From Elder to Ancestor: Nature Kinship for All Seasons of Life

From Elder to Ancestor: Nature Kinship for All Seasons of Life

A practical guide to becoming a good Ancestor • 2025 Nautilus Silver Award • Explains the importance of creating a direct personal connection with Nature and how it is key to becoming an elder who will go on to become a wise Ancestor • Presents exercises and rituals to awaken and deepen your animistic connection to the world and help you intentionally craft yourself as a fit elder • Explores deep spiritual work with the Sacred Self, including shadow work and trauma honoring, as well as practices to help you heal your family line For millennia people connected with the Ancestors as part of their regular spiritual practice, seeking wisdom and inspired vitality from those who came before. Each member of a community grew up guided by sage elders, naturally walking the path into fit elderhood themselves and, upon their good deaths, becoming wise, capable Ancestors to whom their descendants could turn. Revealing how to restore the path from fit elder to wise Ancestor, S. Kelley Harrell explores the spiritual, cultural, and ancestral aspects of aging well. She explains the importance of creating a direct personal connection with Nature and of respecting the spirits who surround us, including asking their permission before engaging them in ritual or healing work. Exploring the concept of animism and how it is key to moving from elder to Ancestor, the author shares exercises for awakening and deepening your animistic connection to the world around you as well as rituals for embodiment and grounding. The author also examines the most powerful obstacles to dying well, exploring deep spiritual work with Sacred Self, including shadow work, the initiatory rite of heartbreak, and how to honor past traumas and dysfunctional patterns. She looks at forging a supportive connection with our Sacred Parents—the first Ancestors—as well as specific practices to help you heal your family line. She shows how recognizing that you are Nature—a part of the sacred order—allows you to begin rewilding and to honor your own sacredness. Showing that initiation into elderhood is the work of our lives, this book explains how, through personal introspection and engagement with the living world around us, we can cultivate our unique way to elder well. “Harrell has given us the most important book in the entire landscape of ancestral healing—the one that clarifies what is ours to do. She continues with a path through the beauty and complexity, heartbreak and joy of our time to offer how we can do what is ours to do, do it now, and do it in a way that restores our relationships with self and life around us. This is not just one more responsibility in our overly full, possibly exhausting lives. It is about how we live each day.” ― Christina Pratt, shamanic healer, teacher, author, and founder of the Last Mask Center for Shamanic “Western culture is death-phobic and age-phobic. We have jettisoned the ancient concept of eldering, leaving older individuals to feel “past it.” Unfortunately, little effort is made for our communities to tap into the Well of Wisdom (Mímisbrunnr in Norse cosmology) that elders draw upon. I only wish this important book had been available decades ago! It offers a roadmap for restoring ancient pathways in the human psyche. Bless the collective by living well and dying well, becoming a well elder and well Ancestor.” ― Imelda Almqvist, teacher of Sacred Art & Seiðr, and author of Sacred Art and North Sea Water in “I have followed S. Kelley Harrell’s work since her early beginnings as a shaman, healer, and author. In From Elder to Ancestor, Harrell’s innovative style of pedagogy, goodwill toward diverse communities, and visionary directives are clear, prescient, and ready to inspire and motivate all who partake. If you seek a greater understanding of matters of the spirit and your role, you must read this book.” ― Priestess Stephanie Rose Bird, Black naturalist, spiritual healer, and author of Motherland Herbal “From Elder to Ancestor offers essential guidance for those of us living in the fallout of settler colonialism, the abandonment of ritual, and the violent disruption of our relationship to our bodies, the land, and our more-than-human allies. Harrell compassionately guides us in exploring the wounds this forced separation has left in us and with great care and wisdom illuminates pathways through those wounds back into deep, joyful relationship and true community. She provides a clear blueprint for becoming an elder and Ancestor our descendants would be proud of through inspiring reflection questions and practical exercises and teaches us to become someone capable of being a bridge to a future worthy of the next generations who are coming. This book is a much needed antidote to the poison of divisiveness and disconnection that characterizes so much of the times we are in.” ― Langston Kahn, shamanic practitioner and author of Deep Liberation “From Elder to Ancestor is a breakthrough and the fir