42. Your ancestors are your liberatory business guides - with Dr. Joey Liu

When you know who dreamed of you, who sacrificed for you, who cleared the path for your existence — it becomes impossible to feel small. 

I'm inviting you to join me and Dr. Joey Liu for a conversation about why ancestral communion is essential decolonization work — and why remembering where you come from gives you a depth of power that nothing else can replace.

Listen to hear more about:

• The practical — not just spiritual — importance of connecting to your ancestors
• What gives ancestral work real power in your life, and not just be a poetic metaphor
• How this work roots you in a power that can't be manipulated or negotiated away
• What to do if you're thinking "but I don't know who I come from" or "I don't feel connected to my ancestors"
• How to start hearing your ancestors' messages for you right away

So many of us are starving for belonging, aching to know who we are beyond what capitalism has reduced us to. This episode offers a way to root into that belonging today.

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Take the free course Buiding Post-Capitalist Wealth: https://play.simonegraceseol.com/pcw

Apply for the 8-week course: Ancestral Wealth: https://play.simonegraceseol.com/ancestral-wealth

Transcript

 Welcome back. You are listening to Liberatory Business and I'm Simone. Today's really special because I am introducing you to my dear friend Dr. Joey Liu. Joey is a teacher of storytelling, among other things. When we met earlier this year through one of my classes, we recognized something in each other immediately, and a great friendship bloomed from that.

And despite the fact that we've only known each other for about half a year, our friendship has become one of the most significant relationships of my life. And it led us to work intimately together to birth something that feels like both of our lives up until now had been leading up to it.

So over the next few weeks, Joey and I are gonna be co-hosting a series of conversations as we prepared to launch our brand new eight- week course called Ancestral Wealth, starting in December. And even if that course isn't for you. These conversations are designed to offer real education on their own.

Today we're talking about how to commune with your ancestors and why this is essential decolonization work that's both spiritual and deeply practical. So let's get into it. 

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Simone: Welcome to the podcast. This is me, Simone, and this is my friend and collaborator, Joey Liu, PhD. Welcome.

Joey: I'm so happy to be here. I'm so happy to finally be sharing everything that we've been incubating for so long.

Simone: We have both been pregnant with this baby, and by the time you are listening to this, the baby will have come out. There's so much for us to tell you. There will be several episodes with me and Joey talking in the next few weeks because we have a lot of things that we want to share with you and teach you in the process of inviting you to our upcoming course, Ancestral Wealth. But even if that course is not for you—and it might not be for many reasons—we really want to invite you to partake in our conversations on the podcast.

Joey: Yes. Birthing Ancestral Wealth has made it so clear who you and I each are as teachers, what our work is. And our hope and prayer is that it brings that kind of clarity to everyone it touches. Even though we are building this course, Ancestral Wealth, that embodies our entire lives up until this point—for me, I feel like it's the culmination of my life's work—we also see offering this education to everyone as something that we really believe is going to shift paradigms. Make real tangible change in people's personal lives, their communities, and all the interconnected systems that we visualize as making up the entire network of the world.

Simone: Exactly. Let's just start by sharing a little bit about how we got together in the first place, because people might not know, and I always think those stories are interesting. We first met because Joey had taken one of my classes earlier this year, Truth or Dare, and we had conversations in the course. I just noted, "Oh my God, this person is so smart and thoughtful. Who is she?" After the course ended—this is my version of the story—we kind of started talking on Instagram, then we started texting each other a lot. We found that, the best way I can put it, is I really felt we were truly being guided by our ancestors towards each other and to do a very specific kind of work together. That has been incubating and we have been really actively tending to it for the past many months. That's what led to this today.

Joey: You know, I haven't shared this with you yet, but that first DM that kicked off our conversation—I didn't even realize I was responding to a story you had posted. I thought I was on somebody else's story, like a close friend of mine, because you had shared something and I was talking about "Ah Po" vibes. Remember the teahouse vibes? I was like, "Who am I talking to?" And I got your autoresponder text: Simone Seol. I was like, "What?" Because I don't usually just randomly DM people that I'm not friends with, but it kicked off this whole conversation. We migrated from Instagram to WhatsApp really quickly. Very quickly I was like, "I've prayed for this. My ancestors sent you. You are the companion that I needed to walk with me in this journey of life."

Simone: And we kept telling each other, "I've been praying for you."

Joey: Yeah.

Simone: So this is what's coming up. What's here today is a culmination of everything that we have been really deeply working on, digesting, processing, and birthing into the world. Speaking of ancestors, we want to devote this episode—the first in a series where we lay out a lot of the pre-education for the education that we're going to deliver later on in our course, Ancestral Wealth. Today is really about how to commune with your ancestors and why it matters profoundly and why this is a critical part of anyone's decolonization work.

