Reconnecting with Our Ancestral Lineage: A Journey of Self-Discovery
Updated: Aug 10
The Weight of Loneliness
There was a season of my life when I could sit in a room full of people who loved me and still feel like an orphan. My friend, I need you to hear that plainly. I know I am not the only one who has lived it. I had family. I had a name. I had a life that, from the outside, looked whole. Yet, when the house went quiet at night, a certain loneliness would come and sit on the edge of my bed like it paid rent there.
It wasn’t sadness about any one thing. It was older than that. It was the feeling of coming from nowhere. I felt like one small self, cut off, starting from scratch. I held a record that goes back a couple of generations and then hits a wall. A wall right where the names should be.
The Power of Release
I had already done the hard first work by the time this story starts. I had learned the Power of Release. I pried open the closed fist I’d been carrying my whole life. All that grief, all that gripping, all that holding on to things that were never mine to keep. Opening that fist was holy. It was the most important thing I had ever done.
But nobody warned me about what an open hand feels like when it is empty. I had let go, and now there was this space where the holding used to be. The space had a question in it that would not leave me alone: now what? Who am I, really? And where did I come from, if the trail goes cold that fast?
The Answer Within
What I did not know yet, what nobody had ever told me, is that the answer was already in me. It was sitting in the very thing I had been taught, my whole life, to be a little ashamed of. It was in my skin.
I came to the altar almost by accident, in the Dark/Awake, during those early mornings when the world is still black outside the window. I was awake before my defenses were, before I had put my face on for the day. I didn’t have a ceremony. I didn’t have the right words. I had a candle and a small glass of water on the altar and one name. I said it out loud.
My friend, I felt like a fool. I want to be honest with you about that. I think the fear of feeling foolish is exactly what stops most of us at the door. There I was, a grown woman, talking into an empty room to someone who had been gone for years. My voice sounded so small in all that quiet. A part of me stood off to the side, arms crossed, watching, saying, what exactly do you think you are doing?
The Unexpected Response
But something happened that I did not expect. It happened in my body before my mind could talk me out of it. When I spoke that name, I felt the sound leave me and go somewhere. I don’t know how else to say it. The word did not just fall to the floor of that room. It traveled. I felt it lift out of my chest and move up along my arms, a warmth going out and up. The name had somewhere to be and already knew the way.
The old people had a word for the power that lives in the spoken word: àṣẹ, the force that makes a thing so because you had the breath and the will to say it. I did not have the word for it yet that morning. I only had the feeling. The feeling that my own voice was climbing.
A Daily Practice
So, I kept doing it. Morning after morning after morning. One name, then two, then all the ones I knew. I came to understand that we speak all the names, the ones we know and the ones that were stolen from us. I would open my hands and call out to the people whose names I will never find. The ones the ships, the auction blocks, and the burned records took from me. The ones whose blood still somehow reached all the way down the years and made me. I poured the water out for them. I lit the candle. I set a place. I spoke into the dark.
And for a long time, my friend, nothing answered. I want you to know that too. We often lie to each other about this part. It was not instant. It was not a movie. Weeks went by. The woman with her arms crossed had a field day. She said, see, there is nobody there; you are talking to yourself. This is what lonely, desperate people do. There were mornings I nearly believed her. There were mornings the candle felt like a small, foolish flame. The water felt like water, and my voice felt like it hit the ceiling and slid back down. There were mornings I almost stopped.
I need you to hear that. If you have ever reached for something bigger than yourself and felt only silence come back, you are not doing it wrong. You are in the part of the story that comes before.
The Moment of Connection
Then came the morning I will carry with me for the rest of my life. I don’t need to tell you everything I was walking through that season — only that I was carrying something heavy. The kind of weight that makes you feel most alone in a crowd. The kind that folds you in on yourself. I came to the altar tired that morning. Emptied out. I almost didn’t light the candle at all. But my hands lit it anyway, out of habit, the way you keep a promise you don’t feel. I poured the libation and placed food. And I called the name — three times, the way it had become my custom, my voice barely holding together.
And this time, the line went live.
