How Do We Carry Our Ancestors' Memories
elephants, enslavement, and epiphanies
Reckless, a massage therapist had called it, chuckling as she wrung out my fragmented scar tissue.
I had fallen through trees and twisted my ankle, running in a forest and over waterfalls in California. A month later, because I wanted to adventure with my dad, I had ran a half marathon through the high desert in Arizona.
The injury was five years old by the time I boarded my flight into Indonesia, on April 6, 2024. But around hour six, my ankle began to swell and ache as if the injury were new. I was surprised and annoyed. I had flown many long distance flights, but I hadn’t felt my ankle twinge with any pain for years. I had done so much to heal it.
Ironically, or so I thought at the time, my father, who was continents away, also had a peculiar injury on the same ankle.
I now understand it was all an omen.
(Please rock with me as I experiment with using third person narratives to share this experience. And content warning: includes references to self-touch as a coping mechanism, incarceration, enslavement, and animal cruelty.)
1. Remember
April 18, 2024 - Evening
A portal opened in the middle of Ubud, Bali into somewhere nameless on the Atlantic ocean.
With a gasp as black as a hallowed sound, Tifanei fell through the portal, into a rectangular wound in the belly of a ship. The drop was soundless. And like tree roots climbing up from under the earth to fracture and engorge on edges of concrete, Tifanei’s right ankle bloomed around the shackle that wrapped her under and tight.
No, Tifanei choked, knew she had fallen into a vivid vision.
No, tears ran wild through her eyelashes and into the cracks of her mourning mouth.
No, she begged for the memory to dissipate.
But the memory persisted.
She was pregnant and stolen.
The bellied ship was rancid with turbid waters. Wet ran against the corners of her toes and lapped her melted bruises. Dark matter ebbed through her shackle and chains with each creaking movement of the hull that contained her and hundreds of others who would never know an escape.
She remembered she was searching. She couldn’t find him; her partner, her developing baby’s father; and she somehow knew she would never be able to find him again.
No, No, No, Tifanei chanted as her child thumped inside of her. He would be born into a world where he and his children and their children would experience struggle and horror.
No, No, she languished, sick and still, unmoving, unescaping, unraveled, unresolved.
The vision faded.
A few hundred years later, Tifanei opened her eyes to find herself rocking her body back and forth in a meditation hall of Bali yoga studio owned by an unknowing white European man; her nylon crop top saturated in tears and confusion.
Tifanei sobbed through the timbre of the drums and chimes of the Tibetan bowls. These sounds had transported her into a vision journey. A journey into her long ago past.
She, now trembling, did not know if what she had just endured was her own memory or her ancestors’, or whether there can be a difference, and if there could be, would the difference even matter.
2. Notice
April 14, 2024 - Mid-day
Tifanei slowly wound her head to observe the majesty in front of her.
Enormous creatures, textured like bark, wrinkled like knuckles, each shuffled to shift weight away from their front right leg which was chained at their ankle.
Tifanei noted the synchronicity—the elephants were bound at the same space her own joint was hot to touch, and she nodded her head with her breath held tight in her abdomen.
The park owners called this place a Sanctuary, but there was no sanctuary Tifanei could imagine that required shackles and whips.
Why am I here, she asked no one except the spirits she knew were listening in. Why is my ankle swelling again? Why are these elephants chained in the same place my ankle has been aching? Do the elephants need me? Do I need them?
In response, a surge of jumbled, conjoined energy crept through Tifanei’s feet. The energy crept through her limbs, heart, and reached her crown. It sizzled and pricked, popped.
A sign along the path, between the tourist stations, read: “the tether is attached to the elephants front foot that causes no discomfort or pain at all. Our elephants are gently trained to accept this tether…”
The sign did not explain to Tifanei the elephants’ pink skin rubbed raw on the front right ankle of each elephant, nor the whips adorning their handlers.
“These animals are enslaved,” she whispered.
Without the breath she needed—for it was stuck in her belly, Tifanei’s skin tried to escape her in an ignited worry.
Tifanei was alone, so alone, days away from anyone she knew or loved or trusted, on a continent that begged her to come and then wrenched her bones when she heeded the call.
This is too much, Tifanei panicked. The boundaryless energy intensified. Hysteria rose.
What coursed through her would lay her level to the ground if she did not find a way to let it pass through, release it and soon. She was scared.
