Family reunions are great, aren’t they? We get to relive our childhood memories – find cousins we used to play with, meet aunts who always were like second mothers, and that one great-great grandad who seems to have outlived the age of the Bible.
These reunions are truly great! Until you find out that many of your problematic feelings resemble the people in your family and you are in urgent need of ancestral healing.
Shared ancestral feelings, ancestral trauma, inter-generational trauma, or whatever name you give it – it does exist!
As long as you don’t feel it, you are all well ‘n’ good. But, one day you might realize that you have many inherited emotions from your forefathers and mothers. Now, is the perfect time to start on the stages of emotional healing.
Let’s understand exactly what is ancestral healing and how to practice it.
What is Ancestral Trauma?
In simple words, ancestral trauma is the unprocessed and suppressed feelings of our ancestors that got carried down to us.
During their time, our ancestors might have faced certain life situations and stressors that led them to develop certain emotions. These emotions helped them survive and achieve certain things in life. It is these feelings that you inherit from them through various means.
However, for you, life situations are different today. Many of these emotions keep you in survival mode and result in a dysfunctional way of life. They also might further lead to emotional and physical issues within you. To live a fulfilling life, you should heal these feelings, then whether you do it with help of the best books on self-healing or DIY efforts.
But, before trying to understand what is ancestral healing, let us first understand how we end up receiving these emotions of the long-lost past.
How We Recieve Our Ancestor’s Emotions?
We receive transgenerational trauma from our parents, their parents, their parents’ parents, and even further beyond. Some of the ways we receive these feelings are:
- Genetic Imprints: Researchers have proved that under extreme circumstances there are chemical changes within our neurotic and genetic system. These changes are then passed down to further generations.
- Childhood Identity Development: During our identity development as a child we imbibe our family’s story, cultural history, parent’s personality, attachment styles, and beliefs. All of this has combined to form our complex emotional patterns of today.
- Emotional Absorption: When we live with someone and love them, we subconsciously receive and absorb many of their feelings. It is one reason you might see whole families driven by some key emotions in their lives unless they are undergoing ancestral healing therapy.
Where is it Stored in the Body?
Depending on the nature of ancestral emotions, they can be stored across different chakras in our bodies. Let’s look at some of the examples.
- Fear and dread inherited from ancestors are stored throughout the chest. These emotions might lead to unexplained breathlessness within you.
- Anger can show up as burns and unnatural shine on your skin.
- Feelings of low esteem can come up as pinching pain in the stomach – the region of the solar plexus chakra.
- Sadness can feel like pain and heaviness within your heart chakra.
In order to lead a fully functional life, you need to start the work of healing ancestral trauma within you. This could be done with the help of emotional healing. Let’s look at what it is.
What is Ancestral Healing?: The Way Forward
Ancestor healing is a method of resolving those emotions within yourself that you inherited from your ancestors. This process involves identifying these emotions within you, and feeling them to their fullest possibility – without any judgment.
The most common sign that you need this healing is – if you are having emotions for which you cannot find any reasonable explanation within your past. However, it is advisable to start with general emotional healing first, before starting the ancestral healing work.
What ancestral healing is NOT?
- It is NOT anxiously searching through your ancestors’ history. In healing work, events do not matter, but only the feelings. During the practices, if you have inherited certain feelings without even being aware of the events, you will still be able to identify and resolve the emotions within yourself.
- It is NOT relentlessly trying to persuade your parents or siblings or grannies to take healing sessions. The only way you can resolve dysfunction in your life is by resolving the unprocessed feelings that reside within you. Also, once you resolve these feelings, their energy will naturally help people in your family to process their own emotional blockages.
Now let’s look at the exact way to resolve your ancestor’s pains and understand how to feel feelings.
How to Do Ancestral Healing?
It will be best if you try this in moments of intense feeling. This feeling could be anything – sadness, guilt, anger, jealousy, or even lust. Whenever you feel this state, just take out a pen and notebook. Alongside writing you will need to perform the ancestral healing meditation. Below are the steps to do this work.
- Identify the Emotion: What it is exactly that you are feeling at this moment? Write it down!
- Identify the Event: Which event in your immediate present, triggered this emotion within you?
- Focus Back on the Emotion: Look further deeper into what you feel. Close your eyes, and let this emotion take precedence. Look into further past – which events are linked to this specific feeling? Write things down.
- Identify Pent-up Emotion: During your writing, remember to focus less on the details of the event, and more on how exactly you felt during these events.
