My suffering is not my own
Many of our deepest wounds are not our own. They come from a time before us. To acknowledge and touch these parts of us can be extremely healing.
For me, the Russian-Ukrainian war brought out many old ancestral wounds, some of them known to me from stories, some never even brought up to the surface of my conscious mind. These of my grandparents’ childhoods during the German occupation of Poland in WWII. How my 17-year-old grandma walked 300 miles alone in the winter to retrieve all the family’s money from an apartment in Warsaw during the air bombing. How my great uncle was on a child fire brigade, literally putting out fires on city rooftops with sandbags, at 12 years old.
This spring I started experiencing feelings of being unsafe, and vigilant, waking up at night troubled, reading the news, and shaking and crying while looking at photos of Ukrainian children. Yes, these are healthy appropriate human feelings, yet I knew I was coming upon an old story from before I was born. It was passed to me via DNA and the cultural climate I grew up in. As hard as it felt, I had the awareness that it was surfacing now so that I could untangle it. How, I didn’t yet know.
Research shows that when we teach animals to be afraid of certain stimuli (by linking pain to odor for example), their offspring develop fear of the stimuli for many generations. Trauma is inherited.
When these things first show up, they seem unsolvable. The strong emotionality (crash state) that they elicit shuts down any kind of possible creative solution. The first order of healing is to get myself into an open, creative, loving, welcoming state.
As a generative coach, I help others through this kind of stuff, and with this one, I got to walk my talk. I was feeling very dragged down by the war, powerless, and depressed. Yet… I cannot help others unless I first help me...
My primary question became “How do I honor my ancestors’ pain and suffering while also living my best and most vibrant life”.
Unable to answer this question myself, I started having some conversations with my ancestors (also embodied by modern Ukrainian people in my mind).
I went wandering in nature asking the trees and the clouds. I turned to my intuition, and I meditated. I tuned into my body sensation, looking for the felt sense of it all. What’s beneath the fear? What’s beneath the terror? The answer as they often do, showed itself to me clearly. They instructed me: Do not forget about us, go be the most amazing self, be limitless, be happy, and all the while remember us. As long as we are part of your journey, as long as we get to come along, you have done your work well.
I also started feeling a tightness in my jaw, my lower teeth squeezing together. During a somatic experiencing treatment, a memory came to me of being kicked in the face, in some dark basement somewhere. Not sure whose memory it was, other than not mine in this lifetime. A release came as they often do, through the body. I got ice cold and shaking violently on the massage table. And then the shaking, together with jaw pain was gone.
We all have our emotional, physical, individual, collective, and ancestral traumas. Unless we face them, and heal them through our body, we often resort to coping mechanisms such as rage, denial, addiction, numbing, depression, or anxiety. Scottish proverb says: “You ask about my drinking, but not about my thirst“. Many of my Polish ancestors coped by quenching their thirst with fire water. It’s the best that they were able to do.
I’m lucky to know my way out of this. The first step to healing our traumas is to acknowledge them. To see the full landscape of disaster. Only then can we bring love, safety, compassion, and understanding.
Awakening to our ancestral trauma can be painful. Here is the good news: If your trauma is bugging you, that means that you are ready to transform it. It’s surfacing because it’s time. This trauma covers a golden vein - your energy and your resilience are in that mud. When you bring it to awareness and meet it with love, the gifts of it will be yours to use.
When I truly connect to the pain of my grandmother walking alone in the woods I also see where my resilience and my courageous spirit comes from. And if I take her with me, she gets to climb all the walls too.
I invite you to contemplate what has been transmitted to you by your blood ancestors and spiritual ancestors. Through this practice, you can celebrate the gifts and transform the pain into veins of gold.
If you would like to look at your ancestral wounds, coaching with me will help you.
Meanwhile, you can do this exercise that you can do on your own to get connected to your ancestors. It is from the late Thich Nhat Hanh, read by him.
Allow 20 minutes of uninterrupted time. Sit upright or walk in nature.
https://youtu.be/AH0wbHjdIX4
If you prefer to read it, here is the text of the recording:
“In gratitude I bow to my ancestors in my blood family through all generations.
I see my father and my mother whose blood and flesh and vitality is a present in me, circulating in my veins and nourishing every cell in me.
Through my parents I see my grandpa, grandma on the paternal side as well as on the maternal side. Their energy has entered me with all expectations, all experiences and wisdom transmitted from so many generations of ancestors.
I carry in me the life, the blood, the experiences, the wisdom, the happiness and the sorrow of all generations.
The suffering and the elements that are to be transformed, I am practicing to transform. I opened my heart and my flesh and bones to receive the energy of insight, of love and of experiences transmitted to me by all my ancestors... ”“In gratitude I bow to my ancestors in my blood family through all generations.
I see my father and my mother whose blood and flesh and vitality is a present in me, circulating in my veins and nourishing every cell in me.
Through my parents I see my grandpa, grandma on the paternal side as well as on the maternal side. Their energy has entered me with all expectations, all experiences and wisdom transmitted from so many generations of ancestors.
I carry in me the life, the blood, the experiences, the wisdom, the happiness and the sorrow of all generations.
The suffering and the elements that are to be transformed, I am practicing to transform. I opened my heart and my flesh and bones to receive the energy of insight, of love and of experiences transmitted to me by all my ancestors... ”