Transcript
Greetings, friends. Thank you so much for tuning into my podcast. It’s been a few months since I’ve shared anything with you, and I’ve been wanting to talk about ancestral healing for a while here now. I’m inside my Silver Streak vintage trailer, which is where I work, and if you hear any banging noises, it’s because there’s a Blue Jay that is stomping around on the roof and making some noise. So please disregard that. So there’s a lot to cover here and I’m really thrilled to be able to share some of my journey of what I’ve learned about ancestral healing.
And as usual, you know, my offering to you is that I try to provide an extremely holistic and comprehensive view of chronic migraine and illness. And of course, I do that by way of healing myself and healing my life. And so I’m sharing, you know, my own firsthand experience in all these areas that I’ve investigated and looked. And I know that for some people, this idea of ancestral healing may seem a bit far afield and a bit abstract as compared to the very nitty gritty, more concrete biochemistry of mineral balancing. And it is, you know, it is.
But I think that it’s also, you know, the way I see it is ancestral healing and essentially any work that we do to come into greater alignment with our core essence is an act of nutrition and essentially healing is about nutrition. It’s about reconnecting to resources and our ancestors can be great resources for us, yet at the same time it’s also true that a lot of the dysfunction and imbalances that occur and exist in our life are patterns that we have inherited. And so it’s very valuable, I believe, when you are ready, when you are interested and called to do ancestral healing work, because we simultaneously get nourishment from the recognition who we are, where we came from, and the recognition of how resilient our family line is, getting to know some of our ancestors better, getting a better sense of our family, because of course our family is our inheritance. Our family, whether that’s through the genes that have been passed down to us or the belief systems or cultural practices that we have inherited, this is our lifeline. And not only do we inherit healthy and unhealthy patterns, but we are also ancestors.
We are also to the extent that we have children passing on our family legacy. And so I think that that’s an interesting way to frame it. And to ask ourselves, what will our great grandchildren, what will be the stories that they will tell about us? What is our legacy? What will they remember about us? And so for many of us who have faced chronic illness, you know, the hope is that part of the story is that you and I got very sick and we’re able to heal ourselves. And that by healing ourselves and all of the rich growth and learning that occurs when we heal ourselves, we are also healing our family line and we are preventing pathologies from being passed on. We are, for example, learning to embody self -care, better self -care. And as we learn this, as we heal our own illnesses, we are also simultaneously teaching this to our children. I’m sure that my children would have nowhere near the understanding of nutrition that they do. If I had not gotten really, really sick, my children can sit down at the table and they look at the food and they know what kind of minerals is in the food.
They know how to navigate the grocery aisles and choose products that won’t poison them. And these are skill sets that they’ve learned by way of living with me because I had to develop them in the process of being sick. well. And they have also witnessed me getting better over the years. So it’s very interesting to kind of just see what kind of themes we choose to explore as a soul, and to understand that a lot of the things that we experience, including chronic illness, that we initially maybe think is just something that we’re uniquely dealing with as an individual, maybe part of an echo or a pattern in a family line that may not be easily recognizable initially because it’s taking a slightly different form, but as we get to know our ancestors more and learn more about their stories and also just undertake the practice of remembering them and what we know about them, we come to see that some of the imbalances that we experience in our psyche, in our body, in our physical challenges, are very much a direct result of imbalances that have occurred in our family line.
So I hope you can see why this is relevant. I hope this is an interesting topic to you. And I just find it so fascinating. So I will start by saying that I’ve been to a number of ceremonies, you know, previous to getting into ancestral healing. You know, I went to some Day of the Dead celebrations where we were asked to bring photos of our ancestors that we put onto an altar. And I do not come from a family of people who really honor and celebrate their ancestors or make offerings to them on an altar.