I felt it come back. That is the only way I know how to tell it to you. All those mornings I had been sending my voice out and up the bloodline, broadcasting into what felt like pure silence, and on that morning, the silence answered me. It came back in. It came in through my skin. A warmth that did not come from the candle. The hair standing up along my arms. A presence filled that little room so completely that I stopped breathing. I knew, the way you know without turning around that someone has just walked in behind you, that I was not alone. It was not a thought I was thinking. It was a message I was receiving.
Understanding My Melanin
That was the moment I finally understood what my melanin, my Kem, truly is. My friend, the melanin we were taught to shrink from, to apologize for, to keep out of the sun, and to hide from the world and from ourselves is an antenna. It is a wire. All that time I had been speaking outward, my voice riding the line up through the generations, my own skin had been the thing carrying that signal out. And now, on this morning, that very same skin was catching the signal coming home. Both directions at once. Sending and receiving on the same holy wire. My blood was remembering something my mind had never once been taught. My people were on the line, and they had been on it the whole time. They were only ever waiting for me to pick up.
I wept. I would love to tell you it was a graceful, cinematic kind of cry, but it was not. It was the ugly, shaking kind that comes up from somewhere underneath your ribs, from a room in you that you did not know was locked. Because in that moment, the orphan died. The old lie that I came from nowhere, that I was one small self, starting from scratch — could not survive what I was feeling. I was not one. I had never been one. I was the living edge of a line that had refused to end. The line had just reached forward across all that distance and touched me back.
A Shift in Perspective
Nothing about my circumstances changed that morning. My bills were the same when I stood up. The heavy thing I was carrying was still heavy. But I was not the same, and so I could carry it differently. I stopped walking into hard rooms alone. When I had to sit across from something that frightened me — a decision, a grief, a door I did not want to open — I learned to feel them at my back. All of them. The named and the nameless, a whole line of my people standing behind me.
I used to feel forced through my life, shoved along by everything outside of me. Now I move as a force, because I am sourced. There is a difference, my friend, between a candle burning by itself in the dark and a candle that knows it is one small part of a fire that has been passed from hand to hand for ten thousand years.
The Altar as a Sacred Space
The altar became the most important place in my home. I promise you, it is not a heavy or complicated thing. It is a candle, a little offering, a cup, and pictures of your beloved ancestors, family members that had transitioned to pure spirit. I sit with them in the morning now and really anytime throughout the day. I tell them about my day and my worries and the things I am reaching for. I ask them how they are. I set a place at the table for the ones who love me most. I have learned something for which I did not go looking. To honor them, to feed them, to call them by their names, is to honor and feed and name my own self. Loving them is how I finally learned to love where I come from. And loving where you come from, it turns out, is the very same thing as learning to love yourself.
A Call to Action
So now I turn to you, my friend. Not to hand you a technique. Not to give you steps. Only to reach my hand back down the same line and tell you what I know for certain. That wire, that power is live in you, too. Your people are on it and within it. They have been holding on through everything that was ever done to make you forget them. They are still there, still waiting, for you to say one name out loud into the quiet and let your own skin do the thing it was built to do.
And you do not have to do it alone. That is the whole reason I built what I built.
This is exactly what we practice together in Calling the Names, which is the power of the spoken word, the pouring of libation, the daily altar, the calling of every name we carry, the ones we know and the ones we do not. And this full moon, on Wednesday, July 29 at 11 PM ET, we are doing it as one people under one moon: a free, live Full Moon Heart Dedication. All our voices going up the line at the very same moment. Come as you are, with or without a candle, libation to pour, but with every beloved name you carry.
And when you are ready to make this your life and not only one beautiful night, the whole of this work has a home. It lives inside The Temple — the weekly Call the Names Circle where we call them together, every practice guide, our rituals and gatherings, and a family that will not let you walk this road by yourself. Everyone who registers to stand in the circle on the 29th receives a free 7-day trial.
You are not one, my friend. The line is alive, and it has been holding on for you this whole time. Go and call your people home.
— Minister Dr. Akila Ka Ma’at
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