Joey: It feels only right to start with this topic of ancestors because for each of us, that reverence, that bowing down to our ancestors, that invitation to them to cover all of this work that we're going to share with the world with their blessings—we feel so guided and we feel so blessed. We feel their hand in our work every step until this point. But as we invite our audiences in to consider their own relationship and their own ways of communion with their ancestors, please receive this episode too as our offering, our prayer to our ancestors, that we're here answering the call.

Simone: Can we just first start with the discussion about why so many of us are severed? Well, we're not severed, but we feel severed from connection to our ancestors.

Joey: This is something that is really our birthright since time immemorial. So many of our ancient cultures pass it down for generations and generations. This fracture, this severance that you're talking about, is really relatively so new when we think about the entire history of humanity. Imperial Western colonization really intentionally broke off people from their lineages, from their ways of knowing and being that had been so wholly passed down from generation to generation. I think that is an important starting point to acknowledge.

Simone: I think it's worth really stressing how recent this phenomenon is of being disconnected from the land that you're from and the ancestry that you're from. This really came into crystal clear focus on the trip that I took earlier this year to Hawaii. I had the chance to learn from indigenous Hawaiian teachers about how the way that Hawaiians define identity has nothing to do with your career or your sexual orientation or your pronouns. None of these things. In Hawaii, your identity is about what land you come from and who your people are—your genealogy. This was taught to me by Kumu Hina Wong. I remember thinking, listening to that and feeling so struck by the resonance between what she was teaching and what it's been like traditionally in my own culture, Korean culture. When you introduce yourself—this is considered a little bit old-fashioned and people don't do it quite so much anymore—but people always ask you, "What is your family name and what land is your family from?" Because even the same family name could be from different lands. I was like, "Wow, the Hawaiians do it exactly the same as my people used to." I don't know as much about how it was in Europe as I do my own culture, but I think it used to be the same across the lands. For example, in Scotland, there are certain clans that come from certain places, and that's it again: land and your family name. Who are your ancestors? Who do you descend from, and what land are you from? This used to truly be across the board how people understood their own sense of position in the world, where they belong, who they are. And in such a short amount of time, this entire system got destroyed.

Joey: Yeah, absolutely. As you're talking, it brought up a couple things. First of all, we share that connection of Hawaii and Kumu Hina playing such an important role in helping us plug back into our molecular ancestral knowledge for ourselves. I had the privilege of learning from Kumu there during my dissertation research, and I made several of the same realizations or parallels as you did. When you're mentioning right now, "Who has this tradition?"—for those who don't know, I'm mixed race. I'm Hakka descent on my dad's side, and Hakka people are a diasporic people originally from China, but now the diaspora has brought us all over the world.

And then on my mother's side, she's half Irish and then half a mixture of other European descent. When I think about the Irish quadrant of my identity, we always knew the stories of "we are Irish." We're third or fourth generations, so recent immigrants, and we're from Cork County—still grounded in name and place, clan name and place. And the parts of lineage that feel the most fractured were also the ones that had been subsumed into white privilege and white supremacy the longest. To uphold the myth of whiteness, the myth of whiteness requires that you forget your lands, your peoples, your tongues, so that you can be privileged under this umbrella term of whiteness.

Simone: Whiteness is a construct that requires you to erase the lands and the genealogy that you're from, so you can just be white as opposed to Italian or Irish or Polish or whatever. And then by giving that up, you gain acceptance into this privilege.

Joey: ...exclusivity. And by the same token, everyone else has been othered and demoted.

Simone: Yeah. We were talking so much about how colonization and white supremacy had to sever people from their sense of their connection to their forebears and their land, because if we remember, then we have power.

Joey: Ooh, yes. You know, this whole creation process with you Simone has been so prayerful, and we've been making so many realizations. So much of this curriculum birthing has been us rooting deeper into our ancestral practices. One day in this process, I had this sort of light bulb moment and realized: all the Disney movies or all sorts of folklore, popular folklore about ancestors, what they get wrong is that we don't just remember ancestors for their sake. They're not just sadly pining away for us in the other world, vainly wishing that we remember them. This message came to me, I believe from my ancestors: we remember them for our sake because they were once our parents, our guardians, and the love that they had for us while they're alive doesn't die. They're still sending that love and those wishes for the best life possible for us from the great beyond. We must remember them so that we can remember who we are and how loved we are and who we belong to. When we do, it shifts everything. We don't need to seek so much external validation. It shifts our relationship with consumption, with materiality, with how we relate to other people, with what we seek and what we do with our life. Because we remember we are so loved, we were so sacrificed for, we are so provided for, and there's so much that they pass down to us and they're just waiting for us to claim and receive.

Simone: If you knew who lived and sacrificed for you to be here, if you knew who dreamt of you and dreamt of your flourishing, if you knew what they wanted for you, then it's really hard to feel small and insignificant and to feel like you're just adrift in a cold and uncaring universe. When you're cut off from all of this and you feel like you're all alone, there's no one who sacrificed and worked and loved and dreamed and paved the way for you to be here, then you become easy to control, easy to exploit, easy to erase, easy to turn into a docile consumer. For Joey and I, it really feels like this existential battle to awaken people to remembering.

