Life Is Still Messy After Healing

Last week I shared with you four common misunderstandings about working with the ancestors. Today I’m back to share one more. 🙂

MISUNDERSTANDING #5: Healing your ancestors will solve all your problems.

If you just heal your ancestors, your life will be great and all your problems will be solved.

More nuanced understanding: Life is still messy after healing.

When working with our ancestors we are navigating the deep waters of personal/ancestral/cultural healing and things tend to be messy. This messiness is to be expected.

However… even once the ancestors are well in spirit and the trauma flowing to us from them is resolved, we still have the very hands-on, in-the-dirt work of embodying new ways of being in the world.

Embodying these news ways of being can be painful, challenging, and upsetting of who we are (who we thought we were); our entire world often gets turned upside down for a while.

I’ve commonly observed (and experienced myself) a toggle back and forth between the ancestors receiving some healing and transforming in some way and then us having to make space/time for our own ways of being in the world to shift and reflect this change as well… We need time for integration and to be in our own process with it all (with their support of course).

A deeper look:

When first exploring ancestral healing, there is often a perception that as the ancestors become well, life just gets better and better. This is a misunderstanding as, in some ways, as the ancestors become well, our lives actually becomes more messy and more challenging.

However, we do tend to get through whatever the current challenge is (we have so much more support available to us) and things actually do become much better overall. And then, the ancestors and Spirit are like, ‘Ok, now it’s time to really get to work’ and everything explodes again.

This is good. This is to be expected as the intention of ancestral healing work is to not only to heal but to also bring the gifts of our ancestors (our gifts) fully into this tangible world.

Our lives and our concepts of ourselves often need to fall apart in order for us to fully embody our gifts and become who we truly are.

This falling (and falling and falling) apart needs to happen because very often what wants to come through us is different and bigger and often at odds  (in unexpected and beautiful ways) with life as we currently know it. We must become the person who can carry these previously unexpressed gifts forward into a world and a time when they are sorely needed.

So, have heart. 🙂 When we are in relationship with our well ancestors, even in the most challenging times, we concurrently experience support, aliveness and often, even joy. There is a knowing that we have exactly what is needed to meet each moment. When our ancestors are well, we are not alone during the challenging times and that makes all the difference.