Re-Membering our Roots, Reclaiming our Original Medicines

What is The نجمع جذورنا | (re)Gathering Our Ancestors project?

This project is dedicated to the re-memberance, restoration, and resurrection of baladi (local / land-based / indigenous / folk) ancestral knowledge and traditional healing wisdoms from the SWANA region (South West Asia + North Africa - more explanation below). Individuals who have native ancestry from this region are invited to participate in re-Memberance Circles that facilitate embodied, experiential, and relational ways of awakening “lost” and forgotten ancestral wisdoms for personal and collective healing and liberation across generations. We also host a virtual HUB dedicated to archiving, weaving, and collectivizing our re-memberance as SWANA descendant folks.

In these spaces, we tend relationships to our ancestors, lands, selves, and each other through engaging intentionally with our baladi traditions. Whether it is our plantcestors (ancestral plants), stories and cosmologies, foods, crafts, dreams, songs, dances, or languages, we allow our bodies to become vessels for the deeper medicine inside these ways to reveal itself through us, to wake up their sacred mysteries inside of us, to restore and re-member us so that we may realign with who we are at the very root and soul of things. 

Re-memberance Circles allow us to engage in an ancient WAY of knowing and re-membering, recalibrating a compass and means by which we can navigate every aspect of our existence. Evoking our innate resilience and creative power. Re-learning how to listen to and follow internal, ancestral, and universal guidance more keenly for uniquely tailored support and insight. Realigning us with creation cycles and our relationship to all that is alive. Re-memberance is a process of healing personal, ancestral, and collective traumas in our bodies and souls. Of restoring, and reclaiming the parts of our spirits and lineages that have been scattered, splintered, and stripped away over the generations. Reconciling wounds and violations, reclaiming medicine and wisdom. We ARE our ancestors - their pains *and* powers.

In a sacred container, we do this work collectively. Weaving our individual re-collections to honor a more cohesive whole. Piecing together what’s been lost and severed so we can find our way back home. Eventually, we present these communal re-memberances on our HUB for healing usage and wider cross-pollination across our broader community. 

Embodied and otherwise suppressed pre-colonial forms of knowing and relating are prioritized, including those generally associated with feminine and gender-variant sectors of our societies. You can learn about what circles are being offered now on our classes + events page. 

Our name is  نجمع جذورنا | (re)Gathering our Ancestors: re-membering our roots, reclaiming our original medicines. 

In Arabic, نجمع جذورنا | nijm3a juthourna literally translates as “we gather our roots”.

نجمع | nijm3a. We gather. (Re)collect our selves and our lineages, with each other. Re-member. Gather the fragments of severed pieces back whole - to unity, to oneness. Mend them, weave them homeward. Each of us, picking up the pieces of ourselves in the holding witness of the collective. Arranging them back into their place in the communal and personal puzzle. Like Isis diligently searching the mouth of the Nile to reclaim the bones of a severed Osiris, put the dislocated parts back in order so she could breathe new life into his skeletal body with the help of her sister and the divine powers. We fill the missing pieces with our sacredness and our love. Phoenixes from the ashes. Emerging from the dissociation of our trauma, severance, and displacement. Our cultural loss and colonial amnesia. Our ancestral, personal, and cultural wounds. Rebirthing, resurrection rituals. We gather together to re-member.

جذورنا | juthourna. Our roots. We call upon the origins of us, the earth in which we began. The tastes, colors, and stories from which we emerged. The network of relationships underneath the ground on which we stand and stood, are nourished from necessarily, can’t live without. The power, sacrifices, and life that makes us. نتذكر. We remember. Recall what we have already known. A knowing from these primordial origins, from our oldest ones, from the deepest most ancient parts of ourselves, and the essence of life itself. Bring back to consciousness truths that live inside our hearts and bones. Thaw them out. Wake them up.  Our ancestors, and the lands they ate and drank from. We tend our cultural and literal roots. That which connects us to the earth and what is beyond it. Gather in the power of all of this to help us re-collect. Knowing that our bodies are living records, bridges between past and future, earth and cosmos, just like our plantcestors, just like the land, that can re-member, heal, create across time and space.

