Essential Wellness Vol 11 2023

Vol II, 2023 resources for inner peace, health and healing

By Chanda Parkinson

Healing Ancestral Trauma A

As a society, we are experiencing a major cultural disconnect. The symptoms are apparent in the widening of our divided nation, and the pain of isolation and loneliness we feel in our own communities and families. In our earnestness to achieve, capitalism has ingrained in us a hyper-individualism that frankly goes against our very nature. Whole villages were once built in cooperation and collaboration, each person clear about the role they played in maintaining the whole. We were once inter-dependent, care-filled beings intent on lifting one another up, knowing we were only as great as the weakest of us.

Dominant cultures would have us believe we are individuals. That is not the basis of a functioning organism. Organisms are inter-dependent, and need all of the parts to succeed and live. We are part of a

lineage, we are part of a hive, a larger collective, even if we don’t feel a part of the larger pattern. This awareness has implications for how we approach healing and trauma. Almost none of it is personal. It’s systemic. There’s lineage pain, cultural pain, exploitative capitalistic pain, sexism, racism, and a lot of that on a body level will resonate on a personal level; it’s systemic, individual, part of the collective pain. If we only try to resolve it individually, it isn’t going to work as well, because we don’t resolve systemic issues in a vacuum. Our approach must be systemic, and that includes the legacies of our ancestors.

ANCESTRAL MEDICINE INTEGRATES A SYSTEMIC APPROACH TO HEALING

It is based on several assumptions:

1. We are left a legacy of trauma by those in our ancestral lineage.

2. That trauma lives and functions within us through

wounds residing in our subconscious and cellular DNA.

3. That legacy of trauma causes us to repeat the same behaviors, patterns, even manifest the same health problems.

4. We suffer because of a lack of healthy interdependence between us and our ancestors.

5. It is possible to build a reciprocal relationship with ancestral energies for the healing of generational trauma.

Through ancestral healing practices such as the ones I’ve explored through Celtic Shamanism, I have begun to restore my own healthy co-dependency with nature and with spirit. I am helping others to do the same. Nature and spirit are speaking to us right now, trying to get our attention, begging for us to make different choices, and to restore this healthy co-dependent relationship. We just need to listen.

BEGIN YOUR OWN ANCESTRAL HEALING JOURNEY

There are things you can do now to begin your own Ancestral Healing Journey. First, discover

where you are situated in the world. Honor those who have walked the land you live on before you. Acknowledging the often traumatic ways in which that land was stolen from Indigenous people in this country begins to restore peace. My ancestors come from Wales, Moldova (Germans from Russia), and Norway. I currently occupy land rightfully owned by the Dakota. This practice of awareness begins healing the cultural disconnect. Research and honor the cultural traditions indigenous to your own people. Make the food of your ancestors and share it with your family. Bring back the oral histories of your people. Put folktales from the countries your ancestors are from on your bookshelves. Go to the places where your people used to live, breathe, create, and die. Imagine walking the roadways and pathways they have walked.

If it feels safe, next, wonder about harmful patterns, behaviors and trauma you have experienced in your past. Begin excavating a timeline of things you

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wonder about not being within your control, that you have experienced. It is likely you have exhibited stuck patterns of thought and behavior that are part of this generational legacy. I do not recommend going down this road of excavation if it doesn’t feel safe to do so alone. If it feels too triggering, include a therapist or trusted friend to join you.

After that, consider developing a spiritual practice that brings you into a healthy inter-dependent relationship with your ancestors who are no longer living. Create an ancestors altar by placing objects from your family, sacred items, photos, soil from lands they walked, or anything that speaks to you. Go to it to offer your prayers of gratitude and love, invite their participation in your ancestral healing journey. This ongoing practice links you with them in an intentional dance of breaking old patterns and trauma for good.

Ultimately, the practice of honoring your own cultural and ancestral roots brings you full circle, and assists with the much needed disease of disconnect we face as a society. It is a way we can take personal responsibility to restoring our place within the macro-cosmic sphere.

When I discovered the stories of my own ancestors, I had to get comfortable learning really uncomfortable truths. There was deep pain, survival, loss, and deep sadness. There were joys as well as challenges. It was humbling to discover where my ancestors were harmed, and also may have harmed others through their own ingrained beliefs, ideals, worldview, and actions. I had to do a hard check-in regarding how those patterns wound up with me. It was a necessary step to seeing the truth of what I come from, so I could assert my own will to take action to help heal those things. My fact-finding mission was the first step.

You can invoke the healing of your ancestors by creating an Ancestral Healing Practice!

