Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash
“Until you make the unconscious conscious,
it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
~~ Carl Jung
Greetings to all my precious people!!
Last week, we began the work of homecoming by clearing physical space – honoring the body as the sacred vessel we arrived on the earth with.
Many of you wrote to share what you cleared and what you noticed. The common thread? When external space cleared, emotions started moving.
Grief. Anger. Relief.
Sadness for what was lost. Gratitude for what remains.
This is not an accident.
In Chinese Medicine, we understand that everything is connected. Your environment reflects your inner landscape. Your physical space holds emotional energy. And both are influenced by something even deeper:
Your ancestral lineage.
This week, we continue the homecoming journey by exploring what you inherited – not just eye color and bone structure, but patterns, beliefs, wounds, and gifts passed down through generations.
Some of what you carry is yours to keep. Some is ready to be released.
The Wisdom of Ancestral Knowing
Indigenous cultures worldwide honor ancestors as guides, teachers, and sources of wisdom. They understand that we are not isolated individuals but links in a long chain stretching back through time.
In Celtic tradition, ancestors are remembered at Samhain (late October/early November) – the time when the veil between worlds is thin and we can commune with those who came before. This is not morbid; it’s recognition that their lives made ours possible.
In Chinese Medicine and Daoist philosophy, we speak of Jing – the constitutional essence inherited from your parents at conception. Jing is your deepest reserve, your root vitality. It carries not just genetic information but ancestral knowing – the accumulated wisdom of survival, adaptation, resilience.
You are the product of millions of years of ancestors who survived long enough to pass on their genes, their knowledge, their patterns.
Every challenge they overcame is encoded in you.
Every adaptation they made lives in your cells.
Every trauma they couldn’t process may still be asking for healing – in you, now.
This is both gift and burden.
What Lives in Your Lineage
Modern science is beginning to validate what wisdom traditions always knew: trauma and resilience are both inherited.
Epigenetics shows us that lived experiences – especially traumatic ones – can alter gene expression in ways that pass to the next generation. Holocaust survivors’ descendants show specific stress markers. Descendants of those who endured famine show metabolic changes.
But it’s not just trauma that passes down. Resilience does too. Strength. Survival strategies. Wisdom.
Think about what you inherited:
Gifts from your lineage:
- Physical resilience
- Creative capacity
- Intuitive knowing
- Spiritual connection
- Capacity to endure
- Ability to love deeply
- Humor in dark times
- Resourcefulness
- Connection to land/place
Burdens from your lineage:
- Unprocessed grief
- Addiction patterns
- Perfectionism
- People-pleasing
- Fear of scarcity
- Inability to receive
- Silence around difficult topics
- Patterns of self-sacrifice
- Disconnection from the body
Here’s the crucial part: You get to CHOOSE what you carry forward.
Not all ancestral patterns are meant to continue with you. Some are ready to be released – not rejected or dishonored, but consciously laid down with gratitude for their service.
“Thank you for keeping us safe. Thank you for getting us here. I release this now. It ends with me.”
Metal Season and Ancestral Grief
We are in Metal season – the element of autumn, grief, and letting go. And grief is not just about the recently dead. Grief lives in lineages.
Your grandmother’s unexpressed sorrow might be sitting in your chest.
Your great-grandfather’s rage at injustice might be pulsing in your blood.
Your mother’s fear of scarcity might be driving your relationship with money.
And you might not even know it’s not originally yours.
In my clinical practice, I see this constantly: women carrying emotional weight that predates them. Anxiety that makes no logical sense given their actual lives. Depression that feels ancient, cellular.
When we begin to trace these patterns back – to ask “where did this come from?” – often the answer is: “This is ancestral. This is what I inherited.”
And here’s the powerful part: When YOU heal it, you heal it backwards through the lineage. And forwards for your descendants.
This Week’s Practice: Ancestral Clearing Ceremony
This is deep work. Sacred work. Give it the time and reverence it deserves.
What you’ll need:
- A quiet evening (ideally near the Full Moon on November 15)
- Candles (one for you, one for your ancestors)
- Photos of ancestors if you have them (or write their names)
- Paper and pen
- A fireproof bowl
- Your journal
Part 1: Create Sacred Space (10 minutes)
Set up an altar or simple sacred space:
- Photos or names of known ancestors
- Candle for ancestors
- Candle for yourself
- Bowl of water (represents emotional clearing)
- Something from nature (represents your connection to Earth)
Light the ancestor candle first. Say:
“I honor those who came before me.
