When you lie on a healer's table for a postpartum womb adjustment—a traditional Mesoamerican practice called acomodada—you expect physical relief. Pānquetzani, a traditional healer and practitioner of Mesoamerican medicine, remembers something else arriving during her first: an anger so raw and present that she knew in her body it wasn't hers. It was ancestral. It had traveled through her lineage, settling in her womb, waiting for someone to feel it and address it. That moment became the hinge on which her entire spiritual practice turned.
The revelation was both crushing and clarifying. Her ancestors—survivors of colonization, violence, and oppression—had passed down not only their gifts but their wounds. The gifts were real: knowledge of plant medicine, the ability to heal through touch, an unbreakable will forged in suffering. But the wounds were equally real and equally inherited. And as a healer working within this lineage, Pānquetzani understood that her job was not simply to celebrate the gifts. It was to tend the wounds, to metabolize the ancestral trauma so it would not continue to ripple forward into her children and their children.
Making Your Life an Altar
For Pānquetzani, reverence toward ancestors is not performed in ceremony alone—though ceremony matters. It is lived. Every choice to slow down, to cry, to dance, to experience sensual and sexual pleasure becomes a small act of defiance against the oppression that denied these things to her grandparents and great-grandparents. She frames it with stunning clarity: "I need to make my life an altar for my ancestors. I need to be the one who is coming with the fire of Hey, this is all for you. My life is for you. The way that I move through the world, the way that I live my life, this is an homage to you, my ancestors."
This is a radically different understanding of ancestral devotion than the one many Western practitioners encounter. It is not about elaborate altars or repeated invocations. It is about embodied living—about giving your ancestors, through your own thriving, the proof that their survival was not in vain. Pānquetzani describes millions of indigenous people killed in the first years of Spanish invasion. Those who survived did so because they carried an unbreakable conviction. They endured so that their descendants could inherit not just genes but resilience, medicine, and the possibility of joy.
Healing Lineages Backwards
One of the most potent gifts Pānquetzani offers her ancestors is an answer to a question they may never have been able to ask: Was it worth it? Did our suffering mean something? Through her own healing work—through addressing the wounds she inherited, through refusing to perpetuate trauma with her own children—she sends a message backward through time: "Your suffering wasn't in vain." This is what she means by healing lineages backwards. It is not a denial of what happened. It is a refusal to let that pain be the final word.
When she chooses to slow down with her children even when exhausted, when she gives them her best self rather than her depleted self, she is making a claim: the colonizers did not win completely. They did not steal everything. Your descendants will know rest. They will know attention. They will know the feeling of being chosen, of mattering. This is the medicine that travels backward, restoring meaning to suffering that cannot be undone.
What Thriving Actually Means
For Pānquetzani, thriving is not a wellness buzzword. It has a specific shape: waking up feeling happy and energized. It means disseminating her medicine to the people who need it most. It means celebrating herself. It means giving her children—not just physical resources but energetic, mental, and social resources—that previous generations went without. It means room to become themselves.
This last point crystallizes in a story about her fifteen-year-old son. He is self-taught in metalwork, creating knives, swords, bows, and tools with meticulous attention. When Pānquetzani showed this work to her eighty-three-year-old grandmother, the response was immediate and astonishing: her grandfather had been a herrero—a metalworker. The family had owned a herrería, a metalworking shop, in Mexico. Generations of craft, of mastery, of a specific way of moving through the world and through metal. No one had ever mentioned it.
Her son found his way back to this ancestral trade not through family stories or pressure, but through freedom. He was given a life where he could wake up, tune into his body, follow what he loved, make a mess, and clean it up. He was not told to choose a sensible path. He was invited to listen to his own desire. And in doing so, he reconnected to a lineage that had been severed, not by choice but by the ruptures of history.
The Freedom to Become
This is perhaps the quietest and most radical act of ancestral healing: the deliberate creation of space for the next generation to discover who they are without the constraints that limited those who came before. Pānquetzani speaks to this directly: "A lot of children don't have that freedom in their homes. A lot of people don't teach their children, 'Hey, you know what? Tune into your heart. Do what you love. Follow your curiosity.'"
The ancestors who survived colonization did so with extraordinary will, but often at the cost of choice. They did what they had to do. They followed paths laid out by necessity and survival. Their descendants, if they are fortunate, inherit both the strength that came from that necessity and the freedom to move beyond it. To choose. To listen to the body. To follow the threads of desire and curiosity back to gifts that may have been dormant for generations.
Honoring ancestors by thriving means understanding that you are not separate from them. Their anger lives in your womb. Their gifts live in your hands. Their dreams—even the dreams they never had time to dream—live in the choices you make each day. When Pānquetzani slows down, dances, experiences pleasure, teaches her son to listen to his own heart, she is not indulging herself. She is settling a debt. She is telling the dead that their survival was answered. That it meant something. That it continues to mean something, alive in the body, in the choices, in the freedom of those who came after.
Where to go from here
If you carry a lineage of trauma or survival—and most of us do in some form—Pānquetzani's work invites a reframing: your thriving is not selfish. It is a conversation with your ancestors. Your rest is their rest. Your joy is their vindication. Your willingness to heal what was broken and to give your children more freedom than you had is how you honor those who came before. The altar is not made of flowers and candles, though those can help. The altar is your life, lived with intention, with pleasure, with the knowledge that every choice to thrive is a choice to tell your ancestors: I am here because you survived. And I am going to make sure that means something.
