TIME TRAVEL: HEALING THE PAST

The course works outwards one ring at a time. First comes the past itself, and then the family, and then the stories we were told, and then our ancestors, and then the whole culture, the people, and then the biggest question of all. So let’s explore this a bit more.

What we can’t change

The course starts by getting clear about what’s possible. We can’t change what actually happened. Let’s be very clear about this, because there are some ungrounded so-called spiritual practices that say you can rewrite your childhood and live from some kind of new version, and this just does not work. This is childish, magical thinking, and nothing good ever comes from that.

But here’s the thing. The past isn’t only behind us. It’s also still going on in us now.

Fort-holders and orphans

When something frightens us, or something overwhelming happens to us as a child, some parts of us take charge to keep us safe, and then, in doing that, very often other parts of us get sent away. And the parts that get sent away are still back there in the past. And the parts that stayed to look after us are still operating from what happened to them in the past.

Now, those parts that are still operating from that we call fort-holders, and the parts we sent away we call orphans, because they have been cast out. They are parentless, essentially. They no longer have any family.

So say, for example, somebody’s anxious about giving a presentation at work as an adult. Very often, if they tune into the part that is anxious about giving this presentation and ask how old that part feels, more often than not it turns out to be quite a young part from childhood, a part that feels it’s going to be criticised.

And that part needs to be listened to and shown some love and gentleness. But then it needs to be told that it can stay at home that day. It doesn’t have to go to work, because really it shouldn’t have been doing that work in the first place. It is a child part, a fort-holder part that stayed in the childhood situation and did the best it could, but it’s still acting out in us now.

So if we realise this and get that part to stay at home, and instead we go to work to do the presentation as adults, our adult part can turn up. And this isn’t just about imagining being adults, but really knowing how to step into adult, to somatically become adult. And to do that, we often need our Power Animal by our side, because animists understood that our Power Animal is what helps us have personal power. That’s why it’s called a Power Animal.

But the thing is, until or unless we learn to do this, the childhood parts of us, the fort-holder parts that learned strategies to cope, are actually still running the show in our adult life.

The tentacle from the past

Now, here’s the thing. Time doesn’t actually behave the way most people think it does either. And in shamanic journeying, we can experience this and come to realise that our past, our present selves and our future selves are actually all a lot closer together than they seem. And all of them are actually affecting each other, and this is something we’ll explore a lot in the course.

The way we sometimes see it, when we journey and look at what’s going on, is that it’s almost like there is a tentacle somehow emerging from behind us, from the past, from what we’ve put behind us, or what we think we’ve put behind us. It enters the back of our body and then extends through the front of our body, tasting all the possible futures ahead of us until it finds one that feels familiar to it. Then it hooks onto that and drags us forward into that future.

So that habit, that tentacle from the past, is one of the ways of looking at why we so often, despite our best intentions, keep choosing futures, or keep recreating things, that are based on past patterns.

Choosing what’s familiar

So what do I mean by choosing things that are familiar to us? Well, very often it’s based on the family we grew up in and our roles in that family. That’s a big part of why people so often tend to recreate family-like situations or familiar roles in their adult life as well. If our father was a difficult man, critical and so on, then very often we will unconsciously choose partners who are of that ilk as well, until we actually become conscious of that and learn what to do about it, which is part of what this course is going to be about.

So Module 2 on the course is very much going to be about looking at family patterns, because we can’t change what we’re not aware of. The more we can become aware of our family patterns, the more we can start to see how these have been playing out in our adult life, and so start to free ourselves from them.

A family has a soul too

In animism, as you know, everything has a soul. Not just people, but animals, plants, stones, rivers, mountains and so on. Now, here’s the thing. Groups of things have a soul too. A valley might have a particular feel. It kind of has a soul, if you like. A particular forest might have a feel, like a collective soul. And that goes for groups of people too. Different families feel different. Different combinations of work colleagues feel different. Different friendship groups feel different.