We understand that these losses, this severance from our ancestral ways is a systemic wound, an original trauma, a strategic violation of our inherent dignity and sacredness as a people, which disrupts the wellbeing of all life. We understand that only original medicine can heal original wounds. That being in an integrated relationship with the ecologies and lineages we come from and dwell in - from address to origins - is natural, healthy, and something our indigenous ancestors around the globe tended necessarily. That it is both a medicine and a responsibility. Our ancestors well-being affects our own, whether we tend it or not. The earth gives us life, whether we respect that or not. Our dissociation from these realities does not change them, but it does affect them and us. Healing this relationship is part of systemic liberation and the transformation of not just ourselves, but this world. Reclaiming these ways is our responsibility, and a healing of the most radical (root) kind. But it is also a process that requires humility, integrity, and patience. When we say “re-membering our indigeneity, reclaiming our original medicines”, we are honoring an ongoing journey of re-membering we commit to, not the arrival of an indigenous identity that is not necessarily our own to claim. We are naming an eternal process and intention of growing towards proximity with the ways of our original ancestors that were organized around LIFE’s laws - the laws of creation, of nature, and our interconnected impact within it. A dedication to learning from, honoring the wisdoms of, and waking up those parts of our lineages and selves however far back they may be. A re-association with our relationship to the earth and the members of our lineages that have been forgotten alongside it. A process of reconciliation. We uplift and honor those in our communities that are still living indigenously, learning from them while we tend who we are right now. Respecting the grief of the many severances along the way, while committing to the medicine of this moment in the journey. Re-membering is an ongoing process, not a destination. As we said before, we ARE our ancestors, and so we are an evolution of their stories, wisdoms, medicines too. This road is a deeper listening so we may heed that by being MORE ourselves, not claiming something we are not. We nurture our roots so that our flowers can bloom, tend the soil so that seeds can flourish - again and again and again. We tend where we come from so we can honor where we are. Our past blesses our future, and we are the all-encompassing bridge.

نجمع جذورنا | (re)Gathering our Ancestors WORKSHOPS & PROGRAMS

The above icons offer an updated schedule of current & upcoming نجمع جذورنا | (re)Gathering our Ancestors workshops, programs, and events. You can also access this information on our Events page - (events with the label "SWANA Community Space" are specific to the نجمع جذورنا | (re)Gathering our Ancestors program.) Our SWANA programing is often times done through online sessions to accommodate our rich and expansive diaspora. I am also open to invitations all over the world to conduct in person sharing wherever there is a SWANA community who desires it, so please do not hesitate to reach out! Some of our past SWANA programming includes:

Follow @swana.ancestral and #hub4hub on Instagram for HUB specific content:

Share your own re-memberance of SWANA ancestral themes on social media by using the hashtag #hub4hub on your posts and tagging our IG account.

Homeward Healing 2016

In 2016, I began the fulfillment of a long-held calling in which I took a spirit-led journey through many parts of the SWANA region (including Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, Jordan, Armenia, Iran, Kurdistan, & Lebanon) to engage in the re-memberance and re-collection of ancestral wisdom on the topics of ethnobotany, cultural preservation, traditional healing practices, and indigenous cosmology & culture native to the SWANA region. It was an "embodied research" journey in which my methods of re-memberance involved a combination of ceremonial engagement, visiting sacred sites, working with plantcestors and the geography of where I was, communicating with locals and elders to learn about regional cultures, languages, ethnobotanical practices, birthing practices, divination practices, oral history, spiritual practices, and much more. You can read posts I wrote on my travels  on the "Homeward Healing" hashtag of our SWANA Hub, as well as go to my Instagram page and review the regular documentation I posted there along my journeys. Here are two short videos I made through my journey with some more information about my trip and how to support this ongoing work. All the online fundraising offerings are still available in our Events page if you would still like to participate. These research trips will be ongoing, and all funds raised will support me to continue this work. 

Be sure to check the #homewardhealing hashtag on my Instagram @Riverroseremembrance to experience some of the stories from my 2016 Trip.

Why does this work matter?

It is my belief and experience that the original medicinal ways of our indigenous global ancestors can offer genuine healing & a restoration of balance collectively, interpersonally, ecologically, and cosmically at these critical times of increased global stress and dis-ease.  Reclaiming these indigenous forms of medicine offers the possibility of accessible, effective, and self-empowered care to achieve health of body, spirit, land and community alike and transform the deepest imbalances being faced by humans- a true people's medicine. "Indigenous" refers to the earth-based traditions established through the early sciences derived from our ancestors' detailed relationships and astute observations of the the natural world and its laws and principles, and the multi-dimensional interconnectedness inherent within it. These understandings are reflected through our ancestral stories, crafts, languages, lands, and cultures.

