Here’s an example from my personal healing journey about how we might use compassionate witness to bring healing to our ancestral line. This healing can happen during a shamanic journey or meditative state.
I always realized that my motherline carried a heavy feeling of grief. The grief was so tangible, it showed up in old family photographs, etched on their faces and in their posture. I never knew its origins until one of my ancestor mothers visited me during a healing session around my desire to be more present with myself. She identified herself as Wilhelmina and appeared grief-stricken, cradling a dead baby in her arms. Her husband had been away from home when her infant child died, and so the responsibility for digging the grave fell to her.
It was winter, and the act of laying her beloved baby in the cold ground stripped her raw. She was not able to share the depth of this pain and grief with anyone, so it entered the family genetic stream and carried through the women in the line, finally down to me, her great-great-granddaughter, many years later.
I compassionately witnessed her pain, then asked my spirit guides to drain the heavy energy of grief from the scene and from the family line. In doing so, the energy of unexpressed grief shifted – both within the family line and within me. After the healing, I was more able be present with myself, including a willingness to open my heart wider and the ability to make better daily food choices.
Sometimes in a shamanic journey or meditation, the information we receive is literal, and sometimes it’s metaphorical. Was my great-great-grandfather literally away from home when the baby died? And did my ancestor mother literally dig a hole in the frozen ground herself to bury her child? I don’t know. What I do know: she felt emotionally abandoned and alone in her grief, and it was a frigid cold, isolating feeling to her. So cold that the energy of grief became frozen in my motherline until it was witnessed and allowed to flow again in being released.
In holding that compassionate witness and focusing on the larger truth, healing came to my family line.
A weekend workshop on “Ancestral Healing: Healing the Red Thread” will be held April 14-15, 2012, at Healing Services on the River in Prairie du Sac, WI. For more information, email debramorrill@charter.net or call 608-279-4319.