When most people hear about the concept of ancestral trauma or ancestral healing, they feel overwhelmed and confused. The concept feels abstract and esoteric.
After all, how is someone supposed to heal something that happened way before they were ever born and to people that they have never met and may not even know about? Here, I’m going to explain ancestral trauma and ancestral healing in depth, help you to understand why it’s so important, and give you an overview on how to do it. Most people are so focused on their own lives in the here and now, and on their own specific moment in the overall timeline of humanity that they’ve lost touch with the bigger picture of their ancestry. Ancestry plays more of a role in your life than most people can possibly imagine, and a much, much bigger role than past lives do. Before coming into this physical life, your awareness was not as limited as it is now in your physical form, in your physical incarnation. You can’t see what you can see from that perspective, in that dimensional reality. So you were observing and aware of all the ancestral lines that you would potentially be assuming as a result of coming to the specific parents that you were considering incarnating through. From that vantage point, you observed the consciousness of your family on both your father and your mother’s side, as well as the expansion path of those specific family lines you were looking to choose into family lines that would be a match to your own intention for this life, and at the same time, for family lines whose own expansion path would be benefited by you incarnating into them with your intention. Each new generation that is born is the expansion path for the family line that stretches back throughout the course of history. Whether you are conscious of it or not, you are continuing the existence and the story of all of those who came before you. The thing is, purpose is born from a mixed bag. You weren’t only looking for what you might judge as good things, you were also looking for what you might judge as negative things, as those things would not only serve your life purpose, they represent the opportunity for progression and expansion for a family line. Every single family line comes with positive and negative themes, strengths and weaknesses, aptitudes and shortcomings, pleasures and pains. And these themes, they continue from generation to generation to generation. For example, a family line might have a pattern of entrepreneurship running through that family line. Or a family line might have a pattern of escapism from responsibility running through it. To make it really simple. To opt into your specific family line can be compared to opting into a specific hand of cards made up of both good and not so good cards. And the purpose for your incarnation in this life is deeply and inescapably woven into how you play those family cards. As people. I’ll be honest, we have a very hard time accepting that our ancestors play a big role regarding who we are in this life. To many of us, thinking that our ancestry has so much influence on us causes us to feel powerless, as if our fate has been decided for us based on whatever family we ended up in. While this perspective is understandable, it doesn’t actually reflect the truth. When you get a hand of cards, it is in your hands how to play those cards. And it just so happens that you came into this life wanting that specific hand. You knew it would benefit you and that it would benefit that family line. Genetics are not simply physical. They are not one dimensional. They are multidimensional. They don’t just apply to your physical body and to whether you have blue eyes or brown eyes. Genes are a multidimensional blueprint or code. Even for things like knowledge, desire, needs, affinities, preferences, versions, phobias, aptitudes in aptitudes, beliefs, feeling states, and memories. What we experience in our lifetime is encoded in our genes, and when a new generation is born, those things are passed down to them. What that means is that deep within you, you contain all of this from every direct ancestor that you’ve ever had. It’s enough to make your head spin. Honestly, based on what has happened before us, some of these things are active and some of these things are inactive within us. This means that we can look at two different levels of ancestral impact, the first being the much larger and more multidimensional, even esoteric understanding that our ancestors are essentially downloaded deep within us. This is the level at which our experience of our ancestors is not direct, it is inborn. For example, individuals within our family line might have been nomadic. That knowledge may be totally lost to us and still within ourselves, we could exhibit an undeniably strong inclination towards stepping out of our comfort zone to keep living in new places. We can call this indirect ancestral impact now, the second being that things are quite literally passed down from one generation to the next, and thus we have a direct experience of our ancestors through our interaction with our own parents and grandparents if we knew them. For example, if one of our ancestors abandoned their family, the normalization of abandonment of children might have created a pattern whereby each generation within a family line, a parent abandons their kids. In alignment with this pattern, your parent may have abandoned you and your siblings. You directly experienced your ancestors and also ancestral trauma by virtue of your own parent abandoning you. We can call this direct ancestral impact. Trauma is something that does not die with the individual that experiences it. Ancestral trauma is a reality. And after the personal trauma that we go through in our personal life experience, it is in fact the thing that impacts us the very most in our incarnated lives. You don’t have to understand esoteric or multidimensional concepts to understand ancestral trauma and how it impacts descendants. Scientists have long been captivated by the startling realities of how memory is passed down from one generation to the next. There have been oh so many studies done on both animals and humans that prove