So, I do have a grandfather, he’s actually the grandparent that I’m the closest to, who did quite a bit of ancestral research, and so I was able to kind of piggyback on a lot of the foundational work that he did into looking into our family ancestry. But overall in my family, there are no traditions around honoring the ancestors. And that may seem normal. Many Americans and Europeans do not have much in the way of those kinds of family traditions. However, I will mention that this is an anomaly, that actually in many, many cultures, they celebrate their ancestors.
There’s actually even a culture I’m trying to remember, I think it’s in Southeast Asia somewhere, it’s an island culture, where they actually keep their they’re dead for a certain number of years. They dress them every day, they brush their hair, they have them preserved somehow. I’m not sure exactly what they use to preserve it, but there are cultures all over the world that have traditions of paying reverence for the dead in various ways and various forms. That’s obviously a more extreme form. But many cultures in Africa, that’s the core part of their religious practices, or they’re not even religious, I guess you could say spiritual practices, is honoring the dead and honoring the ancestors that we came from. So I just want to point out that it is actually quite strange not to have any practice around that. So how did I get into this? Well, I will definitely say that the divorce that I’ve been through is what really catapulted me into doing ancestral research. Part of this was a distraction from some of the more difficult aspects of the divorce where I was sort of procrastinating on some of the bureaucratic paperwork required for the divorce and doing that by doing some online research on Ancestry .com and FamilySearch .com and I started to get kind of addicted to ancestral research. This became what I believe is a fairly healthy coping mechanism in the stress of the divorce where I just started to realize that My ancestors have been through so much, and the more I learned about them, the more I understood what a resilient line of people I come from. And it started to really bolster me, not only to know more about the stories of where my family came from, from, different branches, one branch specifically on my maternal line, my mother’s father’s line, I’ve gotten to know quite well. And so I’ll go a little bit more into that. But essentially, I know about that line, because of the amount of research that this particular grandfather of mine did into his own line. But this grandfather of mine, Whitson Billy Cox, he was born in Nebraska. He was an amazing artist and world traveler. And one one thing that he did is he made a triptych. So, you know, a trifold piece of artwork essentially that is, that opens up and for each of his grandchildren, of which he only has three, he basically created a display with a photo of each of his grandchildren in the center and then photos as well as, you know, the dates of birth of of the ancestral line on both sides.
Of course, he knew more about his family side than the ancestry of the men that his daughters married, but he did take the time to research and try to fill in the gaps and find out about the ancestry of the men that his daughters married. And so each of his grandchildren has one of these triptychs, and it’s a very beloved object of mine, one that I hope to pass down to my kids. And the really fun thing about it is that because there are more gaps on my dad’s side, because my grandpa was only able to do so much research before he passed, and much of that was pre -internet, that he was able to get this information. It’s been really fun because as I’ve done more research, and I actually have traced one line on my dad’s side back to 150 AD and I have also found photos of some people that I’ve been able to cut out and paste into this triptych and it’s a very rewarding feeling to have an empty space with just a name and then to fill that in with a photo or fill it in with a print of an oil painting, for example. I have found incredible portraits of some of the ancestors who were royalty and therefore had the means to have their portraits done. John the Conqueror, and Cecily Neville, and King Edward I, II, and III, and some Spanish counts and then all the way up into some Norwegian ancestors. So it’s quite incredible for those of us who find this stuff fun to see your ancestors peeking back at you through the centuries. It’s also incredibly fun, I believe, to see the names of your ancestors and to see how your story of who you are and where you came from changes as you find out more. So I had no idea that I was part Norwegian or much less Azerbaijani, but I did trace this one line through my dad’s side all the way back to 150 A .D. in Azerbaijan. So Right now what I want to do just kind of as a testament to just these incredible people that I descended from, read out some of their names because they’re quite entertaining and it’s fun to imagine the characteristics and traits of some of these people with these outrageous names. And