I honor their struggles and their survival.
I honor the gifts they passed to me.
I honor the burdens they could not release.
I am here to receive what serves and release what no longer does.”
Take three deep breaths. Feel yourself as part of a long lineage.
Part 2: Acknowledge the Gifts (15 minutes)
Light your own candle. Journal:
“What gifts have I inherited from my lineage?”
Think about:
- Physical strengths (your grandmother’s strong hands, your father’s endurance)
- Creative capacities (your mother’s ability to make beauty from nothing)
- Survival strategies (your ancestors’ resourcefulness, their ability to endure)
- Spiritual connections (who taught you to pray, to notice beauty, to trust something larger)
- Specific memories or stories that carry wisdom
Write freely. Let gratitude flow.
When complete, place your hand on your heart and say:
“Thank you for these gifts. I receive them with gratitude. I carry them forward with honor.”
Part 3: Name What’s Ready to Be Released (20 minutes)
Now the harder work. Journal:
“What patterns am I carrying that are not mine to keep?”
Think about:
- Anxiety that doesn’t match your actual circumstances
- Perfectionism that exhausts you
- People-pleasing that erases your needs
- Fear of scarcity even when you have enough
- Inability to rest or receive
- Patterns in relationships that repeat through generations
- Ways you betray yourself that you saw your mother/grandmother do
Be specific. Write it out.
Example:
“I am carrying my grandmother’s fear of not being enough. She lived through the Depression. She never felt secure. I inherited this even though my circumstances are different. I feel it in my chest – the constant anxiety, the inability to trust there will be enough. This is not mine. I am ready to release it.”
Part 4: The Release (15 minutes)
Read aloud what you wrote – the patterns you’re releasing. As you read each one, say:
“Thank you for keeping me/us safe.
Thank you for getting me/us here.
You served a purpose once.
That purpose is complete now.
I release you with love and gratitude.
This pattern ends with me.”
Burn the paper safely in the fireproof bowl. Watch it transform to ash.
This is powerful magic. You are consciously choosing to end cycles that have run through your lineage for generations.
As it burns, breathe deeply. Sometimes tears come. Sometimes rage. Sometimes relief. All of it is holy.
Part 5: The Commitment (10 minutes)
Pour the bowl of water onto the earth (or a plant) as an offering. Say:
“I commit to living differently than the patterns I inherited.
I commit to healing what was passed to me unhealed.
I commit to carrying forward only what serves life.
I am the one who breaks the cycle.
I am the one who chooses consciousness over fate.”
Place both hands on your heart. Feel yourself – this particular link in the chain. The one who said: “Enough. It changes here.”
Blow out the candles. Journal whatever wants to come.
The Deeper Liberation
Carl Jung wrote: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
But when you MAKE it conscious – when you see the patterns for what they are, honor their origins, and choose to release them – you become free.
Not free from your lineage. Free WITHIN it. Free to choose what you carry forward.
This is not rejecting your ancestors. This is honoring them by doing the work they couldn’t do. By healing what they couldn’t heal. By breaking cycles they couldn’t break.
And when you do this, you free not just yourself but the generations that follow.
Your daughters won’t inherit your people-pleasing.
Your sons won’t inherit your disconnection from feeling.
Your grandchildren won’t inherit the unprocessed grief you finally let yourself feel and release.
The cycle ends with you. The healing begins with you.
Walking This Path Together
This ancestral work is some of the most profound healing available to us. But it’s not easy work to do alone.
In my practice – both clinical and through the C.O.A.C.H. Method – I help women trace these patterns, honor their origins, and consciously choose what to release.
I don’t fix you. I witness you as you do this sacred work. I hold space. I midwife the emergence of who you are when the ancestral patterns no longer run you.
If this calls to you – if you recognize yourself in these words, if you’re tired of patterns that aren’t even yours, if you’re ready to be the one who breaks the cycle – I’m here.
I have a few spots for 1:1 work beginning soon. Let’s talk. Email me.
For now: honor your lineage. Release what’s ready. Trust that you are exactly the right person to do this healing.
Warmly,
Kathy
P.S. Next week: Mental Homecoming – quieting the noise, turning down the volume on a culture designed to keep you distracted, and learning to hear the deeper knowing that lives beneath the chatter. This work builds on what we’re clearing.
“We are just wandering, circling around each other,
we are all, in the end,
just walking each other home.”
~~ Khaled Hosseini
