Honouring where you come from does not mean handing your future back to the people who came before you.
We talk about ancestors very romantically in spiritual spaces. Your ancestors are protecting you, guiding you, clearing the path, sending signs, standing behind you, probably somewhere shaking their heads every time you go back to the same person they already warned you about three readings ago.
Cute.
But I think ancestral work gets much more interesting when we allow for a less comforting possibility: what if some of your ancestors do not actually agree with the path you are taking?
What if they would have hated some of your choices? What if they don’t understand the life you are building? What if the resistance you feel in your bloodline is not always some grand warning that you are making a terrible mistake, but friction created when somebody in the lineage starts doing something the lineage has never had the safety, freedom, language or opportunity to do before?
That question interests me far more than the idea that every ancestor is automatically enlightened simply because they are dead.
Because personally, I do not believe death suddenly makes everybody wise.
Dead does not automatically mean enlightened
I think our ancestors were people first.
Some were wise, loving, courageous, intuitive and resourceful. Some survived things I probably cannot fully comprehend from the position I occupy now, and some of the choices they made are the reason their descendants even had the opportunity to make different ones.
But they were still human.
Some were frightened. Some were prejudiced. Some were cruel. Some made terrible decisions. Some perpetuated the exact patterns their descendants are now trying to undo. Some probably resented their children, disliked members of their own families or carried unresolved wounds for their entire lives.
Within my own spiritual framework, I believe consciousness continues after physical death, that some souls reincarnate and that others may remain more attached to the identities, desires or experiences they did not fully resolve while they were here. I cannot scientifically prove that, and I am not interested in pretending I can. It is simply how I currently understand consciousness and incarnation.
Which is exactly why, when I speak about ancestral guidance, the word I care about most is guidance.
Not commandment.
I can listen to something I believe is ancestral guidance, meditate on it, pray about it, examine how I respond internally, ask questions and still decide not to follow it. If I override it and discover later that the guidance was right, then I learn from that. If I override it and something beautiful happens because I chose differently, I learn from that too.
Either way, it is still my life.
What ancestral resistance actually feels like to me
I do not tend to experience ancestral resistance as some booming voice appearing in the room telling me, Absolutely not, my child.
For me, it is usually much quieter than that.
Dreams can become louder. My intuition can become persistent around something. A pattern may start repeating itself in different forms until I eventually have to admit I am looking at more than one random incident. I can also get this sudden internal urge to pivot, particularly when something that once felt completely natural starts feeling strangely pressurized.
You know when you are so immersed in something you enjoy that hours disappear without you noticing? That feeling of being fully inside it, where you do not need to force yourself to continue because the interest carries you?
When that starts wearing off repeatedly and flow begins turning into pressure, I notice.
Now, I do not immediately decide that means an ancestor has closed the road.
People burn out. Interests change. Businesses evolve. Relationships change. Bodies get tired. Life happens. Something feeling difficult for a week does not automatically mean a spirit is standing behind you holding a spiritual stop sign.
But when several things begin pointing in the same direction, that is when I start asking questions.
Is this fear? Is this ego? Is this an old wound? Is somebody else's expectation sitting inside me? Is this genuinely guidance? And if it is, why is it arriving now?
That process matters to me because I never want spirituality to remove my ability to think.
My body gives me information too, but I still have to interpret it
Part of my discernment happens physically.
There are moments where I receive an impression or think about a particular direction and my body reacts before I have consciously figured out how I feel about it. I might break into a sweat, feel adrenaline, get a headache, experience something shifting in my stomach or even start passing wind more than usual.
That is information to me.
It is not proof - there is a difference.
My body can respond because I am anxious, tired, triggered, hungry, excited, remembering something subconsciously or sensing something that, within my own spiritual framework, feels significant so I do not treat my nervous system like a supernatural lie detector.
If I develop a headache every time I consider a particular decision, I am going to investigate that. Maybe something about the choice genuinely feels wrong. Maybe it reminds me of another experience. Maybe I am frightened of what comes next. Maybe I simply need water.