I think that is a fun practice as a way to get in touch with your ancestors to simply read some of their names out. So I’m going to pause this for a second and pull up my list of some of these outrageous ancestors’ names and read them out. Okay, so here are some of the crazy names of ancestors I found. This is through my great -great -grandmother, Ainsley Rebecca Holt, on my father’s side. And this is going to be back starting from around the 900s, even further back to the 400s. We have, she is related to Malaholke Eichsteinsen, Earl of Moore from Norway. He was married into the French line to Maud de Boulogne de Saint Paul, born in 855. Malaholk was the son of King Æsten Glamre Iversen -Jarl of Oppland og Hedmark, who was married to Askrida Aseda Roggenvald’s daughter, Countess of Oppland Roggenvald’s daughter, born in 812. Moving further back the Norwegian line, we go to Halft and Gemi, the aged Sveide son, who was married to Hylf or Lif, Dogg’s daughter, daughter of King Dogg of Vestmargau König von Vestmar in 735. And so on. I won’t bore you with more of this, but just to say these are the people I descended from and I had no idea I had Norwegian or Danish blood and this is what’s so cool about ancestral healing and research is when we do the research we start to not only see our family lines branching back obviously in many infinite directions and for my family that means you know into colonial New England and an understanding of how my ancestors branched off here, you know, on this continent, but also previous to that.
And it’s just, I don’t know, something I personally love. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. My father personally does not really find any of this stuff very interesting. But how does this relate to chronic migraine? Well, I want to give a few examples, first of all, of this idea of trauma being inherited and passed down in a pattern. And so this would apply even though these instances don’t pertain, aren’t directly related to chronic migraine. They are a good example. of how something that was unresolved emotionally in a previous ancestor can be passed down unconsciously and I believe will be passed down. And so I do believe that in the same way the body, our body is our unconscious, in that same way that our body has to hold the tension and stress of anything we’re not consciously able to metabolize and integrate, we also hold and carry carried emotions, emotions that we are carrying on behalf of other ancestors that actually aren’t even ours. They’re ours to the extent that we are carrying them, they’re ours to the extent that we will continue to carry them to the extent that they’re unconscious, but they are also ours to understand and perhaps to actually put down and put away and recognize where they came from.
And when we recognize where they came from, we can be code breakers. So we can actually break a code through the act of becoming conscious and emotionally integrating something that a previous ancestor couldn’t, can break the code of a trauma response and inheritance. And so I just want to put it out there that while there are many biochemical reasons why people are getting poisoned, in our culture, and we can look at chronic migraine just mechanistically in that way. I personally do believe that the reason why some of us get certain illnesses over others has to do with the way that we are carrying unintegrated trauma from our ancestors.
So let me give you a few examples. These are from, his name is Mark Wollen, W -O -L -L -Y -N -N, and he gives some very fascinating examples of chronic conditions that people had that were not originating in their immediate families, origin but rather had been passed down from grandparents or great -grandparents. So one example that he gave was a woman who got pregnant and all of a sudden had extreme paranoia that she was going to harm her child and they did, you know. deep interview of her trying to understand why she would feel this way, whether she had ever hurt a child before or where this fear was coming from. They couldn’t figure it out. They couldn’t understand it until she was asked, was there anyone in your grandparents line who harmed a child? And then the light bulb went off and she recalled this family story, which incidentally was unconscious until that point. that her grandmother had accidentally lit some curtains on fire which had caught the house on fire and the grandmother’s other child had ended up dying in this fire and so there was a fear that I could harm my baby that was residual and left over from this trauma that her grandmother had experienced. In other words, she was carrying her grandmother’s emotions that had never been resolved from this incident. And so the experience of pregnancy was acutely stressful for her because of this event that had occurred in her family line. Another example that he gave was, he used to work as a psychologist with people who did self -harm and there was one girl who did very extreme self -harm, she was a cutter, but she would not just cut little small cuts but actually cut into her arm or even into her abdomen or her legs to the point where she started to bleed profusely and they couldn’t understand where this could be coming from in her background and childhood when they investigated her relationship with her parents, she had a secure attachment with both of her parents, both of whom were extremely loving people.
