Do you have beliefs and patterns that you feel like you were born with? Is there a history (known or surmised) of trauma in your ancestral lineage?
“When we heal ourselves, we heal the past, the present, and the future (…).There are four things our ancestors need from us: acknowledgment, validation, understanding, and forgiveness.”
– Steven Farmer, Healing Ancestral Karma
Beliefs and coping strategies that enabled our ancestors to survive often get hardwired into the next generations’ DNA, whether it is relevant to their situation or not. These may be inherited or learned from our parents, and/or may go much farther back. For example, my father’s ancestors were Latvian Jews who endured centuries of occupation and oppression. Some of the beliefs I have been untangling from that heritage are: “it’s not safe to pursue your dreams,” “we need to stay below the radar,” and “we need to work ourselves to the bones just to scrape by.” My father defied the first belief when he gave up a promising career and moved to Paris to be a writer, but he eventually had to give up on that dream to make a living. When I chose to leave the humanitarian world and pursue a vocation as a healer and writer, I found myself confronted with many obstacles and challenges. It wasn’t until I began to heal and clear some of the ancestral wounds, beliefs and coping strategies that things began to shift for me.
The following are just a few indicators you may have ancestral baggage that needs clearing:
- You are replicating familial habits or coping strategies
- You have hyper vigilance patterns that don’t match your past or current reality
- You have patterns and beliefs you feel you were born with
- Success and/or failure stories have been passed on as part of the family lore
- Thinking about your family history (known or not) feels heavy
- You feel stuck and don’t know why
The following are seven tips for clearing ancestral baggage:
1. Identify the pattern
First, identify a pattern or area of your life that you feel stuck in, that you sense you might have inherited. For example, are you wanting to leave your job, but fear is holding you back? Do you have a chronic health issue that is preventing you from thriving? Do you struggle with balancing your needs and those of others in your relationships and/or friendship?
2. Identify the belief
Now that you have identified the pattern, what belief do you think might be driving it? For example, “I’m the only one I can trust,” “if I’m not careful something really bad might happen,” “others’ needs matter more than I do.”
3. Trace the belief back in time
Imagine that you are tracing this belief back in time to the first time you started believing something similar. What was happening at the time?
Once you have spent a little time with any memory that might come up, I invite you to keep going back in time, until before your birth, to a time that one of your ancestors might have started believing this. You might get a felt sense of something, hear something, or get a visual.
If nothing comes up for you that’s totally fine. You might ask yourself: “did I learn this from my ancestors?” and see if you get a yes. You can also do automatic writing, where you write the question, and then jot down any answer you get.
If you get a yes, you might ask if it was on your mother’s line, or your father’s line. If you were adopted, you can do this for either your birth parents or your adoptive parents.
4. Explore the belief’s intention
When you have a sense of where this might have come from, ask the belief what its function is. What was going on at the time that your ancestors needed that belief to protect them? What strategy did your ancestor/s develop to survive?
5. Acknowledge the ancestors and validate their sacrifices
Once you have a sense of who might have developed this belief and why, I invite you to write the belief down, and perhaps light a candle or set up sacred space in any way that works for you. You can do this even if you aren’t sure where it came from, you just know somehow that there’s an ancestral component to it. Acknowledge your ancestors for the sacrifices they made to in order to survive and provide for their offspring. Let them know how smart it was of them to develop this belief and strategy, that it was exactly what they needed to do at the time.
6. Ask for their support in releasing it
Imagine that you are projecting a video of your current life for your ancestors, so they see how different your life and current circumstances are from theirs. Let them know that if/when you release this belief, you will be doing it in order to honor their sacrifices, and give back to them. Ask for their support in releasing the old belief and coping strategies, knowing that releasing it for you will also enable them to experience something different—through you. If/when it feels like you are ready, imagine that you are letting go of the old belief. If you wrote it down, you might tear it up. If it feels like something is in the way or blocking you, you may need to spend more time with the belief, your ancestors, and/or the young version of you who started developing this belief.
7. Replace the old strategy with a new one
Now, write down a new belief you would like to replace the old belief with. For example: “I can follow my dreams and be financially secure;” “it’s safe for me to shine.” “I am supported by the universe.” Imagine you are bringing this new belief into your crown (the top of your head). Feel it start to permeate the neural pathways that have been conditioned to the old belief. Then, feel it spreading through the rest of your body and into all the cells that were impacted by the old belief.
Additional resources for healing ancestral wounds:
- “Ancestral Medicine: rituals for personal and family healing”, by Daniel Foor
- “It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle” by Mark Wolynn
- “Healing Family Patterns: Ancestral Lineage Clearing for Personal Growth” by Ariann Thomas.
© Jenny Brav
