BOOKS/LINKS
Trangenerational Integration
LIFELINE GENEALOGY
A Soul-Informed Life
A Soul-Informed Life
The basic clarification of your family tree is the primary aspect of self-knowledge, especially if there is significant resistance.
“To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how profoundly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is.”
--Jung, The Portable Jung, Joseph Campbell, Editor, pg. 103
"Each of us, every living being, is a small earth, one could say, because we are in intimate connection with the earth, we are partially earth, we are conscious of our earthly body, for instance." ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159
"The earth is a microcosm in the great cosmos of the stars and we are ourselves microcosms upon the earth." ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159
“To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how profoundly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is.”
--Jung, The Portable Jung, Joseph Campbell, Editor, pg. 103
"Each of us, every living being, is a small earth, one could say, because we are in intimate connection with the earth, we are partially earth, we are conscious of our earthly body, for instance." ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159
"The earth is a microcosm in the great cosmos of the stars and we are ourselves microcosms upon the earth." ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159
"But no man can truly know himself unless first he see and know by zealous meditation...what rather than who he is, on whom he depends, and whose he is, and to what end he was made and created, and by whom and through whom."
"Thou wilt never make (from others) the One (that thou seekest), except there first be made one thing of thyself."
--Gerhard Dorn, Philosophia Meditativa, Theatrum Chemicum (1602)
"You can't wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die." ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 147
"If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 132-133
In cases of inferior feeling, a trauma very often has pathological consequences in the realm of sensation, e.g., physical pain unaccompanied by feeling.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 53-54
“The alchemists saw it in the transformation of the chemical substance. ... But some were clever enough to know, “It is my own transformation-not a personal transformation, but the transformation of what is mortal in me into what is immortal. It shakes off the mortal husk that I am and awakens to a life of its own.” --Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Paragraph 238
“Among the latter there are human figures that can be arranged under a series of archetypes, the chief of them being, according to my suggestion, the shadow, wise old man, child (including the child hero), the mother (“Primordial Mother” and “Earth Mother”) as a supraordinate personality (“daemonic” because supraordinate), and her counterpart the maiden, lastly the anima man and the animus woman…. The above types are far from exhausting all the statistical regularities in this respect.” --Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious – CW 9i (1934–1954) (1981 2nd ed. Collected Works Vol.9 Part 1)
LIFELINE GENEALOGY
A Soul-Infused Life
"Thou wilt never make (from others) the One (that thou seekest), except there first be made one thing of thyself."
--Gerhard Dorn, Philosophia Meditativa, Theatrum Chemicum (1602)
"You can't wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die." ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 147
"If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 132-133
In cases of inferior feeling, a trauma very often has pathological consequences in the realm of sensation, e.g., physical pain unaccompanied by feeling.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 53-54
“The alchemists saw it in the transformation of the chemical substance. ... But some were clever enough to know, “It is my own transformation-not a personal transformation, but the transformation of what is mortal in me into what is immortal. It shakes off the mortal husk that I am and awakens to a life of its own.” --Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Paragraph 238
“Among the latter there are human figures that can be arranged under a series of archetypes, the chief of them being, according to my suggestion, the shadow, wise old man, child (including the child hero), the mother (“Primordial Mother” and “Earth Mother”) as a supraordinate personality (“daemonic” because supraordinate), and her counterpart the maiden, lastly the anima man and the animus woman…. The above types are far from exhausting all the statistical regularities in this respect.” --Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious – CW 9i (1934–1954) (1981 2nd ed. Collected Works Vol.9 Part 1)
LIFELINE GENEALOGY
A Soul-Infused Life
YOU ARE THE TREE OF LIFE
ENTANGLED GENERATIONS
This is Strictly Personal
"I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self."
~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 196.
"You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
The Law of Root and Branch
In Qabalah, the first law is called “The Law of Root and Branch,” which echoes the Hermetic axiom, "As Above, So Below." What happens in the material world is a replication of events taking place in a higher world, hidden from our senses -- the reasons for everything that happens in our world. This is “the root world,” and our world is “the world of consequences” or “the world of branches.” They are called ‘root and branch,’ indicating that the element in the lower world is considered a branch compared to its exemplar template in the Upper World, from which the
lower world has been imprinted and formed.
Our genealogies are living systems, which are constantly expanding and correcting. We work with others on the World Tree to create the most accurate droplines we can, and correct as we go, breaking brick walls, lopping off obsolete branches, pruning extinct ones, and cultivating new ones.
We correct our own path mistakes, while admins correct the medieval lines that were faked in the past. Does falsified behavior carry over into the field of genealogy? Yes. The field of genealogy is not without its frauds and propaganda from Nennius, to Bede, to Geoffrey of Monmouth. There are no proven descents from the ancient world.
The tree continues to grow, sustained by core spiritual values and common ancestral roots -- the root causes of life's problems and events. For species survival, one person may merge with ancestors and descendants, as a single amplified entity. The whole of reality is a living organism. Only form and structure dies, not the 'ground' or root of Being.
Genealogy, an interpersonal bridge, is about the 'greening' of our Tree. It can change our self-image and narrative and regenerate us. The unconscious mirrors the universe, and our Tree mirrors that wholeness and our place in it, aware of its presence, importance, and cyclically repetitive change. Time cycles back upon itself, and is not solely historical and linear.
