Ancestral Karma

I want to share a really powerful quote: “It ran in your family until it ran into you. You’ve been anointed to break the cycle. Generational curses stop with you.”

Family comes with baggage – every one of us was damaged by people we love including people that brought us into this world. Each of us also descended from people who faced terror, torture, imprisonment, persecution, extinction – or barely survived it but carried emotional and psychic scars for the rest of their lives, passing them down in obvious but also surprising ways to future generations. And every one of us has good reasons to hold onto grudges and even to perpetuate them. But each of us also has the opportunity to overcome what has been done not only to us, but to those who came before us and those who will come after us in our ancestral lineage.

You’ve been anointed to stop the cycle and heal generations of your family

This is an initiation that you cannot pretend isn’t happening. You will become aware of the karma you inherited long before you could speak or understand, and you will become responsible for ending any toxic, negative, violent or unhealthy curses that continue to impact your families.

In fact, there has never been a better, more capable, wiser, or more powerful person in your entire genetic line as you. That’s because you are here, and you are endowed with knowledge and insights that nobody before you had access to – the information age has enlightened us about DNA, about ancestral traits, about trauma and karma and about ways to heal and help future generations. In whatever version of the afterlife you believe in, you will be revered by every soul that shares any genetic material with you as the hero of your family.

That can be a huge responsibility and one that carries its own emotional baggage and grief. The most important thing you can do is to take care of you right now. In whatever way that feels right at this moment. Give yourself a hug. Pat yourself on the back. Do some tapping. Schedule a reiki session. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Think about your most joyful experiences. Think about those you love the most. Think happy thoughts. Drink some water or some tea.

Because as a result of the work you’re going to learn here, you’re going to open a portal (particularly in your dreams) that’s going to exorcise some demons. You may not even realize yet that some of your own conflicts and issues in this world were inherited and suddenly they’re going to start popping out of the woodwork. That’s because you will essentially have announced your presence as the ancestral healer of your family tree to everyone and everything that ever crossed the people you are related to. They’re not going to attack you or anything – they’re just gonna start popping in, particularly when you’re dreaming.

Hey – I’m the soldier that killed your dad 50 years ago in the Mekong Delta!

Howdy – I’m the girl that jilted your granddad and resulted in him marrying a woman he didn’t love and cheating on her which explains that whole other family y’all didn’t know about until you got messages from a bunch of crazy cousins on Ancestry.com!

I’m the Nice German gal whose husband was wounded the first year of World War II forcing me to take a job as a guard at Dachau. I selected your great aunts and uncles for extermination. I was just trying to feed my family!

I’m the railroad conductor who fell asleep at the switch, causing a crash that disabled your great grandfather which meant he wasn’t able to have more kids after your dad, who grew up desperate for siblings and connections and so he joined a cult and you were forced to share everything with a bunch of kids you weren’t even related to, so that dad could feel like he had a family. My bad!

I’m the auctioneer who sold your three-times great grandmother away from her parents, leaving a ripple effect throughout history of separation anxiety and fear of authority. But half of my descendants now are mixed race, so are we good?

In fact, all kinds of terrible historical figures might pop up in your subsconscious – Atilla the Hun, grave robbers from the plague years, the men who set Joan of Arc on fire, Popes and shitty feudal lords and Josef Mengele and Caligula and Roy Cohn and other less famous assholes. All these lesser demons just might show up because you smoked them out of their hiding holes. Doing that diminishes any power they have over you and your loved ones, but theyr’e gonna need a hot minute to realize their reign of terror is over.

And that’s okay if they want to pop in and yell boo at you, because you can handle it.

But some of your little unfriendly ghosts will be your actual ancestors. Because some of them did some horrible things too. Your ancestors were criminals and addicts and abusers and robber barons and shysters and grifters and killers. Not all of them of course, a small fraction of them, but you can see how one bad actor can really drag a family down. Those unlikeable members of your own family tree are also liable to show up and here’s something that you will learn in time:

You can divorce them. You can energetically remove them from your ancestral line in a loving, forgiving but permanent way. They’re not gonna like that, which is why when you begin doing this work they’re probably going to show up in your dreams with an attitude of “why, you meddling youngster, I walked fourteen miles every day during the Depression to the breadlines to feed my family, how dare you snip me out my rightful place!” to which you’re going to respond, “yeah, but you also lost the family farm to your gambling debts and you took off for a whole year when you were supposed to be working a factory in Cincinnati and sending money home and instead you were hanging out with drunks and whores and only sent two letters home during that year with any cash, and then had the nerve to show up and get mad when mom got us a new daddy!”

Ancestral Karma isn’t just a whirlpool that eddies down from one generation into the next without effort. Some of your ancestors are deliberately keeping that karma and even their traumas alive because they didn’t know they could release them, they certainly had no idea how, and they are deeply wedded to the wrongs that happened to them because they have not moved forward in their afterlife and forged a new identity for themselves. That shit that happened to them is all they’ve got and they believe it’s their only legacy to leave behind. That doesn’t mean they encourage the perpetuation of it because they are evil or abusive, but rather that they usually want to remind the next generations of how bad it got for them as a form of protection. They know what happens when you don’t know your history, they’re sticking around in some energetic way because they don’t want you to repeat their mistakes.

So we have to lovingly try to move them on their way, letting them know that you have learned the lessons and you have corrected them and if they still persist, you have to pluck them out which disconnects them from popping back up again (at least for you and your kin).

The vast majority of these tragic figures from your past are willing to learn how to let go – they just never found anyone to speak directly to them, to let them know it’s safe to do so and you are going to help. Sometimes that means you have to listen to them, so when they show up in your dreams or even in your waking life in some capacity, pay attention. Write down what they say. Repeat those words back to them, and tell them you’re going to work together to make things right.