the inheritance of trauma and also of memory across generations. Keep in mind that this indirect ancestral impact, as well as the more direct experience of ancestral impact, can manifest in both positive and negative ways. And what is important to accept is that living within you is the gift of all of those positive things that are running through your family lines. And also living within you is the challenge of all of those negative things that are running through your family lines. The task that we have taken on by being born is the task of resolving that inherited trauma. Indeed, so many of the traumas that we experience in our own lifetime are a direct byproduct of ancestral trauma. The question when it comes to ancestral healing is, can you consciously take advantage of those gifts, and can you consciously master those challenges? Clearing ancestral trauma is about resolution. Trauma resolution is about healing. And healing is about changing something into its improved state. For example, if a person has experienced a lack of belonging, to heal would be to experience a true sense of belonging. Or if a family line experiences and exhibits consistent betrayal, to heal would be for that family line to develop the quality of loyalty and to experience loyalty at its essence, clearing ancestral trauma is about changing patterns that have been running rampant through your family lines for the better. Right now, humanity is at a crossroads. So many of the detrimental patterns that we are seeing on a mass scale within humanity, patterns that are threatening our own demise and also the demise of other beings that share this planet with us, are in fact ancestral patterns that are the result of ancestral traumas. Our own progress as a species depends on reconnecting to our ancestors and on recognizing and changing the detrimental patterns that are recurring throughout history from one generation to the next. But here’s the thing. Society is made up of individuals. This means the ability of our species and countless others to thrive depends on individuals engaging deeply in ancestral healing right now. For this reason, right now there is a massive push within the greater universe towards ancestral healing. It’s going to continue to be a theme, and I mean a major one, everywhere you look, when these massive movements occur in the greater universe, it’s a very good idea to just choose consciously to get on the bandwagon, right? The good news is ancestral healing can be really, really fun and completely mind blowing.
The first thing that a person needs to do is release or resolve some of the resistance that they might have to doing ancestral work or ancestral healing. The reason being that this resistance that a person might have for any number of different reasons, acts as an oppositional force to being able to do effective ancestral healing work. From there, it’s time to research. This means you want to find out as much about your ancestors and your family line as possible. Obviously, some people are able to find out more than others. Some people hear me say that you should find out as much as you can about your family line and they panic. Maybe you were adopted and couldn’t find any information on your birth family. Maybe you have no contact with your parents or other members of your family line and were unable to make contact. Remember that when it comes to working with ancestry, it is simply the more you know, the better you can work with. Whatever hints you may have, however tiny. Believe me when I tell you that if you are committed to ancestral healing, more information has a sneaky little way of surfacing. It feels a lot like an easter egg hunt that never ends. The real heart of ancestral healing is about recognizing unresolved pains and detrimental patterns within your family lines and changing those into their improved state. You do this with both traumas that are direct and traumas that are indirect. For example, you might notice that a pattern running through your family is that everyone had to keep strong and shut up and get things done on their own. You might decide to consciously work on communicating, sharing your emotions, and on learning to fully resource other people by getting them to do things with you. When you are healing ancestral patterns, you need to come up with practical ways that you are going to change the pattern or create improvement for the trauma. You’re not only going to figure out what you want to let go of and change within your ancestry, you’re also going to decide upon what you’re going to reown, revive and embody. One of the biggest mistakes, quite frankly, that experts on ancestral trauma make is that they think clearing ancestral trauma is just about letting go of and resolving the negatives within your family lines. Almost all of the focus of clearing ancestral trauma is on the bad things that happened and on the unwanted aspects of the family line. But this is just one part of clearing ancestral trauma. The other part is to consciously discover, own and integrate the positives within your family line. And they exist in every family line. All too often, clearing ancestral trauma is done from a place of rejection. It becomes all about things in and about their family line that they want to get rid of. Therefore, it’s done from an energy of wanting to disown or emancipate oneself from one’s ancestry. And this is the opposite of healing, and it is the opposite of integration. You can’t reject your ancestry and not simultaneously reject yourself, because your ancestors are an aspect of you and a very, very big one. And upon coming into this life, you wanted them to be. The gift of embracing your ancestry is a gift of integration of the self. It is also to develop and restore a sense of belonging within the overall picture of your place, within the picture of this human world. To clear ancestral trauma, you are not only going to have to resolve what is not benefiting your ancestors, you’re going to have to own, celebrate, and proudly embody the wonderful things about your ancestors. For example, say that you discover that your ancestors had an incredible aptitude for music. You may choose to