Transformation and integration are irrational but coherent processes that we participate in consciously. Spiritual concepts may arise and be incorporated into the personality as we become more aware of our self. Relationship is the foundation of life -- to be in contact with, to be related. We can imagine that soul is informed by the body and participation in the sacred.
Our particular way threads between the opposites of our forebears. It is a royal road that helps us understand the duality of the phenomenal world. Life opens, animated by presence and experience. The Tree becomes our symbol for what is unexplained, for what contains Mystery.
Ancestry is the ancient path...the trail of our ancestors that reconnects us with Nature and our nature. In our therapeutic quest we make vital connections, discern the Knowable and Unknowable, dream myths, and heal our wounds.
We project the ancestors into our surroundings just as we do all the contents of the unconscious. We search for meaning, pattern, and cause. Faulty pattern recognition leads to faulty judgments and behaviors. Recognizing patterns, we integrate and predict.
We are only as sick as our secrets, and when it comes to family secrets, we are likely unconscious of them and our need to integrate them. To reveal a secret and make it conscious integrates it into the family history. It may be concealed in our genealogy, symptoms, or public records.
Most families have dark secrets, handed down from generation to generation like "booby-trapped heirlooms" waiting to explode. Secrets have far-reaching implications for families, setting the stage for a tense emotional climate of guardedness, anger, and reactivity. Even the tendency to conceal may be unconscious but have collective impact. We don't even know that we don't know about ancestral shames and fears. It's a mystification where we don't know our needs or who we are.
Most families don't fill the primary nurturing needs of their members very well. A lethal cycle of wounds and unawareness ensues. Are there important secrets in your family? In your partner's and/or ex-mate's family trees? If so, they may signify shame-based or fear-based ancestors, emotional cripples, and inherited psychological wounds that are personal, moral, cultural, or religious. http://sfhelp.org/fam/secrets.htm
At the personal and collective level, George Orwell claimed, "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
Populated Interior
Like an arborist, we understand the deep interweaving growth, It takes time for such development, (for trees, sometimes centuries). Our lives, events, and experiences are ecologically interconnected. The Tree unities the domains of factual events, history, legend, and myth, making a thread of person connection and experience leading back to the mists of pre-history.
Our relationships really seems to exist in a kind of ancestral tree-time. New routes through life are found; tree intelligence sends signals out through the roots. Tree existence can be lived with warmth and an intimate sense of one’s inner core. The personal unconscious is populated with complexes, while the collective unconscious is the realm of ancestors and archetypes.
Grounded Present
Ancestors present themselves as human beings, though we define the unconscious as a psychical existence in ourselves of which we are unconscious. Genealogy helps us penetrate beyond the barriers of consciousness. In the beginning of our work, the ancestors are an undifferentiated mass of unconscious impulses. Jung speaks of this prima materia:
"We get messages from time to time from the unconscious: dreams, phantasies, intuitions, visions and so on; and it is from these that we draw the conclusion of a psychical existence in ourselves which is totally different to our conscious mind.
Its psychology is quite different, and the contents which come to us from it differ, in a most peculiar way, from the contents of the conscious. The latter belong to a personal psychology, to the personality of the ego which is in the world, whereas the unconscious is not, but is rather a world itself. One could almost say it was the world, and that it speaks, as it were, to us."
Our unconscious still functions like it did millions of years ago, and knows the unknowable. We have discovered that trauma can be passed between generations, even events that took place before birth. The epigenetic inheritance theory says that environmental factors and memory-traces of earlier generations can affect the genes of future generations.
Modern physics suggests that soul is considered an indefinite, non-structured, massless energy made up of electromagnetic radiations that is a coherent, imperceptible, uncontainable and recyclable energetic support pathway (Pereira 2015). It has a capability to store information holographically within the void or vacuum and create memories beyond the limitations of the brain and body (bodily consciousness and functional consciousness).
Like the transformative procedures of alchemy, genealogy is also a transformative practice of the 'greening' of experience, the greening of our Tree, aided by genealogical arts that give it the proper form in due time, and "prepares the matter as becomes Nature, for such work, and such work provides also, with premeditated Wisdom, a suitable vessel.
Art can produce extraordinary things out of natural beginnings that Nature herself could never create. For unaided Nature does not produce things whereby imperfect metals can in a moment be made perfect, but by the secrets of Our Art this transgenerational integration can be done.
Unconscious & Invisible
Many adults seem to come from low-nurturance (dysfunctional) childhoods. So did their parents and ancestors. In such dysfunctional family trees, secrets are common - information about family members or events that someone feels should be withheld from kids, in-laws, strangers, or everyone -- the missing pieces of the family story.
What we don't know can hurt us. Family secrets are different than unawareness of information about members and ancestors. They're conscious decisions to withhold details of a shameful, scary, or illegal event or relationship (like a crime, abortion, an affair, or desertion), or a shameful personal trait (like an addiction or perversion). Some family secrets stand alone. Others are part of an inherited family distrust-policy that says "We don't tell outsiders our family's business."
Unassimilated trauma in one generation turns symptomatic in the next. Adults try to hide significant events and facts from children but they pick it up unconsciously and search for that x-factor compulsively, instinctively. Our genealogy is a map of the unconscious, a light in the dark, a red thread to follow into the labyrinth. The quest for the Holy Grail is a journey of psychological transformation.
