Happiness Break: How Connecting With Ancestors Deepens Belonging

Through a gentle ancestral meditation, discover how grounding in your roots can open the door to healing, meaning, and a deeper sense of belonging.

How To Do This Practice:

1. Settle Into Your Body: Notice whether you’re sitting, standing, or walking, and gently bring your attention to the natural rhythm of your breath.
2. Ground Yourself Through the Earth: Feel the weight of your body supported by the ground beneath you, and let any thoughts drift by like passing clouds.
3. Sense the Ancestors in Nature: Expand your awareness to the sky, the earth, trees, and mountains, imagining them as ancestors who have been here long before you.
4. Connect With Your Heartbeat: Place a hand on your heart if it feels comfortable, noticing the steady drumbeat within you—a rhythm shared across generations.
5. Cultivate Compassion for Your Lineage: Envision compassion as a color or texture in your chest and let it gently radiate outward, offering it to your ancestors and to yourself.
6. Offer a Wish for Healing: Bring to mind a simple wish for the easing of suffering—your own or others’—and breathe it through your body from sky to earth before slowly opening your eyes.

Scroll down for a transcription of this episode.

Today’s Happiness Break Guide:

SARÁ KING is a neuroscientist, medical anthropologist and educator at UC San Diego.

Learn more about Sará King here: https://www.eomega.org/people/sara-king

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

A Meditation to Connect With Your Roots: https://tinyurl.com/ycy9xazc

Related Science of Happiness episodes:

Are You Following Your Inner Compass: https://tinyurl.com/y2bh8vvj

How Water Heals: https://tinyurl.com/utuhrnh3

Who’s Always There for You: https://tinyurl.com/yt3ejj6w

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Transcription: https://tinyurl.com/mrsnwvrm