The sensation gets my attention but the interpretation still requires discernment.
Ancestral loyalty can turn into self-betrayal very quickly
This is one of the areas where ancestral work becomes especially interesting to me, because family systems can preserve behaviours long after anyone remembers why those behaviours existed in the first place.
Imagine a woman learns to remain quiet because speaking openly is dangerous for her. Her daughter grows up watching that and learns that being agreeable keeps the peace. Her granddaughter absorbs the message that visibility creates problems. Three generations later, another woman is sitting there wondering why being seen makes her deeply uncomfortable despite the fact that nobody in her current environment is actually threatening her for taking up space.
The original behaviour may have been incredibly intelligent but that does not automatically make the inheritance useful.
This is why I cannot get behind the idea that honouring your ancestors means preserving every pattern they left behind. Some patterns existed because they kept somebody alive. I can respect that without carrying the behaviour into circumstances where it no longer serves me.
There is a massive difference between saying, I understand why you needed this, and saying, therefore I must need it too.
And honestly, I think being able to make that distinction allows me to have more compassion for the people who came before me, because I do not have to turn them into villains in order to choose differently.
Marriage and children made me confront this in my own life
For a long time, marriage and children existed in my mind as possibilities.
They were things adults did. They could be nice. If I met the right person and life unfolded in a particular way, maybe that would be part of my story but… I never had the kind of burning desire for motherhood I have seen in other people.
My best friend has understood that feeling differently. My brother has always wanted to be a parent. There is something visceral in that for them, something that feels like an actual dream rather than simply a socially available option. For me, it was much more like, Hmm, yeah, that could be nice.
And the older I got, particularly after navigating different relationships and being forced to become more honest about what I genuinely wanted, the more I realised marriage and children were not sitting anywhere near the top of my list.
That does not make marriage oppressive.
It does not make motherhood unhealed.
If somebody wants five children, a spouse, Sunday dinner and the whole family setup and that brings them genuine fulfilment, please go and build exactly that.
The issue begins when somebody else's fulfilment is handed to you as an obligation.
That is where inherited expectation can become self-betrayal very quickly.
Your ancestors may understand survival better than they understand your freedom
This is something I think about a lot.
Our ancestors were making decisions inside worlds that may have looked completely different from ours. Different laws, expectations, threats, economic realities, gender roles, religious structures, opportunities and consequences.
A woman who survived by staying invisible may have been incredibly wise for the life she was living.
But I live in a time where, as a woman, I have more agency than many women in my lineage would have had. Not complete agency, obviously, but enough that I can earn my own money, choose whether I marry, decide whether I become a parent, leave relationships, speak publicly, create a business and construct a life that may have been inaccessible to somebody several generations before me.
So if one of my ancestors learned that safety meant remaining unseen, why would I automatically assume that staying unseen is still the correct instruction for me?
Maybe one of the gifts created by ancestral survival is that somebody later in the line gets to experiment with freedom.
If I believe we incarnate to experience life through our own consciousness, then perfectly recreating somebody else's choices would almost defeat the point.
I did not come here to cosplay my great-grandmother.
I can honour her and still live differently.
An ancestor may be warning you. They may also be afraid.
This is where I think people need to be very careful about treating ancestral wisdom as inherently holy.
If I feel resistance around something, I want to know what kind of resistance it is.
Does it feel like, There is genuinely something wrong here; slow down and look again?
Or does it feel more like, Nobody in this family has done this before and unfamiliarity feels dangerous?
Those are completely different things.
Living relatives do this all the time.
Tell your family you are leaving a stable job to start a business and somebody will immediately tell you how risky it is. Tell them you do not want children and suddenly you are being informed that you will die alone surrounded by cats. Tell somebody you are leaving the family religion and now there is concern for your soul. Start something unconventional and inevitably somebody will ask when you are going to get a proper job.
They might genuinely love you.
Their fear might even come from that love.
It still does not make their fear prophetic.
So why would I assume the dead are automatically incapable of the same limitation?
An ancestor can love you deeply and still be wrong about what happiness actually means for you.