The ancestral legacy, our pre-history, imposes limitations and faulty narratives. Parents fail to speak up or have an inability to discuss certain matters. Secret histories are cut off and denied, forgotten, or suppressed. Chemical tags acting like Post-its can latch onto our DNA, switching genes off and on.
Such complexes, connected to the experience of earlier generations, are usually deeply unconscious, alienating, and distorted by defensive reactions. We sense a divergent reality. They are a split in our being, including obligations, trust, and duty. Shame, anger, and repressed rage of ancestors -- their disowned and unexpressed feelings, thoughts, and fantasies -- are carried by the child.
The child identifies with shame-based parents. Shame is internalized by abandonment, emotional or otherwise. It double-binds core feelings, needs, and natural instinctual drives in defensive dysfunctional behavior and obsessive, disorganized nature, shame memories, and triggers. Shame freezes into identity.
An internalized sense of shame is the result of toxic family secrets -- shameful intergenerational secrets that have gone unconscious as a core of emotional illness. It impacts our sense of identity, dignity, and honor. It makes our attachment style anxious, ambivalent, disorganized, or avoidant. It colors our ethical and spiritual life, which is about wholeness. Shame shows our human limitations.
Family, as the matrix of character, shapes our identity. Toxic shame is an unconscious demon that creates the most neurotic and character-disordered behaviors -- self-identity disorder and denial. The cover-up is a false self -- inauthentic, fragmented. Dehumanizing shame takes over the whole identity with acting out that has life-changing consequences.
Toxic shame disturbs the self and sense of identity with negative inner states that develop in the false self: chronic depression, codependence, alienation, paranoia, splitting, compulsions, perfectionism, inferiority complex, inadequacy, narcissism, self doubt, self-rejection, and the isolation of loneliness. It runs the gamut from neurosis, to character disorders, to criminality.
Healthy shame is the root of humility, of humaness and compassion. It makes us act out, transmits destructive power between people, and is the primary source of violence to self and others. Healthy shame is revelatory and leads to finding our true self, spiritual destiny, and calling. (Bradshaw)
ENTANGLED GENERATIONS
This is Strictly Personal
"I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self."
~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 196.
"You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
The Law of Root and Branch
In Qabalah, the first law is called “The Law of Root and Branch,” which echoes the Hermetic axiom, "As Above, So Below." What happens in the material world is a replication of events taking place in a higher world, hidden from our senses -- the reasons for everything that happens in our world. This is “the root world,” and our world is “the world of consequences” or “the world of branches.” They are called ‘root and branch,’ indicating that the element in the lower world is considered a branch compared to its exemplar template in the Upper World, from which the
lower world has been imprinted and formed.
Our genealogies are living systems, which are constantly expanding and correcting. We work with others on the World Tree to create the most accurate droplines we can, and correct as we go, breaking brick walls, lopping off obsolete branches, pruning extinct ones, and cultivating new ones.
We correct our own path mistakes, while admins correct the medieval lines that were faked in the past. Does falsified behavior carry over into the field of genealogy? Yes. The field of genealogy is not without its frauds and propaganda from Nennius, to Bede, to Geoffrey of Monmouth. There are no proven descents from the ancient world.
The tree continues to grow, sustained by core spiritual values and common ancestral roots -- the root causes of life's problems and events. For species survival, one person may merge with ancestors and descendants, as a single amplified entity. The whole of reality is a living organism. Only form and structure dies, not the 'ground' or root of Being.
Genealogy, an interpersonal bridge, is about the 'greening' of our Tree. It can change our self-image and narrative and regenerate us. The unconscious mirrors the universe, and our Tree mirrors that wholeness and our place in it, aware of its presence, importance, and cyclically repetitive change. Time cycles back upon itself, and is not solely historical and linear.
Transformation and integration are irrational but coherent processes that we participate in consciously. Spiritual concepts may arise and be incorporated into the personality as we become more aware of our self. Relationship is the foundation of life -- to be in contact with, to be related. We can imagine that soul is informed by the body and participation in the sacred.
Our particular way threads between the opposites of our forebears. It is a royal road that helps us understand the duality of the phenomenal world. Life opens, animated by presence and experience. The Tree becomes our symbol for what is unexplained, for what contains Mystery.
Ancestry is the ancient path...the trail of our ancestors that reconnects us with Nature and our nature. In our therapeutic quest we make vital connections, discern the Knowable and Unknowable, dream myths, and heal our wounds.
We project the ancestors into our surroundings just as we do all the contents of the unconscious. We search for meaning, pattern, and cause. Faulty pattern recognition leads to faulty judgments and behaviors. Recognizing patterns, we integrate and predict.
We are only as sick as our secrets, and when it comes to family secrets, we are likely unconscious of them and our need to integrate them. To reveal a secret and make it conscious integrates it into the family history. It may be concealed in our genealogy, symptoms, or public records.
Most families have dark secrets, handed down from generation to generation like "booby-trapped heirlooms" waiting to explode. Secrets have far-reaching implications for families, setting the stage for a tense emotional climate of guardedness, anger, and reactivity. Even the tendency to conceal may be unconscious but have collective impact. We don't even know that we don't know about ancestral shames and fears. It's a mystification where we don't know our needs or who we are.