And then they started to ask her about anyone else in her family who had been cut, or where if this could have come from. grandparents and then it dawned on her that her grandmother was an alcoholic and her grandmother was driving drunk and basically drove into a pole and her grandfather flew out the window and became lacerated within in the windshield and bled to death before an ambulance could come. And so this is another situation where the granddaughter is carrying the unintegrated and unresolved guilt, shame, and emotion of the grandmother. And it’s interesting, I wonder kind of to what extent, especially since the mitochondria is passed down through the mother, to what extent unintegrated, unresolved emotions in the family line may be more prevalently passed down through the maternal line, through maternal experiences. And especially, you know, living in a patriarchal culture where I don’t think that women or mothers are particularly valued or recognized, I think that it very well could be that a lot of illness is being passed down through the mother line.
But of course, there’s a lot of trauma in men as well, especially, I believe, in my own case of looking into my family, just understanding the impact of the world wars on my family system and specifically especially the tendency of men in my family line to self -medicate with alcohol and mind -altering substances as I believe much of that is a side effect not only of patriarchy which requires that men not show feelings and vulnerability but especially prevalent among men who have been in war and have post -traumatic stress disorder. So Then you think about the implications of men going to war and having people die.
And how that would affect the whole family unit in terms of if those men were dissociated or emotionally dysregulated, how that would affect their wife and therefore how well that wife was resourced or not in the relationship and therefore how that impacted the children. So I think most of us have some ancestors with PTSD. Most of us have situations where there were death of children or exiled, disowned people in our family who did things that were considered unconscionable and therefore have been exiled from the family consciousness. Most of us have ancestors who had addiction or where there were divorces. So we, you know, all families go through this kind of universal human experience that includes some very predictable patterns of trauma and also a lot of resiliency, love, creativity, which is also important to think about, right? So I think it’s important, similar to how we look at the minerals as there are these toxins that are metabolic roadblocks. We could see ancestral trauma as being like a toxin. And then there are also these nutrients and minerals that when we’re deficient and we get out of a deficiency state and we get nourished with these minerals, we gain resiliency.
And I believe the same is true with ancestral healing. When we start to connect to and understand how incredibly amazing and resilient and interesting and wonderful many of our ancestors were and gain a greater appreciation for that through getting to know them, knowing them, this acts as a form of nourishment and nutrition. So I would love to do more of this work with clients, but usually the amount of time I have with coaching clients, we don’t really end up getting into this, especially since I’m fairly new to it myself. We haven’t really, but I did have one client where she was pregnant, so she couldn’t take a lot of supplements, and she had the time and interest to work on this level. And one thing that we did uncover, and this was all part of the work with neurolinguistic programming, but one thing we did uncover is this question of, what are the migraines providing you?
It seems a little bit obnoxious, but I do believe in this premise that everything that we’re experiencing is offering us something, and it’s sticking in our life because there’s something that it’s giving us, and sometimes that is unconscious. It doesn’t mean that it has an inherent meaning, but it’s the meaning that we make out of it. So, for example, unconsciously, me having chronic migraine was a permission slip for me to do a lot of self -experimentation and research that I otherwise don’t think I would have done. And likewise, in the case of this client that I was working with, we were able to uncover through this process of inquiry of what is it that the migraine could be providing you, we were able to uncover what appears to be an inheritance from her grandmother of an inherited belief which if it’s an inheritance, it is a pattern, it’s an ancestral pattern, an inherited belief that no matter how much pain she was in, she could prove that she could function and that she would get some admiration and recognition from people who would say, wow, you know, you have this chronic pain condition and yet you’re still, you know, supporting your family with a corporate job, right?
