The Sins Of The Forefathers

Ancestor worship is a wide-spread belief system, in both primitive and sophisticated cultures. Ancestral healing unfortunately gets very little attention these days, even though some of our patterns and energy imbalances may well stem from our genetic pool.

My first exposure to the concept of communicating with our Ancestors occurred many years ago, during initiation into the Southern African culture of divining and healing. During my training to become a Sangoma*, in a remote area in Southern Africa, time was always put aside for offering prayers to, and for consulting with the Ancestors. My mentor taught me how the Ancestor energies affected their still living relatives, and how, in most African cultures, they are seen as being our link to the spirit world.

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors ~ Edmund Burke

It is accepted in these cultures that our Ancestors live concurrently with us, and that the idea behind ancestral communication and healing should be seen as quite simple. Where intense types of behavior, problems or traumas have occurred with one or more of our forefathers, the actual energy from that very experience gets passed down to future generations. I feel this concept is in line with the words found in the Bible, “laying the sins of the parents upon their children.”

I was taught that we carry the resonant patterns of our forebears at a genetic level, somewhat like a radio frequency tuned to our Ancestors, allowing information or energy to occur. My mentor would emphasize how fourteen was the appropriate number when going back into one’s ancestry. The fourteen souls would be made up by adding your parents (two), grandparents (four), and great grandparents (eight), equaling fourteen Ancestors in total to incorporate into any healing and clearing work, or ritual.

I have worked on sending distant healing to a fourth generation Ancestor of a client, who suddenly, and for no apparent reason, experienced the onset of anxiety attacks. We were able to trace her family tree, in which a particular deceased family member had been institutionalized with severe anxiety episodes. That was a very memorable experience that changed her life.

More attention seems to be given lately to Ancestral tracing on the Internet, whereby one can trace your lineage via specialized websites. Television shows on this subject have also become popular, such as the well-known genealogy documentary series, Who Do You Think You Are? In this show celebrities partake in their own journeys, going back in time to explore their own Ancestry, and it actually appears to have had a profound healing effect on some of the individuals featured.

We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us ~ Liam Callanan

Sometimes, as psychic advisors, we are consulted about the possibility of being cursed, particularly when customers feel they are going through very dark episodes in their lives. Traumas created or experienced by our own forefathers can be incredibly powerful. With the help of my mentor, during my own training to become a Sangoma, and subsequently in working with other healers, I have worked through releasing any ancestrally blocked energy of my own. This was mainly done through forgiveness and understanding, especially by attempting to see that they too were doing the best they could with what they had at their disposal during their space in time.

*Sangoma is a Zulu term colloquially used to describe Southern African traditional healers and diviners. They are in effect the shamans of Southern African tribes.