Most families don't fill the primary nurturing needs of their members very well. A lethal cycle of wounds and unawareness ensues. Are there important secrets in your family? In your partner's and/or ex-mate's family trees? If so, they may signify shame-based or fear-based ancestors, emotional cripples, and inherited psychological wounds that are personal, moral, cultural, or religious. http://sfhelp.org/fam/secrets.htm
At the personal and collective level, George Orwell claimed, "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
Populated Interior
Like an arborist, we understand the deep interweaving growth, It takes time for such development, (for trees, sometimes centuries). Our lives, events, and experiences are ecologically interconnected. The Tree unities the domains of factual events, history, legend, and myth, making a thread of person connection and experience leading back to the mists of pre-history.
Our relationships really seems to exist in a kind of ancestral tree-time. New routes through life are found; tree intelligence sends signals out through the roots. Tree existence can be lived with warmth and an intimate sense of one’s inner core. The personal unconscious is populated with complexes, while the collective unconscious is the realm of ancestors and archetypes.
Grounded Present
Ancestors present themselves as human beings, though we define the unconscious as a psychical existence in ourselves of which we are unconscious. Genealogy helps us penetrate beyond the barriers of consciousness. In the beginning of our work, the ancestors are an undifferentiated mass of unconscious impulses. Jung speaks of this prima materia:
"We get messages from time to time from the unconscious: dreams, phantasies, intuitions, visions and so on; and it is from these that we draw the conclusion of a psychical existence in ourselves which is totally different to our conscious mind.
Its psychology is quite different, and the contents which come to us from it differ, in a most peculiar way, from the contents of the conscious. The latter belong to a personal psychology, to the personality of the ego which is in the world, whereas the unconscious is not, but is rather a world itself. One could almost say it was the world, and that it speaks, as it were, to us."
Our unconscious still functions like it did millions of years ago, and knows the unknowable. We have discovered that trauma can be passed between generations, even events that took place before birth. The epigenetic inheritance theory says that environmental factors and memory-traces of earlier generations can affect the genes of future generations.
Modern physics suggests that soul is considered an indefinite, non-structured, massless energy made up of electromagnetic radiations that is a coherent, imperceptible, uncontainable and recyclable energetic support pathway (Pereira 2015). It has a capability to store information holographically within the void or vacuum and create memories beyond the limitations of the brain and body (bodily consciousness and functional consciousness).
Like the transformative procedures of alchemy, genealogy is also a transformative practice of the 'greening' of experience, the greening of our Tree, aided by genealogical arts that give it the proper form in due time, and "prepares the matter as becomes Nature, for such work, and such work provides also, with premeditated Wisdom, a suitable vessel.
Art can produce extraordinary things out of natural beginnings that Nature herself could never create. For unaided Nature does not produce things whereby imperfect metals can in a moment be made perfect, but by the secrets of Our Art this transgenerational integration can be done.
Unconscious & Invisible
Many adults seem to come from low-nurturance (dysfunctional) childhoods. So did their parents and ancestors. In such dysfunctional family trees, secrets are common - information about family members or events that someone feels should be withheld from kids, in-laws, strangers, or everyone -- the missing pieces of the family story.
What we don't know can hurt us. Family secrets are different than unawareness of information about members and ancestors. They're conscious decisions to withhold details of a shameful, scary, or illegal event or relationship (like a crime, abortion, an affair, or desertion), or a shameful personal trait (like an addiction or perversion). Some family secrets stand alone. Others are part of an inherited family distrust-policy that says "We don't tell outsiders our family's business."
Unassimilated trauma in one generation turns symptomatic in the next. Adults try to hide significant events and facts from children but they pick it up unconsciously and search for that x-factor compulsively, instinctively. Our genealogy is a map of the unconscious, a light in the dark, a red thread to follow into the labyrinth. The quest for the Holy Grail is a journey of psychological transformation.
The ancestral legacy, our pre-history, imposes limitations and faulty narratives. Parents fail to speak up or have an inability to discuss certain matters. Secret histories are cut off and denied, forgotten, or suppressed. Chemical tags acting like Post-its can latch onto our DNA, switching genes off and on.
Such complexes, connected to the experience of earlier generations, are usually deeply unconscious, alienating, and distorted by defensive reactions. We sense a divergent reality. They are a split in our being, including obligations, trust, and duty. Shame, anger, and repressed rage of ancestors -- their disowned and unexpressed feelings, thoughts, and fantasies -- are carried by the child.
The child identifies with shame-based parents. Shame is internalized by abandonment, emotional or otherwise. It double-binds core feelings, needs, and natural instinctual drives in defensive dysfunctional behavior and obsessive, disorganized nature, shame memories, and triggers. Shame freezes into identity.
An internalized sense of shame is the result of toxic family secrets -- shameful intergenerational secrets that have gone unconscious as a core of emotional illness. It impacts our sense of identity, dignity, and honor. It makes our attachment style anxious, ambivalent, disorganized, or avoidant. It colors our ethical and spiritual life, which is about wholeness. Shame shows our human limitations.
Family, as the matrix of character, shapes our identity. Toxic shame is an unconscious demon that creates the most neurotic and character-disordered behaviors -- self-identity disorder and denial. The cover-up is a false self -- inauthentic, fragmented. Dehumanizing shame takes over the whole identity with acting out that has life-changing consequences.
