Blood Memories
On ancestry and the way memory moves through us
I have been thinking a great deal about lineage these past few weeks. Part of it is gratitude, and I want to thank you all for reading and supporting this work. Part of it is that I recently received an honorable mention from CRAFT literary magazine for a chapter from the book I am writing about my mother and grandmother. That recognition touched me more than I expected. It reminded me how close these stories still live inside me, how ancestry is not something we study from afar but something that moves quietly through the body, shaping the way we stand, breathe, and move.
Lately I’ve been thinking about ancestry not as a family tree, but as a current. Some of what flows through us is visible, the shape of our hands, the tilt of a jaw, even the things we have been taught to dislike, crooked teeth, knobby knees. But some things are hidden, encoded deep inside the body’s remembering. Science calls it genetics. Spiritualists call it soul. I believe they are the same thing.
Martha Graham, the pioneering force behind American modern dance, called it blood memory, the way something ancient and unspoken moves us before we can name it. It is also, quite fittingly, the name of her most excellent memoir.
What we carry in our bones sometimes moves ahead of our awareness. The femur, the tibia, the phalanges: they remember long before our minds catch up. I feel it in my own sacrum, the shift of the pelvis that echoes how my grandmother pivoted beneath a hot California sun, her hands in the soil, her back bent not by choice but by necessity.
Inheritance is not only what we pick up consciously, the traditions, the stories, but also what we inherit unconsciously. The strain in the lumbar region that might map to a lifetime of bending over fruit trees. The shallow breath that perhaps carries the memory of someone who held her breath for decades in silence. These are small anatomical clues: the clavicle that rides high in someone scarred by guardedness, the scapula that wings out as though trying to connect to something behind it. They are the body’s archive.
This is not some airy New Age claim that we can feel our ancestors in the ether alone. It is a grounded observation of the mind-body connection, the fact that what the mind carries the body must house. The child of someone who survived unspoken loss may hold her shoulders slightly forward, guarding an invisible wound. If our ancestors held fear, lied about fear, endured fear in silence, that fear folds into us. It becomes a tightened diaphragm, a shallow inhalation, a tensing of the adductors without reason.
And yet, movement offers a path. The breath that draws into the ribs, the spine that lengthens in a simple roll-down, the hand that places gently on the mat. These are not trivial. They are acts of remembrance and of release. We are not doomed by what we inherit; we are responsible to it. To feel it, to know it, to move it.
Heritage is not only the bright inheritance of skill, but also the shadow inheritance of trauma. The per of lineage in the serratus beneath the ribs. I ask my students to listen to the hyoid, to the subtalar joint, to the iliac crest, not because we fetishize anatomy, but because these places are where memory accumulates. We move them so they are not buried. We invite the current of ancestry through them so that we might feel its direction and choose whether to follow or transform it.
Graham said, “The body is a sacred garment. … It is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor, and with joy and with fear as well.” To honor the garment is to honor the lineage it embodies: the good, the bad, the silent, the coded. We are not simply owners of our bodies. We are custodians. We are moving the current of ancestry through flesh, and tendon, and memory. And in that movement lies the possibility that the mind and the body might find harmony, might rest in each other, might breathe together, as one.
How do you carry the people who came before you? What is your connection to your ancestors, and how do you recognize them when they rise up in you, in ways large or small? Feel free to post in the comments. I’d genuinely love to hear from you. I am listening, with my whole self.
I love the way that you weave in Graham’s wisdom, as, in a lovely way, she is also part of your lineage.