So that the being in pain and bearing through it and still being functional Despite it is like a badge of honor in her family right specifically that came through her grandmother because her grandmother had a pain condition and there was a similar belief system and value that she was still able to function as a of pride and a big part of her identity that had gotten wrapped up in that. So, I thought that was really fascinating, and this client was very receptive to looking at that, but understand that it’s something that was inherited. So, when we’re doing ancestral work, we are getting to know what these inherited patterns are, we are making meaning out of our family’s stories, and we are examining the belief systems that are driving much of our symptoms.
So I know for me personally, I’m doing ancestral research. I don’t get migraines anymore, but I do I have a lot of issues in my life since the divorce that have really made me look at this ancestral pattern of, for example, women staying in relationships with people who mistreat them and being kind of endlessly obsessed about another person’s potential despite being poorly treated and being so committed to marriage for the sake of the children that you put up with stuff and continue in a relationship that is ultimately not supportive to you or healthy. So I believe that I have certain belief systems that came from my family, although, you know, on an outward facing level, I’m very proud that I come from two people who are still married and have a healthy relationship.
And I initially thought that was the reason why I stayed in my marriage as long as I did, because I simply didn’t have any frame of reference for divorce. But I know now, in looking at my great grandmother, Esther, a lot more, I have a better understanding, I think, of how and why I was willing to essentially not only self -sacrifice and self -abandon, but be in denial about certain aspects of my ex -husband’s personality because other things were just more important to me. such as preserving a marriage for children. And I think some of that may have come from her, from Esther. And this great -grandmother of mine, Esther, she also had a very hard life in rural Nebraska. They were farmers. Her family was very poor. And her father died when she was six years old. So she had a history of not abandonment so much as loss of a father figure, of a male figure in her life, and then was raised by a single mother who was struggling very much and who was very resourceful.
She started her own restaurant. She eventually remarried another widow and they were farmers. So they moved from Nebraska then down to Texas and they were actually living in a tent. They were wall of their house was being built and they were farming peanuts and watermelons. And then her mother and that man broke up, the mother broke up with him. And I actually have letters that my mother has transcribed from my great -grandmother Flora, Esther’s mother. And Flora died quite young. She had a distended abdomen, she had migraines, and she had cancer. And so there is certainly a pattern there of uh, loss of a father figure that then resulted later in Esther’s life in, in further abandonment by the man that she had married, who she eventually took back.
Um, but basically, yeah, Esther had a very early imprint of loss, uh, loss of masculine presence and watching her single mother struggle. And then, and then Esther herself struggled for, for eight years, uh, before my great grandpa. came back to her and she took him back, but essentially a lot of instances of single mothers who were very, very strong, very resourceful, but lived in a lot of poverty. And in Flora’s case, she died quite young with migraines and cancer and digestive problems. So You know, I mean, of course, everyone dies of something, and all of our ancestors have had various health issues and ailments, but it may be worthwhile for you to think about and ask yourself, do you have any ancestors who have a history of headaches or migraines? And if you do, look into that line. This other client of mine who had the grandmother who bore the pain of her pain condition and was still functional in it.
I don’t think that grandmother had migraines per se, but the belief system that was passed down was one around being functional in the midst of chronic pain, even if it wasn’t migraine. And this same client’s father, I believe it was her father, had tension headaches. So a history and a past It’s In addition to that, this client also had a very traumatic birth in which her she was a vacuum was used for vacuum extraction for her birth, which could have affect her cranium and created a sense of pressure on her head. And then she also had incidences of a concussion or being hit in the head and still had the problem. She said her husband would mention that she very frequently bonked and bumped her head even to this day. So there’s these patterns and these patterns don’t only come from toxins and pollutants in the environment. So sometimes we need to go all the way back to understand what this pattern is so that we can understand how to break that pattern. And it’s not obviously always clear how to do that when some of these are so deeply embedded literally, you know, from a stage of development and time that’s pre -verbal.