Joey: Yeah. And here I just really want to speak with so much compassion to those who feel, "Well, where do I begin? I don't even know who I belong to." I want to acknowledge that you and I have talked so much about how rich we are in knowing our people and where we come from and having access to spaces that our ancestors walked and places where they prayed and they dreamed. We just want to also acknowledge that for so many there is some tender work ahead to re-root. But no matter what your story is or what your lineage is or where it was broken, we do believe that it's possible—not only possible for all of us, it's really necessary for our collective futures that we all join together and do this work.

Simone: I think for those of us for whom there's more fracture in ancestral memory, you're right, it can feel harder, but I think the invitation is always there. Everyone's ancestors are always actively speaking to them. It's a question of are you going to develop a practice so that you're listening on purpose, you're tuning in on purpose. I know that I've spoken to lots of people in my community who feel, "Well, I know my parents and my grandparents, but they weren't great people. And beyond that, I don't know where I come from." That can feel—what does this have to do with me if I can't, don't know and can't know, or maybe I do know, but I don't like who my ancestors are, those ones that I do know? What I always want to remind people is that you have a vastly greater number of ancestors that you don't know about than the ones you do. If you just go up like 10 generations, that's like a thousand ancestors, literally from all the marriages and, you know, that you can't possibly know about. So when it comes to ancestors, if you know your parents and grandparents and even great-grandparents, that's just like the very top tip of the iceberg of everyone who had to be here, who had to work and love and sacrifice and dream and pray so that you could be here today.

Joey: Right.

Simone: And even if, yeah, well, my parental line directly includes colonizers and I know they did harm. But even if that's true, every single human being has ancestors that were kind of not great people. Because humans are humans everywhere. Every single one of us has ancestors who were not perfect. They were all human, but they carried great wisdom and they were capable of immense love, and they were kind, caring, compassionate, wise, capable, creative, resilient people, all of whose qualities we have inherited in our DNA, every single one of us. Even if your ancestors were colonizers, colonization was only the past few hundred years. I mean, Western colonization was only the past few hundred years and beyond that they weren't colonizing. You have far more ancestors who weren't colonizers than the ones who are. We really want to encourage you to connect with the possibility that there are so many from the great beyond, as you said, who are looking at you right this moment and looking on you with just the biggest love and are guiding you and rooting for you and celebrating you and clearing the path before you. That is something that is so obvious to me because it's part of the worldview that I grew up in. That kind of understanding of this ancestral worldview just comes built in if you are raised in Korean culture. But talking to Joey, I realized, wait, hold on, this is not built in for everybody else, so I really want you to know, I want to offer that to you as a living possibility.

Joey: Yeah. So I'm hearing two things surfacing for me as you're talking. One is we really need to do the humanizing work of our ancestors. Sometimes the word ancestors is thrown out there sort of in social media or public discourse and it's sort of romanticized or mythologized. At the end of the day, we have to remember our ancestors were humans just like us, which means they were imperfect just like us. And the range of full humanity is vast. So I'm so glad that you named this. We'll have ancestors who are not so great people, who maybe didn't get a chance to really complete their karmic lessons, whatever your world belief is. But I think we can generally agree people are meant to grow and learn lessons and become better and better in their lifetime. And not everybody has a chance to really embrace that and mature fully. There's a dysfunction that is sort of passed down in every generation. So there's two things here. One, when we sit with that and realize everyone has that truth of ancestors embodying the full range of humanity, we can see that there's so much love for us to receive from those who were loving. And there's also a sense of shared responsibility for every single one of us that for whatever dysfunction, whatever trauma, whatever crap was passed down, we do have a responsibility to heal and break those patterns.

The second thing that's coming up for me is realizing that our ancestors are the shoulders we stand on. Meaning that we are all supposed to do better than the last generation because they've passed down so much seeing, so much knowing, whatever they couldn't finish in their lifetime. The baton has been passed to us, and now we have a chance to do better, to learn more, to be human in freer ways. For me, that just represents so much vast possibility and hope.

Simone: So let's talk a little bit about what ancestral practice actually means. Why this active practice is what marks a difference between genuinely being in communion with your ancestors versus, like you said, having a kind of vague, romanticized idea of it, where it becomes just like a metaphor. It's like a beautiful, spiritual, poetic metaphor, but it doesn't have real teeth. It doesn't have real power in your life.

Joey: I think you and I will start to share a little bit from our personal experiences here. I think I shared with you at one point that throughout my life I can see where something has been guiding me. There was a time when I didn't have language for it, so I used to refer to it like the universe. As I got older and closer to home again, and back to the rituals that were passed down in my lineage, I realized these are more personal relationships. These were people, these are my ancestors speaking to me. It's not just some vague, nebulous universe that's at hand. I'm going to pause here. I feel like I have a few more tangible things, but before we dive into that, I'd love to know how you shifted into knowing that it was your ancestors at work versus something else that you may have called it before.

