Ancestral Healing
The origin of ancestral healing is innate to the human experience and our cultural belonging. It is inherent to all of us. No matter our background, we all have traditional, cultural, and indigenious ways of honoring our heritage, the way we live our lives, and remember our family trees. Aspects of ancestral healing include honoring the lands we come from, reflecting on the lived lives of our relatives, cherishing the impact they had in their children’s lives, and also how they contributed to society and their community. Another element to ancestral healing is not only honoring your lineage and who you belong to, but how it has been passed down and how it has been lost.
We all come from and carry the past, yet it has been forgotten because culture and history continues to move forward at a speed that can often cause us to forget our roots. Ancestral healing is original to all humans and has always served to help us connect through place, space, and rituals that honor life, death, and living cycles.
Ancestral healing is especially important because we not only experience personal lived trauma but the trauma held within our families. Healing looks different for everyone and there are many modalities that can be celebrated which contribute to the continued growth and expansion of the collective consciousness. However what makes ancestral healing so important is that it is centered around your experience and lineage that is uniquely you. Looking at your individual generational trauma, you are able to release and find acceptance of family wounds that occurred in someone else’s life that has shaped the energy and beliefs of your lineage.
The study of epigenetics shows us how generational trauma is passed on, not only through genes but the psyche of generations. Certain genes will trigger fight, flight, or fawn in your nervous system. Ancestral healing restores the nervous system of you and those you belong to, so you can operate in the world in a way that is not constantly rooted in past hurts and experiences.
All of us in some degree come from a lineage of people who experienced great traumas such as genocide, immigration, slavery, famine, abandonment, and so on. However, if over time, we simply say that this is part of being human and that it’s “normal” for these things to happen, they create a wound inside our psyches, energetic bodies, and behavior patterns. When that continues to happen with no ritual, spiritual honoring, or resetting of the nervous system (physically and spiritually), we pass those same ideas and energy onto the next generation.
The core wound is never really the symptom. These patterns, wounds, and ancestral traumas manifest in different ways in our careers, finances, relationships, and the way we view ourselves and others. They feel ingrained in us, yet completely separate. They hold us back from what we know to be true about ourselves, how we show up in the world, and how we want our lives in the outer world to look. It alters our reality based on fears that don’t belong completely to us.
Most of the time we believe that something is wrong with us or we need to change our mindset, when really we are carrying the beliefs, patterns, and memories of the people who came before us, which play out over and over again in our own lives.
At some point, we have to “break the chain.” Changing your behaviour or going to an energy healer doesn’t change your ancestors or their energetic bodies. Therefore, going to the ancestors directly and connecting to them through song, dance, and the things they request when you’re in the ancestral realm, help shift their energy so you can embody the fresh energy of transformation, and breathe your own dreams into life.