So each person in a family has a soul, but the family itself kind of has one as well. It’s a kind of living entity in itself, with its own patterns and its own feel to it. Most of us actually know this already. We just maybe haven’t thought about it consciously. Walk into some homes and you can feel straight away the energy of that family. Some might feel easy and warm. In others, everyone’s on edge. Some just feel cold. Nobody says a word. What you’re picking up is the family pattern as a whole, the family’s collective soul, if you like. And this is one of the things we’ll look at.

The roles we play

Also, within a family there are roles. Most of these aren’t actually spoken about consciously, but they are immensely powerful nevertheless. Somebody in the family might be the hero, or the golden child, the person who is concerned with keeping the family together, or keeping up appearances, rescuing everyone. Another role is the scapegoat, who gets all the blame, so nobody has to actually deal with any family issues. They can just blame the scapegoat instead and project it all out onto them. There might be the lost child, who keeps out of the way, keeps quiet and never asks for anything. There might be the joker, the peacemaker, the rebel and so on.

Each of these has a role in a family, like an organ in a body, if you like. And when we are in one of those roles, which all of us are in families, it also becomes a strategy we adopt and play out in our adult life too.

Constellations, done ethically

Now, there’s a famous way of working with all this called family constellations, developed by the German therapist Bert Hellinger. In constellation work, you get other people in the group to represent, to stand in for, your family members, and they’re positioned in the room in a spatial relationship to each other, kind of like the plasticine figures we started this talk with. Plasticine figures can’t speak, but people can, so people start to speak about what they’re feeling as the father or the mother or the golden child or whatever. And then they might start to move around as well, move closer to some people, or feel themselves wanting to move away from others. So the whole dynamic of the family starts to reveal itself and unfold.

Now, I took part in many constellations over the years, and they were often really quite jaw-droppingly powerful and insightful. The ethics of them never felt quite right to me, though. Although you’ve got the client’s permission to do their family constellation, you don’t usually have the consent of the family members being represented. Nobody has asked the father if it’s all right for somebody to represent him in the constellation, or the mother, or anybody else. The only permission you’ve got is from the person who asked for the constellation. So of course, that is working without consent.

That said, it’s undeniably powerful work, so I wrestled with it for a long time. And then one day I was facilitating a constellation, and once it was set up, I decided instead to ask the client, who was observing their constellation: “What parts of you stayed to deal with this family situation, and what parts of you did you send away?”

When the client had answered, I asked all the people representing the other family members, the parents and siblings and so on, to step out. Instead, we were left with people representing the different parts of the client: the parts that had stayed, and the roles they’d adopted in trying to find a way to be in the family, and the parts that had been sent away. A constellation now of the fort-holders and the orphans that this family situation had created in the client.

This became a much more ethical way of working, because we were only working with the client’s parts. But I discovered it also became a much more powerful way of working. And you can do this at home with plasticine, or even just with coloured pens on paper, and that’s what the plasticine model we started with was about.

So we’ll look at how to do this in a safe way, and also what to do with the figures once you’ve finished the constellation, because obviously you don’t want dysfunctional family members hanging about as bits of plasticine dotted around your house either.

Everything we do on the course is never going to be unethical or working without permission, even though we are looking at family, often current family. That is an absolutely categorical thing about the way we’re going to be working.

We are storytellers

Now, you’ve probably heard me say more than once that shamans say things are as they are because of the stories they’re telling themselves. An oak tree is an oak tree because it’s telling itself the story of the Oak Oversoul. The Oversoul of Oak, of course, being in the Lower-World: the perfect story of what a perfect oak tree can be. And then it tries to be the best version of that it can in the middle-world, given the environment it lives in. Of course, it’ll be affected by the direction of the wind and how much water is available and all that kind of thing.

Everything around us is trying to do that, apart from us humans. We’re a bit different, because we’re restless, we’re curious, we want to know what things mean, so we make up stories. And that’s what we are. That’s our great gift. We are storytellers, and we are exceptionally good at storytelling.

The problem, though, is that we can end up telling stories that are so entrancing that, however preposterous they actually are and whatever the evidence against them, we still believe them. Look around modern-day culture at all the wild conspiracy theories, the bonkers stories in religion, or just bonkers political beliefs. And our bonkers story of human supremacy. We get lost in our own stories, and they become like a spell we get caught up in.

