Image by Paul Lewin
We all come from a long line of ancestors, of fates and stories once told and later lost. However lost and forgotten our ancestral past may be, it still lives through us, mostly unconscious and unexplored. Our lives are influenced by events and experiences that happened to others in a distant past and we are seeding imprints for others in a distant future.
We have learned to experience ourselves in a fragmented way, contained within the remits of our personal life, from birth to death, but there are far wider influences at hand. There is a wider story of who we are that has been writing itself from one generation to the next. A thread of living that binds us to experiences that have existed beyond the years we have personally lived through.
We have grown out of the roots and soil of our family tree and its sap of life and nourishment, its consciousness, runs through us. It determines how we move through life, and affects us in ways we don’t immediately recognize or understand. By inhabiting the wider narrative of where we came from and of those that came before us, we come to find our rightful place at the forefront of our ancestral line. We come to restore within us a deep sense of belonging to something greater, a homecoming on a soul level that aligns us to our own purpose in life. This is the journey of weaving ourselves into a greater wholeness.
To re-member the long line of people we have descended from, to acknowledge how many connections it took for us to arrive, to appreciate the life and death cycles that have supported our emergence, helps us witness the enormity of being alive, here and now. We didn’t just happen, we have been happening all along. And like our ancestors, in the mists of time ahead, we too are going to occupy that place of the unseen and the unspoken.
Until we face and process the lives and fates of those that came before us, our path in life will be influenced in ways that don’t fully belong to us. By turning towards our ancestors, we find the collective imprints of wounding and patterns of healing our life has rested on. Trauma travels down the family line, silently moving from one generation to the next, until someone in the line is sufficiently resourced to be able to face what has been trying to reach some level of resolution.
The trauma of our family line might have been on a personal or a collective level. It might have descended from the fate of an ancestor, or from the fate and trauma of a whole country. The pain of those that survived or those that didn’t. The traveling wounds of war and genocide, of migration and displacement. These points of psychic fracture move forward down the life line to remind and forewarn those ahead of the dangers in which they lived or perished. Each generation equipping the next to deal with what they knew life to be. Because the ancestral field is truly benign and the deepest longing of our ancestors is for subsequent generations to thrive, in that way they too live through us.
In the realm of the soul, time is not a linear dimension. Here past, present and future coexist at any given moment. Pain and healing travel through the forces of time and cellular memory backward and forward from their source of origin. The systemic consciousness is acutely aware of any exclusions or misalignments in the family line, and will engage future generations to restore any sense of incompleteness. We are all part of an ancestral super-organism that abides by the deeper laws of nature. The laws of interconnectedness that require us to see further than we are used to, with eyes that penetrate through time and artificial boundaries.
Current epigenetic research is starting to catch up with the tribal notions of the interconnectedness that binds the ancestral field. Nothing exists in isolation and when we work on ourselves we do it in service of those that came before us and of those that are yet to emerge. Our inner work is in service of the consciousness that runs through the systems we belong to. In service of the deepest yearning of the soul, integration and completeness. In inner work we are truly dealing with the infinite and the unbound.
