Ritual, Cultural Healing & Ancestral Reclamation
Rituals Present in My Culture and Family
The rituals most present in my family of origin are Christian ones — Sunday church services, prayer before meals, homegoing funerals with full choirs and open caskets, Bible verses posted on walls, and the language of God's will used to explain everything from illness to abuse to loss. These are the rituals I was raised in, and they are still the framework my family operates within. My grandmother believed she would sit at the right hand of God. My family gathers around caskets and sings. They pray. They pass the offering plate. Christianity, in its Black American expression, has been the container my bloodline has used for spiritual life for as long as anyone in my family can remember — which, given the history of slavery and forced religious conversion in this country, is itself part of the wound.
But there is a difference between the rituals my family practices and the rituals that are mine. My family's Christianity is real to them. It has held them through grief, through poverty, through the particular terror of being Black in America. I do not dismiss what it has offered them. I also know, deeply and without apology, that it is not my path. The God my grandmother invoked was used to keep her silent. The church my mother attended did not protect me. Religion, as it was practiced in my family, was more often a tool of performance, control, and shame than a vessel of genuine healing. That distinction matters.
And I carry something else entirely. My rituals are Ifa. They are womb healing and Reiki. They are libations poured at an ancestor altar at dawn. They are Oriki spoken into the morning air. They are herbal preparations made with intention, healing circles held with other women, somatic practices that return the body to itself. My family calls this evil. They say I am a witch. They say I practice voodoo. And I understand where that comes from — it comes from the same religious indoctrination that told our ancestors that everything they knew before the slave ship was devil worship. That lie has been one of the most effective tools of cultural destruction in human history. I refuse to let it take anything else from me.
How Culturally Specific Rituals Support Healing from Trauma
Culturally specific ritual works on a level that generic healing practices cannot fully reach — because trauma is not just personal, it is cultural. What was done to my body was done to me. But what was done to my ancestors — the erasure, the forced conversion, the severing from language and land and tradition — was done to an entire people. Healing from that kind of wound requires a medicine that is at least as old and as specific as the wound itself.
Ifa and Isese Practice as Structural Healing
Studying Ifa in the Isese tradition under my Baba's guidance has been the single most structurally significant healing practice I have engaged in, because it does not just address symptoms — it addresses identity. It answers the question that sits underneath all trauma healing: who am I, really, beneath what was done to me? The Odu are maps of the human soul across every possible configuration of life. When I study them, I am not learning new information. I am remembering what was always true about my ori, my lineage, and my purpose. That remembering is healing in the most complete sense of the word — it restores what was taken, not just from me, but from every ancestor who was told their tradition was worthless.
Womb Rituals as Lineage Medicine
The womb is where lineage lives in the most literal sense. It is where life enters the world, where trauma is encoded and transmitted, where the oldest cellular memory of a lineage is stored. Womb rituals — yoni steaming, womb massage, intentional Womb Reiki, sacred rest and renewal practices — are culturally specific in that they connect to a long tradition of African and Indigenous women's healing that existed long before Western medicine decided women's bodies were problems to be managed. When I tend to my womb with herbs and intention, I am participating in something my great-great-grandmothers knew. I am restoring a practice that was interrupted, not invented. That continuity is itself a healing act.
Ancestor Veneration as Community Across Time
One of the specific ways cultural ritual supports trauma healing is by restoring a sense of belonging — not just to the living, but to the dead. Black American trauma has, in part, been a trauma of isolation and severance. Slavery severed names, severed languages, severed the knowledge of which village, which lineage, which Orisha claimed your bloodline. Ancestor veneration at my altar, pouring libations and calling names both known and unknown, is a refusal of that severance. It says: the chain was broken, but I am reconnecting it. It places me inside a community that spans generations rather than leaving me alone with wounds I did not create. That shift — from isolated survivor to member of a living lineage — changes everything about how healing feels.
