Connect With Your Ancestors: Transforming the Transgenerational Trauma of Your Family Tree (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

The journey I am currently travelling gained greater intensity when I was twelve years old. My two aging grandmothers sat with me around their respective kitchen tables in rural and small town Saskatchewan and shared with me all the family lineage that they had gathered. I carefully copied every detail they shared onto long scrolls of paper I had created by hand, taping on new pages as they were needed. I was fortunate that they had plenty to share and it set me off on a trail I couldn’t possibly imagine at that time, like a detective with an exciting mystery to solve and a few hot clues. The twists in the family ancestry continue to present themselves today and the mystery is far from solved. I still have those original scrolls. I was fascinated with All My Relations, both the paternal lines and all the many fascinating maternal lines. I knew that the deep connection I had to my past, with the long line of women and men behind me, was a great resource in my life when the going got tough. I always have a strong sense that I am part of a greater whole – a greater system. The rapid advancement and increased usage of the internet throughout the world this past decade has taken my genealogical findings to great heights. The number of family history websites has exponentially gathered the people of the world into a much smaller interconnected community. At some point, it occurred to me that all the family history buffs in the world are searching for healing for their ancestral family systems. I have gathered knowledge about my family system beyond anything I had every hoped to know. Today my journey, which includes traditional genealogy, emotional genealogy and genetic genealogy, has gathered thousands of ancestors and hundreds of my grandmothers and grandfathers. I honour each life through acknowledgement and respect, knowing that a little piece of each one of them carries on within me. I honour and accept their trials and tribulations. I honour each destiny and each fate.

Along with my genealogical journey, I exponentially expanded my awareness and my worldview the past five decades by travelling to sixty countries, some many times over, enjoying the beauty of all the wonderful continents on planet Earth. My first big trip was to Anchorage, Alaska when I was fourteen years old. I won the honour of representing Canada with three other young Rangers (members of the Girl Guide organization) at a two-week backpacking trip with dozens of American Girl Scouts from many different states. That trip opened my heart to the world and I yearned to know everything I could know about the world and her people. That thirst for knowledge continues today. I love experiencing the diversity of people, their mindsets and cultures, the natural world we share globally and the ever-changing impact of humanity.

My life path has been quite circuitous. For forty years, I experienced the ups, the downs, the beginnings and the endings of several very important intimate life relationships, including the tragic death of one life partner that felt like he was taken far too soon. It became quite clear that life was very fragile and that every day was a blessing. I am grateful for every lesson that I learned along the way from each of my life partners in shaping who I am today. As well, over the past thirty years I experienced the wonderful journey of motherhood, finding great joy in raising three young sons with various physical, emotional and educational life challenges from the moment of conception into the amazing young men they are today. I acknowledge that it took a village and I’m grateful to all those who helped me on the journey – they know who they are. I grieved the loss of babies that shared life in my womb for a time and didn’t come to share a living journey. I was fortunate to have great joys and great challenges presented to me along this spiritual journey that nudged me this way or that whenever I needed to change direction and pointed the way when I was stuck and wandering in the wilderness on my own. One of those directions was a lengthy odyssey into social and political justice and advocacy and I spent twenty plus years going outwards – looking at the issues of others who were marginalized in some way by dominant society.

The past twenty years or so I embraced a path of lifelong learning. I explored the spiritual and cultural practices of many indigenous peoples around the world and investigated with great curiosity most of the existing Eastern and Western religious practices and their nature, and the reciprocal relationship they have in the lives of human beings. With the energy of the new millennium revealing itself, I was drawn into the field of indigenous peoples in a strong way, deeply focused on understanding the transgenerational trauma left behind by colonization, assimilative government legislation, and the enforced attendance of many generations of indigenous children in residential schools with the intent being cultural genocide. I made every effort to learn from those who were impacted by this trauma and created as many opportunities as possible for indigenous and non-indigenous peoples to be in the same space for interaction, conversation and celebration of cultural diversity.

In 2003 I experienced physical body trauma, without apparent cause, that stopped me dead in my tracks. The pain was so overwhelming it could not be swept under the rug. My whole life I had been involved in athletic endeavours of one type or another and injuries carrying pain were just part of the journey. This new intense body pain carried a message for me that I couldn’t ignore. I could no longer use social activism; keeping busy; or yoga, Pilates, aerobics or skiing to mask the inner emotional trauma that needed to be addressed. I had to admit to myself that being a survivor to a fault with great resilience and a high threshold for pain had served me well in the past. That way of being had permitted me to carry on with life – day after day. Now it was time to surrender to this pain and allow myself to open to vulnerability. It was time to go within for the answers and to stop ignoring that pile of emotional trauma that I thought I had so cleverly swept under the rug. Time to look at all that messy emotional stuff that I had put aside for so long. I had to face myself fully in the mirror and look myself in the eyes – look deeply into my soul. I needed to connect with my authentic Self – that patient Soul that was eternal within me. It was time to open the enormous trunk that carried all the trauma I had experienced in this lifetime and all the transgenerational trauma for my family system and ancestors and to take action to resolve it.

My love of research and writing and my scholarly Soul guided me back to learning in a formal way. I started a degree in religious studies at the University of Calgary on September 11, 2001 - yes, it was 9/11 - and following that surreal day it was very satisfying to gain a greater understanding of all the religions of the world. It was so timely for understanding the religious and spiritual dynamics within the human condition that are based on fears that transgenerationally linger within causing so many to readily set about creating separation of one religion from another and one ethnic group from another. I learned more about death and dying and ritual practices around the world. I completed that degree with a thesis on the rise of Pentecostalism in Bolivia and the rest of the global south and the way politics plays into religion. It encouraged a study of migration patterns and religious trends that were occurring around the world. Following that degree, I explored the energetic fields of intuitive development, mediumship, and the healing properties of touch.

Back into the academic world, from 2009 to 2011 I completed a master’s degree in conflict analysis and management at Royal Roads University with a concentration on political, ethnic and security issues. It was a mind-expanding program for understanding systemic responses to situations of conflict wherever they occurred in the world. There was a tangential study of truth commissions and how the deep transgenerational trauma that is left unresolved by the process of the commission lies festering just under the surface of society waiting to be resolved one person at a time. My major research project was focused on the transgenerational trauma for individuals, families and communities left behind by the residential school system in Canada and the underlying conflict that creates in society between the Indigenous Peoples and the Settlers. I listened to the voices of many long-time community peacebuilders, including those with indigenous ancestry and those with non-indigenous ancestry, who encouraged personal healing of inner wounds as a precursor to effective cultural peacebuilding between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.

This gave birth to my interest in...