- Let Your Body Do the Work: These emotions will trigger certain bodily reactions. Let them occur naturally. For instance, during experiencing pent-up anger, you might feel the need to punch your pillows or chest. You will want to cry relentlessly while feeling sadness, guilt, grief, and jealousy. Fear and dread might make your body shake and shiver.
- Look into Your Immediate Family: Once you have gained a certain understanding of this emotion within you, now you’re ready to find it in your family members. Let the emotion take precedence, and then look into each of your family members – who amongst them possess this same emotion? Enter into their shoes and feel this emotion from their perspective to do your own ancestral healing therapy.
- Go Further Back to Ancestors: Now go deeper into your ancestors – alive or dead. Look at who amongst them possessed this same emotion. Again, enter into their shoes and feel the feeling from their perspective. Let your body work naturally. Writing down will help you in going further deeper.
- Come Back to Present: Once you feel a certain level of exhaustion, then it is time to come back. Re-focus your attention on breaths and mindful awareness. You can even take a power nap to feel refreshed.
When you wake up, you will find out that certain heaviness has been lifted off from within you. There will be some emotional blocks resolved within your energy system. You can now carry on with life and wait for the next intense emotional state when you can continue your work of healing ancestral trauma.
Best Tips for Doing It
Some of the below tips will help you in carrying out the above work for yourself. Let’s look at these useful tips.
- Persist: Ancestral healing is painful work. In your most intense moments, you will feel certain reactions in your body that will make you want to run away. But, do not do that! It is exactly after that moment of intensity, that you will find an intense relief and clearing out of a major emotional block.
- Do not Judge: No emotion is ever right or wrong. If while resolving a feeling you enter into a judgment mode, it will focus your attention away from emotion, and into your thoughts. This is why, it is important to develop a non-judgmental attitude towards your own self.
- Keep Practising: The process of healing ancestral trauma is not a one-day done deal. You will have to do it frequently – every time you face an intense emotion within yourself. But, the more you practice it, the more you will feel lighter and better functional with life.
- Find Your Own Way: Every individual is built differently. The practices and tips in this blog are just meant as a guide. Once you have done some initial ancestral lineage healing, then you should try to mix-n-match and try a way that fits you perfectly.
Why I Should Heal Ancestor’s Emotions?: Key Benefits
If you have already tried some form of healing then you must have known this – it is so satisfying, empowering, even pleasurable, and out rightly fun!
But, let’s look at the specific reasons for you to try the ancestral healing work.
- Resolving ancestral traumas gives a very high emotional relief. It helps you to get out of the reasons of feeling sad, anxiety, guilt, grief, fear, and every other low-frequency emotion.
- This healing will cure your long-held physical issues. Physical problems are only a symptom of emotional blockages. When these blocks will get resolved, your physical health will also improve.
- With ancestor healing you will become a fully functioning person. It will help you in every aspect of your life – work, relationships, and general well-being.
- Many people also do self-healing work to achieve spiritual growth. It helps build higher self-awareness, deepen self-connection, and find meaning in one’s existence.
All in all, healing ancestral lineage within you, will guide you towards your higher self. Let’s find some alternative ways of practicing it yourself.
Alternative Ancestral Healing Techniques
One size does not fit all! If you feel that apart from mindful healing you can also benefit from some other techniques, then you should try them.
Below are some other techniques which you can use to resolve your ancestral emotions.
- Ancestral Research: Family history, genealogies, and stories are uncovered to identify ancestral traumas and help resolve them.
- Family Constellations Therapy: It is a group therapy in which individuals take turns to act as family members of the client.
- Energy Healing Modalities: Ancestral healing techniques might also involve energy healing ways of reiki, acupuncture, or Qigong. These are used to balance the body’s energy flow and resolve unprocessed emotions.
- Rituals and Ceremonies: Certain religions practice rituals and prayer for ancestral healing to honor the ancestors and emotionally connect with them. They can help you build the heart of a child that Jesus talked about.
- Creative Expression: Art, craft, dance, singing, and writing can also help you envision your history and your feelings in those events.
However, you must remember that ultimately it is the suppressed emotions that matter – and not the events themselves. Even if you can’t fully uncover your ancestral history, still you can heal. All it needs is going beyond your mind and finding yourself as an energy system made up of emotional energies.
To Sum it Up
Even if you think you have received a lot of generational trauma, still it is in your hands to resolve those emotions.
Ancestral healing will help you get rid of low-frequency feelings, cure long-held physical problems, and become a fully functioning person.
The best way to resolve such emotional blocks is to practice a mindful way of looking at your most intense emotions. This mindful perception will help you experience the suppressed feelings of your past and your ancestors’ past. This experience will immediately open up your emotional blocks and resolve that particular emotion.