Reiki and Energy Healing as Sacred Embodiment
Reiki, as I practice it, is not a Western import — it is a universal recognition that the body is an energy system, and that intentional, loving touch and presence can move what talk alone cannot reach. As a Reiki Master, I have experienced firsthand what happens when a body that has been violated, shamed, and dissociated from is finally met with sacred, non-extractive attention. It relearns safety. It relearns that it belongs to itself. For a Black woman whose body has been the site of so much that was not her choice, reclaiming the body as a sacred vessel through energy healing is not just therapeutic — it is a revolutionary act of cultural reclamation.
Connection and Disconnection from the Rituals of My Ancestors
My relationship to the rituals of my ancestors is not a simple story of connection or disconnection. It exists in layers, some of which I have resolved and some of which I am still sitting with.
Where the Disconnection Lives
The deepest disconnection I carry is not one I created. Slavery stripped my ancestors of everything that could not be hidden inside the body — their names, their languages, their lands, their cosmologies, their ritual knowledge. What survived survived in fragments: in the rhythm of the music, in the way Black women have always gathered to tend to each other, in the herbalism that never fully disappeared, in the particular way grief moves through a Black funeral. But the formal knowledge — the names of the Orisha who claimed my bloodline, the specific Odu that governs my ori, the prayers and ceremonies my great-great-grandmothers would have known before they were taken — that was methodically erased. I feel that erasure. It is a specific kind of grief, mourning the loss of something you never had and yet somehow know you are supposed to have.
The second layer of disconnection came through religion. Christianity replaced what was stolen, and for many of my ancestors, it was not entirely their choice. It was conversion by force, by threat, by the systematic destruction of everything else. What makes this complicated is that Black people took that imposed religion and made something extraordinary with it — the spirituals, the freedom songs, the church as the center of civil rights organizing, the homegoing service as a genuine act of communal grief. I honor what my people built inside that container. And I also name clearly that the container itself was placed around them by people who wanted to erase who they were. Both things are true. Both deserve to be said.
The third layer is closer to home: what was simply never taught. My grandmother and mother did not pass down the ancestral ritual because they did not have it to give. What they had was church, survival, and secrecy. The knowledge of how to tend to the spirit, how to communicate with the dead, how to read the natural world as a living conversation with the sacred — none of that was transmitted to me. I had to find my way to it myself, which means I came to it as an adult, working backward through layers of religious conditioning and cultural erasure to locate something that should have been placed in my hands as a child.
Where the Connection Lives
And yet — I am deeply, intentionally, actively connected. Not because the path was easy or the knowledge was handed to me, but because I chose it and I keep choosing it. My Ifa practice in the Isese tradition is my most direct connection to the spiritual system of my West African ancestors. Every Oriki I speak, every Odu I study, every morning I sit at my altar, pour water, and call names — I am rebuilding what was broken. Not from nothing, but from the deep cellular knowing that this is where I belong. My body recognized Ifa before my mind understood it. That recognition is its own form of ancestral memory.
I am also connected through my healing work. Every time I sit with a woman and hold space for her womb healing, her grief, her lineage wounds — I am doing something my ancestors in the villages did. The healer, the midwife, the elder woman who knew the herbs, the prayers, and the ceremonies — she is in me. She was always in me. My credentials and my training are the contemporary container for something ancient. I did not create this calling. I inherited it.
The hardest part of my connection is doing it alone in my family. I am the only one. My family thinks I am practicing evil, that I have been deceived, that I have turned my back on God. I understand why they believe that — they were taught to believe it, the same way our ancestors were taught to believe that everything they knew before the slave ship was devil worship. I do not carry anger toward my family for this. I carry grief. And I carry the quiet, unshakable conviction that someone in every lineage has to be willing to be the first. To walk the path that looks strange to everyone around them because it leads home. I am that person in my family. And I have made peace with what that costs.
Reclaiming the rituals of my ancestors is not nostalgia. It is not performance. It is the most honest spiritual act of my life — returning to what was always true about who I am, beneath every layer of what was imposed, inherited, or survived. I am not practicing something new. I am remembering something ancient. And every day that I remember, I am healing — not just for myself, but for every woman in my lineage who was never allowed to.
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With deep reverence,
Allonia Water
