How to Close The Loop of Family Karma and Move Towards 'Completion'

Completion and the Living Ancestor

One of the most important underlying core themes of becoming a Living Ancestor is continuously orientating our lives toward completion. I mean this both on the micro scale of small daily events and on the macro scale of completing one’s life so that when we arrive at the moment of death, we feel done.

For the more complete we are at the time of death, the more possibility exists that we move from this plane into the ancestral realms as a vibrant, auspicious, and helpful spirit. A spirit with agency. A spirit with capacity to act. This stands in contrast to becoming a hungry ghost.

The hungry ghost is a being still deeply attached to this realm in unresolved ways. This lack of resolution is what we would call an open loop. The spirit still has unfinished business here, and because of that, it cannot detach enough to gain the vantage point or energetic orientation required to help the living or to continue its own evolution beyond this dimension of reality.

What It Means to Be “Done”

This notion of being done is something each of us is called to reconcile within our own heart.

What does it mean to you?

And how can you live your daily life in such a way that, if death were to show up today, you could feel as though you were on the thread of completion, even if you did not technically finish everything you had started?

Of course, there are tragic events that can derail this orientation entirely. People die very young. People are taken suddenly. They never get the chance to complete what they came here to do.

And precisely because this is true, for those of us who are capable of orientating this way, it becomes even more important to try.

Karmic Ties as Open Loops

One of the layers of completion has to do with understanding and relating to karmic ties.

Every karmic tie is, in some sense, an open loop. And every open loop is, in some sense, a karmic tie. There are scales to this. Some loops are small. Some are enormous. Some dissolve on their own. Others require our conscious participation to resolve.

The more karmically tied we are to a particular path, the more likely it is that unfinished business exists within it.

This is one reason ascetic and monastic traditions emerged. Individuals retreated from worldly engagement entirely. No ambition. No family. No legacy. No participation in the social field. The orientation was to escape the material world, which was seen as a trap, an illusion, or an impediment to spirit.

This is one way of avoiding karmic ties altogether.

Potentially a valid path for those who are truly called to it.

The Path of the Living Ancestor

There is another way.

The way of the Living Ancestor is not about retreating from karmic ties, but about moving them toward resolution, dissolution, and completion. This can be done both through how we live our daily lives and through the practices we engage in.

This allows spiritual life to be something that unfolds through the world rather than away from it.

And to make this principle more tangible, I want to share a story from my own life.

My Grandmother and an Unfinished Thread

As some of you know, I was raised by my grandmother. She was a medicine woman. She was my first teacher. She introduced me to magic, spirit work, and animism. Throughout my childhood, we were exceedingly close.

She loved me deeply. She treated me well. And despite the wounds that naturally arise in any relationship, I was, in many ways, her golden child.

As often happens during adolescence, when sovereignty begins to form, we drifted apart. There were intense arguments. One of the largest fractures came when I revolted against being forced into the African traditions I was raised in. I later returned to those traditions on my own terms, but at the time, this departure caused a significant schism between us.

I also married young and left home at eighteen. My wife and I moved to New Mexico to begin our lives together.

Illness, Distance, and Absence

Years later, while I was working at Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, my grandmother began to show signs of severe dementia. This illness runs along the maternal line of my family. All the women, as far back as we know, have died from it.

At the time, none of us had the capacity to recognize or address it effectively. Looking back now, with what I know, I believe I could have helped her in meaningful ways. But that awareness did not exist then.

As her condition worsened, she required care. I was a young man, fully immersed in my own life, and not prepared to offer it. The person who took her in was her son, my uncle.

Growing up, he and I had a contentious relationship. That detail matters for what comes next.

The Loop Reveals Itself

About a month ago, my wife and I traveled from Hawaii to Florida to surprise my mother for her sixtieth birthday. It was a long trip. Hard on the body. Not something I usually enjoy. But we did it as a sacrifice for her.

During that visit, we were at a gathering, and my uncle began talking about what it was like to care for my grandmother. The experience was harrowing. She had become a danger to herself and others. Lives could have been lost.

He was present with her. Devoted. Loving. He took care of the woman who raised me.

And I was not there.

I had heard versions of this story before, but in that moment, something landed differently. I realized I had never acknowledged him. I had never thanked him. I had never named the regret I carried for not being there, and for the fact that my relationship with her remained strained when she died.

I felt it immediately.

An open loop.

Closing the Loop

I took him aside and told him how I felt. I thanked him. I acknowledged his devotion. I expressed my gratitude that she had someone like him at the end of her life.

He understood.

He told me I was young. That I had to live my life. That she was his mother. That he was glad to do it.

And something closed.

I felt it.

I hadn’t known that loop was still open until being in my family field brought it to the surface.

I could have tried to resolve it privately, through meditation or internal work. But it surfaced in relationship, and so it wanted to be resolved in relationship.

The Practice of Completion

These are the kinds of conversations, actions, and orientations I want to encourage.

To become attuned to open loops.
To notice when unfinished business surfaces.
And to take the opportunity to close it.

Not just for ourselves.
But for others.
And for the ancestors.

This is a core aspect of becoming a Living Ancestor.

To live in such a way that fewer threads remain dangling behind us.

To move toward completion, while we still have breath.