The Ancestral Convergence: Food & Ritual for Healing this Thanksgiving

November 17, 2022 juniper stokes

I recently saw yet another post about eating ancestral foods and working with ancestral plants on Instagram…

Eat the foods your ancestors ate. Return to the foods that enlivened your DNA throughout generations. Turn to the native plants of your ancestral lands.

This was the message.

On the one hand, I love it. This is something I teach in my Rewilding the Spirit course, having students do a bit of research and prepare a meal that their bloodline ancestors might have enjoyed.

Yet I also teach my students how to connect with their land ancestors—the local ancestors that are keepers of the land they live on now, in this lifetime. Ancestors with whom it’s equally important to partner. Here, we prepare and enjoy local, wild foods to attune our current DNA to the current land we live on.

Reading this post on ancestral foods so close to Thanksgiving here in the States got me thinking—what would an ancestral Thanksgiving meal actually look like?

Would we turn to our recent American ancestors—those who cemented stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie into our collective consciousness?

Or perhaps we celebrate local abundance and honor the spirits of the land here, with wild rice and three sisters (squash, beans, and corn) themed cuisine? (An approach my family usually takes...)

Or maybe, as the post suggests, we travel further back to the native lands of our blood relatives.

I have to laugh as I think about what option three would look like…my Dutch, Irish, Swiss, French, and Welsh meeting Mike’s Italian and German heritage would create quite the menu!

And what if we tried to really incorporate all our ancestral influences? Pumpkin pie, wild rice, pickled herring, spaghetti and (vegan) meatballs…

As ridiculous as this image might seem, I actually love how clearly it demonstrates an important truth:

We are the convergence of many ancestral lines.

Ask yourself: What would a truly representative ancestral Thanksgiving dinner look like in your home?

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A Thanksgiving Menu with Ancestral Cuisine

This year, Mike and I are having a quiet dinner…but still going all out on our menu, as I’m somewhat addicted to cooking.

Our menu tends to mix some traditional foods with some local ones, and I always try to add a bit of wild, foraged plants in the mix. As we’re both vegetarian and I’m gluten free, everything becomes an updated fancy-pants version of ancestral cuisine.

We’ll have a few dishes I make every year—butternut and wild rice salad, boozy spiced cranberry sauce, pumpkin bread rolls, and green beans. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, and gravy always make the menu as well. (You can find a few of my favorite recipes here!)

We often have a stuffed pumpkin for our main, but I’m changing it up this year with a sagey mushroom, chestnut, and walnut loaf. Fingers crossed it turns out!

Gratitude, Trauma, and a Complicated Time of Year

Thanksgiving has traditionally been a time to focus on gratitude. Yet, I think many of us are sensitive to the fact that this holiday brings up many challenges, as well…

For those who have lost loved ones—and so many have, especially in the past couple of years—Hallmark images of happy family holidays can feel like knives in the heart.

For those who experienced early childhood trauma, any holiday focused on family can heighten a complex array of difficult emotions, decisions, conversations, and more.

And, while Thanksgiving is still a time to reflect on all we’re grateful for, it’s also becoming more and more a time to reflect on the ancestral traumas that gave birth to this holiday. The very real scars on the peoples and lands who tended this earth before the arrival of settlers cannot be ignored.

These challenges are real and painful, and they can make it easy to slip into guilt and despair. They can even activate fear around even publicly celebrating this holiday.

Yet gratitude is one of the highest vibration states we can enter into. Gratitude shifts our energy and opens our heart. It fortifies our spiritual strength in trying times. It tells the earth and our loved ones that we appreciate all the gifts in our lives. It communicates our own true worth to our innermost selves.

What if we treated our Thanksgiving menus as opportunities for healing? What if we ritualized our feasts as vessels of ancestral reconciliation?

Rituals for Thanksgiving Healing

Rituals work because of the powerful confluence of intention and energy they create. Though seemingly magical, they are one of the most powerful ways I know of to create real, observable change in our lives.

Any major holiday is already charged with extra usable energy—generations of repeated intentions and actions have already ritualized these days.

This means that when we set the intention for our Thanksgiving dinners to become healing ceremonies, we really can impact our personal and collective energy in powerful ways.

Though the details of your personal rituals will look different depending on your intentions, a few pieces will be the same:

Set your intention for healing before you begin preparing your meal. Then hold this intention throughout the cooking process. See your love, gratitude, and desire for healing flow from your heart, into your hands, and into the food.
If possible, state your intentions out loud at your dinner table. Invite the others present to offer their intentions for healing, as well.
Affirm that as you consume the food laid before you, your body becomes an alchemical vessel of transformational healing. Just as your digestive system physically transmutes food into energy, the energy of intentions you’ve poured into the food alchemizes into healing.

Any and all healing intentions are welcome here. Trust your guidance. Here are a few suggestions depending on what might be alive for you in this moment:

For family gatherings that might trigger personal trauma or seemingly inevitable conflict, try infusing the food with the emotions you wish to cultivate more of—perhaps self-worth, protection, or family harmony.
For those who wish to honor loved ones across the veil, you may like to prepare their favorite dishes. Imagine the part of them that lives on in you getting to enjoy the meal through your physical vessel. Allow space for their physical absence to be named, and perhaps their spiritual presence to be welcomed.
If your heart is pulled toward all the people without healthy, hot meals at this time of year (or any, really), a beautiful practice here is to harness the energy of your own gratitude. Have everyone around your table feel a deep sense of gratitude for all the abundance you enjoy. Then imagine this abundance spreading to all beings. Visualize, with all the energy and focus you can harness, a world in which all people are fed. This practice might seem small, but it's a little bit of collective magic that really does spread blessings upon the ethers.
To contribute to our collective reconciliation around the traumas inflicted on native populations and the land here, learn about the traditional foods of the ancestors where you live. See if you can incorporate and celebrate these foods into a menu with your own traditional dishes. Set the intention that as your body harmonizes these foods, so harmony and reconciliation build in our collective. Focus on shifting guilt and judgment to love and visions of a better future for all who walk this land.

Please know, these practices aren’t meant to replace the very real-world actions needed to reconcile and heal a horrific legacy of colonization. Nor do they replace the self-healing and resourcing necessary to navigate complicated family legacies. (And for goodness sake, if hunger pulls on your heart be sure to donate to local food banks!)

My intention here is to help transform the underlying energy of our collective traumas so that we can create greater leaps in healing in the physical plane. Just as we tend our own well-being in mind, body, and spirit, we can tend our collective well-being through multiple modes and layers of healing.

An Invitation

This Thanksgiving, take some time to reflect on the many lineages that make up your ancestry. Feel into where healing is needed. Feel into where celebration is called for. And enjoy the sacred dimensions of the wild convergence that is you.