Simone: Yeah, so some parts of my story are really not generalizable because I grew up in quite a unique family where even amongst Koreans we're very unique in that we have a very alive, sort of shamanic practice, just because of who my dad is and who my mom is.

Joey: Can you explain more what shamanic means in the Korean context for people to really understand it?

Simone: Okay. So the word shaman, shamanic, shamanism—it is thrown around a lot. People use that word a lot in social media. The word shaman actually comes from the Siberian region. The indigenous people of Siberia practiced spirituality where there were particular intermediaries of the physical human world and the spirit world, and the shamans would work as intermediary going back and forth between the spirit world and human world through ceremonies, through ritual, through going into trance states. Korea, geographically, is very close to Siberia, and our shamanic traditions are a direct descendant of that Siberian tradition. So we have a very similar practice that has persisted through thousands of years and in more recent history, despite oppression by government policies and American cultural imperialism.

That's very alive in my family lineage because my grandmother was a shaman and my father practices trance state ancestral communion. He facilitates that for others as well. We have confirmed through other shamans in Korea that my dad and I in turn are meant to carry that lineage, those powers. And when I say powers, I really mean power slash responsibility. Because of that, my brother and I have always grown up where someone in the family will go into a state and be like, "Okay, we just got word from great-grandmother who passed away for the past 40 years." That was very normal for us. So a lot of that I took for granted, and it was normal, but also it's very strange how that also became very compartmentalized from the rest of my life, especially the times that I spent in the US. Also sort of modern Korea is very secular and we kind of cordoned off the more spiritual mystical parts. Everybody's just busy in daily life making capitalism go around.

One of my most poignant memories of the two becoming un-compartmentalized I guess was a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago, realizing that I wasn't doing my work sort of in spite of my Koreanness and who I come from and my family. By my work, I mean all my coaching and teaching. I always thought my coaching and teaching is over here, and who my family is, where I come from, all our weird shit is over here on the other side. I had a friend tell me the only reason you think those two things are separate is because of white supremacy, because of colonization. Now that I tell the story, maybe it sounds like "duh," but at the time it was like thunder and lightning for me. Like what? These two things aren't separate. Wait, hold on a second. What does that mean? And then I realized that my every impulse, everything that I know really deep down, all of my abilities, the gifts, the perspectives that I have, every single one can be directly traced back to who my father is and who my grandmother is, and who my great-grandmother is.

I always felt a little bit different. I'm able to articulate it now in a way that I wasn't back then, which is that everything I know at a really deep level about why this work matters and why I do it and how I do it is just so deeply Korean. Let me just give you a specific example, which is there is the ancient founding mythology of the Korean people, which every kid who goes to school in Korea knows this. It's a mythology about how the son of heaven came down and blah, blah. But the reason that the son of heaven came down to found the ancient Korean nation, it's a philosophy and it's four words called 홍익인간. And I bet if I write it down in Chinese, you would know, but it means to be of benefit to humans everywhere. It is the founding ethos of the Korean nation, and also it is specifically very important to our family. I don't know exactly when that became true, but my father, whatever he does, his work, he would always tell us about this philosophy of 홍익인간, what it means to be of benefit to humans everywhere. "I do this work because of that, and you are going to do this because of that." And so that is at the very core of why I coach and teach and everything. I literally think about 홍익인간. That's probably something that, if you're not Korean, if you're an average Westerner, you don't relate to because that's not part of how you were formed, but it's a part of how I've been formed.

I started paying attention to more things like that over the years after I had that first initial awakening of, "Oh, these things aren't separate. They shouldn't be compartmentalized." Then I started paying attention to all the signs and the detours, and all the times when I thought I was going to go in this direction, but I ended up going this other direction. All of it led me back completely unexpectedly to my ancestral lands. I never thought in my entire adult life prior to moving back to Korea, if anyone would have asked me, "Can you see yourself living in Korea, married to a Korean man?" I would have said, "No. That's ridiculous. Why would I do that? My home is in New York." And yet here I am living a life that I never imagined. When I just trace back to all of those clues, "Wait, how did I end up here?" And yet I know that so deeply. Every time it was ancestral guidance and it just feels like sinking deeper and deeper into a kind of spiritual home, like belongingness that is very different from how I had conceived of my life within the kind of frameworks and structures of secular modernity, of capitalism. Like, "Oh, I was going to be this person, live here, achieve these things." And ancestors were like, "No, you're not."