Honour does not mean obedience
This might be the part I feel strongest about.
I can honour somebody's life without recreating it. I can respect the way they survived without making survival the organising principle of my own life. I can appreciate guidance without treating it like an order. I can even believe an ancestor sees something I do not and still decide, I hear you, but I need to learn this for myself.
Because ancestral healing does not make much sense to me as a one-way relationship where the dead are endlessly teaching the living.
What if we are teaching something too?
What if the descendant choosing differently shows the lineage what became possible after them?
What if the woman who never marries is not betraying generations of married women, but experiencing the autonomy they never had access to?
What if the man who goes to therapy is not rejecting the toughness of the men before him, but showing that masculinity no longer needs to depend on emotional suppression?
What if the person who chooses art, spirituality, travel, queerness, business ownership, childlessness or another unconventional path is not abandoning the lineage at all?
Maybe they are expanding it.
My relationship with religion makes this much more complicated
As someone of African descent, I cannot talk honestly about ancestral spirituality without eventually running into Christianity, colonialism, slavery and cultural erasure. I think about ancestors who used Christianity to survive, to find hope, to create community and to believe that something existed above the people oppressing them.
I also think about the fact that Christianity was used by enslavers and colonial systems as a tool of control. Both things can be true.
Historical evidence shows that Christian instruction was, in some contexts, used by enslavers to encourage obedience, while enslaved communities also took Christianity and reshaped it into something that sustained hope, resistance and freedom. Enslaved people were not simply passive recipients of somebody else's religion; they interpreted, transformed and sometimes weaponised that religious language back against the systems oppressing them.
That complexity matters to me because I do not want to flatten history into something emotionally convenient.
There were also forms of erasure attached to slavery and Christianisation. Africans were separated from names, languages, communities, customs and identities. In some historical contexts, enslaved Africans were baptised and given Christian names before being transported across the Atlantic.
Names are not trivial.
Names tell you where you came from.
Language tells you how your people understood the world.
Ritual tells you how they made meaning.
So when somebody's original identity is stripped away and replaced with whatever the dominant system decides is acceptable, that does something to a lineage.
That wound is part of why my own journey through religion has involved so much unmasking.
At the same time, I do not want to tell a lazy story where Africans had one unified spiritual tradition until Europeans arrived with Christianity. Africa has never had one religious history. Christianity existed in parts of Africa long before modern European colonialism, Islam also has very deep African histories, and traditional African spiritual systems themselves were incredibly diverse.
Decolonising spirituality should not require inventing another simplistic version of the past.
My brother and I are a good example of why I do not believe everybody needs the same route
My brother is deeply Christian.
I am spiritual and I do not automatically see us as connecting to two completely unrelated sources.
I always think about it like this: when my brother calls Mum, he might use the normal phone function. I might use WhatsApp.
Different method.
Same woman eventually saying hello.
Now obviously Christianity and my own spiritual framework contain real theological differences, so I am not saying every religious system is secretly identical and all terminology means the same thing.
What I mean is that I understand why Christianity carries him.
It gives him a framework, language, meaning and a way to connect with what he understands as God.
My path looks different. I work with Source, ancestors, tarot, astrology, intuition and other practices he may never want anything to do with.
And genuinely?
That's fine.
Maybe the deeper lesson within a family is not that everybody has to reach for the Divine through the same doorway.
Maybe every generation uses the language it has available to understand being alive.
What if my ancestors were Christian and would hate my spirituality?
Honestly?
Maybe some would.
I know that is less comforting than pretending every ancestor immediately becomes spiritually progressive the second they die.
If somebody lived their entire life believing tarot was sinful, divination was dangerous and communicating with ancestors was forbidden, I cannot simply assume death erased every one of those beliefs.
Maybe their understanding expanded afterward.
Maybe it did not.
I do not know… and that is precisely the point.
I do not know enough about what consciousness experiences after death to confidently tell somebody their ancestors approve of every spiritual practice they now use. It is equally possible that what somebody interprets as ancestral disapproval is their own inherited religious fear resurfacing through them.
