I Had to Burn It: Ancestral Knowledge Remembered

This summer I received a card in the mail. No name, no signature, but I recognized the handwriting — my mother’s.

On the front: red and blue hearts. Inside: a few short words, and tucked behind them a photo of her and my father. The same man who never raised me, never supported his children, who later married her after forty years apart. Two people who left wreckage behind, smiling in a picture together. No mention of their granddaughter. No acknowledgement of the harm. Just a picture and a performance of care.

When I held it, I knew what I had to do.

At first, I only meant to burn the photo. Then I realized her handwriting had to go, too. Then I noticed the envelope — sealed with her saliva — and knew the most amount of her energy that I could gather needed to be released. Piece by piece, I collected everything that carried her essence.

I carried a bowl of water outside, and without thinking, I poured salt in it. I gathered a stone from the yard. I carried the photo, the card, the envelope to the fire pit. I lit them. I placed the stone in the flames. I watched the paper curl and blacken. I fed the fire until the paper was ashes. When the flames had done their work, I poured the saltwater over the remains.

The next morning, I knew it wasn’t finished. Earth needed to seal this. I went to my blackberry bushes, rinsed the ashes into water, and poured the mixture into the soil. Blackberries grow with thorns and sweetness; they felt like the right place for this transmutation: suffering becoming nourishment.

At the time, I didn’t have the language. Later, I looked and I learned why I had been guided to use those specific elements:

• Fire (release and severing)

  • It is the first medicine when we must break a tie that binds us to harm. Fire clears the shape of what must end.

• Salt + Water (purification, protection, witness)

  • Salt has long been used across African, Indigenous, and global spiritual traditions as a purifier and protector. Salt in water becomes a cleansing balm; it neutralizes emotional residue, washes away spiritual debris, and seals the edges of the wound. Water is the great dissolver and witness — it receives grief, carries messages between realms, reflects and remembers. Putting water on the flames is symbolic of letting the emotion rise, then cooling it into something still and clear.

• Stone (witness and memory)

  • When I placed a stone in the fire, it did not burn. It held what the fire released. Stones hold time; they are the quiet archive of what was and what is being changed.

• Soil / Earth (closure, burial, transmutation)

  • Returning the remnants to the earth is not discarding them — it is returning them to the womb of the Mother. Soil says, “This no longer belongs to you. Let it be composted. Let something new grow.”

When we hold ritual like this, we’re not performing for anyone. We are doing ancestral bookkeeping. We are closing ledgers that have been kept in our bodies and in our lineage.

What it means to “pay something off” energetically

This language — “paid in full” — has weight in ancestral healing. You did not choose the abandonment, the abuse, the broken ties. But these create cords, obligations, and debts that show up in our lives as patterns and burdens. You may have been paying on that debt all your life — not with money, but with:

• silence

• overgiving

• shame

• guilt

• hyper-independence

• exhaustion

• the sense that you have to be emotionally responsible for those who harmed you

  
  

When you create ceremony — fire, stone, saltwater, earth — and hold that intention clearly, you are telling the system and the ancestors: this account is closed. You reclaim energy that was conscripted by old wounds. You stop paying for what you never owed.

Why I bring this work into coaching

We Black women have never been promised safety, not in our bodies, not in our homes, not in our institutions. The science of ACEs, the generational epigenetic research, and the work of people like Resmaa Menakem and Dr. Joy DeGruy connect the dots between historical harm and the nervous systems we inherit. Books like The Body Keeps the Score taught many of us how trauma sits in the body; Menakem and DeGruy help us read that truth through race, lineage, and history.

If safety is never guaranteed externally, then thriving must be learned internally and ancestrally. That’s what I do with the women I hold: we build containers — psychic, emotional, and spiritual — where all parts of you can come home. Where your protectors are seen, where your smaller parts can rest, where your ancestors can witness and rearrange what is no longer required of you.

This practice is not a quick fix for burnout. It’s not a productivity hack. It’s not a checklist. It is an ongoing reclamation! A tending of a field where your nervous system can, slowly and in its own time, remember what safety could feel like.

I chose freedom. I chose myself. And this ritual was one of the ways I made that choice visible and irreversible.

Too many of us keep surviving while calling it thriving. But our bodies know the difference. Our ancestors know the difference.

So I’ll ask you: what debts are you still paying that were never yours to carry? And what will it take for you to finally say, paid in full?