In this video we will discuss how to heal your lineage. As we have often said everyone has both individual and collective karma. Part of that collective karma is the karma we inherit from our lineage or family. The higher self, which is the totality of all of our experiences of every lifetime, chooses the conditions of our birth. On some level we choose our parents and family.
That means we choose certain karmic patterns to incarnate into in order to learn the lessons they have to teach us. Some of us may feel quite close to our family and sense we have deep and ongoing karmic connections to our family members. Traditionally families are families of souls with countless lifetimes of karmic history. Each member playing a different role lifetime after lifetime as each learns from the other and balance their karmic debts.
Others may feel quite estranged from their biological family. This is most common amongst those who identify as wanderers. Wanderers are souls that have come from other places and have incarnated on Earth at this time to assist with the transition. Wanderers will feel like black sheep and may not be very close with their birth families.
Nevertheless, whether you identify as a wanderer or not you have family karma by virtue of being born with a human body into a human family. That is because family karma follows the body as well as the soul. Moreover, family dysfunction on this planet is the norm rather than the exception. It is almost impossible to incarnate in a human family without being impacted by its karmic patterns.
I never really felt close to my biological family. I always sensed they had a long history of relationship that I was not a part of. There was mutual love, but on a deeper level a lack of understanding and connection. As I became an adult and moved away from the family home we grew further and further apart and it became difficult to maintain the bonds of family connection.
Despite not feeling very connected to my family, I have had to work through the karma of my lineage. One of the biggest of those karmic patterns has been blockage around abundance. I grew up in the coalfields of the Appalachian Mountains into a family of coal miners who before that were subsistence farmers and pioneers, who were before that indentured servants and serfs.
The area I grew up in is one of the poorest in the United States. It is culturally isolated and most people born there never leave or stray far from where they grew up. In many ways the peasant culture of Victorian England is alive and well in the area where I grew up. Education is disdained, as is the concept of social mobility and abundance.
Hard work and survival are valued, but joy and abundance are almost unimaginable. I began breaking the mold of my family karma when I moved away from home at eighteen and went to college then law school. But even the choice to go to law school was informed by a scarcity mindset. It was the safe path to financial security and a middle class life.
Joy, passion and abundance weren’t values I even considered when choosing a career. I was primarily concerned with survival. I had a very restricted outlook. I spent decades joylessly checking off the boxes of what I felt I needed to do to survive. After becoming a lawyer I spent years working 60 hour weeks with no holidays or recreation.
It was only after I achieved a certain amount of financial and professional security that I was able to start thinking about having more joy and abundance in my life. Only after satisfying basic needs was I able to contemplate self-actualization.
My friends from middle class and wealthy families generally speaking didn’t have to go through this process. They have other karma they are dealing with but overcoming the mindset of a medieval serf is not one of them.
The first step in healing ancestral patterns and trauma is noticing the pattern. Start by looking at places where you are stuck in your life and notice if this is a pattern that played out in the family home. It may be you need to talk to someone with an outside objective perspective to help you notice these patterns.
An outside perspective is useful because we only know the perspective we have, and that perspective is informed by our family conditioning. The trauma that is normal to us may look quite different to a healed perspective.
The second step is understanding how the family karma came to be. This may require some investigation. Maybe you talk with family members about the family history or do genealogy research. When you are able to get a longer view (a few generations) of the family history the patterns will become more obvious, and you’ll be able to see more clearly how they are playing out in your own life.
The third step is to forgive your family and self for being caught in this pattern and choosing a different way of being. This may or may not include conversations with your family. The most important component of this step is how you relate to the trauma and those involved. See the patterns, forgive everyone involved, and choose a more healed state of being. Again this may require the assistance of an outside perspective, because we don’t always know what a healed perspective looks like.
Know that you incarnated in this body at this time to stop the legacy of pain. Trauma based karmic patterns are passed on until they are healed. You have the opportunity to be the last in a long line of suffering. When we honor our karma we also honor our responsibility to stop the wheel of suffering. If we do that we will have the opportunity to start new karmic patterns for our lineage based on more joyous, abundant, and life affirming patterns.
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