In a climate of ongoing war and a region who has seen multiple iterations of colonization and patriarchal conquest for thousands of years now, it is hard for many of us to even trace who our early ancestors actually are, none the less connect to their initial wisdoms and ways of navigating earthly life.  Our indigenous languages, traditions, narratives, ceremonial practices, cosmologies, rites of passage, medicinal forms, relationships to the environment, social structure, concepts of gender, birth and childrearing, and ways of being are largely buried or forgotten. With the exception of unspoken residue from these old ways which have managed to weave themselves between the lines of more contemporary practices so undetected and subtle, the rawest instinctual expressions of our own bodies and intuitive insights are perhaps the most powerful and viable gateways to the medicine of this ancient wisdom. Our mere presence is the greatest testament to our ancestor's resilience and steadfastness after all.  We are our ancestors, and their efforts, livelihoods, and labor have literally produced both the cellular, cultural, and essential fabrics that we are made of.  

Legacies of Colonization...

For generations across the whole span of this earth, humans have proven the fundamental importance of culture in preserving sustainable, healthy, and self-determined ways of living across global communities and landscapes.  We have seen time and time again how conquerors have strived to kill and suppress the original cultural ways of a people in order to effectively gain control over them and their lands.  There is a relationship between culture, land, and power, and there is something irrevocably resilient about being in-tact with your original traditions and ways of being. For generations, it is these nature-based ways which have determined how a people sustain and understand themselves on the ecological, personal, spiritual, and relational levels, delegate and utilize their natural resources in sustainable ways, and realize health that is self-determined, communal, accessible, relevant, holistic, and effective. Land-based aboriginal cultures have been attacked strategically to undermine the self-determined existence of global indigenous peoples. 

To reclaim these aspects of our lineages puts us in touch with a fundamental capacity to heal and sustain ourselves and our lands in practical and multi-dimensional ways not narrowed by colonialist definitions and external power. It realigns us with the truth and justice of a natural/cosmic order based on the rhythms of our natural world and the relationships that affirm and uphold life (rather than a man-made order which destroys life for the sake of power and profit, for example).  The effort to reconnect to this wisdom is a part of reclaiming wholeness in a way that resonates with the most primordial sense of who we are, retrieving balance and connection to our foundational capacity and know-how to flourish in life-sustaining ways- beyond war and its damage to our lands and relationship as a people, beyond fabricated divisions and vulnerable unities constructed by imperial influences, beyond engrained colonial identities and ways of navigating our day-to-day well-being, and past the amnesia, trauma, and despairing chaos that has so often been created thru it all. Reconciling our relationship to our ancestors is a fundamental aspect of restoring peace, dignity, purpose and integrity to our lands, selves, and communities. It is the empowerment that takes our lives and health back into our own hands and allows us to know and express more fully who we really are by honoring the wisdom, sense, and resilience from which we come, and the relationship we bare to the living world around us. This does not mean we romanticize the cultures of our ancestors or the nature of how they lived; rather, it means we connect with the original truths by which their lives were organized in order to ensure harmony and alignment with the forces of nature/creation at work around and within them, even when this obliges us to reconcile with the violations and imbalances they too perpetuated. 

Earth Crisis, Life Crisis...

In a climate of increasing environmental stress globally, returning to the wisdom of our indigenous ancestors earns an added layer of urgency and importance.  Increasing pollution of our air and earth, deforestation, the deadly nuclear radiation leaking across our ocean and water systems-particularly in the aftermath of Fukushima, fracking, climate change, droughts, floods and natural disasters, are posing inevitable and fast-approaching threats to our actual livelihood as a species.  In the meanwhile, our economies continue to suffer, political conflict and war is increasing, the institutions established to take care of our public well being are corrupt and breaking down, and maintaining preventative and accessible levels of whole health thru the increased toll this all causes is more important than ever.  

At the most basic level, the elements that nourish our livelihood are being diminished as a result of our choices and ways of life as a global human community. We have failed to regard the basic tenement of our relationship (and responsibility) to life itself.  It seems we as a broader culture no longer recognize that the elements of life, both within and around us, are fundamentally constructed to reinforce more life- the water and sun nourish the plants, which transform the air, which circulates through our blood cells, which mineralize our bodies and feed our organs, and on and on and on, just to keep us alive. EVERY vessel and cell in the microcosm and macrocosm of this Earth, including our own physical bodies, are constructed merely and purposefully with the intention of sustaining more life, and are dependent on one another to do so. The human species is forced to either reconcile our relationship with these elements that give us life, or to extinguish possibilities for our next generations to be born at all. Returning to the indigenous principles of our ancestors provides culturally relevant and earth-wise instructions on how to live in sustainable, resourceful, and respectful creation-based ways that are necessary to rehabilitate and maintain the future of life for humans, plants, animals and beyond. They offer us medicinal tools to understand how to sustain life and realize our own intimate connection to its constant happening, reconcile and transform some of the damage which has already incurred to our communities and lands as well as our consciousness as a species, and re-invoke a spirit of balanced living that is desperately called for thru this time and has already been overdue in its neglect.  They are the most basic yet profound principles which reinforce the ways that life in its most natural effective state, instills more life, and that WE as humans are not isolated from our function in upholding this basic reality. Reciprocity, respect, responsibility, and reverence are all part of the equation.

