This is me, about to shimmy through a hole in a rock, on a cold winter day in Cornwall. It was 2019, and I was with a group of friends visiting some of the ancient megaliths and sacred sites of Cornwall, England. I’d spent the greater part of the last decade grieving a lost pregnancy, seeking partnership, delving into women’s mysteries, and doing all I could to become a mother. Why not add shoving oneself through a fertility stone to the list?

In all honesty, I hold tremendous reverence for the Neolithic stones and whoever built them. According to multiple locals in the southwest of England, holed stones were particularly connected to fertility, although this one, Mén-an-tol, was also strongly associated with healing.

Humans have been trying to solve the mystery of fertility since the beginning. Fertility and abundance are two of the most common attributes assigned to magical objects, sites, stones, herbs, times of the year, and symbols. In the case of this megalith, the stones known as mên-an-tol, the person wishing for fertility or healing must pass through the stone to receive the blessing.

I’ve been to many sacred sites in ancestral England, but this just so happened to be the last sacred site I visited before becoming pregnant the following spring. I know my fertility and pregnancy were due to many factors, but I love the idea that my last true act of willful magic and dare I say, superstition, before my pregnancy, was to crawl through an ancient hole that might just help me become a mother.

Recently, I invited a number of people to dream with the ancestral mothers. That is, to invite the spirit of their ancestral mothers to bring them messages through their dreams. These dreams were then shared as a form of collective weaving, bringing together the messages from the mothers.

What the dreams revealed is how vital the simple, old, “slow” ways of doing things are. I was reminded of how simple rituals and rites of passage are often the threads that connect generations and provide a sense of cultural and earthly belonging. Shimmying through an ancient stone is one thing, but what would it have felt like if I’d watched my aunt or sister squeeze her way through the same stone, or knew my mother had done so before I was conceived. Or if I had known that I had been passed through the stone three times at birth, like my older siblings had before me? What would it mean to me, and how important would it feel to do the same if and when I was ready to call in a child?

Traditions can feel limiting, but they can also offer a sense of connection. When that connection feels severed through famine, war, migration, or religious persecution, it can be difficult to re-connect the threads. This is where dreamwork can be so profound. We can have truly informative and instructional dreams through actively inviting positive or healing ancestors into our dreams. I have witnessed generational healing take place through ancestral dreamwork.

Dreams can be a way to reclaim lost rites, not as perfect replications, but as whispers from the past, offering glimpses of what once was. In dreaming with the ancestral mothers, the dreams carried the weight of ancestral memory—echoes of hands grinding grain, of midwives singing into the night, of grandmothers whispering blessings over cradles. These dreams remind us that even when the physical thread of tradition is severed, something deeper endures, waiting to be remembered.

What does it mean to pass through a holed stone, to leave behind the old and step into something new? It is an act of embodiment, a moment of intention made physical. Perhaps, like me, you’ve found yourself drawn to ancient places, feeling the pull of something just beyond language.

It is easy to dismiss these acts as superstition, but the body knows. The body responds to ritual, to movement, to the simple act of marking a moment as sacred. Whether it is a fertility rite, a dream incubation, or a whispered prayer, these small gestures link us to the countless souls who came before. They remind us that we are not the first to long for healing, not the first to stand at the threshold of change and ask for guidance.