You Are the Gift Your Ancestors Gave to the World

I am not alone, I am the gift my ancestors gave to the world and, as such, I pick up the baton. If there are challenges to be overcome, I will overcome them. If there are old hurts to be healed, I will heal them. If there are lessons yet to be learned, I will learn them. If there are talents and gifts I have inherited, I will use them; I am the very extension of all who came before…

While I don’t know each of my ancestors’ individual stories, I feel them through my own experiences. There are some things that hurt more than others, some things that are more joyful than others, each perhaps on a similar path travelled by another part of me in a time gone by.

When the first physical trace of me appeared back towards the end of 1945, as an egg in the fetal version of my mum (who was developing in her own mother’s womb at the time), this physical piece of who I am was carrying a lot of emotional data about my maternal lineage.

Just as I said in Womanhood – A Story of Our Time, the emotions we feel are carried in each of the cells within our body, positive emotions fuel our wellbeing and negative emotions create dis-ease and disruption to our biological makeup if not dealt with in a healthy way.

So when that seed of who I am physically was joined with the rest of the genetic DNA required for me to take my human form - the successful one-in-a-(250) million sperm - almost twenty seven years later, it is easy to see that who I am is a veritable buffet of everything from my entire ancestral make up to my own life experiences.

Despite not knowing the specific stories of the vast majority of the people in my lineage, it is easy for me to imagine these and how they might affect my life now as I enjoy reading historical time-slip novels. These have two or more interconnected stories across varying timelines where the main character gets taken on a voyage of discovery that dives into challenges they are facing in the present day.

This brings to life the stories of the past and how they intertwine with the present. While fictional, there is no doubt they were almost certainly, at some point, bits of someone’s story. These stories are the kinds of stories we all descend from and they echo down the generations and affect us in ways we often sense but don’t fully understand.

I do know, though, that all my grandparents had experience of the Second World War; with one set of grandparents also alive during the First World War. Having heard some of the real stories, been to museums and specific battle sites, and having read many fictional stories that bring to life the details of that time, I can see how the things that affected their lives then ran through the veins of my parents in their respective upbringings and then got passed on to me.

It was a time when feelings were heavily suppressed and having basic rations was something to be grateful for. There was a sense of lack, not abundance, yet gratitude for the little that was had. There was so much trauma at that time, and yet there was also beauty, many of our ideas are shaped even today by the experiences our ancestors had throughout that time not so long ago in our history.

I have a very definite sense that - despite life being very different for my grandparents then - they were all real people with wants, desires, hurts and tragedies.

Last year, before my mum died, she filled me in on parts of her own mother’s story. There was a lot of pain that continued on in mum, showing up as resentment towards others in her lineage for being the perpetrator or being too passive. Her own childhood experiences in that environment also inevitably shaped her values and beliefs about the world and, thus, her life experiences and the way I was raised.

Talking to another elderly member of my family about her childhood recently, I uncovered old hurts there too; events that happened over seventy years ago still fresh in her mind. I asked whether she had ever reconciled her issues, but they had never spoken about them, a common feature.

The things that happen to us early in our lives we sort of chalk up as history in our heads, feeling foolish to even mention or care about them. Yet they can weigh upon our hearts for eternity, shaping the very fabric of who we are and how we allow ourselves to interact with the world.

When we were asked to sink into our maternal and paternal lineage during a meditative part of a Family Constellations session I attended this week, facilitated by a good friend, the joy on my gran’s face as she birthed my father popped into my imagination. Perhaps she intuited her own father’s creativity (a father she hadn’t ever known) in the eyes of her youngest son, perhaps not, but her joy was evident in her creation.

I also imagined the same at the birth of my gran on the maternal side. The stoic great grandmother of the stories I had heard was somewhat softened by the birth of her baby girl that was named Joy. It was quite beautiful.

That we are each the gift that our ancestors gave the world was one of the many take outs I had from that session. When I mentioned what I was writing about to my friend she added “You embody all that was and all that is, you are your ancestors’ prayer for all that could be.”

That is quite something isn’t it? Here we are, the leading edge of all that has been, with opportunities to be aware of ourselves and love ourselves as never before. And if that is all each of us do, imagine what life would be like? What an amazing gift to the world.

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