The Authority of the Feminine...

The question is inherently feminist: how do we respect the creative, relational, receptive, and life-nourishing qualities of this Earth and of our own bodies and relations (regardless of your sex or gender)? How do we transform the damage of exploitive relations already perpetuated for decades by our global economic and socio-political structures to the rawest elements and relationships that our lives are built upon- including the suppression, devaluation, and disrespect of our own mothers and their rightful authority- their offerings, principles, and *ways of relating and perceiving*? We are being asked to return to more life regarding, sustaining, and relationally in-tact ways of living for our basic survival, and must restore the balance and sanctity of the feminine (and masculine)- both physically and otherwise- in order to do so. And it is needless to say that within this, our HOW itself must be (de/re)constructed- re-empowering the wisdom of our stories, our bodies, our dreams, our senses and emotions, our relationships, our natural world and other non-linear and receptive ways of knowing, as our ancestral cultures and creative/feminine aspects always have. (This is one of the many things that has been devalued and dismissed by colonial and patriarchal institutions and the ways of knowing they have instilled in many of us, and one of the things we work on rewiring through our group work with the medicine.) 

Perhaps the current earth crisis can be viewed as a resurrection of Life's fundamental authority, delegating an inevitable justice of direct consequence to the offensive actions of humans in violating the respectful reciprocation needed to nourish life and its elemental creators. We have the option to listen and regard this call, make amends through transforming our global actions in how we relate to the principles and forces that create life, with reparations for the damage already done, or die as a stubborn and stupid species unable to regard the basic source of what has nourished us and undermining the efforts of our preceding lineages in the process.

Amongst our Earth-based indigenous ancestors, matriarchal values were a natural expression of this necessary regard and high respect for life itself, in all its reverence.  In the ancient SWANA region, women's rites and matriarchal values were practiced commonly, proven in some of the earliest documented ancient civilizations on the Earth. Steeped in ancient Egypt, across Mesopotamia, and beyond, one of the most ancient sites in the world documenting our matriarchal origins is Catal Huyuk, in Southern Anatolia, Turkey/Historic Armenia, which archeologist date at 7500BC. Women's spiritual societies and traditional rites of passage are still practiced within the subtle crevices of SWANA's most underlying social fabric, despite the widespread domination of patriarchy and its effective efforts to repress expressions and reverence of the feminine mysteries/power worldwide. Weavers and dreamers, diviners and healers, mothers and aunties who tend the well-being of their communities day to day in the private spheres of our lives so that ALL our community can thrive. The medicine of the feminine is about creation itself, as all encompassing as God, as infinite and necessary. Sadly, the proper and widespread regard of the feminine mysteries have been violated severely in the SWANA lands (as they have elsewhere), and are becoming lost to the majority of recent generations, and absent to even the consciousness of many.  Even the most obvious expression the feminine mystery/power, the act of birth, is diminishing in its ritual potency as time passes thru the region. For example, in Lebanon, while probably more than 90% of our mothers and grandmothers only two generations ago performed the rite of birth in their homes and villages amongst the support of one another, it is close to impossible to even locate a traditional midwife anymore in most Lebanese villages, none the less one who has an apprentice to pass their teachings onto.  In fact, not only have hospital births become nearly the singular option available, but Lebanon has one of the highest C-section rates in the world. Instead of allowing the technology of our modern (colonial) medical institutions to support us and work in tandem with our ancestral ways to ensure our lives be safe and prosper, we have completely thrown away the very ancestral wisdom which brought our own families into existence for thousands of years, effectively enough for all of us to be here.  We have not even considered the deeper implications of this on our communities, on the spirits being ushered in and the many facets of spiritual and scientific know-how that has disappeared alongside it. We are severing thousands of years of experiential medicine, ritual, sacrifice, and practice tended by the feminine lineages of our lands and all the mysteries that live within it. Birth being a moment that affects literally every single human on this earth, we cannot begin to imagine the sacred implications of this on our current and future generations without understanding the paradigms of practice within traditional methods of birth-work, and of our responsibility to creation itself. HOW we create and navigate our innermost authority to do so, be it physical birth or otherwise, is fundamental to understanding, transforming, and restoring the sanctity of the feminine and its necessary power in sustaining all life for all genders and our place as a species across the Earth.