Crystal Prescriptions: The A-Z Guide to Over 1,200 Symptoms and Their Healing Crystals - Judy Hall 2006

Our ancestors within us
Ancestral Healing

The deeds of an ancestor can create family karma that continues to influence the fate of the family’s descendents until the karma is dissolved.

Dr Hiroshi Motoyama

The ancestors are always with us. In some cultures they are honoured, but much of the modern world has lost touch.

Transgenerational issues

Genealogical karma offers a unique opportunity to learn lessons associated with the previous experiences of your loved ones and ancestors, as well as the predecessors of your community, organization, or nation. This level of karma is often very impersonal, and it is farther reaching than the karma of an individual. Healing and resolving family-level and group causal patterns has a liberating effect among all members of the target population. Some experiences are so universal that each person incarnated shares in this inherited karma.

Nicholas Pearson

As Nicholas Pearson points out, genealogical karma goes far beyond the family, and it can incorporate ubiquitous family myths that cross cultures and belief systems. In addition to genetic memory, ancestral memory plays its part in transmitting transgenerational issues. Anything that is spoken about in the family, passing down the ancestral line, becomes ’true’ even when it isn’t factually correct. But it symbolises the family saga: the myth that is lived by. Family ’memories’ of being Russian or other displaced aristocracy, of being swindled out of money or land, or dispossessed from a homeland are commonplace. These myths and sagas incorporate themes and issues that may need to be healed not only at the personal level but also on behalf of the greater whole — when one shifts, everything shifts. Common themes often include both extremes of a spectrum, played out in alternate lives or by different members of the family:

Challenging ancestral and transgenerational themes and issues

✵ Displacement from land of origin

✵ Power — economic and personal

✵ Codependence vs. Solitary loner

✵ Victim-martyr-saviour-rescuer

✵ Unworthiness, Shame, Guilt, Fear

✵ Resentment, Criticism

✵ Abandonment, Rejection

✵ Family scapegoat

✵ Bondage

✵ Submission — ’always comply’

✵ Rebellion — ’never comply’

✵ Freedom of the individual, Suppression of the individual

✵ Perfectionism

✵ Dominance, Abuse, Addiction

✵ Aggression (the ’war gene’)

✵ Suppression of emotion

✵ Disappointment

✵ ’It’s not safe’, ’Don’t trust…’

✵ ’Look up to those above us on the social scale’

✵ ’Know your place’, ’Obey those who rule’

✵ ’We have every right’, ’We have no right’

✵ ’There will never be enough’, ’It will be taken away’

✵ ’It should be different’

✵ ’In the past we were’, ’We were swindled’

✵ ’People like us don’t’

You can probably add your own experience to this list. I’ve intentionally listed the challenging aspects because these are — generally — what need to be healed and transformed. But it is wise to remember that ancestral themes can also be positive, and once the negative has been released, it creates room for the positive potential to manifest. However, ancestral imperatives such as service to one’s country, to one’s family, or to one’s fellow human beings can have either a positive or challenging effect according to how they played out through the generations — and how much they stifle or thwart an individual’s soulplan and soul expansion. This is especially so where such imperatives have become deeply rooted to the exclusion of all else and so a lineage breaker will incarnate to break the pattern.

Family inheritance and DNA

Research into the effects of the ancestors on genetic inheritance has been going on since the early 1960s. Early researchers used isolation tanks and pharmacological triggers to access deep DNA memories and transgenerational experiences. It was postulated that family history, and a carry-over of memories, may have a profound effect on well-being, the effects of earlier experiences subtly altering the family DNA through biological memory amendments. From current scientific investigations, such changes are recorded in the so-called ’junk-DNA’ helix (see page 83), negative experiences leading to ’taboo’ areas of life or vulnerability to specific dis-eases that pass down the family line. However, positive experiences can imprint useful survival skills and soul qualities:

Over sixty-five years ago the Jewish people were liberated from Nazi Europe. Since that time, researchers have found that the Holocaust has had a psychological, social, and cultural effect on first and second generation survivors… The third generation appears to be reconstructing their grandparents’ history, resurfacing their legacy, and in doing so they are realizing the strength and heroic battles their grandparents fought in order to get to the place they are today. Findings indicate that rather than ruminating on the pain of their ancestors, focusing attention on their strength may result in the ability to move past the pathological symptom.

The research suggests that ’epigenetic inheritance’, where a person’s life experiences can affect the genes of their offspring, may play a huge part in a child’s development. While it is widely acknowledged among scientists that DNA does not change, chemical tags that originate from a person’s lifestyle and habits can become attached to DNA leading to small differences.

Melissa Kahane-Nissenbaum¹⁴

According to the new insights of behavioral epigenetics, traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors’ past, leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA. Jews whose great-grandparents were chased from their Russian shtetls; Chinese whose grandparents lived through the ravages of the Cultural Revolution; young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived massacres; adults of every ethnicity who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents — all carry with them more than just memories. Like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. They become a part of us, a molecular residue holding fast to our genetic scaffolding. The DNA remains the same, but psychological and behavioral tendencies are inherited. You might have inherited not just your grandmother’s knobby knees, but also her predisposition toward depression caused by the neglect she suffered as a newborn. Or not. If your grandmother was adopted by nurturing parents, you might be enjoying the boost she received thanks to their love and support. The mechanisms of behavioral epigenetics underlie not only deficits and weaknesses but strengths and resiliencies, too. And for those unlucky enough to descend from miserable or withholding grandparents, emerging drug treatments could reset not just mood, but the epigenetic changes themselves. Like grandmother’s vintage dress, you could wear it or have it altered. The genome has long been known as the blueprint of life, but the epigenome is life’s Etch A Sketch: Shake it hard enough, and you can wipe clean the family curse… Just because certain genes have been switched on or off due to our ancestors’ experiences does not mean they have to stay turned on or off… We are all the authors of our own lives, but if we do nothing to change the default script that is being played out then the ’broken record’ will just keep playing.¹⁵

So, the effect of trauma can be reversed, and may well lead to incorporating new strengths and soul learnings into the ancestral line, facilitating evolution. A process that may have commenced fifty, five hundred, five thousand or fifty thousand years ago. However, the drug-based therapy suggested above may not be required as crystals could do the switching for you.

The fears of the fathers

In an experiment carried out at the Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, mice were subjected to fear around the smell of cherry blossom. That fear passed to subsequent generations through amended sperm. So, the previous experience of an ancestor, in addition to personal previous life experience, may underlie seemingly irrational phobias.¹⁶ In commenting on the findings, Dr Brian Dias, from the department of psychiatry at Emory University, said: “We have begun to explore an underappreciated influence on adult behaviour — ancestral experience before conception. From a translational perspective, our results allow us to appreciate how the experiences of a parent, before even conceiving offspring, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations. Such a phenomenon may contribute to the etiology and potential transgenerational transmission of risk for neuropsychiatric disorders such as phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

The effect of the personal karmic past

When genetic memory is married to a person’s own karmic experience, the genetic sequence is switched on. If it does not match the karmic experience, it is less likely to be activated. Of two siblings in a family line that carries alcoholic addiction, for example, one may bypass the addiction but could perhaps display another kind of obsession or compulsive behaviour, while the other becomes a full-blown addict. Similarly, a genetic precondition such as Huntington’s Chorea may be triggered, or not, according to personal past life inheritance and the soulplan for the present life.