learn a specific instrument with ancestral celebration in mind. Or let’s say that you discovered a wonderful tradition that they used to practice. You may choose to revive and honor that tradition. One step further is to resolve ancestral karma. So let’s talk about karma. Karma is a sanskrit word that means act or deed. In Hinduism and Budhism, the word has come to mean any decision or action that brings about good or bad results, either in this lifetime or in reincarnation. It’s also come to mean fate or destiny. In this context, ancestral karma means that these choices and these actions and those physical, emotional, behavioral and mental traits and characteristics that brought about either good or bad results. It is very much in our best interest to right our families wrongs. It is very much in our best interest to heal intergenerational wounds and to change their detrimental behavior characteristics and patterns into positive ones. It is in our best interest to make better choices and take different actions, especially those that bring about healing. To clear ancestral karma, you identify decisions that your ancestors made or actions that they took, specifically ones that brought about bad results. And you consciously clear some family karma by making a different decision, by taking a different action, by righting the wrong, essentially pulling the fate of your family line in a different and a corrective direction. For example, imagine that you find out that your family exploited forests for generations. As loggers. You might donate time or energy or money to an environmental foundation that is focused on reforestation. The next part of ancestral healing is to dissolve detrimental ancestral loyalties. Belonging with our family and staying connected to them is a core need that we all have, even at a subconscious level. We want to maintain our loyalty to them, but not always that we maintain our loyalty to others are beneficial for us, for them, for the family line, or for the rest of the world. Just think of a person who maintains their loyalty to their family line by maintaining hatred for an entire other demographic of people, or by failing so they don’t make their family feel bad about their general lack of successes. It’s in everyone’s best interest to discover what these negative ancestral loyalties might be so as to dissolve them, replacing them with positive forms of loyalty instead. You can also forgive on behalf of your family line. Lack of forgiveness serves as a sticking point for the progress of a family line. Therefore, a powerful practice can be working towards forgiveness and letting go. This can take many, many forms. It can take the form of you forgiving your ancestors or a specific ancestor. It can take the form of you being the person in the family line to forgive someone or something that harmed your ancestors or a specific ancestor. It can take the form of you letting go of something that you are holding on to or resolving a sticking point relative to your ancestors. And it can take the form of you letting go or your ancestors or a specific ancestor regarding a sticking point or something that they are holding on to when it would benefit them to let go. Instead, it can also take the form of you forgiving yourself for something regarding your ancestors. The hard part about this is you can’t simply force forgiveness or just decide to forgive. This is in fact a form of bypassing. You have to work towards forgiveness.
Some more powerful steps that will help you to embrace your ancestry as well as to enhance ancestral healing, is to do things like engage in meditation, journey work, or medicine work, specifically with ancestral connection and or ancestral healing in mind. You can listen to the music of your ancestors. You can experience their cultures. You can learn their language or skills or arts and crafts. You can read about the history that they would have experienced. You can set up an ancestral altar. You can make and eat the food they used to make and eat. And if it is possible for you to do, visit your ancestral lands and drink the water there. In fact, genealogical tourism, also called roots tourism, is a whole section of the travel and tourism market. Now, water in general is a very special thing because it holds memory. To get personal with you, whenever I go anywhere, I make it a point to drink the water there. The reason being that water holds an energetic vibration, and a big part of that specific vibration is information. Drinking the water in a place is like downloading that vibration and that information, information about the land and everything associated with it. It connects you immediately to where you are and to what happened there and to all those things that that water and that place encountered before you. When you go back and you drink the water that forged your people, it has the power to restore you and remind you of everything you’ve lost touch with. It’s a reset on both a personal and an ancestral level. It is an indescribably deep kind of reset. The power of returning to your ancestral land cannot be overstated. Rather than expecting ancestral healing to be something that you do and then it’s done, consider it to be like a lifelong relationship that you’re building with your ancestry. The better it gets, the better it gets. You don’t have to worry about getting it all done. After all, relationships are not something that you’re looking to be done with. Everything you end up doing over the course of your life regarding this relationship you have with them will bring improvement into your life and will add an ever increasing sense of depth and richness to your existence. Your family line is not out there in the world. It is inside of you. When you reject your family line, your ancestor, you reject yourself. You create splits within your unconsciousness. It creates an internal separation, and it creates internal suffering. You are the culmination of your ancestry. It is very much alive within you, and it very much matters. The memories of all of your ancestors that came before you are your memories. Their trauma is your trauma, and your joy is their joy. Love and light.