A few years back, I flew to Arizona to visit my parents where they wintered as snowbirds. The trip was emotionally unsatisfying, and I was especially frustrated that my mom wasn’t able to be present with me. It triggered me, and I cried in the shuttle from their home to the airport to return to Wisconsin.

This continued to affect me profoundly for several days. I finally journeyed about it and asked my helping spirits for insight and healing.

In that healing journey, the divine compassionate ones brought through one of my ancestor grandmothers. She identified herself as Wilhelmina. She 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 unable 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 lineage, finally down to me, her great-great-granddaughter, many years later.

Was my great-great-grandfather really away from home when the baby died? Did my ancestor grandmother literally dig a grave in the frozen ground herself? I don’t know. What I do know is this. She felt emotionally abandoned and alone in her grief. It was a frigid isolating feeling to her – so cold that the energy of grief became frozen in my maternal lineage until it was witnessed in this journey. By holding space for Wilhelmina, the sadness and sense of loss was allowed to flow and release.

I compassionately witnessed her pain, then asked my spirit guides to do an ancestral healing. They drained the heavy energy of grief from her, the lineage, and me.

After this healing, I noticed shifts in my mother and in myself. For me, it included a willingness to open my heart wider, to allow more joy in, and to be more present with my emotions.

I always realized that my motherline carried a heavy energy of grief. The grief was tangible – it showed up in old family photographs, etched on their faces and in their posture. I never knew its origin until this journey.

This work is real, and it matters.

September 10, 2021