Toxic shame disturbs the self and sense of identity with negative inner states that develop in the false self: chronic depression, codependence, alienation, paranoia, splitting, compulsions, perfectionism, inferiority complex, inadequacy, narcissism, self doubt, self-rejection, and the isolation of loneliness. It runs the gamut from neurosis, to character disorders, to criminality.
Healthy shame is the root of humility, of humaness and compassion. It makes us act out, transmits destructive power between people, and is the primary source of violence to self and others. Healthy shame is revelatory and leads to finding our true self, spiritual destiny, and calling. (Bradshaw)
Symptoms usually lead us toward self-knowledge. Our legacy fascinates, compels, and conditions us. It directs interests, preferences, and occupational and other life accomplishments. Catastrophes, poverty, war, and genocide are environmental impactors. They change us then we effect one another.
We compulsively act out ancestral traits and repeat the same admonitions and double binds, automatically. The conscious and unconscious minds don't speak to one another; they don't even speak the same language. So, we tend to symbolically reenact experiences our families have not integrated. Rather than avoided, they need to be worked through, not passed on for generations as a 'false self'.
Integration proceeds by perceiving and acknowledging our ancestors with our conscious minds, including our intergenerational wounds and trauma and the weight of the transgenerational history. Neurotics assume too much blame while the character disordered project blame onto the other and the world.
Integration processes help resolve identity confusion, leading toward wholeness. It brings clarity to the emotions, intelligence, and intuition with the unconscious dimension. Incorporating invisible or missing parts of our essence restores us, providing we have the capacity to embrace it and take it in. Just like everything, we are subject to the cosmic cycles of birth, death and regeneration.
Jung says, "Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead." (Liber Novus, Page 244). Our genealogy is a psychic treasure house of latent wisdom. Inquiry, exploration, and expansion of awareness and self-knowledge is fundamental to the human experience.
Some conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, other contents can also arise from intuitive or ancestral wisdom. Sometimes people can't see what is right in front of them because they cannot or will not even imagine it. Jung thought it sufficient that the dead produce effects like symptomatic repetition and unconscious alienation.
Jung thought the repressed, unlived life of the parents exerted some the strongest effects visited upon children. By this the means the potentials of the parents that have remained unrealized and the personal qualities that have been repressed, never been developed or expressed, or authenticity repressed.
"Jung felt that the “unlived lives” of the parents deeply impacted the lives of the children, as if “branding” the children with a particular destiny. The unlived lives of the parents is an ancestral inheritance which has great weight and gravitas, in that it literally shapes the lives of the children. Jung elaborates: “that part of their lives which might have been lived had not certain somewhat threadbare excuses prevented the parents from doing so. To put it bluntly, it is that part of life which they have always shirked, probably by means of a pious lie. That sows the most virulent germs.”
"The repressed, unlived lives of the parents act like a contagious and malignant psychic virus which infects the surrounding field. Speaking about repression, Jung makes the point that, “whatever you repress, whatever you don’t recognize in yourself, is nevertheless alive. It is constellated outside of you, it works in your surroundings and influences other people. Of course, you are blissfully unconscious of these effects, but the other people get the noseful.” This psychic virus is like a nonlocalized bug in the system which creates a dis-ease and disturbance in the coherence of the family. This virulent psychic pathogen germinates in and replicates itself through the unconscious of the children, which is the medium it uses to reproduce itself through generations, i.e., over time." (Paul Levy, "Unlived Lives")
Some people deny their roots. Others try to pass for what they are not, mourn for what their family used to be, or keep their identity ambiguous. It means being stuck between a negative past and a transpersonal future, a root of unconscious anger and depression, or rages. We grow up under emotional clouds which color our personalities.
Some families suffer dire straits that force them into challenging passages and migrations. Not all family members survive attempts to break their life cycle. Such family secrets and survivor traumas tend to remain or become unconscious over generations, manipulated by misplaced family loyalty.
When the sensation of inauthenticity, or repetitive cycles, or crises become overwhelming, we are obliged to deepen our understanding, gain clarity of our roots, and know ourselves better, deal with our past in the present as true selves. To do so, we have to break out of differentiated consciousness and dissolve back into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void, or primal states of undivided being. Falling apart a new style of reflection possible in the psyche. Old outworn rigidities dissolve and flow is re-established.
If you ignore, deny, reject or project on them then your ancestors remain unconscious to you and therefore tremendously powerful. The unlived life is that aspect of one’s life that was avoided due to such factors as fear, willful unconsciousness, or an excess of conformity. By not denying them, we can stop stop living unfinished stories, and passing them down. We create relationships with dialogue.
Historically, some families change their names, religions or cultures, but genetic ethnicity and sacred wounds remain. Some migrate or even escape to foreign lands. The repressed prevents the return of your forgotten self in the present. Jung thought, "You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection." (Red Book, Page 298)
Indigenous people equate ancestor loss with soul loss that can be retrieved by reintegrating our ancestral generations. Our memory gives the dead greater reality and invokes their “participation” in births and marriages. If ancestral spirits are watchful, we cease to be cut off from those relationships and feel more whole.