So I ask questions.
I pray.
I meditate.
I observe what continues to repeat.
And ultimately, I still make the decision.
Because I do not want to leave one inherited religion only to create another invisible authority system where I am terrified of disobeying dead relatives.
That is not spiritual freedom to me.
It is obedience with different branding.
Not every inherited fear needs a supernatural explanation
This matters too.
Families pass things down psychologically and socially whether you believe in ancestral energy or not.
If women in your family experienced repeated betrayal, you may grow up hearing stories that shape your understanding of relationships.
If generations experienced poverty, money can trigger anxiety even when your present circumstances are relatively stable.
If visibility historically brought punishment, success can feel strangely dangerous.
If silence kept people safe, speaking openly may create guilt.
Those things can travel through parenting, stories, behaviour, modelling, trauma and cultural conditioning.
I do not need the psychological explanation and the spiritual explanation to fight each other.
Both can be useful lenses.
What ultimately matters to me is what I am going to do with the pattern now that I can see it.
Whether the fear arrived energetically through my ancestors, through family conditioning or through something I learned myself, I still have to decide whether it deserves another generation of authority.
Sex work taught me something about paths that do not look respectable
There are choices I have made that I can imagine several ancestors having extremely strong opinions about.
Sex work is probably high on that list.
Depending on the time they lived in, their religious beliefs, their understanding of sexuality and what survival looked like for them, I can imagine that chapter of my life being difficult for some of them to understand.
But it also taught me an enormous amount.
It changed the way I understood men, sexuality, desire, power, performance, attention and what people reveal when they think judgement has temporarily left the room.
That does not mean the path needed to become permanent and it definitely does not mean I am recommending sex work as a character-building exercise. Please use some sense.
What it showed me is that a chapter can contain valuable information even when you are not meant to live there forever.
That has happened repeatedly throughout my life. One experience teaches me something, the information becomes useful somewhere else, then the path shifts again.
Maybe an ancestor looking at one isolated chapter would say, You shouldn't be here.
Maybe.
But if I had never been there, would I know what I know now?
That is why I do not think ancestral guidance can always be reduced to approval versus disapproval.
Life is rarely that tidy.
When flow becomes pressure, I start listening differently
This is probably one of my clearest personal indicators that something needs attention.
There are things I can become completely absorbed in, where the hours disappear and I do not need to convince myself to continue because the thing itself is feeding me.
Then, occasionally, that quality changes.
What once felt exciting becomes heavy.
I start forcing something that previously moved quite naturally.
If that happens for a day or two, whatever. People get tired.
But if I keep desperately trying to recreate an old sense of flow and the experience keeps answering me with pressure, I start wondering whether the chapter itself has shifted.
That does not mean the path was a mistake.
It may simply mean it worked.
We struggle with this because we assume that if something was good for us, it should remain good forever.
But jobs, relationships, identities, beliefs and spiritual practices can all be completely right for one season and completely wrong for another.
Maybe your ancestors are not dragging you away from something terrible.
Maybe you are simply being nudged because you are trying to build a permanent home inside a season that has already taught you what it came to teach.
Repeating patterns bring the conversation back to me
One thing ancestral work has taught me is that I have to be careful not to turn every repeating pattern into something happening to me.
If something keeps happening, eventually I have to ask what I keep participating in.
Where am I abandoning my own boundaries?
What am I tolerating?
What have I already been shown that I keep treating as optional information?
I learned this especially through experiences where my lack of boundaries eventually had serious consequences for my health and wellbeing.
That forced me to understand that a boundary ignored for long enough does not disappear.
Eventually your body, your circumstances or another person may create one for you.
So if something repeats, my first thought is no longer, I'm cursed.
I want to know where my agency is.
That is what makes ancestral work useful to me.
It should bring me closer to my own participation, not convince me invisible forces are controlling every aspect of my life.
You can break the pattern without hating the people who created it
I think people can become very dramatic about generational healing.
