Photo by Natalie Stultz.
You reshape humanity...
For the past couple of weeks, I've been sharing some of my experiences of a decade of work uncovering the ancestral wounds I carried within me.
I shared the magic of doing your family histogram; and then last week, we talked about how the field of epigenetics has proven that these ancestral wounds do in fact get passed down, and I shared my story of inherited sadness, longing and hopelessness.
So what happens when we explore these wounds?
Does anything change?
I can tell you one thing that immediately happens: you get a sense of relief from the feeling that you're somehow broken or crazy. All of a sudden, some of your deepest feelings make sense.
After sharing my blog post last week, several family members wrote me to say that what I described was exactly what they always felt as kids. My mother especially, called me and said she felt everything I wrote could have been written by her. It makes sense.
So there's an initial relief.
Another feeling that immediately washes over you is the inextricable closeness with your ancestors and all of your relatives. You get the tangible feeling of being one flesh with them.
In the days and weeks since doing some of this deep work, I've felt closer to my grandmother and even my great-grandparents than anything I could've imagined.
But most importantly, once we are aware, we can do the healing within ourselves of those hurts that were never ours.
A logical mind might say, "but once you realize they're not yours, that should be it. You should be able to discard them and move on."
The problem is this is not logical. This is cellular. We carry the wounds along with our DNA as if they were ours. In fact, we could argue they're ours just as much as our eye color.
(If you'd like to dive into the science of this, you can read Bruce Lipton's work. He's a molecular biologist who's described how the clusters of proteins that surround our DNA in every cell are very much like a fingerprint. The fingerprint of those proteins gets passed down with the DNA inside the egg and sperm that become you.)
We carry the fingerprints of those wounds and they feel like they're ours even if they were not originated in our lifetime.
We therefore have to process them and heal them as if they were our own. There's no way around it.
What I do to heal these ancestral wounds is the same process I use to help people heal traumas and hurts they've lived themselves.
The same work I did on myself to heal the wounds from being sexually assaulted was the work I did to heal the wounds of my great-grandmother's tragic life and my grandmother's profound sadness and hopelessness.
What's the result?
Let me tell you in the words of my own experience...
In the process of doing this work, I discovered that I had inherited a fundamental inability to see the everyday miraculousness of life. I just did not have it in me.
I had never been naturally joyful or optimistic. I could be circumstantially joyful and grateful for events. I could make myself optimistic too; but it was not who I fundamentally was.
Since doing this work, I've tapped into a deeper well of pure joy.
As I was coming out of the work, for first time in my life, I deeply understood the notion that life -- ALL of life- IS essentially an expression of joy.
For the first time in my life, I began to have the visceral knowing that being alive is a celebration of life... That my mere existence is pure joy.
I have no other way of explaining this... yet. I don't quite have the words for something that is still new to me.
I'm not sure I can fully convey just how profound this shift has been for me. I've gone from a deep inexplicable sadness and hopelessness to feeling that life is indeed miraculous... and not because I'm repeating affirmations or trying to convince myself, but because it's just what I feel viscerally to be true inside of me.
As you can imagine, I want EVERYBODY who currently feels the way I felt my whole life to experience this shift. If I could shout it from the rooftops I would. If I could sit in a public plaza and take anybody who shows up through this shift, I would.
So here I am... blogging about it and sharing it with whomever this might reach. I trust that whomever I am meant to help, and in whatever way I am meant to do this work in the world, it will unfold with ease. I believe that now more profoundly than ever before.
We ARE the expression of living joy.
Our mere existence IS a celebration of life.
What keeps us from living that truth every day is the product of inherited programs that shape us from conception, the family and human conventions that form our beliefs from the time we're born, and our lifetime experiences that determine how we experience our life.
For decades, even before I had any tools, I knew we somehow could change all of this. That conviction fueled my relentless pursuit for growth and healing. Now I know on SO many levels that this is not only true, but I know how to do it.
If you resonate with any of this and you're ready to do this work, I would be honored and delighted to be your ally and guide in this important work. Just send me a note.
I believe we are reshaping humanity with this work.
This is deep, important work that you can do.