Healing the Family Soul

Guest post by Jackie Stewart for Crafting the Sacred’s series on Ancestral Threads.

We each have a family Soul that yearns to experience divine love, acceptance and wholeness in the same way that our individual Souls do.

As individuals, when we experience painful or challenging situations and emotions, our Souls call us to accept them with love and integrate them into our lives.

We want to avoid pain so we often push away, ignore, suppress or resist the very experiences that our Souls call us to accept. It’s so much easier to accept the experiences that we judge as positive than it is to accept those we don’t like. It’s so much easier to accept the emotions we judge as positive than it is to accept those we don’t like.

On a Soul level there is no positive or negative – there are simply situations that give us opportunities to embrace our experiences with love and acceptance so we can discover wholeness.

On an individual level, when aspects of our personalities or experiences get rejected or denied or suppressed or pushed out we block our Souls from feeling love and wholeness.

On an ancestral level, when something has happened in our family that was rejected or denied or suppressed or pushed out, our family Soul is blocked from feeling love and wholeness.

Yet the family Soul seeks to feel love and wholeness in exactly the same way that our individual Souls do. When events in the past weren’t healed they get transmitted to future generations to heal.

All families carry unresolved traumas that remain unhealed because our ancestors simply didn’t have the emotional resources available to heal them.

Traumatic events like war, death, suicide, miscarriage, famine, adoption, murder, illegitimacy and abuse that take place in a family can reverberate through future generations causing emotional scars that get passed through the family line. If those experiences weren’t fully healed at the time they happened, the unresolved pain stays in the family Soul seeking resolution.

Those of us living now are in the unique position of having wonderful resources to heal and, as a result, we are not simply healing ourselves, we are healing our entire ancestral line. When we are able to open our hearts wider to welcome in all the experiences of our families we heal the past, present and future generations too.

If you find yourself struggling to heal an issue that seems to be persistent or doesn’t have a logical basis in your own experience there’s a good chance that you’re experiencing the pain of an ancestral wound. Wounds in the family Soul can show up in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

You might feel blocked in manifesting your life’s work because you are unknowingly being loyal to an ancestor who couldn’t live their creative dreams.

You may be carrying a sense of deep grief or hopelessness that comes from your loyalty to an ancestor who died young.

You could be struggling with money out of loyalty to an ancestor who died in poverty.

This nature ritual will enable you to honour your ancestors and bring more acceptance and wholeness to your family Soul and, subsequently, to your own individual Soul.

Nature Ritual for Ancestral Healing

Go out into nature and, if possible, take off your shoes so you are barefoot on the belly of the earth. Close your eyes and take 100 slow deep breaths in through the nostrils and out through the nostrils to centre yourself.

You are going to create nature art that represents the integration of your family Soul. (Put your shoes on now if you need to).

Gather a collection of leaves or stones or shells or nuts or seeds or flowers or twigs.

Begin by choosing a small growing plant or particularly beautiful nature gift to represent you. Now choose nature gifts to represent your parents, siblings, grandparents and other ancestors going back 7 generations. Place them in rows with your grandparents behind your parents, great-grandparents behind your grandparents and so on.

As you go further back down your family line, you may find it easier to select one nature gift to represent an entire generation unless you feel particularly called to represent each individual.

Now you will choose items to represent trauma or pain that may not have been acknowledged in your family and place them on the earth where you instinctively feel they need to be placed. If you sense that a particular wound is attached to a particular individual, you may feel called to place the item that represents it next to that person.

Tapping into the infinite love of your wise Soul self, welcome in each of these wounds with acceptance – all families have experiences of these somewhere in the ancestral line, and all families have struggled to accept these which is why they remain unhealed.

Place an item on the earth to represent each of these wounds even if you’re not aware of them being an issue in your family and say each statement silently or aloud as you place the item.

I honour the stillborn babies and the miscarriages
I honour the family members who were cast out
I honour the tragic deaths
I honour the abuse
I honour the shame
I honour the trauma of war
I honour the poverty and famine

Other wounds may come to you that need to be honoured. This may feel quite emotional for you, be gentle with yourself. Take a moment to look at this representation of your family Soul and all the pain there has been.

Now it’s time to place other nature finds into this representation of the family Soul as you say these statements silently or aloud.

I honour the choices that were made so I could live
I honour the skills and gifts and Soul qualities that I have received
I accept the blessings of my ancestors as I live the life they have gifted me

If you feel called to, you can add to this ritual with something from your own sacred practice. You may wish to sit in quiet contemplation for a while. Leave it on the earth as a symbol of acceptance and, when it feels complete, you can leave.

Your family Soul will now receive the blessings of the sun and the moon and the elements. And I hope that you, dear Soul, will be more able to experience the peace of acceptance and the blessings of your ancestors in your life.

I am grateful to the work of John L. Payne whose workshops and books have enabled me to do much beautiful work to heal my family Soul.

Photos by Jason Smalley

Jackie Stewart is a Soul whisperer, barefoot breather, nature spirit, and creative thinker. Jackie has been holding sacred space for people to heal since 1999 using spiritual counseling, flower and crystal essences, guided meditation and energy work. Her new Emotional Healing Package contains powerful Soul Medicine from guided meditation, flower and crystal essences and an emotional healing workbook filled with love, wisdom and healing and is available with 25% off  until October 31st.
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