Know Your Roots.
Samhain is the Celtic festival that honours the ancestors. It falls at the end of October and its modern day name is Halloween. On Samhain of 2021, I set the intention to learn more about my ancestors, to uncover who had paved the way for me and to honour their life, even if it was just in the way of knowing their name.
I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I am curious about long distant relatives. Where did they live, what job did they do, what were their beliefs? I was hoping that by learning these things, I may learn more about myself, peeling back another layer and giving me a greater sense of who I am.
I started with speaking to my parents, asking questions and making notes to build a picture of the previous generations. Their knowledge only went back so far so I turned to the internet and found familysearch.org a huge help. It’s a free site and helped me to track back all the way to the 1600’s. I visited the local library as a friend and fellow Yogini told me about the free resource of Ancestry.com available on their computers so I took advantage and managed to fill in a few more gaps. I learnt that the majority of my ancestors, for the past 400 years on my Father’s side, had lived in the Staffordshire Moorlands, where I continue to live today. Many worked with the land as farmers and later in the local collieries. Could this explain my love of nature and the outdoors and my fear of small spaces? Some of my relatives weren’t lucky enough to live a long life and died in their 20’s due to accidents in the mines.
Knowing our ancestors is vital, especially when it comes to looking at what makes us up on an energetic level. Gifts and also trauma can be passed down through the bloodlines so if we are to really embrace this life we have been gifted we must know and have a relationship with our ancestors.
“Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month old foetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother.
We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through grandmothers to the first mother.”
‘When the Drummers Were Women’. By Layne Redmond.
This concept is well understood by the indigenous people of North American and many other countries around the World, whose philosophy is based upon the Seventh Generation Principle. When making decisions they consider the past seven generations and the future seven generations, offering themselves as a bridge between the two. Learning from and understanding the inheritance of the past and adding present ideas and knowledge to make decisions and take actions that will benefit and look after the future generations. Now if this is not a concept that is truly needed at this time, I don’t know what is.
I used to think, what can I possibly learn from my ancestors. We are living such a different life and we are now more evolved than the people of the past. In truth our brain isn’t any more evolved than it was 100,000 years ago (www.science.org). Yes, we have developed more resources and made new discoveries but the capacity of our brain is no different. I now feel that our ancestors have a tremendous amount of knowledge to offer us. They weren’t bound to technology and lived closer to the Earth and her rhythms. A way of life that I feel is calling us all back at this moment in time. The need to connect to our ancestors is age old. There has been ceremony and ritual held by different cultures around the World for thousands of years. In our Western culture I feel we have lost touch with this. Very few of us know our roots and are willing to work through the trauma that has been handed down through our lines. All people go through challenges and what we experience imprints on our core which can then get passed on to the next generation and so on until someone in the lineage decides to face that trauma, name it and break free of it. Choosing not to live the same patterns and feel the same fears. Here are a few examples around some of the traumas that may be inherited:
Scarcity. Stock piling food and money and feeling restricted.
Patriarchy. Masculine trauma of not being able to show emotions. Feminine trauma of low self-worth, not voicing opinions.
Witch wound. Playing small and trust issues.
Shame and forgiveness.
Just as trauma can get passed down the line, so can gifts. Knowing our roots, can lead us to our dharma (Soul’s purpose).
Our dharma may not be our career and we may not make any money from our dharma, but it is the thing that is going to make us feel fulfilled. The thing that lights us up, our unique gift to the World. Trauma may try to hide or play down these gifts, but they are intimate parts of ourselves. We came into this World with our unique gifts and we will leave this World with them. It is up to us to choose if we are to use them or not. Our ancestors have carried many of these gifts with them, so by breaking free of trauma and using our gifts we are not only honouring ourselves but also our past ancestors and our future as we are clearing the way for them to reach their highest potential.
I have lots more to discover. Knowing our roots is not a quick process but is so worthwhile. Learning about the hardships of my past relatives has given me strength and resilience when facing my own challenges and it has nurtured compassion in present relationships. My children have loved hearing about what I’ve found out and it’s helping them to feel more grounded and enriched too.
It is through the choices our ancestors made, the love they shared and the challenges they overcame that we are here living this life today. May we all know our roots and be the bridge between the past and the future.
If you live in the Staffordshire Moorlands area and are interested in finding out more about your family history, please visit https://u3asites.org.uk/leek/page/18971 where you will find out more details about two family history classes based in Leek, Staffordshire and family history conferences.
Love & Light,
Natalie.