Joey: Okay. I love that you shared this story. This is so powerful and I'm going to share my story next, but I just want to note right here for everyone listening, one of the reasons why we're sharing our stories, instead of just going into "here are 10 steps to commune with your ancestors," is because your ancestors are in the specificity of the context of who you are to them, who they are to you, and every little piece in your life is going to be what shows you that. We cannot tell you that. That is where you have to reflect back on your own story and see your ancestors' hand guiding you. It's beautiful to hear your story because you can just see how undeniable it is. It's undeniably true for you. And I am reflecting on my path too. A few themes came up from your story. So I'm going to kind of tell my story through that same lens. One is I noticed that the conversation with ancestors rubs up against the conversation with religion under Western colonization. I think that's been one of the tools used to disconnect us from our ancestral communion, our connection with them, when in fact, it's not really religion at all. I mean, it's not religion at all. It's the truth of how we got here.

So what I'm thinking about is as a child—I have one parent who's born and raised in the US and I have one parent who's born and raised in Taiwan. They met in Taiwan and they had both been converted into Christianity. That particular form of Christianity had told my parents that it was inappropriate to continue doing the rituals for our ancestors. That was considered ancestor worship, which is incongruent with the Christian faith. So the way I grew up was being told that, you know, we're a Christian family, we're not allowed to hold the incense. My parents had to negotiate the tension. They kind of made up their own rules and said, "Okay, we won't hold the incense and we won't bow because that's like bowing to a false idol according to the Christian religion. But we can enter the temples and we can stand up the tombs." I kind of had to negotiate, "Wait, how do I still be intact with who I am and who these people were that brought me here, while trying to be a good Christian, as these people have taught me to do?" And I'm seeing other ways that my aunt, my father—who's the Hakka parent—really reached to still hold our ancestors, even after being converted to Christianity.

So, even though I'm mixed race, and by the age of three, I was growing up in the US, and almost every day of my life, if we met new people, they'd ask, "What are you?" Because I appear racially ambiguous. My father was insistent that me and my siblings would answer that question with, "I'm Hakka." Don't explain the rest. Don't worry about, "Well, what are you mixed with?" All they need to know is you're Hakka. Because as a Hakka people, our existence, our identity has always been under threat. We are a diasporic people. That's the oral histories that's been passed down for us. Our survival passed down from our ancestors was to be very insular, to pass down our mother tongue, to keep our customs and our rituals intact so that we wouldn't forget who we were, because that was always under threat from dominant groups around us.

So my dad was still honoring the ancestors and honoring lineage in ways that he could sort of justify logically that it didn't rub up against religion. I grew up disconnected from being able to really enter the temples and practice those rituals. I always longed for something more. The Christian faith that I grew up in wasn't enough for me. When I came home to Taiwan, I always felt sort of like an imposter going into those spaces because I hadn't been taught how to do those rituals or communion in that way. Similar to your story, as an adult married with children, I still had the desire to go home. And by that I mean move from the US to Taiwan. As soon as I got here, the pull was to enter the temples and learn these rituals. I'm really blessed to still have aunties close by who are practicing these and who would take me under their wing to show me this.

But even without being in the temples, the ancestors were finding their way to me through synchronicities, through signs, through realizations, and started to show me that so many of the things that I'd been intuitively doing in my life were connected to wanting to honor them, to live out the dreams and the prayers that they had prayed over me. For example, when I had my children, I spoke only to my children in Hakka, not English, even though they were born in America. Despite how difficult that is—my husband doesn't speak any Hakka—I was like, "I have to pass down our tongue." Our cultures are to have multi-generational homes. All my friends in America thought I was crazy to invite my dad to move in with us when I got married. But I invited him. We had a home, a room for him in our home. My husband is such a good sport to embrace that part of our culture. All of these things really embodied this desire to honor the ancestors' prayers to keep our family intact, keep our identity intact, keep our language intact, because all of that roots us into a form of belonging. When we have that belonging, we are not easily taken advantage of.

I can look back on my life just like you and see what I was up against when I was a teacher in the school system, or what I was up against when I was in colonial institutions of higher ed. Every time I was going against the grain, it was because I was rooted in such a deep sense of self. I'm a teacher this way because that's what my culture believes teachers to be. You see it as taboo that I'm telling my students I love them, that I'm telling them I can be your auntie, I can be whatever parental figure you need. Whereas other Western teachers are disconnected from their students, just handing out the work. But this is the paradigm of teacher that was bestowed on me by my ancestors, so I could just see their hand in my life, similarly to yours.

Simone: Speaking of, we keep talking about why this is not just like a nice vague, spiritual thing to do, but why this is vitally important for the way we carry power in this world and how we assume authority and how we walk through the world, sometimes in tension against bigger structures that would rather that we remain small and docile. Your story reminded me of something that happened to me, which again relates to how really pragmatic this work is and how it really roots us in the world differently. I think a couple of years ago, my husband and I went on a date and we were walking, taking a walk somewhere, and we just happened to come across this band of dancers who were doing traditional Korean dance with Korean traditional music. That's not something that you see every day in the streets of Seoul. We just stopped to watch for a while, and I don't know where it came from, but I just started bawling. Not just like a tear or two. Full body, like heaving, sobbing. I don't know. It surprised me. I was like, "Where did this come from?" I didn't have any kind of emotional association with that kind of music and dance before. My husband was like, "What is happening?" And it was so sudden and so overwhelming.

