Living Into Your Legacy

What are your ancestral values?

Since losing many loved ones in 2020 due to COVID, I've experienced high levels of grief, and I also found myself diving into death doula work as a form of healing. When I first jumped into the death industry, I kept it to myself—attending trainings, reading books, and connecting to practitioners in the death community very silently. It's been a journey that has brought me to understand better what legacy is and how I would like to continue building my legacy and becoming the ancestor I want to be while I'm still here.

Also, while thinking about what to write for this post, I looked at my Facebook post and found this image from 5 years ago. I was consciously diving into death work and understanding its connection to birth work. I should say the events of 2020 were the catalyst!

So what even is legacy? I like the following definition. A legacy is something that is a part of your history or that remains from an earlier time. It's easy to think about this as tangible items - houses, money, etc - all very much a part of legacy, but there's more.

"Your legacy is every life (person) you've touched." -Maya Angelou

Your legacy includes every person you have touched and the energy and experience you have brought to those interactions. When I think about that, I see legacy as a path to being an ancestor.

What kind of ancestor do you want to be? What traits of yours do you want to duplicate in upcoming generations? What traits do you want to be acknowledged and healed through generational hope and healing? What changes would you make now for your inevitable future embodiment of being an ancestor?

Many of us have heard of core values (the root beliefs that a person operates from), but I invite you to take it up a level and think about your ancestral values - the beliefs you follow through life and death.

My ancestral values are:

Reverence: having a deep respect for all beings as a standard, seeing through hate and negativity in that process.

Integrity: always abiding by my morals and principles, even when it creates a more challenging path.

Vision: seeing not just through the eyes but through my intuition with complete trust

Trust: understanding that everything in front of me isn't all the universe has available for me

Justice: Committing my energy and resources to supporting justice for under-resourced communities

Inheritance: being able to bring the tangible and non-tangible to my predecessors

These values create a place for me to go back to when I am feeling lost, confused, or not sure of what the next step is in the journey of life, knowing that the decisions I make now will be my legacy and, in turn, reflect on how I embody being an ancestor when my time comes.

I invite you to think about your ancestral values, how you have lived into them so far, and what changes to implement to live into them fully.

Live your legacy <3