All My Relations: What is Ancestral Healing?

It is said that the pain inflicted into a person, or sometimes an entire culture, will be passed on for seven generations before it fades out. This is called The Seven Generations Theory and it is ancient wisdom from many different cultures around the globe. Indigenous cultures spent time speaking their stories to each other and they knew long ago that there seems to be trends in the way “history repeats itself” and therefore if one spends time healing themselves completely, they will heal the seven generations behind them and the seven generations ahead of them of that particular pain. Of course as I begin to talk of this knowledge and wisdom, there will be people wandering about the empirical claims to this and where is the evidence. My response and truly all I can say is choose your liking, a person will look for healing when they know there is a pain or a dis-ease be it mental-emotional, spiritual or physical and I find people will move towards the level of healing they are ready for.  In my spiritual outlook and opinion on this, which is also based on how I understand the energetics of this Universe, is that when an individual is even beginning to read this article, they are starting to be interested and ready to deal with harm that has been passed on through their generations and if they continue this path, only then can they understand the path of ancestral healing. You have to walk it yourself first, you can’t simply just understand it before in an article full of words. It’s a huge concept and very multifaceted dealing with everything from ruling paradigm (ours is the Age of Science and thus of course people want the evidence based medicine, we are taught only things that are proven or have evidence are real and everything else is false), the Culture and traditions you came from and how integrally or not they were preserved, this deals with the Sociology behind your individual dynamics (co-parents, divorced parents, social class, income…) and even the ruling governmental ideologies of the society you grew up in, all of this goes into who you are and what your story is and nobody has the same story. Culture and communities might have similar stories but each family is different and each individual out of that family is different.  Ancestral Medicine looks into your particular family story to see how dis-ease has manifested into you as an individual. With that said, I will indeed try my best to find the words to describe and explain some of that giant picture and landscape of how to heal from ancestral wounds, and what they might even be in the first place.

Most people only tend to show up to see a Doctor when there is physical pain of some sort or when they can finally not cope on their own. Often physical manifestations in the body are from much deeper, mental-emotional or spiritual wounds. Ancestral medicine therefore does address the physical however it really encompasses all aspected of the individual: the mental-emotional and psyche, the spiritual and the physical selves. In a nut shell, I would say Ancestral Healing is deep mental-emotional spiritual counselling and support to understanding who we are at the core of our very being. Knowledge is both power and a compass towards healing, it allows us to understand our stories and what our heritage was, what our personal history is and why we are the way we are today.  This goes into the deep realms of an individual, their family lineage and their cultural history to understand and can encompass many facets of knowledge of the other healing modalities to gain some direction into what is actually the origin of the dis-ease and how to remove it from the terrain of that human. For example, Ancestral Medicine will also include facets of Traditional Chinese Medicine knowledge and wisdom (did you know lung problems such as asthma can be associated to some deep grief and sadness?), Counselling and use of some of the ruling lineages of Psychotherapy ( I love Carl Jung and his dreamworks, we spend lots of our life in the dream world) and even modalities such as Hypnotherapy can be used. The fundamental basis of Ancestral Healing Work is to understand, to simply understand who you are at an individual level, what history happened that moved you into that place and to unveil, unveil, unveil. Once one starts to understand themselves, they start to unveil their different levels of harm within themselves (and with that harm, how they inflict harm on another) and they start to heal, and this will occur on all the levels of the being. Often abuse of some sort is the trigger that will bring an individual along the ancestral healing path, or physical pain that can’t seem to be resolved any other way. Sometimes it is deep depression and an individual is not finding their healing with the Western Antidepressant Pharamcopeia or in some cases it’s a form of trauma or even despair and suicide. Often we as individuals seem to have to dip real low before we finally seek help.

We live in a very empirical based, scientific-orientated society. When there is a giant ruling paradigm that is considered the truth, especially for hundreds of years, most people can not grasp that their could be another way to view something, another perception, perhaps another truth. Ancestral healing is about taking yourself out of the modern day realm of physical medicine (mostly physical disease pathologies) and allowing yourself to still be logical and rational, but opening yourself up to other possibilities of dis-ease.  In Western pathological medicine for instance, we may say that a certain disease is hereditary and we even found the exact chromosome it appears on, however, in Ancestral Medicine, we might talk of something else. We MIGHT (notice those capital words and don’t take this as a rule as each case and each individual is absolutely unique...) connect ovarian cancer with the forced abortions that occurred in world war two that women two generations later might not even know about but somehow and for some reason, their body remembers. We might connect the trauma of the wars being passed on through alcoholism and physical abuse to the sons of the soldiers, and then they never wanted to put their own son through the physical abuse but they were still angry inside and verbally abusive, which still created a very harmed individual. We might connect asthma to some deep grief that occurred in childhood as one felt abandoned emotionally by her mother who did not have the mother before her as emotionally available because well, perhaps she had died or she had left or even she was harmed by another part of the story. Ancestral Medicine is about learning YOUR STORY, who you are, what your history is and how harm and pain was latently passed on. It is very important to know where we came from and grow our roots, and this is where ancestral healing divides, especially as there is mostly second and third generations of uprooted individuals into this Canadian culture so that is one division and the other part of it is with the true Indigenous peoples of this land that have been here for generation upon generation and lots of the pain has been inflicted by the settlers coming in. I find in going into ancestry, the pain of moving from the homeland and being uprooted into a new land caused a lot of problems for the Settlers that are not seen in the Indigenous People, yet the pain of being moved in upon and changed by the Settlers is different to the Indigenous people that the "White People" might not understand. So, so far in my experience, firstly understanding when people came to this Home or if they were First Nations creates different pathways of treatment in Ancestral Medicine. I also find if the harm incurred somewhere in the story was sexual versus non-sexual abuse creates different pathways of treatment. Other than that, we are all HUMAN and as a human, down to our basic soul level, we are this energetic substance that is pure and light and full of love and very easily harmed. We all, very early learned how to protect ourselves and in that essence, a "Pain Body" was created. We then spend our entire life going through these sufferings and cycles to try and see what our Pain Body might be. Ancestral Medicine is a tool of aide to work through this.

Thank you. Namaste. All My Relations.