What is knowing anyway? A story of embodied memory and ancestral healing

It's amazing what can be known and unknown at the same time. 

It's amazing how the unknown can reveal itself through the body, through dreams and resonance and place and art. In short, through living, in its own time. 

My mum is half-Irish. This is a fact. Her father was Irish and all his family before him, as far as we know. And yet for most of my life, this felt untethered, like a post-it note that had lost its stickiness and blown away, edges curling. Like a fact about an extinct animal I could neither see nor touch or smell. 

This grandfather of mine

He is actually my grandfather 

I know this now.

Through my childhood, he was more of a myth. He was a tuning stick creating the vibration of loss. 

What I sniffed out, the unsaid, was an injury that had not healed, a miasma of estrangement and not-rightness across the too-pristine surface of my mum's stories. 

I always had more questions than could be answered. 

Something was missing. 

My grandfather was missing. 

He left for the last time (they did not know that then) when my mum was 6 and my aunt 8-years-old. 

Old enough, I realised later with a sudden clang, to know something - deeply - of his texture and scent, of how his hugs felt, and of what aspects of life he pointed out. Where did their joint attention land? 

Of course, he was never the stranger in the story. Oh, how this pains me. This heartbreak. My mum and aunt unsupported and likely deeply ashamed. Carrying their mother's shame. Never to see their father again. 

So of course, into the unknown, out of the unknown: poetry. 

I have been writing about my family for years. 

When I told a close family member about a poem I'd written about my grandfather, they said with contempt, "You don't know anything about him. How could you!?" Oh inevitable charge of shame.

It's true. I don't know. And therefore: Into the gap. 

There is a whole world of knowing that is sensed, that cannot be caught as facts, cannot be fished out as discrete truths.

This knowing through the body, of the embodied imagination, the embodied unconscious is wild & upending. This knowing is not authoritarian, perhaps cannot even rightly be called truth. It is my highest authority in my work. As when, working with a client, a door opens. With full knowledge that we're not there yet and that we don't know what will happen, I acknowledge the door, I must trust the door and walk through it.

So, back to this family saga. A legacy of abandonment and pain unacknowledged. My grandfather leaving, skipping Ireland under his brother's name, on the clifftop, on the prow of a ship (did he make it to Australia? A rumour on the docks). Abuse alluded to. Educated in an all-boys Catholic school.

When I had the chance earlier this year to change flights in Dublin, I said yes and followed my instincts to take a less than 24 hrs pilgrimage to the area my grandfather grew up in.

Everything about this short trip was a delight. I felt so at home on this land.

And when I got out of the Irish sea having swam at dusk at the forty foot, I stood there watching the teenage lads jump in one after the other, and hesitate and joke and egg each other on. And suddenly I felt in my bones my grandfather swimming here with his 6 brothers. When only men could. When they were young and vital and very handsome. I knew, oh, the life they lived here, the summers roaming the hills across the cliffs, and romances, and winter hooleys at Uncle Mike's tiny white cottage on the hill.

And the space between my shoulder blades was searing and tingly and I cried and felt so grateful. More rightfulness. More dimensions of this man. This man, my grandfather, who did not just abandon the family but who survived, and came to a hostile country, loved my grandmother while quietly despised by her parents, and who loved me before he knew me (he has never known me) and who ran, who ran from all that love and pain.

I wrote in 2021:

Oh, tell me you didn't love your dark-haired daughters?

Their bellies and heads smaller than your hands.

Their skin so soft, their eyelids closed under your lips.

You buckled at their delicacy and heat

Your throat stoppered by the wave of churning

hurt in your chest.

And then, just a week ago, I was walking down to Aldi (no kidding) when I felt an old and specific seam of grief through my body (it wasn't mine) and bubbling up into my mind, the knowledge, oh, but of course he loves his daughters. He grieved them (whether consciously or not) all the rest of his life.

So I cried. Felt this sadness. And was flooded with a forgiveness I hadn't known he/we needed.

This is how ancestral healing happens. As life work, as a practice of life and love, of dedication, or paying attention, of following whispers and trusting.

What do we need: ritual, poetry, place, movement, dreams, creativity, but most importantly, the courage and the trust to keep the field open.

To open our hands whenever we catch hold too tightly (of a particular story or identity). To open our minds whenever they grasp too tightly onto THE truth.

Opening to the field. Backwards and forwards in time. I'm grateful for this mysterious life and the other world in this one.

October 2025