TIPS BEFORE BEGINNING YOUR OWN ANCESTRAL HEALING PRACTICE

1. Establish energetic boundaries with those in spirit who are not in a healthy place, and then only call forth the healed wise beings of your lineage.

2. Ask them to heal the lineage between you and with them. If you don’t feel comfortable connecting with your own ancestors, lean on the stars, the sun, the moon. Those are our ancestors too, and they will help you every time.

down lineage from. Celebrate the shifts and changes that you experience in the wake of embracing an ancestral healing practice.

4. When the ancient lineage of your ancestors is in a vibrant state, you too are in a vibrant state. It is never too late to begin.

5. If you need support, enlist a trusted friend to help, or reach out to a spiritual mentor.

We are all just walking one another home.

Chanda Parkinson utilizes tarot and astrology to support others through transitions in life with clarity and deep compassion. She is devoted to assisting others on their own Ancestral Healing path through astrology, education and ritual healing. As the author of “Meditations for Psychic Development: Practical Exercises to Awaken Your Sixth Sense,” Chanda is fiercely committed to mentoring others in the discovery of their own spiritual gifts. Find Chanda on Facebook, Instagram, and www.chandaparkinson.com.

Can You Inherit the Fate of Your Ancestors?

By Anuradha Dayal-Gulati

Ancestral energy patterns come in many forms and play out in different ways. For instance, behavioral patterns may be easily visible. As much as you don’t like to admit this, your behaviors do mirror those of your parents and generations prior. Some of us are frugal, others get angry quickly, a few are overly suspicious.

You may also have patterns of being generous or feeling passionate about issues. Sometimes, themes remain the same in relationship after relationship. And in families, the themes reappear several generations in a row. A “family curse” is real: it’s a repetition of an old energetic pattern passed down the family tree. Maybe you have known someone who vowed they would never again get involved with a certain type of romantic partner. Then you saw that, despite their falling for someone who on the surface was very different from their previous partner, the same old dynamic was at play in this person’s new relationship. Maybe you have experienced this yourself. You might say you will never again become involved with someone who is hypercritical only to end up with a partner who doesn’t openly criticize you but shows you through their actions that they disapprove of you. Or maybe you’re in a relationship with someone who respects and supports you but complains that you’re very critical of them. It’s as if you’re in the same relationship

you were before, only with the roles reversed.

There is another kind of pattern that I call “experiential patterns.” These are instances where you see the same kinds of experiences recurring across generations. A grandfather was betrayed by his business partner, and the same type of thing happens again to his son and to his grandson. Or someone faces constant setbacks in their professional pursuits, and this pattern repeats itself. While it’s possible to call this a “family curse,” if there are positive patterns, you call them “family blessings.” Or more broadly, you may even call this “family karma.”

Many of us accept these patterns as karmic— something you must accept and live with. But what if there is more to this than meets the eye? What if there is a message behind these patterns? I call this what is it that is wanting to be seen. What if you need to unlock something to release yourself and also those who may come after you from repeating these patterns?

As decades of research on the psychology of emotion has shown, each of us has a response system that is activated by a range of triggers. What if your emotional response system is a window into understanding some of these patterns you are trapped in? And what if, by

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developing an understanding of this system and these underlying family patterns, you can then start to unlock the cycles of behavior and experiences you may have found yourself in? Does your frugality come from honoring the earth or due to a fear of lack? Does your worry about not having enough manifest in you holding yourself back and not taking some risk, thus putting a ceiling on your professional life? Or does this emotion and behavior make its presence felt by having too many possessions that clutter your home (hoarding), or by your demanding financial control of your partner?

Do you feel that you are not enough? Who else in your family has felt this way? What is the origin of this story you tell yourself? I encourage you to begin to journal some of the answers to these questions, but you will also explore them more deeply in later chapters. If you stop to notice how your family energy field influences your life, you can be more conscious of any decisions you make in that moment of choice. Will you do what you’ve always tended to do, or will you pivot, breaking out of an old pattern of action and reaction? My own experience has shown me that letting go of old habits and establishing new ones can be very difficult. If you don’t consciously choose a new way of thinking, feeling, or acting, your unconscious chooses the familiar path. When I started noticing

and working with patterns, I wasn’t aware that I resisted making plans far out into the future. Planning vacations or social events too far ahead of time was fraught with anxiety for me. My parents didn’t like to plan too far ahead either, perhaps because of my father’s unpredictable travel schedule, but as an adult with my own children, I didn’t have to deal with this when making plans. My unease about looking at hotel websites to compare and contrast lodgings made no sense. It took me a long while to realize that I was repeating an old family pattern.

