Contemplations on Spirit
'In this blog I contemplate the means to understand one self and the motivation that moves us to unfold in heart and soul.'
What Flows From Us: Pitru Paksha and the Face I Didn't Know I Carried
Somewhere in the years since I began tracing my family tree, I found out that its roots do not stop in Europe. They travel on, generation after generation of crossing and mixing, into Java, into Bengal, into the Philippines, into Oceania. It startled me. I know it doesn’t really show but; the far east has always been part of me, quietly, structurally, long before I ever went looking for it.
Today happens to be the 3rd day of Pitru Paksha - the sixteen-day rite of ancestor veneration observed in parts of the Hindu world, among others in Bangladesh and West Bengal, where it centers specifically on the paternal line. It is not, in that tradition, a vague gesture toward “the ancestors” in general. It is precise: your father's fathers, and their fathers, the particular thread that runs down into the particular body you happen to be standing in. Looking at my grandfathers photograph on exactly this day feels less like coincidence and more like the kind of alignment I have spent my working life learning to notice.
We are woven from inheritance and from will - and both are true at once.
I say something like this to my students, often, in asana class: our being is made of two things at once - the heritage we did not choose, and the free will that is nonetheless entirely ours. Neither cancels the other. The pose your hips will or won't allow, the grief that surfaces on a particular exhale, the intuition you can't quite explain - much of it was handed down before you had any say in the matter. And yet the choosing, moment to moment, of what to do with what you were given - that part is yours alone.
Which raises the only question that actually matters, on a day like today: what is it, exactly, that flows so abundantly out of us, generation after generation? Is it nectar - something to be received, tended, passed on with gratitude? Or is it simply old, worn thin by repetition, something we keep circulating only because no one has yet had the courage to stop?
Pitru Paksha does not ask us to worship the past uncritically. It asks us to feed it, yes - but also to look at it clearly enough to know what deserves feeding. That is tapasya, in the end: not punishment, but discernment lit by fire. You sit with what has been given to you, and you let the inner flame decide - this, I keep; this, I offer up and release.
The tradition itself offers something almost startlingly physical to do with all of this. In Bengali households this week, people rise before dawn, face south - Yama's direction - and pour water mixed with black sesame seeds over the thumb-side of the left hand, the pitru tirtha, naming their ancestors as it falls. A small plate of rice and ghee is set out on the balcony or rooftop for the crows, who are said to carry the ancestors' visits in disguise; if a crow eats from it, that is taken as a blessing received. A lamp is lit and left burning. None of it asks you to believe anything in particular. It only asks you to do something with your hands, out loud, facing the actual direction of south, instead of merely thinking about where you come from.
So today I am sitting with Java, and Bengal, and the Philippines, and Oceania, all quietly present in one face that looks nothing like what people expect when they meet me. I am asking what in me is nectar, and what is ready for the fire. I don't have the answer yet. I'm not sure Pitru Paksha is meant to give one - only to make the asking unavoidable.
Happy Descending, thanks for reading
xx 092826 Melanie
Sources
• Pitru Paksha – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitru_Paksha
• West Bengal: People take holy dip in the Hooghly River, perform 'pind dan' on last day of 'Pitru Paksha' – Organiser – https://organiser.org/2022/09/25/94918/bharat/west-bengal-people-take-holy-dip-in-the-hooghly-river-perform-pind-dan-on-last-day-of-pitru-paksha/
• Tarpana (procedure, materials and the pitru tirtha hand position) – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpana
• Mahalaya 2026 – Pitru Tarpan, Bengali Traditions & Devi Paksha Guide – AstrologIQ – https://astrologiq.ai/pujas/mahalaya-2026
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