Since soul is the living thing in us, soul loss is depression, loss of vitality or passion about life, or feeling that something is missing in life, or inauthentic. Body-language betrays feelings. We define ourselves by interaction. When you put human names and stories to it, perception shifts.
Genealogy is about re-connection. It helps heal loss of meaning, survivor-guilt, direction, vitality, mission, purpose, identity, and deep unhappiness. We need to know who we are and where we come from beyond the recent past. We can follow the lines of our genealogical descent like a path, our particular path into existence.
--Iona Miller
7 generations of ancestors can be tracked in this circular family tree.
Below: Thierry Guillard, Rooted in the Present
Transgenerational Therapy
"When I worked in my family tree, I understood the strange communion of the destiny that unites me to my ancestors. I had the strong feeling that it was under the influence of events and problems that were incomplete and unresolved by my parents, my grandparents, and my other ancestors. I had the impression that there is often in the family an impersonal Karma transmitted from parents to children. I always knew that I had to answer questions already asked by my ancestors or I had to conclude, or continue on the previously unresolved issues". ~Carl Jung
"What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul. Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection." ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
"Therefore you should have reverence for what has become, so that the law of love may become redemption through the restoration of the lower end of the past, not prediction to the boundless mastery of the dead. But the spirits of those who died before their time will live, for the sake of our present incompleteness, in the dark chords in the rafters of our houses and beseech our ears with urgent laments, until we grant them redemption through restoring what has existed since ancient times under the rule of love.
What we called temptation is the demand of the Dead who passed away prematurely and incomplete through the guilt of the good and of the law. For no good is so complete that it could not do it justice and break what should not be broken."
---Carl Jung, Nox Secunda: pages 345-346 the Red Book book
"When I worked in my family tree, I understood the strange communion of the destiny that unites me to my ancestors. I had the strong feeling that it was under the influence of events and problems that were incomplete and unresolved by my parents, my grandparents, and my other ancestors. I had the impression that there is often in the family an impersonal Karma transmitted from parents to children. I always knew that I had to answer questions already asked by my ancestors or I had to conclude, or continue on the previously unresolved issues". ~Carl Jung
"What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul. Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection." ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
"Therefore you should have reverence for what has become, so that the law of love may become redemption through the restoration of the lower end of the past, not prediction to the boundless mastery of the dead. But the spirits of those who died before their time will live, for the sake of our present incompleteness, in the dark chords in the rafters of our houses and beseech our ears with urgent laments, until we grant them redemption through restoring what has existed since ancient times under the rule of love.
What we called temptation is the demand of the Dead who passed away prematurely and incomplete through the guilt of the good and of the law. For no good is so complete that it could not do it justice and break what should not be broken."
---Carl Jung, Nox Secunda: pages 345-346 the Red Book book
Carl Jung: On the Road to Wholeness
"Nobody who finds himself on the road to wholeness can escape that characteristic suspension which is the meaning of crucifixion.
For he will infallibly run into things that thwart and “cross” him:
first, the thing he has no wish to be (the shadow);
second, the thing he is not (the “other,” the individual reality of the “You”);
and third, his psychic non-ego (the collective unconscious)."
--The Psychology of the Transference, CW 16, Paragraph 470
"Nobody who finds himself on the road to wholeness can escape that characteristic suspension which is the meaning of crucifixion.
For he will infallibly run into things that thwart and “cross” him:
first, the thing he has no wish to be (the shadow);
second, the thing he is not (the “other,” the individual reality of the “You”);
and third, his psychic non-ego (the collective unconscious)."
--The Psychology of the Transference, CW 16, Paragraph 470
At birth, we unconsciously inherit unfinished stories of our parents, our ancestors and our society. Like open circuits, the charges of this heritage influence our lives for we cannot cut ourselves off from our roots without losing an essential part of ourselves. These histories replay themselves in some of the difficulties we encounter in our own lives, often programming the same outcomes again and again. The various ways in which we try to protect ourselves from them, by becoming withdrawn for example, or through excessive conformity to others and to society at large, prevent us from truly being ourselves and living in the present moment.
To release from the past that haunts the present, the author invites us to understand the laws that regulate these transgenerational inheritance. His approach goes beyond the established clichés. Rather than striving in vain to cut the ties to our origins, we should learn to integrate them, drawing upon traditional wisdom and the arts for inspiration. The key to emancipation from these problematic heritages does not lie in constructing barriers or armouring ourselves defensively, but rather in reconnecting with our selves and with others at a more profound level, one which is often unconscious. Rather than compounding an all too individualistic and egocentric approach, which can only disconnect us from others and from our origins, the author proposes reconnecting with our true selves so as to return to, and be rooted in, the essentials of life.
To release from the past that haunts the present, the author invites us to understand the laws that regulate these transgenerational inheritance. His approach goes beyond the established clichés. Rather than striving in vain to cut the ties to our origins, we should learn to integrate them, drawing upon traditional wisdom and the arts for inspiration. The key to emancipation from these problematic heritages does not lie in constructing barriers or armouring ourselves defensively, but rather in reconnecting with our selves and with others at a more profound level, one which is often unconscious. Rather than compounding an all too individualistic and egocentric approach, which can only disconnect us from others and from our origins, the author proposes reconnecting with our true selves so as to return to, and be rooted in, the essentials of life.
