burden in your hands.
Then you get to choose what fills that space when you are ready. You decide what gets carried forward. Your release is an act of sovereignty. You chose what to let go, and you now choose what you will carry forward; this is the beginning of your own discernment where you determine what belongs in your hands in the first place.
You have been handed many things; you don’t have to carry them all into your future. You get to choose what continues through you.
Journal prompt: Looking back across all three days, what's one thing I noticed that I want to remember?
What Comes Next
This is a small window into the kind of work that runs through all twelve weeks of Remember Her, where practices like this one build, week over week, into a full return to embodied sovereignty.
Ready to go deeper? Join one of my upcoming Remember Her cohorts, or explore Unearthing if you're just beginning to uncover what's still alive in you.