From that day on, I just felt this insistent, incredibly strong pull to listen to more of that music and to expose myself to more of those dance performances on purpose. Not just running into it on the street. So I remember I intentionally sought out such a performance, and during watching a performance like that in a different venue, I just had this moment of incredible, full body shivers, sort of download, understanding, very specific message from my ancestors saying, "Do not ever worry about what anyone else says about you because you are so protected." And there was an edge of ferocity to it. Like, "Do not worry." Like, if you worry you're fucking stupid. You know, like you have no idea the kind of army that we have surrounded you with. No one can fuck with you, never fear. And I was like, "Where did this come from?"

Ever since then, I have completely lost any kind of self-consciousness that I may have had about how other people perceive me, especially having so many eyes on me or who's talking shit about me. All that. It was never a big issue for me, but there was always residual. But all that residual just completely melted away. Now I have no fear. And it's not like I had to "work on my beliefs." I just got that download and everything just melted away. To be sure, not all ancestral downloads are as dramatic as this, but some are. And it is with these points of contact, communion, as you would say, Joey, that as we learn who we are, we learn where we get our power from and where we're meant to go. The more we tend to those relationships, the clearer those signs become. So in that way it is incredibly pragmatic work as well as spiritual.

Joey: My gosh, your story reminds me of something too. You heard the voice of your ancestors there so clearly and undeniably, and I've had many moments like that where you just know who's speaking to you internally. It's so clear that you're being spoken to by a forebear. But for those who haven't heard that loud of a message yet, here's what I'll say. This is what I believe to be true, and you can run this through your own discretion. Our ancestors also speak through our living elders, and so a lot of times the voices that you'll hear, the initial messages you'll receive, coming through your lineage, coming from your ancestors, before you sort of devoted yourself to the practice of listening to your ancestors directly, you'll hear them through your living elders. And that voice, as you were delivering that message and the story, I was like, "I've gotten those messages from youth, through my father, through my grandparents." This is who we are, this is how we see you. You are blessed, you are protected, you are anointed. And then those echoes will ring too. As you deepen your work, as you deepen your listening, you'll start to hear that more directly from your ancestors themselves.

Simone: Such an important point. It's not just the dead people, sometimes it's the living people who carry messages for you.

Joey: You know, I am hearing maybe some of the doubts that might be coming up in folks' minds as they're listening to this charge right now, or this suggestion, because I had them myself at some point. I'm recalling when I was early on in my research career as a PhD student and I was working on a narrative project about the Hakka people as told through one thing about me. This is ancestral too—I've always had this sensitivity to being a collective voice, not an individual voice. So even when I wanted to talk about our Hakka history because it's so underrepresented, I said, "Well, I have to film a documentary where all of my family members and our community members are speaking directly, because I don't want to speak over them." The fear that came over me before I even pitched my family this project, because I was like, "Well, this isn't what we do. We don't generally—a lot of you might be thinking this—we don't have those type of conversations. I don't have those close, open, free type of relationships with my family members. They're not going to just want to sit down with me and talk story about memories and people who have passed on." I was gripped with that insecurity or discomfort or just the fear that, you know, my elders are going to look at me like, "What do you mean you want to interview me about these things?"

So if that's not a part of your family culture, I see you. And I will tell you, they all surprised me. They all surprised me. I sat down with them and then it's like—and this just happened to me a couple weeks ago. I said to my 90 and 91-year-old Ah Gong and Ah Poh, my grandparents here in Taiwan, I said, "I think I'm going to start bringing my little camcorder over." I just dated myself. "I want to start recording you and have you guys share stories and talk about gardening and how to take care of babies and all the wisdom, because once you're not here anymore, I still need this on record. So I can pass it down to my kids and grandkids." I was so nervous. I was nervous to ask them that. And my Ah Gong, my grandfather, goes, "Of course you should, you should do this." They are so proud to be asked this. And there's just something that lights up in us. They are our future ancestors now. And there's something that lights up in us when we are being asked to be that channel of wisdom for our descendants. That's the way it should be. So I encourage you to all experiment a little bit, even if it's awkward at first.

Simone: Yeah. And I know that you talked a little bit about the difference between this and religion or worship. I think it's really helpful for people to know that when we say commune with your ancestors, we don't mean worship them. You don't—you're not going to worship your grandmother. That's weird. Instead you have a relationship with your grandmother, grandfather, whatever. And you tend to that relationship. The way that we envision it is that your parents love you. Your grandparents love you, at least in theory they should. And when they pass, they don't stop loving you. For those of us who have children, you can imagine, you love your children so much and you're not going to stop loving them just because you transition into a non-earthly form. So there are all these people who are in another world and who are loving you. It is just saying yes to that connection. It's not worship, it's not creating a new belief system to subscribe to. It's not a new religion. It's not that.

