In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, I explore the inextricable link between ancestry and destiny, grounding an ancient metaphysical idea in a very practical, embodied way.

I begin by situating destiny within older cosmologies that understood reality as multidimensional, inhabited by forces with agency, and animated by a soul that incarnates with an orientation and a potential. From there, I trace how many traditional cultures understood destiny not as a fixed outcome, but as an unfolding process shaped by the ongoing relationship between soul, body, circumstance, and choice.

From this foundation, I turn toward the ancestral layer. Drawing from Yoruba Ifa and Orisha traditions, as well as Daoist understandings of Jing, I explore how ancestral inheritance and destiny were understood as inseparable. The body itself becomes the meeting point between ancestral forces and the soul’s unfolding path.

I speak to the soul as a being that incarnates with an orientation, a pull toward experience, expression, and becoming, while simultaneously entering into a web of ancestral inheritance that establishes real constraints, patterns, and potentials.

These inherited conditions are not obstacles to destiny, but the very soil through which it must grow.

To bring this into the everyday, I offer a deliberately mundane example: the human squat. As an ancestral movement pattern built into the structure of the human body, the squat reveals how fate, choice, inheritance, and outcome interact at even the most basic level of embodiment. The body we inherit sets real parameters.

How we engage those parameters becomes a site of conscious participation. What we inherit shapes what is possible. How we engage it shapes what unfolds.

Through this example, I invite you to extrapolate outward, toward family inheritance, cultural stories, bodily predispositions, and the broader ancestral field that shapes what is possible for us. Destiny, in this view, is not about escaping fate, but about making conscious, participatory choices within the circumstances we inherit.

It is the art of bringing awareness, care, and choice to what we did not choose.

This episode is an invitation to see ancestry and destiny not as abstract concepts, but as lived, embodied processes unfolding through everyday decisions, movements, and orientations.

From here, the conversation expands outward to family lineage, cultural inheritance, bodily predispositions, and the broader ancestral field that precedes us. Destiny emerges not as escape from these forces, but as conscious participation within them.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe