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When was the last time you thought about your ancestors? This guided meditation by Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen will help you connect to your heritage and reap the potent benefits of remembering your roots.
How To Do This Practice:
- Arrive and Center: Find a comfortable position. Close your eyes if you’d like. Place your attention at the center of your chest. Notice how your chest expands as you inhale, pauses, and gently releases as you exhale. Rest in that pause between breaths.
- Open the Heart Space: Imagine your chest softening and opening. With each breath, sense a feeling of spaciousness there. Let this space become an anchor to return to.
- Invite Your Lineage: In that pause of breath, bring awareness to your ancestors. Elders of the past, present, and those yet to come. Acknowledge the richness and complexity of your lineage.
- Remember Origin Stories: Call to mind the stories of your elders and their elders before them. Picture their journeys, the lands they once touched, and the lives they carried forward. Imagine their footsteps across the earth, leading to where you stand today.
- Connect Land and Heart: Visualize the lands your ancestors belonged to. The soils, waters, and skies that sustained them. Bring those lands into the center of your chest, merging them with your breath, your heart, and your pause. Feel the connection ripple from them to you, and from you back to them.
- Rest in Home and Belonging: Let the word home echo silently in your heart. With each breath, feel this home expand outward—into belonging, togetherness, and care for all living beings and for the Earth itself. Rest in that pulse of vastness and possibility.
Today’s Happiness Break Guide:
DR. YURIA CELIDWEN is an indigenous scholar of contemplative studies, and author of the book, Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Foundations For Collective Well-Being.
Learn more about Dr. Celidwen: https://www.yuriacelidwen.com/
Related Happiness Break episodes:
Where Did You Come From: https://tinyurl.com/2y9uyjj6
How To Tune Into Water’s Restorative Power: https://tinyurl.com/2k6ybzrs
How To Ground Yourself in Nature: https://tinyurl.com/25ftdxpm
Related Science of Happiness episodes:
Are You Following Your Inner Compass: https://tinyurl.com/y2bh8vvj
How Water Heals: https://tinyurl.com/utuhrnh3
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Transcription:
DACHER KELTNER: We know from countless studies that family connection is so important to our happiness and longevity. So today we’re going to be led in a practice to connect with our families. But not the ones with us now—we’re going to visit ancestors.
I’m Dacher Keltner, welcome to Happiness Break, a series by the science of happiness that provides research-backed practices to give you a boost in your day, all in under 10 minutes.
Just thinking about your ancestors for five minutes can make you feel smarter and more capable. That’s based on research from the University of Graz in Austria.
Leading this meditation is my dear colleague Doctor Yuria Celidwen. Yuria is an indigenous contemplative studies scholar of Nahua and Maya descent from Chiapas, Mexico. She also works towards developing a more sustainable planet with the United Nations.
Yuria begins by first speaking her indigenous Maya Tzeltal language as a way to create an awareness of the massive cultural extinctions and bio cultural loss we’re experiencing at a global level.
YURIA CELIDWEN: (Speaking in Indigenous Maya Tzeltal language) Hello and welcome! I dearly hope you are doing well. My name is Yuria Celidwen, born and raised in the cloud forest of Chiapas, Mexico from the Indigenous Nahua and Maya Peoples. I honor the Xučyun territory of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Ohlone Nation. We honor our Elders of the past, present, and those to soon emerge, while celebrating the richness of our cultural legacy.
What you just heard are my indigenous Maya Tseltal language with which I honor the occupied territories of the Lisjan Ohlone Land of the Berkeley area from where I am speaking today. We lose an indigenous language every two weeks, so revitalizing our languages reclaims our presence and in that way generates places of belonging to an ever expanding circle of care and concern for Mother Earth, for all our systems and communities that we belong. And in that way, we ensure that we are creating the possibilities for planetary flourishing
I’ll ask you to bring your attention now into the center of your chest. Allow the chest to open, and relax. Try to find that moment, that very place in the center of your chest, that’s where you breathe in. It opens. And there is a pause. And as you breathe out, it relaxes, until again it reaches that pause. Try to find and meet that pause, that bridge that connects the constant cycle. That constant flow between openings and returning. Never to the exact same place. There’s always something changing. But there’s always that pause. To rest.
So try to meet me in that pause. And in that pause we bring awareness of our lineage, our elders, past, present and emerging. In that pause. We honor the richness of their legacy. So think of those elders that have been core to you. We realize as well the complexities of our lineages. So in that place of pause, in the center of your chest, within your heart, aim to hold that complexity, with that openness, with that vastness, and with the return to the place of safety in the pause.
So think about those origin stories of your elders, their own elders, and their own, and their own back in time. To their respective places all around the world, wherever it may be, and connect those elders to their lands. The different lands that touched their feet. The different elder’s feet touched those lands until they came here to this place, to the ground under your feet, that now you so caringly touch.
And bring that land into the center of your chest, into your heart, and that place of pause, that place of safety, that place of opening and that place of return to the pause. Home. Home. And let home reverberate, ripple in that pulse through every breath, that place of vastness and possibility, and togetherness, and belonging through a vast lineage of living beings and our Mother Earth, ever expanding, ever welcoming in the center of your chest, within your heart, in the place of safety, breath, and home.