My personal belief is that because our ancestors are in the spirit world as opposed to this material world, they are closer to the absolute power that I call God. My ancestors aren't God, but they're closer to God. They have less obstruction between themselves and God because they no longer have to occupy human bodies. So I can pray to God and I can ask my ancestors to pray on my behalf, and they can carry messages to me from their own hearts, from their own love, or they can carry messages from God to me. So they're, I kind of think of them as intermediaries, as well as people who have wisdom on their own. Can you share how you think about this?

Joey: Yeah, so I'm not necessarily subscribed or ascribed to one particular religion. For me, even the concept of God is more poetic, maybe in my language. Sometimes you'll hear me talk about God, but it's not exclusive to any other religion. It's interesting for me, re-rooting into my practices as guided by my living elders, my aunties. The way that we honor our ancestors here in Taiwan and in our Hakka culture has been mixed in with local folk religions. So we also have temples and shrines to local deities. We call them actually land uncles. And every portion of land has an uncle overseeing.

Simone: That's so cute.

Joey: Yeah, it's so cute. And I'd have to do a little bit more research on the history of that. Like if it traces all the way back to sort of the indigenous practices that were here. Just for some context, Hakka people have been here—my family has been here for 22 generations. So we've been here as long as America even existed as a country. So a really long time. And we have been in close coexistence with indigenous cultures here. For us, our practices, and this is not necessarily the totality of my belief system, but going through these practices is that the local land uncles, we can go into their temples and we can commune with the land uncles, which are then intermediaries to us and our ancestors. And our ancestors can also commune with us directly. But if we have certain questions or we want to ask for added blessing, the different gods or goddesses can also—it's almost like we imagine like a council of just spirit power around that.

The way I believe this is, you know, one thing that we know for sure as humans is that our humanity is going to end. We are all mortal. That is one thing that we know for sure is that we are all going to die. And everything else in every culture and every language and every belief system has been doing our human best to put into language what happens next. A lot of that is based off of these transmissions that we receive through our intuition, through our spirit. And humans have been on earth for all these thousands of years. It's just so fascinating for me to look culture to culture and see the patterns of what feels true despite what culture you're in, despite what language you speak, what feels true. And that is just that no matter what, when your ancestors passed on, when your loved ones pass on, there's still this tether of they're still looking out for you, they're still passing on their love for you. And however we commune with them, however we get to them, however our messages get to them or their messages get to us, and whether God is above them or next to them or whatever, I think all that's the poetry that each of us gets to write as we live our life.

Simone: Yeah. And you know, one of my friends slash colleagues slash teachers, Daniel Foor, PhD, he wrote the book on ancestral healing and he teaches ancestral healing courses and he's a Muslim and is a fully practicing Muslim. I think it's so wonderful to be able to hear Joey's story and my story and have Daniel's example, to know that this can and should fit into whatever—whatever spirituality or religion you're coming from, you can make space for relating to the people who gave birth to you and love you and are looking out for you.

Joey: Absolutely. That's the message here is that we're trying to remove any friction from anyone from reconnecting to this. To pull it all the way back to where we started this conversation with—if we haven't reassured you that this fits into the belief system that you've already built for yourself, just go back to maybe the question of: What's stopping you? Because for us, from a historical lens, there were seeds planted early on by colonizing education that really is where we start to see in human history where ancestral traditions were starting to be fractured. So at the very least, get curious and ask yourself questions. If I feel hesitant about this, what's the source of that? Is that something I still want to root into? Or can I shift my roots a little bit to some more nourishing soil?

Simone: And I know that I've spoken to a lot of people who have fears about not knowing who their people are, not being able to connect to it because of various historical disruptions. Maybe you're American and sort of a European mutt—you have X percentage from this country, X from that—you don't know. What we want to offer is that we guarantee there is already an ancestor speaking to you. Maybe you're like 15 different kinds of ancestry and you're like, "Which one? I don't even know any of them." Okay. But just ask to hear whoever is already speaking to you.

Joey: There's two things there. There's the intuitive work—sometimes when we just pause and listen and start to do practices that strengthen our self-trust, we begin to realize we've been spoken to, which is the point that you were making. And then there's the other side to this too, because if you are sensitive and cautious of, "Well, I don't want to be claiming that was my ancestors' voice and I was just imagining things," or "I crave this so much, so I'm just making this up"—this is where I invite people to do the story work. For my living elder, who is probably from the most fractured, colonizing lineage, who was my maternal grandfather, his work in his later life was to be a genealogist. I now am looking at that and thinking, wow, he's even being pulled to heal some strands, whether he realized it or not. He offered the service for decades to folks to help them trace back their story. There's something to be revealed in starting to find out who your ancestors were by name and story. Because when you gather those pieces, it makes it a lot easier to start seeing those signs and synchronicities of how they might have been showing up in your life.

