08/29/2022
Five Beautiful Teachings of Shamanism
A Written Series of Five installments
by Gwendolyn C. Natusch, B.S.Ed., M.Ed., MSW
Installment One: Healing Our Ancestors
It appears that there is a real uptick in ancestral healing & transformation happening in the field of shamanic healing. I’ve been working with individuals myself for the last year or more and have developed a 3-session process for individual ancestral healing. The demand for this work required it!
So, what is this ancestral healing thing? When I first was introduced to ancestral healing I had images of my cave man ancestors come to mind. Quickly I learned that not only did I have a very limited idea of ancestors in the way that medicine people and many indigenous people understand them.
Yes indeed, we have ancestors that were cave people and ancestors that come from Africa which is understood now as the place of man’s beginnings on earth about 2 million plus years ago. However, we are more interested in our ancestors of today when we look through the lens of ancestral healing. These ancestors you know! These would be mother, father, grandmother, grandfather (both maternal and paternal), great grandmother and great grandfather. Some people knew or know their great, great grandmother or great, great grandfather and some may have heard many stories about them and their influence still lingers and lives on in the family and in the descendants. In this healing work we are concerned with the ancestors who have influenced our lives directly. It is this pool of ancestors that we look to for healing and transformation of ourselves, our ancestors themselves and also our descendants.
So, what is this all about?
Our ancestors have had wonderful lives that were full of joy, love, cheer, successes and accomplishments as well as grief, loss, trauma, illness, relationship challenges, childlessness, abuse and more.
In fact families struggle with seven types of shadows:
1. abuse
2. addiction
3. violence
4. poverty
5. illness
6. abandonment
7. betrayal
These shadows and the wholeness are passed down to descendants at the time of the ancestor’s death. They move down through the DNA of their descendants as energetic signatures. The unhealed wounds of our ancestors visit their descendants as illness, trauma; that was the same or very similar to the unhealed trauma of the ancestor, relationship wounds, money problems, issues children and bearing or losing children, addiction and on and on.
This goes in the opposite direction as well in that our ancestors pass down, talents, ability to amass wealth, to acquire a great job, happiness in family life, beauty of the body and heart and on and on. The unhealed wounds of our ancestors however, keep us from our gifts that are our own as an individual Soul and from those gifts that we have inherited from them. Ancestral wounds can keep us sick, stuck and senseless.
It is important to honor our ancestors for the lives they have lived, the courage it took to forge forward as well as for the challenges they faced and conquered. Their lives, joys, struggles and earned wisdom helped us to bring us where we are now.
Whether we know it or not we live the stories of our ancestors in our thoughts, bodies, memories and mind. They comprise what we learn at our foundations as a child and they are concretized as we grow older. This creates a heavy and carved in stone belief system of how you work, how the family works and how the world works. Most never look at their foundation stone that was carved at age 5 to 7 and live their whole lives with these beliefs and guidelines. Often, they are great grampa’s learnings and hard-earned wisdoms and descendants simply don them as if they were their own without question.
Your story isn’t new, in fact it is a replay or a retelling of stories handed down to you. They are the sagas inherited from your mother, grandfather, father and great grandmother. Some are stories and conclusions that came from fear or trauma and other stories that are really our beliefs, come from joy and wholeness. To reflect and decipher these is life changing because we recognize what needs to be made whole within us. This is where shamanic healing with the ancestors can be life changing and open you to more joy, success, passion, love, stillness and contentment.
In ancestral healing we want to clear our DNA that contains our ancestors’ limits, wounds and traumas from our body, energy field and mental and emotional bodies. In this healing work we bring their lessons fully into our awareness and discover which of these wounds live in our life, heart, mind and body. In the shamanic ancestral healing work, we clear these shadows from our lives and our energy field and in doing so we also free or ancestors from their unhealed wounds. This also keeps these traumas and wounds from our descendants and prevents them from showing up or clears them like the ancestors are cleared energetically through the awareness building and the energy clearing. The DNA signatures are made whole and are cleared through this sacred healing work.
In this healing of the ancestors, you will also connect with your ancestors’ joys, loves, passions, successes and accomplishments. You will see where these also live in your life as well! Ultimately, you change your inner stories and are no longer limited by an old, old list of guidelines for life that you have outgrown or never explored your own sense of them to see if they fit, if they serve you or even if you agree with them at all.
This is ancestral healing work, this is the clearing and transforming of family trauma and unhealed wounds found in the culture, behavior and shadows of families. Each generation is tasked to clear and heal their own wounds and shadows so that their descendants do not have to carry and heal them and they leave a beautiful legacy after they die.
I implore you to honor your ancestors or they will continue to haunt you and to live through you through these energetic DNA signature, family stories, beliefs, and culture. You will be destined to live their trauma wounds, illnesses and unhappiness’s.
In shamanic ancestral healing you can change the stories and break the curse from your ancestor's wounds so they and you are restored and healed. Then you can begin to celebrate your ancestors no matter how terrible their legacy was.
We do this work for ourselves, our ancestors and our children and grandchildren! We also do it to elevate the world. When we rewrite the ancestral stories, we elevate our ancestors and let go of holding them responsible for our lives and negative legacies. In this way we stand in self responsibility. We then can bring home to our hearts the beautiful gifts, wisdoms and joys of our ancestors and our Soul!