She did not know the energies she was feeling were memories; memories resurfacing from a place so deep in time that they were short-circuiting her nervous system.
Tifanei hurried through the elephant “sanctuary,” back into her hotel room—a room that was serendipitously upgraded for her birthday, an upgrade she had initially celebrated: a room with a wrap-around balcony, with an expansive view of the park, so many vantage points where she could see even more elephants at once, even more elephants bound, chained by their right ankles.
When she arrived, she stood in the center of her room and desperately unwrapped her birthday dress from her hips. The dress fell to the floor in a dramatic bow.
Breathe, Tifanei, she attempted to soothe herself. These feelings will pass.
Breath as restless and formless as the moment, she stepped out of the puddle of her clothing and climbed into the king-sized bed behind her.
I am love, she chanted the only words she could think might transmute the torrid energy enveloping her body.
I am love, and then she sought to set herself free.
I am love, she spread and spun her fingers between her thighs, beckoned the power of an orgasm, sought to chase away her anxiety, chase away the chaos that clicked and clacked with the chains she heard from the bound elephants outside of her window.
I am love, her discordant pleasure coaxed longer breaths from her body. Click. Clack.
I am love, she fell to a brassy whisper as tears of fear trickled from her cheeks—click, clack—to her breasts—click, clack—atop her belly and—click, clack—onto her fingers as she stroked and massaged herself into a ragged climax.
I am love. I am love. I am love. I am love. I am love. I am love. I am… . Somnolence mercifully pulled her into another realm and out of her fear, away from her body (where the memories awaited her).
And Tifanei slept through her 36th birthday without dreams.
3. Witness
April 18, 2024 Evening
This time she knew the memory wasn’t her or hers.
It was Tifanei’s grandmother who she had never seen, never touched, never met.
It was Tifanei’s father’s mother’s memory of her father’s birth.
No—ah—uuhh—oohh!
Her grandmother was young, very young, screaming through vowels, alone in a hospital room with her right ankle chained in hand-cuffs to a bed.
Her grandmother was in psychiatric confinement in a hospital in Upstate New York.
No! Pleass---aaaeeee---aaiii---eeeaasssee!
The vowels stretched to screeches and her grandmother’s pain seeped out from the memory and into the air surrounding Tifanei.
Tifanei shot her eyes open, yanked back to the present moment, again in the meditation hall of the yoga studio, floating above the dark Ayung river, tribal music drowning out the cries of neighboring breath-work participants.
Tifanei covered her mouth in despair. Her grandmother had been shackled in birth.
I’m so sorry, grandma, Tifanei drew out a silent wail. I’m so sorry.
Her ankle. Her father’s ankle. The slave ship. The hospital room. It was all ancestral. It was all linked.
In these violent memories, Tifanei was witnessing anguish trapped in her lineage, pulsing as a wound inside her own body, as a reminder, as a message, as a signal—to witness.
(The following is a text thread with my father. I had texted him immediately following these experiences, because I was surfing in adrenaline. I was not okay. The memories/visions deeply affected me. I wanted confirmation. Or rather, I wanted to be soothed and held, but confirmation was a decent placeholder.)
Tifanei: What is the likelihood that your mother was in psychiatric care when she was pregnant with you and gave birth to you?
Dad: High. But that’s just speculation on my part.
Tifanei: Why do you think the chances were high?
Dad: I believe she was in the thick of her mental heath issues and alcohol issues at that time.
Tifanei: I have this feeling, or rather had a series of visions that lead me to believe, that our ankle issues are related her to being chained when giving birth. [I researched and found the] hospital you were born in was also a psych facility.
Dad: Hmm i would bet there are records kept some where.
Tifanei: [T]hat type of trauma at birth is bound to come out physiologically.
Dad: 👍🏿
Thank you for being here and witnessing me.
I recommend taking time to release the energy of this story with a meditation. Here is a link to a recent meditation from our Sanctum of Creation podcast:
Thank you so much for giving us this Tifanei. Thank you for moving through your process and for inviting us to share in a meditation to release the things that aren’t ours to hold so that we *can* create. Thank you thank you & I love you 💛💛💛✨
I was going to say, powerful story, but Louise beat me to it. Thank you for sharing, it was very vivid. The story of your Grandmother captivated me. Her story, and the parallel of the elephant was both horrifying and noble. My heart aches with the pain they both endured.