Who keeps a dream journal? I would encourage you if you haven’t started, to start one. Even if all you do is enter a note or two on your phone’s app, that’s fine. But pay attention to who shows up in your dreams over the next few weeks – some will be beloved ancestors like parents or grandparents, seeking connection. Some will be figures you weren’t fond of in life or heard terrible tales about. Some you won’t recognize but you’ll sense that you are connected, and some will be the people who wronged your ancestors.

Don’t let any of them get into your head. Doing this work means reminding yourself regularly that you are the captain of this ship and in charge of your destiny. You’re going to right some wrongs but that means some wrongs are gonna show up! See them, note them, and move on. You don’t need to listen to the tales of woe by some 400-year old traitor from the American Revolution. They are dead. It’s their karma you have to deal with.

An effective book at understanding how we can face and overcome these issues is “Healing Ancestral Karma: Free Yourself from Unhealthy Family Patterns” by Dr. Steven D. Farmer, a psychotherapist and shaman specializing in ancestral healing.

We aren’t going to resolve your family conflict and issues today. We’re just beginning this work, and we’ll revisit this topic many times. But I’m going to give you a practical lesson to work on facing and healing your own family baggage and trauma. Have something with you that represents a past member of your family – a picture or an item that they once owned. If you have a candle, light it. Otherwise, just hold the item in your hands for a moment and picture a soft white light surrounding it.

Picture the person who owned this item, or who is featured in the photo. Who was it? A parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle, a distant relative, a long-ago ancestor? Who were they to you? Name your relationship with them (“Grandma Eileen” as example).

Then break down the number of transitions between you. If it is a grandparent, you are twice removed from them. If it’s a great-great uncle, you are (from the uncle to their sibling – your great great grandparent - is one step removed, from them to you is four steps removed, so this relative would be your five-steps-removed-uncle Josiah or whatever)

Next, list what you inherited from them. Did you get the same wispy beard that they also could never grow, or the wide child-bearing hips that gave them that certain sway? Did you inherit their Type 1 Diabetes or their addictive personality? Did you inherit their love of the ocean, their talent at poker, or their interest in Asian Art?

Now identify what you know of their death. Was it a natural death or were they killed? Did they leave this world knowing they were going and after a long and reasonably good life, or was their life stolen from them? A life stolen is a life’s purpose unfulfilled. What were they doing that they didn’t get to finish? Are you – or anyone else in your family – attempting to do something similar?

I believe that you are the manifestation of your ancestors’ greatest dreams and ambitions. You are the version of themselves that can control their destiny and can create their own fortune. Even those ancestors who were less than stellar still deserved to realize their dreams and many of them did not. The karma that they passed on is one, therefore, of unfulfillment. How have you and your siblings and cousins and children and others attempted to pick up that mantle, to resurrect it, and to carry it forth? Did you do it because it felt right and natural to do so, or did you do so because you were guilted into it by others? Guilt is part of the karmic wave that is rippling through your family tree. If grandpa never got to be elected as mayor of Boston after years of working his way up through bureaucratic positions and city council, and then your dad pressured you to run for an elected office, can you see how dad is carrying the guilt and grief and loss of his father and trying to keep it – keep that karmic wheel – going?

You should only carry what fits in your hands and has the right weight for you. Those are decisions though that you have to think about – how do we honor our ancestors in the healthiest and most practical ways?

But back to our exercise. Think of this ancestor and what you inherited or claimed from them. That can also include property, like the object you are holding or even your home if it passed down generations until you now own it.

Picture that white light around your ancestor as a bubble, alive and swirling around and around. That white light has been placed around your loved one to isolate the trauma they experienced in their lifetime, so that it does not continue. You may see that light spike or kind of ooze and that’s when you know there is some really deep work that must be done for this family member, to help them heal without trying to infect others. For the next couple weeks, pay attention to your dreams and see if this person shows up – in any incarnation of way – and write it down. Sometimes they have a really specific message, one that must be acknowledged before you can just release them and their karma.

Start though with a sense of compassion, even for your worst ancestors. They were traumatized and that’s why they traumatized others, likely, even those they loved. Treat them with love and compassion, and let them know that you are listening and you will be working with them to help.

Next Mother’s Day, I’ll be hosting a free live ancestral healing along matrilineal lines, so stay tuned for that announcement in early 2025.

There are many ways that we can face the karma and the trauma and the wrongs of past generations and find ways that we can heal them for ourselves, for our families, and even for those who lived a long time ago. It starts with compassion, even for the worst wrongs. Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself and to those who carry scars that they didn’t earn, that were passed down to them.

I am not however asking you to forgive those who wronged your family, your ancestors. Only those that share your genetics and your karma.

The Egyptians had a term called Merkaba – Mer (light) Ka (soul) and Ba (body). Merkaba is also a Hebrew word meaning Chariot of the Soul (mentioned 44 times in the Old Testament). The Merkaba is associated with the Tarot Card of the Chariot, and the Merkaba is also a symbol -

The symbol, which takes the shape of a star, is believed to be a divine vehicle made entirely of light and designed to transport or connect the spirit and body to higher realms.

If you have a family member who you believe has left some serious karmic damage in their wake, you can use the Merkaba to help them ascend to a place where they can find healing and continue on their evolutionary journey. This isn’t for an ancestor who was seriously evil or depraved or anything like that – just a normal fuckup who hurt their loved ones along the way and never atoned for it and which you still see cycles of that trauma playing out in your family. Addictions and betrayals and theft and codependency and mental illness and the like. Later, at your altars, you can incorporate tools that you will use for karmic ritual work.

We will discuss more about Ancestral Karma in future blogs as well as at Facebook and Instagram - are you following?