Ancestors

 

What do you embody in your life?

Your DNA, first of all. But also perhaps certain configurations of cultural tradition - gender roles, social roles, professional roles? Perhaps a certain body of techniques, traditions, perspectives, and practices?

Chances are that a good deal of whatever you most fully embody was passed down to you through some lineage - directly transmitted to you by someone, to whom it was directly transmitted by someone else, and so on. This is always the case with your DNA, of course, but it also happens with structures of embodied tradition.

The genes you embody were passed down to you by direct transmission through the generations of your biological Ancestors.

In old-style tribal cultures, it was/is common (often nigh-universal) for one's embodied traditions to come down to one via the same lineage of as one's genes. That is, if you lived in such a culture, your skills and beliefs, your songs and rituals, your way of living in the world, would probably have been directly transmitted to you through older blood relatives. If you were a midwife or a metal-worker, chances are that you'd be the genetic descendant of a long line of midwives or metal-workers. If you learned special songs to sing for certain purposes on certain occasions (songs of celebration, songs of mourning, hunting songs, healing songs), chances are that your genetic Ancestors would have sung those same songs for many generations.

In the modern world, people have more opportunity to receive and embody traditions transmitted through non-genetic lineages. If there are traditions you embody in your life that have been passed down to you through any lineage of direct transmission, then the beings who came before you in that lineage are your Ancestors, whether or not they're also among your genetic Ancestors.

(My sense is that this only applies in situations in which a deeply embodied experience is directly transmitted person-to-person - that is, if you study dance under a teacher who personally trained under Alvin Ailey, then Alvin Ailey is among your Ancestors; but if none of your dance teachers ever trained directly under Alvin Ailey or under anyone in Alvin Ailey's direct lineage of students, then Alvin Ailey isn't among your Ancestors, even if you're a huge Alvin Ailey fan and constantly watch films of his performances and have become quite good at imitating his technique.)

As an aikido teacher, I count Morihei Ueshiba, the Founder of Aikido, among my Ancestors, because the art that he embodied was personally transmitted to me by students of his and students of students of his, and now I myself embody that art in my own life, and am shaped by it, as surely as I embody and am shaped by my genes, and the art is transmitted through me to my students and to my students' students as surely as my genes will be transmitted through me to my genetic descendants.