Spells

A spell doesn’t need a witch or a cauldron. All it takes is someone dominant imposing their will on someone who is susceptible. Children most of all, of course.

People leaving abusive relationships often describe it as waking from a spell. Whole countries can fall under the spell of charismatic leaders, as we are seeing, horrifyingly, at the moment. And then there are the spells whole families live by. We don’t talk about that. We mustn’t answer back. We mustn’t get above ourselves. We are special. The Maguires, we’re a special family.

And of course, we adopt personal stories to act as spells as well. We tell ourselves, “Oh, I mustn’t ever answer back. I mustn’t be too loud. I mustn’t be assertive. I mustn’t be vulnerable.”

Healthy stories

Now, here’s the thing. We need stories to live by. That’s just how we are as human beings. We are a storytelling species. We need stories in the same way that cheetahs need to run, and birds need to fly, and fish need to swim in water. That’s who we are.

The question is whether the stories are healthy or not, and whether they’re sane or not. A lot of the stories we live by aren’t actually that sane. “Oh, it was all God’s will.” “Everything happens for a reason.” Or, despite all the evidence to the contrary, “Oh, my parents must have loved me really.”

Now, a shaman, of course, is somebody who is prepared to see things as they actually are, who can see the truth of things. That’s pretty much what the word shaman means. And so shamans are people who really understand that everything is stories. Everything is as it is because of the story it’s listening to. The role of the shaman is to understand that and to try to keep the stories healthy.

So the shamanic approach isn’t about getting rid of stories. It’s to know everything is stories, but to know which are healthy stories and which aren’t, which are useful and which aren’t, when stories are helpful and when they stop being helpful.

All of that is something we’re going to look at in terms of family patterns specifically, the stories we have taken from them, and how to work with that.

The seven generations

Then in Module 4 we’ll go even further back, because shamans have always understood that if somebody doesn’t actually deal with their issues in their life, very often those issues don’t go away when that person dies. They somehow, in mysterious ways that we will explore, get passed on to the next generation. And so you get things like a grief you can’t quite put your finger on, that actually goes down the generations. Or a sense of shame, or rage, or fear, all sorts of things.

Animist cultures understood this, because they said we are affected by the seven generations that came before us, and that the way we live will affect the seven generations after us. Seven isn’t necessarily some sort of magic number. In some ways it just means several. Although there is some interesting research around this too, which we’ll look at.

Let’s do the maths

Now, let’s do the maths on how many ancestors we’ve got. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. Every generation, the number doubles. Go back 20 generations, 400 or 500 years, and that’s more than a million ancestors. Go back 30 generations, and you have more than a billion ancestors. That’s actually more people than were alive on the planet 30 or 40 generations ago.

So how does that work? Because cousins marry cousins, distant cousins marry distant cousins, over and over again. It weaves back in on itself. So we don’t have that many different ancestors. We have fewer, and we’re tied into each of them many times over. Which means that pretty much everyone who had children about 1,000 years ago, and whose line carried on, is very likely somewhere in the family tree of everybody in a large geographical area, say Europe, or Africa, and so on.

My own example

Now, I’ve got my own example of this. When I got into therapy, one of the things I needed to deal with was a lot of shame. My childhood role in the family was to be the outcast, the scapegoat. And inevitably, as a child, I took on board that this must mean there was something wrong with me. There must be some reason why nobody wanted me in the family.

However, as an adult, the more I worked on this in therapy, I realised there was still something left, and that some of this sense of shame just didn’t feel like mine at all. My father carried a deep sense of shame all his life that he never worked through. And on his side of the family, for hundreds of years, we were part of what were called the Border Reiver families, the raiders on the borders between England and Scotland.

You’ll sometimes hear that the word reiver gave us the word bereaved. It’s not actually quite true, but it’s close enough. To reive means to rob, and bereaved means being robbed of somebody. The English–Scottish borders were a very unhappy place to live for hundreds of years. There was continuous minor warfare and strife, and so a lot of people were bereaved. So that’s my ancestral inheritance on my father’s side.