But as I’m pointing out, when it comes to ancestral healing, you know, some of these patterns predate even our own conception. They are just existing as tension patterns in a family line. But I do believe that energetically, and I do believe that our ancestors exist as spirits, and many cultures do, that we can actually get help in this healing from our ancestors. And I’m not sure if this fits with your spiritual worldview, but I have actually firsthand experienced through my own process of meditation and having an ancestor altar, having photos of my ancestors on my altar, and coming into relationship with them, I have actually felt their presence and felt their blessings at various times. And just like any other relationship, it doesn’t seem real and it isn’t thriving and alive and real when you’re not feeding it, right? So ancestors, I believe their spirits very much like to be fed. And this is, you know, traditional in many cultures that have an ancestor altar where they actually make offerings to their ancestors. They will put food out for them, they will light incense and I definitely get the sense that that is like a portal to the spiritual realm where we acknowledge them not just in our mind but we acknowledge them by making very concrete offerings because they are not embodied in this realm anymore and those more concrete scents and foods act as like anchor points that help them to come into more concrete relationship in this realm as we meditate and work with them at our altar.
So I just want to describe a little bit of kind of like my own organic process of making my way through doing this ancestral work as an actual spiritual practice. And currently right now, because I’ve been in some transition in my living situation, the triptych of my ancestor’s altar has been folded up and so I am not deeply steeped in it. But at the point when I was the most and have been the most steeped in it, I have had photos of my ancestors on my altar and I just kind of started out my ancestral healing practice by gazing into their eyes and I think there’s something quite profound about really just looking through the centuries and looking at the expressions in their faces and seeing their spirit and their signature, their energetic signature, as we behold their countenance. And I think it’s a really beautiful practice. And of course, at the same time that I’m doing this, you know, I was collecting more information about my family and learning more about them. But I think making overt prayers to ancestors, thanking the ancestors is an excellent practice to add in to whatever you’re regular spiritual practice is.
So for me, I just bundled that together with the rest of my meditation practice and it lends so much richness and aliveness. So in addition to doing that and doing ancestral research, finding more about the story of where your ancestors came from, and there’s a lot of them, so it’s kind of like, you know, a huge project. You will never run out of content. Because I really do have noticed that when you start noticing the ancestors, they will start noticing you. When you start feeding and paying attention to this information, all kinds of new information will come out of the woodwork, and some of it is a bit unsavory.
So, like my mother, when she knew I was doing ancestral research, she found a whole bunch of letters from my great -grandmother and my great -great -grandmother. and my great great grandfather and so she typed them up and we have a whole folder and archive that we’re adding to and you know it would be like I would learn a certain amount and then she would just email me and be like oh I found a huge box of letters you know so to me it felt kind of like the ancestors were like oh wow someone’s actually paying attention to us let’s give her more information right and So that’s just kind of a remarkable feeling. I’ve also had other very interesting kind of eerie experiences, especially I think this has to do with Esther where I have had a feeling of because I was doing so much research into the late 1900s and turn of the century when she was born, where I noticed my aesthetic style started to change more towards someone who was alive at that time, where the clothing that I was drawn to and even the type of furniture that I was drawn to buying was an aesthetic that is actually not really usually what my aesthetic is like.
And I just kind of also had a palpable felt sense of this one ancestor Esther or it could have been another one but it was definitely one from Nebraska from that time period because I have a feeling of her and she I actually even had a very strange experience of feeling like I was in a different time Um, so this was at the time when I was doing a lot of this work and I took a walk down to the river near my house. And I live in a place that is like an agricultural area that has been for quite a long time. So certainly at the turn of the last century, there were a lot of orchards and a lot of farmhouses, a lot of big barns. And, you know, I live in a rural area, so I was walking down this dirt road and it was a hot sunny day and I had taken a cold dip in the river. And so my, um, my clothing was wet and I was looking down the road and there was of course not a car in sight but it was just a vast hill of grass and a barn and the sounds of a river and blackberries and I was noticing that time kind of like slowed down and I actually felt that I was like in a different time.
