Flight Chronicles of the Hummingbird - Day 53 – 5-29-2021 - "Know Thyself" - My Understandings on Generational Trauma and Personal Trauma

 

Everyday gets more and more interesting with what I am learning about myself and the beautiful changes that are happening.

Just learning how to sit in whatever feeling is coming up for me in the moment is huge.

You see, I’ve been listening to a book called It Didn't Start With You, By Mark Wolynn, about how the traumas in our lives are not the only challenges that we deal with. We also have generational trauma and some of the feelings we have are not ours but have come from a long line of pain. It comes through the DNA (and not the DNA that deals with health).

I originally got the book quite a few years ago because that has been how I felt for most of my life. Something drew me to listening to it again, as I never finished it.

I had been to see therapists, coaches and a friend hypnotized me as well. Having gone under hypnosis was when I realized that a lot of the fear, shame and grief that I had been carrying around, especially the shame, was actually my mother’s (I’m sure there was other stuff, but that was the theme at the time). The book goes into how and why that is.

Both sides of my family absolutely have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A portion of my dad’s side of the family, two and three generations back from me, was wiped out in a concentration camp in 1943. I have a family tree that I made on ancestry.com and when I came across that part of the family, all of the death dates were 1943, there were no months/days on any of them. I even have a picture somewhere of them that my grandmother used to show me.

Then there is my mother’s side. She is a second-generation holocaust survivor. She was born in Czechoslovakia and she and her parents left when she was four and went to Israel for safety and then to Germany after the war ended. Something very traumatic happened to her when she was a child, and she would never share.

When I learned about the fact that she had such trauma as a child, I was more easily and readily able to picture her as a child in order to forgive her and then to ultimately forgive myself. That was necessary for me to heal and move forward because all of the anger I held toward her, I finally realized, was hurting me. That is another story I can tell at some point.

I just realized that we, being here on this planet today, are the healers of generational trauma and our own as long as we are ready to take that journey. I have been doing this since I was 27 and it is not an easy journey. I did learn that the more we heal ourselves, we also heal seven generations past and seven generations into the future.

I am certainly not the same person I was when I was 27. I can feel a huge difference, I think differently, I talk differently, I connect with others differently and it is an everyday job. This is not fleeting, and it isn’t for the faint at heart. It can be scary, it can be an emotional roller coaster, it can throw you into the depths of the Dark Night of the Soul and it is beautiful, joyful and fulfilling all at the same time. It pulls you in to find the truth about who you are and that is what life is about. “Know thyself” is etched into the entrance of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece.

Not everyone is set up to do this, I have found. In particular, when I work with my clients or connect with others, I have had to learn to ask them if it’s ok that I share something with them about what they shared with me. They may not be ready to look, and I get to respect that and meet them where they are.

Throughout my life, people have laid out all of their deepest darkest secrets with me and it is mostly my job to transmute that energy for them and guide them (as I have learned about myself). Plus, I get to be a safe space for them to heal in some way.

It’s a pretty amazing thing how this works and I am grateful that I have the ability to do this for others. Again, it has taken me my entire life to work on my generational and personal traumas to get to this point.

So, part of this process for me is to literally sit in feelings as they come up. These feelings could be mine, and they could be someone else’s or sometimes I can feel the collective of humanity when something big is happening in the world, like what is going on in Israel right now. Probably more so because that is part of my DNA. I know this may sound crazy; it is true.

When I say “sit in,” I am saying I allow whatever feeling (energy) is coming up to come up. Sometimes I really can’t tell what it is so I will just allow myself to cry. Crying always helps release these stuck energies. My mother was never able to do this and although she was in a lot of emotional pain when she left this planet, there was the forgiveness that I had done that gave her some peace. I had always wanted that for her and had even pictured at many times in my life, what that would look like (and it did actually happen as I mentioned above). I got to see that peace in her eyes before she died and I have peace too.

I can’t really explain just how any of this works, it just does. I am designed to do this work. We all have a design and gifts and that just happens to be mine.

Now, you are probably going to think I am a total nut job and that is ok. If this resonates with you, great! If not, that is great too. It just happens to be where you are at. I think I wrote at one point that no one who believed the earth was flat was ready to hear about the earth being round. Well… this is similarly the case here too.

So, the bottom line is that the more we work to heal ourselves, the more of these energies of present, past trauma or generational trauma we release and the more we feel freedom and peace in our spirit and lives. This is turn affects everyone you come into contact with, in some way AND the world becomes a better place.

I hope you have a beautiful day and know that whoever you are or wherever you are out there in the world, you are loved. Thank you!