Simone: True.

Joey: And deepening that trust of, "This probably was one of them speaking to me, asking something of me, guiding me." Even if they weren't that great of a person, what's to say that from the great beyond, they aren't moving you to do better than them, to heal the lineage? Because one thing that we know—if you look at biology, if we look at living systems theories, take spirituality out of this, take God out of this—if we just look at biology, any living system is primed to do whatever it takes to be able to thrive. That is why symbiosis is sort of the law of the land in the biological kingdom. We have to get ourselves to a state of optimal conditions for all of us to grow and flourish. If we just take that as scientific truth, then we can start to understand that for us as a human species, we are supposed to find what's healthier. Take whatever was dysfunctional in one generation and find ways to grow healthier for the next generation and the next generation. When we're inviting you into this work, if anything else, just start to see it as that. How can I—maybe up until this point looking into my ancestry has felt really sketchy and I don't want to find what skeletons live in those closets. Maybe we can remove some of that friction and just say, we're all human. Do this for your next generations, because this is a moment where we get to choose which ancestors, what kind of ancestors we want to be, and what we want to set up for our future generations too.

Simone: So good. Yes. We really want to reassure you by saying the longer you do this, the more it's going to become clear. The better you're going to get at being able to discern between, "Oh, maybe this is just me projecting or imagining," versus, "Oh, this is an ancestral message." You are going to find more information. Ever since I became very acutely aware of this, maybe four or five years ago, I have been finding so many breadcrumbs that led me to another opening, which led me to another opening. Trust that breadcrumbs are being dropped for you, and that pursuing one will lead to another and that you're always being spoken to. Trust builds through practice, and we are going to really teach systematically how to lead yourself through this in our course, in our upcoming course, Ancestral Wealth. If you want to do that, you can do that with us.

Okay, so this feels like a good place to let people know about our free course called Building Post-Capitalist Wealth. We do a lot of ancestor work in that. If you are a person of the global majority, if you are Black, Brown, Indigenous, Arab, Asian, Pacific Islander, you are invited to take that course for free. I will leave the link to it in the show notes. If this is a good fit for you, it's an invitation to our full eight-week course, starting in December, called Ancestral Wealth.

Joey: I want to make a little bit of a bridge here. We spent the whole episode talking about ancestors. So why are we now talking about wealth? Why are we talking about post-capitalism?

Simone: A little bit of a jump there.

Joey: We've talked so much about our ancestors' dreams for us, our ancestors' love for us. Simone and I have shared stories about how our ancestors have guided us really into the best version of life that you or I could possibly imagine, and it just keeps getting better. One thing that happens when you start communing with your ancestors is you realize the people who loved you want the very best for you, and the very best for you happens to be very opposite of what colonization and capitalism has designed for you. Capitalism has reduced us over just the last few generations—again, a very short period of human history—has reduced humanity to labor and to consumption. That is just not the world that our ancestors have dreamt and built and sacrificed for, for thousands and thousands of years since time immemorial. 

Simone and I—our ancestors are so loud about: this has to stop. We have to get the world, we have to get our brothers and sisters, we have to get this living planet and the more-than-human life forms that we share this planet with—we have to get it back into alignment with what all of our ancestors dreamed for us. The only way we can do so is by organizing and amassing and redistributing and creating sustainable channels of flow for the resources that we are responsible to steward. In the world that we live in right now, part of the resources show up in the form of currency as money. So we have to talk tactically: how do we do this? How do we build this new world? Before that, we have to really shift our beliefs to re-root it to: yes, this is for us, wealth is for us, flourishing is for us. It's not metaphorical, it's tangible, it's practical, it's lived. This is why we've built both the free course and the live eight-week course. We've poured our all into that because we want to invite a very special group of people who are ready to jump in and take responsibility and also receive the blessings that have been intended for them for so long.

Simone: Calling all would-be architects to a world where humans experience thriving outside of being reduced to labor and consumption. That is our ultimate goal here. If you feel, "Hey, I feel like that's something that I'm being called to," please continue on this journey with us. We got a lot more good stuff coming to you in this podcast series. Check out our free course once again. That's Dr. Joey Liu and myself, and I'll talk to you next week.

Joey: See you next time.

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 Hey, thank you so much for listening. If what we share today resonated with you, I want to invite you to take our free course Building Post Capitalist Wealth. There's a lot of ancestral work in that course. It's designed specifically for people of the global majority. If you are black, brown, indigenous, Arab, Asian, or Pasifika, that course is for you. It's completely free, and it's also a beautiful introduction to the work that Joey and I will be doing together in our full eight week course, Ancestral Wealth, starting in December. You'll find the link to the free course in the show notes, and I'll be back next week with more with Joey.

Until then, may you feel the love and protection of your ancestors.