Anuradha Dayal-Gulati is an energy practitioner and transformational coach with a Ph.D. in economics. After fifteen years in finance and academia, she began a new path of helping people release the past and reclaim their power. Trained in flower essence therapy and family constellation therapy, she lives in Boston, Massachusetts. https://healyourancestralroots.com/

To learn more: healyourancestralroots.com

Walk with Me

By Sharon E. Martin, M.D., Ph.D.

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My tipping point toward learning about shamanic practice and energy medicine came completely unexpectedly. I opened a clinic in rural Pennsylvania about 18 years ago and was faced every day with the differences between Western medicine and what felt to me like a more holistic healing approach.

One day, a Friday evening, about 5 o’clock, after a long week of seeing patients back-to-back, I was exhausted and ready to drop. The drive home was about 30 miles, and I was eager to get started. I came out of the exam room and stood at the counter in the nurses’ station to finish up my paperwork for the last patient. I looked up and saw the receptionist walking down the hall from the main lobby, a worried look on her face.

She told me a young man had come into the office with his girlfriend—he was not our patient—complaining of anxiety and looking agitated. The receptionist had talked over the situation with one of the nurses; they both thought it was important that I see this patient. My mind was a tumble of thoughts, some of them not

so charitable because of the time and possible needs. Doesn’t he have his own doctor (meaning, why do I have to work late on a Friday night)? What if he is clinically psychiatric (meaning, how am I going to get the state police or ambulance here to bring him to a psychiatric facility; or, what if it takes the police two hours to get here and I am stuck waiting)? Do we have to restrain him if he needs psychiatric admission and refuses to go (am I putting my staff in an unsafe position)?

I took the young man into the exam room while his girlfriend sat in the waiting room. Something told me to put away the computer and paper; I turned my gaze to him and just sat. He was handsome and youthful, with soft blonde hair that curled gently on his head. Later, I reflected that he looked like a cherub. He began to tell me of the vivid dreams he had every night; dreams about things that would happen to people he knew and sometimes to people he had never met. Mostly, the dreams were about bad outcomes for the people. In the daytime he could not get the images out of his head. The worry was disrupting his sleep and his ability to find peace.

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The key thing in psychiatry, at least at the level of a general practitioner, is whether these images are hallucinations or whether his beliefs were paranoid or delusional. Was he simply having a bipolar episode with his mind racing and his problems sleeping and eating? I decided to call his girlfriend back to the exam room. When he has these dreams, I asked her, do they come true? Do they yield accurate predictions? Yes, she said. Then I asked whether anyone else had noticed his ability to predict the future. Again, her answer was yes. In fact, his grandmother was a Romani and told the family when this young man was a toddler that he had “the sight.” The more I learned about him, the more I realized that Western medicine’s approach would not be helpful and might even be harmful. First, he was not crazy, and no amount of medication would fix what was ailing him. He had heightened intuitive skills, even predictive skills. The most psychiatry could offer was anti-anxiety medications, which would be sedating at best. And pushing this lovely young man into the medical system would cause him to be labeled as defective or “cracked,” which he was not. Rather, he was extremely intuitive and empathic traits that are undervalued in our society. What he really needed to learn was when to allow his “seeing” to occur, to make it on his terms. In a sense, he needed to gain mastery over his perceptions.

I told him how I saw his issues and that I did not think he was crazy. That was all he wanted to know. The relief on his face when I said this was reassuring to him and rewarding to me. Had I not seen this issue from an out-of-the-box perspective, things would have turned

out a lot differently. I suggested that he seek out some renowned intuitives and find out how they learned to master their “sight.” He left the office that day calmer and reassured. I left the office committed to learning a new way of “seeing” things myself.

Not long after, I began in-depth shamanic energy training with Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., founder of the Four Winds Society, an organization that teaches healing of the luminous energy body. Over the last, nearly 20 years, I have studied with some master healers, some of whom are very intuitive as they work with the energy body, while some follow techniques passed down from the elders of indigenous cultures. The commonality among all my teachers is that they firmly believe the pathways to health and well-being are much broader and deeper than those used in Western medicine. I have come to agree with them.

Sharon E. Martin, M.D., Ph.D., graduated from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and is a board-certified physician of Internal Medicine with a doctorate in physiology. She is a graduate of the Healing the Light Body curriculum of the Four Winds Society and the host of two radio shows, Maximum Medicine, and Sacred Magic, aired on the Transformation Talk Radio network. A doctor at a rural health clinic, she lives in Hustontown, Pennsylvania. https://drsharonmartin.com/

Live Well.