Translated from the French edition :
"Chamanisme, rapport aux ancêtres et intégration transgénérationnelle"
http://www.ecodition.net/en/livre/shamanism-ancestors-and-transgenerational-integration/
The Ancients already knew the therapeutic potential of the family links between generations that we rediscover in modern transgenerational analysis. Far from being a new fashion, the recognition of transgenerational processes dates back to the first shamanic type of communities. Their methods to cure "The Ancestor Syndrome" offer essential historical references and valuable teachings to contemporary therapies.
Transgenerational integration brings a welcome middle ground for exchanges between traditional, shamanic and actual therapeutic approaches. This new field nourishes the rooting of contemporary practices as well as the renewal of ancestral wisdom. With the contribution of specialists from different backgrounds, this collective book presents a wide spectrum of perspectives to bridge traditional and modern knowledges.
*Olivier Douville is a psychoanalyst and anthropologist, international speaker and lecturer at University Paris 10 Nanterre and Paris 7 Denis-Diderot.
*C. Michael Smith Ph.D., is a Jungian psychologist and medical anthropologist, Cherokee-metis healer and teacher, director of Crows Nest International.
*Élisabeth Horowitz is a psychogenealogist therapist, international speaker and the author of numerous books.
*Iona Miller is a therapist, writer, artist and consultant.
*Myron Eshowsky is an international mediator, author and shaman.
*Pierre Ramaut is a transgenerational psychoanalyst.
*Thierry Gaillard is a depth psychologist, author of a new thesis on
the Œdipus myth.
Shamanism, Ancestors and Transgenerational Integration
Introduction By Thierry Gaillard
Elders and traditional cultures emphasized active relationships between generations and with their ancestors. These exchanges connected the community with its roots and sources – both symbolic and mythological. When in harmony, these links would assure a balance for the collective as a whole as well as for each of its individual members. When these links were lost, shamans would be called upon to restore them and to heal the symptoms occasioned by this loss.
The healing potential and the importance of these links between generations and their ancestors have been rediscovered in numerous approaches in contemporary therapy: depth psychoogy, transgenerational psychoanalysis, family therapy,
psychogenealogy, epigenetics, etc.
Today we distinguish the conscious transmissions between generations, named "intergenerational", from the unconscious transmissions, named "transgenerational", which call for healing or therapy, that is to say "transgenerational integration".
As explained by the authors of this collection, the Ancients managed these links between generations and their ancestors in a variety of ways. Ancestor cult, for example, kept the memory and transparency of family histories alive to prevent the consequences of unconscious legacies that could affect (or alienate) descendants.
Martin Duffy explains: "In shamanic traditions it is important that the person is not just understood as an individual, they are connected to a network in their society as well as connected to their family lineage. Ancestral healing is very important in shamanism. And they are discovering this through science as
well, in the field of epigenetics, where we can see that we inherit our physical characteristics, but we also can inherit much more.
We can inherit memories of trauma, and generations later this can be manifesting in our current lives. One of the journeys we do in shamanism is to journey back and meet our ancestors to discover the power of our lineage. We often think of the defects we may have inherited, but it is really important to travel back to discover the power that we have from our ancestors too. In all shamanic cultures, working with the ancestors is vitally important because we are the ancestors of future generations to come."
Ancestor cult pre-dates religions. It was widespread in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and was part of a desire for global harmony. When this harmony is not respected, the imbalance can be harmful to humans and to the rest of creation.
Thus African totemism in spiritual tradition was not only concerned with men, but also with other creatures, including animals and plants. No wonder that the ancestral customs have deified their ancestors, or have promoted some to the rank of intercessors with the gods, giving them some special functions: enhancing biological regeneration by their intervention in births and in actions to enhance soil fertility; ensuring the moral and social order; protecting their descendants whose peace, health, and well-being they assure and whom they warn by omen or oracle. These traditional societies were aware of their origins and the life stories of their ancestors much more than we are today. Their collective memory particularly allowed recognizing the liabilities inherited from ancestors to avoid repeating the same mistakes, and to experience healing from them. 1 [Martin Duffy (2015),"Ancient Wisdom, Modern Medicine", Network Irland Magazin, issue 93, Robinstown.]
The great writers constantly remind us of the importance of transgenerational, as Gustave Flaubert, "Many things would be brought to light if we knew our genealogy."
When you start to clarify your family tree, its unsolved conflicts and the missing transmission form previous generations , you are already taking an active part
to the process of integration. Without being aware of our transgenerational inheritance, profitable and/or distressing, our entire connection to our origins, to being and to life may be diminished.
Anyone could find and get in touch with their roots through their ancestors, showing many ways they care about them (anniversary ceremonies for exampl
e). The ancient wisdom says it is important to cultivate our rootedness and treat it when necessary - in the same way as we would care for a tree.
Deepening these ties to ancestors is a way to reconnect with the healthy parts of our roots, to our mythological and spiritual origins. In transgenerational integration work, what counts is to be pro-active vis-à-vis our roots, to integrate them instead of passively undergoing our transgenerational inheritance.
In order not to be possessed by this unconscious inheritance, Goethe said, "what you have inherited from your forefathers, acquire it to possess it."
Giving life to one's ancestors within us becomes then a practice for oneself, a practice which, particularly in shamanism, extends to animals, plants, minerals, always with the aim to live in harmony with all creation. And finally, it is this love relationship in the world, including the ancestors, the heavens and the earth, animals, plants and all the life that animates the world, which is our relation to the "source".