Suddenly everybody before them was traumatised and unconscious and they are the first enlightened person ever born into the family.
Please calm down.
Your ancestors navigated worlds you did not live in.
Some of the choices we criticise easily now were made under conditions we have never experienced.
I can have compassion for that and still choose differently.
I can say, I understand why this made sense for you, while also saying, I refuse to continue it.
Those statements do not cancel each other out.
Actually, I think that is where genuine generational change becomes possible.
Maybe you are not here to make your ancestors comfortable
We talk constantly about making our ancestors proud… I am not convinced that is always the assignment.
Maybe your role in the lineage involves making some of them deeply uncomfortable.
You might be the first woman who does not marry, the first man who goes to therapy, the first person who leaves the family religion, the first person who returns to an older tradition, the first queer person who refuses to disappear, the first one who chooses art instead of the safe career, the first person who decides not to have children, or the first one who earns enough money that survival no longer has to dominate every decision.
The first person to say:
Actually, we're not doing that anymore.
Breaking a pattern can look like betrayal to somebody whose entire identity was shaped inside that pattern.
It does not automatically mean the break is wrong.
So what do I actually do when I think my ancestors disagree with me?
I listen.
That does not mean I obey.
I also do not immediately rebel just to prove that I can.
I sit with it, pray, meditate, write, watch what keeps happening around the situation and ask whether what I am feeling resembles fear, ego, conditioning, intuition, genuine guidance or several of those things at once.
And then I give the answer time to stop being dramatic.
That is important for me because the clearest guidance I receive rarely requires panic.
Eventually, I choose.
Because ancestral guidance is still guidance.
I am the one currently incarnated.
I am the person who has to live with the result and that means I reserve the right to override the advice.
There may be consequences.
There may also be triumphs nobody in my lineage has experienced before.
Both possibilities belong to the risk of being alive.
Your bloodline gave you a starting point, not a finished script
I honour the people who came before me because without them, I would not be here. I honour what they survived, the traditions that carried them, the religions that gave some of them hope, the things they knew and the things they were forced to forget.
I can also interrogate the systems that controlled them, renamed them, limited them or taught them to fear parts of themselves.
Those two things can exist together.
What I refuse to do is mistake honour for surrender.
My ancestors had information I do not have.
I also have information they never had access to.
That is the entire point of generations.
Knowledge moves.
Circumstances change.
People experience possibilities that did not previously exist.
An ancestor can love you deeply and still be wrong about what happiness actually means for you. Your parents can be wrong about it. Your siblings can be wrong about it. Your entire community can be wrong about it.
You can even be wrong about it and change your mind later.
That is not failure.
That is being alive.
So I do not want ancestral work to become another form of obedience. I do not want to leave one inherited rulebook only to replace it with an invisible one.
I want relationship, respect, curiosity and discernment, with enough sovereignty to occasionally listen to the people who came before me and still say:
I hear you. I'm going to find out for myself.
Because if my ancestors survived long enough for me to exist in a world where I have more choices than some of them did, perhaps honouring them does not mean recreating their limitations.
Maybe it means seeing what else their survival made possible.
If this is the kind of resistance you are trying to understand
If you keep finding yourself at the same crossroads, feeling pulled between what your family, your conditioning, your intuition and your spiritual path seem to be telling you, that is exactly the kind of thing we can unpack together in a private session.
I do not believe in telling clients that an ancestor has issued some dramatic spiritual command and therefore they need to reorganise their entire life around it. What I do is help you look at the pattern properly: what keeps repeating, what belongs to your conditioning, what your intuition has been saying underneath the noise, where fear may be masquerading as guidance and whether the resistance you are experiencing looks more like a warning, an inherited limitation or a genuine invitation to pivot.
If you have been circling the same decision and cannot tell whether you are being redirected or simply frightened of choosing differently, you can book a reading with me through here. Bring the situation as it is. We can look at the spiritual dynamics, the patterns underneath it and, most importantly, where your own agency sits inside all of it.
Because your ancestors may be part of the conversation.
They do not get the final vote.
— Love, Venus xx
