Healing Through Ancestral Wisdom with Ssanyu Birigwa

Welcome back to Empathetic Presence. Today I'm sitting down with my dear friend Ssanyu Birigwa, a Columbia-trained narrative medicine clinician and 80th generation indigenous bone healer whose practice bridges ancestral wisdom with embodied presence.

In this conversation, Ssanyu shares how deep listening creates reciprocity between ourselves and others, why taking off our masks is both necessary and sometimes unsafe, and how connecting with ancestral knowledge can help us slow down in this fast world.

We explore the intersection of narrative medicine and indigenous healing practices, discuss why qualitative research matters as much as quantitative data, and examine how high-achieving individuals can access the tools within themselves to heal and accelerate beyond their wildest dreams.

In This Episode:

• How Narrative Medicine teaches clinicians and leaders to be truly present with others
• The practice of unmasking and why safety must come first
• What it means to be a bone healer and how this lineage guides Ssanyu's work
• Why our evolution doesn't require more input—it requires wisdom about when to engage and when to simply be
• How to leverage resources collectively so more of us can feel safe taking off the mask
• The power of sharing lived stories as an antidote to institutional silencing

Ssanyu was born with healing hands—the proud descendant of Ugandan bone healers dating back more than 80 generations. Growing up between Newton, Massachusetts and East Africa, she witnessed the precision of Western medicine alongside the wisdom of ancestral healing practices that had sustained her lineage for centuries.

After a health crisis left her partially paralyzed and the death of her uncle and surrogate father, she began asking the questions that would shape her life’s work: How do we listen to our bodies to understand the truth of our emotions? How do we heal physical pain by accessing the stories trapped within us? How do we bridge clinical rigor with ancestral knowing?

This inquiry led her to Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine program, where she earned her master’s degree and received the 2016-2017 Narrative Medicine Fellowship. She now serves as Adjunct Professor at Columbia and lectures at Columbia Irving Medical Center on the intersection of spirituality and health.

As Co-founder & CEO of Narrative Bridge, Ssanyu brings narrative medicine training to organizations seeking to integrate deep listening and embodied wisdom into leadership. She created the Pause3™ Method framework rooted in her lineage of bone healing and narrative medicine and leads the Resonance Lab, an annual practicum for leaders integrating these modalities into their own work.

She has lectured and taught at institutions including the Sorbonne, Johns Hopkins, Kripalu, NYU, and led programs for the Soros Foundation in Uganda and Rwanda. She also maintains a private practice for leaders. This work is one of refinement, excavating what lives beneath burnout, disconnection, and inherited patterns to restore embodied presence and ancestral coherence.

Through The Sunday Pause, her weekly newsletter, she shares contemplations on narrative medicine, ancestral healing, and what the bones already know.

In Luganda, her father’s tongue, her name means “happiness, joy”—the energy she brings to this work and to the people she serves.

www.ssanyubirigwa.com

Substack: @ssanyubirigwa & @resonancelab