I used to think my father’s guilt, and his need to atone, also ran through me like the letters through a stick of rock. Now, it isn’t actually there any more, and hasn’t been for years, because I decided to do what I could to make sure the buck stopped with me: that I became the link-breaker. So I deliberately set about doing what I could to heal not only my own part in this, my own shame, but all the shame I’d inherited too, so that the buck really did stop with me. And that’s one of the things we’ll be looking at on the course too.

Places and peoples

Then in Module 5 we’ll go even further, and look not only at family trauma and generational trauma, but at trauma carried by whole cultures as well, and by the geographical places people live in.

Where I live at the moment, in North Wales, the last hunter-gatherer people disappeared around 6,000 years ago, replaced by farming people moving into Britain. Then, about 4,500 years ago, those first farmers were largely replaced in turn by another wave of invaders called the Beaker people. And then again, wave after wave after wave, including the English replacing the Welsh, and so on. That means traumas can go back not just a few hundred years down our ancestral line, but over much bigger periods of time.

The Fall

And, of course, the biggest, the ultimate trauma of all of these is the collective trauma of the Fall, which you are all familiar with now. It’s a term I took from the writer Steve Taylor. It’s when we fell away from our sane, healthy, animist relationship with the living world. Because to domesticate ourselves, to fit into what we call civilisation, into crowded, hierarchical, agricultural societies, we had to repress and send away huge parts of our own nature. We had to send away our wildness, our sensitivity, our grief. And we all carry this collective trauma as well.

So we come down a long line: 6,000 years of trauma since the Fall, handed down generation after generation, most of which we’ve never really faced. On top of that, we have whatever specific traumas were added into the mix over the last few hundred years by our more recent ancestors, and then the particular situation of our family and our schooling. There are lots of layers to this, and this is what we mean by ancestral trauma, essentially.

So we’re going to look at the whole of this, and the different ways of dealing with it. That will include practices you are probably familiar with, things like soul retrieval and disentanglement, but we’ll look at all of them from this particular perspective of the many different types, layers and textures of ancestral trauma, and at specific ways of applying them to heal ancestral burdens. And also to knit ourselves back together, to deal with our soul losses, and to extract ourselves from unhealthy middle-world stories. And then, even more so, to connect ourselves back to the Lower-World and the other-than-human as well, and heal our power loss.

In doing this, we will hopefully realise that we don’t actually have to carry any of this ancestral stuff at all. To put it down, we have to face it, and then we have to do the things we need to do to free ourselves from it. But we’re not stuck with it. It’s not our duty to carry it.

We absolutely have the right to put all this stuff down.

So one of the things we will really look at is how to actually put it down.

That, of course, begs the question: how do we want to move forward? What about the seven generations after us? What kind of an ancestor do we want to be for the people who follow us?

Because the reality is, if you think about it, sooner or later you’re going to be an ancestor, whether you have children or not. What you do in your life gets passed on in ways that are far more mysterious, but nevertheless true, than simply direct biological transmission from parent to child. We affect everybody around us too. So we really do affect the generations after us, depending on how we live our life now. So the last module of the course asks this question:

What kind of an ancestor do you want to be?

Which is a pretty amazing question to ask yourself.

So that’s briefly what the course is going to cover, and it’s liberating stuff. Most people, even if they’ve had an inkling that they are carrying ancestral burdens, find, when they actually start to learn how to identify them and really face them, that it’s amazing how much they have been burdened by these things, and how extraordinarily liberating it is to put them down and no longer carry them. So it’s big and powerful work.

Having said that, the whole course is intended to be done gently as well: in bite-size pieces, little and often, and manageable. So I hope that sounds interesting, and something you would like to do, to unburden yourself of generations of stuff that you just don’t need to be carrying any more.

So remember, Healing the Past is open to everybody who’s completed a First-Steps course and at least one of the Next-Steps courses too, because you need to have that grounding to be able to do this work. And of course, contact me if you want any further information. I hope to see you there.