Healing The Karmic Patterns Of Ancestral Trauma

Sometimes during meditation, I recall past events and childhood memories that had been long forgotten. A recent vision, for example, took me back to the home I was raised in. But the scene was one I do not remember.

I saw myself as a little girl, around three years old, and members of my mother’s family were visiting us. Everyone was singing and playing instruments together. I saw myself watching them and enjoying the music, but then felt guided to look diagonally upward to another scene happening simultaneously.

In the other scene I saw my ancestors; at least that is what I concurred because they were going back in a line. Behind my great grandmother, who was playing the piano, there were people who I sensed to be her parents, and then her grandparents behind them, and so on.

In that glimpse into the distant past, I observed how the behavioral patterns and family dynamics of our ancestors, some of it dysfunctional and unhealthy, had become the patterns of my family. I also saw how these patterns were passed on to me and how it has shaped the patterns in my life and my own family to this day.

I then invoked the Heavenly Light to wash over all of us: myself and my family, my living relatives, all my ancestors who came before us, as well as all of our future descendants. I prayed that all of the disharmony in my family lineage be healed, and also that any other families and individuals we had disharmonious interactions and relationships with be healed too.

In Hawaiian culture this kind of healing prayer is known as Ho’oponopono. It is an ancient spiritual practice of reconciliation and forgiveness, which in English literally translates to ‘to make right,’ or ‘to make good.’ Ho’oponopono is essentially a personal responsibility and forgiveness prayer or ritual to heal, among other things, feuding families and ancestral trauma. When practiced repeatedly, it is said to balance out karma. I do believe in praying for those who wronged or harmed us, because within their healing we find our own as well.

A Course in Miracles tells us “When I am healed, I am not healed alone.” Any healing work you do goes forward to your descendants and backward to your ancestors ~ Steven Farmer

Family karma is an interesting topic, if we are willing to put our strong emotions about it aside for a moment. Many wounds can be healed when we approach the topic from a spiritually oriented perspective. I have also been shown by my deceased loved ones, spirit guides and the angels, that we all come to the earth plane to learn and grow spiritually as a soul. The subjects and issues that trigger us most are also the ones we want to pay the closest attention to and surround with the most amount of compassion.

What I’ve seen in my own life, as well as in many readings with my clients over the years, is that we don’t necessarily have to resolve the karmic imbalance with a living family member whom we have an issue with. Instead, we need to resolve it within ourselves. We can free ourselves from the karmic ties and dysfunctional dynamics by personally apologizing to the Universe and asking for forgiveness, for ourselves and for them.

We can even do this with family members who have been utterly cruel or abusive to us. When we forgive someone who has hurt us, we are liberating ourselves from a dynamic that we don’t have to go through with them again in a future lifetime. It prevents or heals ongoing patterns that are dysfunctional and destructive, instead of passing them down to our descendants and future generations.

Every family has karmic patterns to heal. Once we awaken to the fact that we have come to the earth plane to grow spiritually, we become more aware of our true responsibilities. We gain a deeper understanding of how envy, greed, fear, resentment and anger is not only inherited from our ancestors, but how we can be the origins of new dysfunctional patterns that will be passed on to our descendants and future generations.

Unfortunately, it’s not only positive and influential habits or traits that can be handed down generation to generation — so can destructive perceptual lens or relationship patterns that we are likely blind to ~ Jody Michael

Once we see and acknowledge the core of our own and other’s karmic dysfunction, it becomes obvious that our first job is to love and forgive ourselves, in order to the same for others. When we do this, it dissolves much of the psychic wounds and dysfunctional cellular memories in our family lineage, and it also offers a great example for our family, relatives and friends.

Healing happens in families, communities and nations only when we can identify the trauma wounds that have been passed down over many generations and take personal responsibility for it today. We must also surround it with much healing light, forgiveness, and unconditional love. This is when the miracles of transformation begin to happen. We stop wrestling with it, we end the suffering of many generations, and the love becomes more powerful than the ancestral wound.