This is the intro to a meditation on family, ancestry, and land. I suggest folks stand to face their birthplace, but that’s optional. It’s good to at least know the compass directions so one can somatically sense the map. The sequence builds a branching web of historical memory and myth, imagining the lines between our body and our birthplace, through our parents and extended families, known and unknown, through layers of displacement, back to our ancestors’ places of origin, feeling for the place where our lineages began, before displacement. Feeling for the distance we’ve come from indigeneity. For each step in the instruction the practice is to make imaginitive contact, feel the resonance of that contact in the body, and allow the felt sense to move through you as much as is within your resources and capacity to process with compassion, clear witness, and embodied presence.

The intro talk for this meditation reflects on trauma and beauty in our cultural heritage, and suggests gently that this kind of reflection can be thought of as related to the ancient Buddhist practice of seeing one’s past lives and understanding karma as action and its results. Starting there, we came here. The inquiry then draws on the brahmavihāras: loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. It also brings in the specific supports for processing the past: forgiveness and gratitude.