I’ve been developing this idea for a while, and speaking about it as a metaphorical way to engage in Buddhist inquiry into identity and liberation. I’ve been doing a meditation based on the idea that I call “Restitching”, in which the practitioner imagines back through their family lines, feeling through centuries of ancestry and migration for the home before the first displacement, the land, known or unknown, where one’s ancestors were indigenous.

(You can find a version of the “Restitching” meditation on Liberate Meditation, a beautiful new meditation app “to support the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color community in healing to thrive with love.”)

I talked about the concept at San Francisco Insight this month, and it was such a pleasure to be back at my old SF saṅgha again. Here’s the meditation and talk.

Meditation: Brightening your energy
(Recorded on 9.15.19 at Insight Meditation Satsang, San Francisco, CA)

Talk: Ancestor work as a metaphor for rebirth inquiry
(Recorded on 9.15.19 at Insight Meditation Satsang, San Francisco, CA)