It was weird and I almost felt like I wasn’t really even myself. I felt almost like I was in a different time and I was a different person in a more rural, agricultural setting in America. It was kind of just like, I don’t want to call it deja vu, but almost like a flashback or it’s very hard to put into words and describe. Anyway, you know, these are some of the types of things that can start to happen when you do this kind of ancestral work. So let’s see what else I could ramble about this for a while. Yeah, I already mentioned, I think that I think that the process of like, Finding old photos of your ancestors is incredible. If you’re looking and hunting and searching different family lines and you come across some old photos, it’s quite a striking experience. And I would say for me a very addictive experience to find a photo of an ancestor that you’ve never seen. And some of these photos that I found of ancestors were are quite old from the time period you know when photography was first developed and these people were quite old at the time that the photos were taken so many of them were you know born in the late 1700s and I was able to find wills.
I actually found the will of one of my ancestors that was in colonial New England and his will where he passed down so much flax and so many sheep to his wife and so many pounds of money to his sons and his wife. You know, that was interesting to see because, you know, it wasn’t even American dollars at this point. This was in colonial New England. Many of the people at those times were farmers and millers and housewives. If you look at the census reports, it’s basically you’ll just see for the men, it’s a farmer and for the women, it’s housewife.
There were very few other occupations, although some of my ancestors were millers. But it’s just it’s just an interesting glimpse, you know, to see who fought in which wars. who was drafted into which wars. So there are a lot of those kinds of records available. You can find photos of, you know, tombstones of your ancestors or even houses that they used to live in. And so part of this for me is that I now feel more connected to different parts of the United States, that if I go visit there, you know, where my ancestors were, I will know where to go, know where they lived. And it’s also interesting that I ended up here in the Columbia River Gorge, which is a place where my grandmother lived. She was from a railroad family and she would live in the little apartments above the railroad station. And she used to pick cherries in a town nearby here where I live. And so I think it’s also interesting that sometimes we move someplace without realizing or understanding that our ancestors were there before. When I first moved here, I did not know that about her. I did not know that my ancestors’ footprints have been through this area before.
And similarly to when I lived in Vermont, I did not know that my family had any connection in Vermont. I knew I had some French -Canadian ancestors from Quebec, but I did not know until doing this research that some of my French -Canadian ancestors were also born in Vermont. So I do think that there are these energetic patterns and lines of the paths that our ancestors have tread that sometimes, even though it’s unconscious, we are also drawn to and follow similar paths that they have tread and find ourselves. in similar places that they lived before.
So I’ll just end by sharing a little bit about family constellation therapy, which is a type of therapy that is quite phenomenal where the therapist actually ends up channeling the therapist or anyone else in the room. This can be done in large groups where other participants basically act in and channel other family members. There is a show called Another Self. It’s a Turkish show. that’s all about this. And it’s been pretty mind -blowing for me. I’m working with a woman named Rita Gendelman, G -E -N -D -E -L -M -A -N, Rita Gendelman, and she’s worked with autistic children a lot, but she has been helping my family through this divorce process to understand more about our family constellation.
So one thing about family constellation therapy is that the flow of energy in a family cannot flow coherently when there are exiled family members. And so what I noticed, what I found out and uncovered, is that my great -grandfather, my maternal grandpa’s father, It’s so interesting because basically in family constellation therapy we map out where the individual people are in our awareness and he was off the map. My grandpa Tom was off the map as well. And I have a very hard time remembering this great -grandfather’s name, which is a sure sign that he’s been exiled. And I didn’t know why he was exiled, but now I do because of some letters that were found. And, you know, I don’t want to spread the dirty laundry of the family.
