A Time for Ancestral Healing

Ancestral healing is the process of identifying and releasing wounds passed down by our ancestors. 

A Collective Drive for Healing

For those of you feeling the call to understand your ancestors and their impact on your patterning: you’re not alone.

Over the past few months, more and more of my one-on-one sessions have discussed family-based patterning. I came to realize that this was a collective calling to understand ancestral wounds.

Since early 2020, there’s been a shift toward collective action. 

In quick succession major collective events transformed our interactions with one another. COVID-19 restricted our movements, the Black Lives Matter Movement opened our eyes and hearts to injustice, weather turmoil forced us to acknowledge the reality of climate change, and the list goes on. 

All these events hit the collective consciousness heavily, and opened people up to thinking about life and society with a fresh new perspective. 

What is Ancestral Healing?

Now that people are considering the roots of social injustice and climate change with a new lens, they’re also opening up to examining their own relationships within their families and communities.

Ancestral healing plays an important role in the personal journey to wholeness. By knowing how the lives of our ancestors unfolded, the struggles they faced and how they coped with these demands, we can understand how our family dynamics evolved. 

For instance, knowing that my great-great grandfather left his wife and 13 children in England to homestead land in a cold, harsh land far, far away tells me that providing for that family was of the utmost importance. It also indicates that connection took a backseat so that the family could be fed and clothed. In an era where introspection was a luxury, surely my kin did not think about their choice to move to Canada with the same perspective. 

As I sit here contemplating the steps required to build a life or business filled with awe, it's important to acknowledge that it took many, many generations before the luxury of ancestral healing became feasible. The tools to compassionately investigate our ancestral wounds, and the time required to conduct such investigations, have really only been available in the past few decades. 

The Ancestral Healing Process

Working on ancestral healing is a process that requires a great deal of compassion - and a healthy serving of optimism. Even in the face of deeply troubling revelations: every story offers opportunities for action.

Anyone researching their ancestry is bound to discover both positive and negative stories about their genetic heritage. Sometimes these stories are felt, and not voiced. These are the stories that are more complicated to piece together, as they rely on sensation. 

To be sure, any healing process combines both verbal narrative (which is open to interpretation) and felt sense. In my work, with the polyvagal theory, physical state is always addressed before the story. So while we might not understand the “what” that caused the state, we trust that the body carries knowledge - even from generations past - that can inform the steps required for our healing process. Make no mistake - this trust takes time to cultivate. And like any healthy relationship, it should take time. This is how we learn to feel safe in our choices and bodies. 

Once we understand our ancestors and their wounds, we have an opportunity for honouring and healing our genetic lineage. 

Ancestral Healing via Family Constellation

My dear friend, Mira Chen, introduced me to the world of Family Constellation Therapy in 2019. As I began my journey to understand the unhealed wounds left behind in my family timeline, Mira offered insights into how patterns continue to play out in my life. 

With Mira’s help, I chose lego-like figurines to play out the members of my family. Each figurine represented a member of my family, and was ascribed certain characteristics. Mira guided me to identify a series of patterns I’d like to understand, and then, we began to work. 

At first, I felt like building the constellation was simply play. Yet, as Mira moderated the session, patterns became so abundantly apparent that I laughed out loud. How could I not believe in this work, when I worked with helping spirits? (The answer is, I did believe. I just didn’t understand the power of family constellation therapy until I lived it.)

I sat with the revelations of this single session for a long, long time before I felt ready to explore my ancestry in greater detail. 

A Personal Calling for Ancestral Healing

Early this year I received an email from a distant cousin inviting me to a family reunion on the site where my family first built their Canadian home. 

As pioneers in the Canadian West, my great-great grandparents settled in Alberta with 13 children. As you can imagine, 13 children propagate into dozens and dozens of grandchildren - and so on. Yet, as the room began to fill with my family, there was no mistaking that we were related. The same full heads of hair. The same pale eyes and long faces. 

There was something else that we shared: a deep belief in intuition, felt sense and connection to nature. Dowsing was a common skill in the group, so too was training in Reiki. Many family members studied and practiced spirituality in novel ways. Beyond the genes we shared and the pioneering spirit from which we were born … we shared some traits that were a little harder to explain. 

Discovering a Set of Unspoken Values

During that celebration, I learned a few things about my ancestry that surprised me. 

One of the 4th generation Canadians provided a list of what they identified as unspoken family values. They included:

• Kindness & gentleness
• Education
• Economic independence for all children
• Egalitarianism
• The value of music

What struck me most poignantly was the fact that ALL children were encouraged to learn, to gain independence, and to follow a calling. Especially girls, who were often bound to home and family.

I feel so deeply connected to these values, and they are a guiding light for my work. They’re also an indication that history wasn’t always patriarchal.

The message I took away was this: not all ancestral healing takes place on the wounds. Sometimes, healing comes from understanding the shared positive traits or occurrences. My family healing came through spending 3 days together, sharing stories of what had worked, what had gone wrong, and how we hoped to make change together. I left the gathering feeling nurtured by people who shared the same patterning, and hopeful that we’d continue to support one another from afar. 

Ancestral Healing: An Opportunity for Hope

Ancestral healing can often be heavy and daunting. We may, like with any form of healing, make bleak and awful revelations. These wounds require deep holding, compassion and care. Most importantly, they require time. Deep wounds take time to understand, to come to terms with and to heal.

Yet, when doing ancestral healing, it’s not all bleak! Sometimes it can provide foundational guidance for the path forward. The list of family values brought tears to my eyes, to know that despite all the things we’d lived through as a collective family - we shared foundational principles. 

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