But I just want to warn you that there is, when you do this research, there can be some very unsavory details that you might uncover about your ancestors. and I think that it can still be useful to know about them because again, when someone is exiled or when there are taboo things that have occurred or traumas that are not talked about and were shoved away, this affects the overall energetic flow of energy in the family system and when we can acknowledge these things that happened and emotionally integrate them, the flow of the energy in the family flows better. And it also means that our children don’t have to carry those unresolved feelings or unintegrated feelings.
So while on the one hand, some people are carrying you know emotions that weren’t integrated, on the other hand I think there are some some things that occurred that are so far exiled that obviously all of them won’t be retrieved but the point being that greater consciousness and awareness of the imprints and situations that our ancestors have been through helps that energy to just flow. There’s something about bringing consciousness and non -judgmental awareness to things that were previously shoved away and resisted that allows that energy to be freed up. Now of course we can just have that idea of just greater awareness. We can consciously choose to think of ourselves as code breakers. But I also do believe that emotional integration, learning how to emotionally integrate is an excellent tool because it’s just clearing congested energies. And when we combine family constellation therapy and ancestral work with something like the presence process, which I’ve mentioned before, which is my own particular meditation process, we start to be much less emotionally constipated.
And of course, this then results in a clearer flow of energy through our body, which means our physiology works better, our digestion works better. we’re also more centered and grounded in who we really are in other words our core essence because we are no longer necessarily carrying unconscious patterns that we were holding on behalf of other people by recognizing them they’re able to be freed up so that we don’t have to carry them and so a lot of what ancestral work is is recognizing what is mine and what is not mine and to the extent that we’re unconscious of a lot of these patterns we are carrying things that we don’t have to and so part of being a code breaker is giving some of that energy back. So if your grandmother believed that part of her ability to be an accomplished person in the world is to be admired by others because she can still function well even in the midst of pain, it might be time for you to give that belief system back to her and recognize it’s much easier to do so when you recognize that it came from somewhere else, that it didn’t originate with you.
And so of course there are many dysfunctions in our family that we could be code breakers for and you know there are infinite ones. One of them that I am trying to break the code of is being a beggar. This is something that I was completely unconscious of, but which seems to be extremely true now that I’m aware of it. I see it everywhere. And Rita, Rita Gendelman helped me understand this in the family constellation therapy that there’s a history in my family of women being beggars. And this is not just on the literal level of being like materially impoverished, but more on an emotional level when it comes to their interactions with men.
And the power differential between men and women, especially when women have children with men, how remote and cold that men can be in relationships, how hard they can be to access and to get through to, and this tendency of myself and other women in my family to have kind of a needy, begging quality when it comes to wanting and needing attention from a male figure. So that’s one I’m looking at very much. and also being in a politically disadvantageous position as a mother where a man may have more power and where you have to beg for certain privileges to be granted or resources to be granted, for example.
Yeah, or even simply warmth, and affection to be granted. All right, so I think I went through a lot of that. I know I didn’t talk about migraine all that much, but if you want to do this work, you know, it’s an organic process. As with everything spiritual, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. I don’t actually really have that many resources to pass on other than Rita Gendelman’s work. I also recommend looking into Mark Wolin’s work, W -O -L -Y -N -N. There’s some YouTube videos of his. Another interesting resource is Rupert Sheldrake.
He’s the one who developed the concept of morphogenetic fields, this understanding that many of the phenomena that we consider static in the universe are actually just habits of behavior. behavior. And this holds true for many laws of science that we hold to be static, which he’s proven or not. But check out his work, Rupert Sheldrake’s work. He has some very interesting things to say about ancestral energies and the habits of ancestors, the habit patterns of behaviors and the habits of beliefs that family systems can have. And then just do research into your family. Find out where you came from.
If you already know some of that, find out more. Print out more photos of your ancestors. Frame them. Thank your ancestors. Put a vase of flowers out for them. Light incense for them. Make offerings for them. I think that they notice this and they appreciate it. And of course, have fun with all of that. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