This is a kind of guarantor of a happy and prosperous life that all traditions have always taken to heart to protect. As we will see in later chapters, these ideas are reflected in many ways in the ancient wisdom, in some rituals and especially in the first shamanic societies. They are also present in ancient sacred texts, including the Bible, Job (8.8) "Ask those of past generations, attend to the experience of their fathers. For we are of yesterday and we know nothing."
Gustav Glotz explains that before the cult of individuality that we know today, the person (or the subject) was considered in relation to his family and not as individual. One blood was transmitted from generation to generation, forming a single being. In this perspective, a person who acted against the gods or against the laws of life, exposes his family and his descendants to pay the moral and spiritual debt that he or she had contracted, even if he or she does not personally suffer the
consequences, [2 Gustav Glotz, (1931), Histoires grecques, PUF, Genève.
The "cult"of individualization and repression (instead of psychological integration) that characterizes modern societies here shows its weaknesses. Too many secrets, non-integrated traumas, events and unfinished stories, are replayed between
generations and disrupt the bonds of filiation. Due to an accumulation of alienating transgenerational inheritance, our society has lost the thread of the stories that bind generations together. Compared to the life of the ancients, it seems we have lost the feel for a living, spiritual parentage, rooting the sensation of being the architect of the creative updating of our heritage.
The recognition of transgenerational unconscious legacies comes right on time to apply not only therapeutic needs, but also to important cultural issues we are confronted with nowadays (increased infertility, disruption of natural forces,
endemic epidemia, questions about parenting, Alzheimer's disease, etc.
The articles in this collection share this perspective of re-appropriating, or updating, the old knowledge about transgenerational phenomena for the mutual enrichment of cultures, traditional and modern.
Pierre Ramaut will develop the relationship between the transgenerational psychoanalysis and shamanism, particularly around the issue of healing ghosts. "As transgenerational psychoanalysis, shamanism considers 'Ancestors disease' and their ghosts. These are dead 'not completely gone', who departed with an encrypted secret, in tragic circumstances, and still have a score to settle, or those who have not accepted the loss, or those whose body we never found, making it impossible for a mourning process to take place."
In an illuminating reading that combines anthropology, psychoanalysis and shamanism, Olivier Douville will return in his article to the question of ancestors and initiations.
Inspired by the ancestral methods, Elisabeth Horowitz will present ten therapeutic rituals to heal one's family tree. And to stay in the field of therapeutic applications,
Myron Eshowsky addresses the issue of collective healing rituals for transgenerational trauma. As he explains: "The unhealed ancestral past
stories exist in the spiritual space and are considered as factors causing disease and conflicts within the community. We pay past debts. If we have not cleared the slate, an invisible loyalty prompts us to repeat a moment of joy or unbearable sadness, injustice or a tragic death."
For her part, Iona Miller invites us through the doors and thresholds that separate us from the world of our ancestors. She will develop this theme, as well on the psychic, spiritual and material level, recalling the function of some monuments from the shaman and druidic culture, sculptures of aperture (vulvas) in the world of Mother Earth, the Sheela-Na-Ghi, for both initiation and protection.
Pre-Pub http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/x.html
In my article I will return to the source of the conflict that opposes the traditional culture and the modern since more than two millennia. To cope with the profound changes generated by the birth of our modern civilization (in Athens in the 5th century BC), Sophocles had to rewrite the old myth of Oedipus. He leaves us a model of healing the conflict between tradition and modernity that restores harmony between worlds. A model that gives pride to the integration of transgenerational inheritance as he said through the initiation of Oedipus to self-knowledge, knowledge of the gods and of the universe.
Finally, this collective book ends with an interview of C. Michael Smith on themes such as transmission, adaptation of ancient traditions to today's reality's world and
to the way of the heart, honoring the earth, heaven and all the living.
http://www.ecodition.net/en/livre/shamanism-ancestors-and-transgenerational-integration/
"Chamanisme, rapport aux ancêtres et intégration transgénérationnelle"
http://www.ecodition.net/en/livre/shamanism-ancestors-and-transgenerational-integration/
The Ancients already knew the therapeutic potential of the family links between generations that we rediscover in modern transgenerational analysis. Far from being a new fashion, the recognition of transgenerational processes dates back to the first shamanic type of communities. Their methods to cure "The Ancestor Syndrome" offer essential historical references and valuable teachings to contemporary therapies.
Transgenerational integration brings a welcome middle ground for exchanges between traditional, shamanic and actual therapeutic approaches. This new field nourishes the rooting of contemporary practices as well as the renewal of ancestral wisdom. With the contribution of specialists from different backgrounds, this collective book presents a wide spectrum of perspectives to bridge traditional and modern knowledges.
*Olivier Douville is a psychoanalyst and anthropologist, international speaker and lecturer at University Paris 10 Nanterre and Paris 7 Denis-Diderot.
*C. Michael Smith Ph.D., is a Jungian psychologist and medical anthropologist, Cherokee-metis healer and teacher, director of Crows Nest International.
*Élisabeth Horowitz is a psychogenealogist therapist, international speaker and the author of numerous books.
*Iona Miller is a therapist, writer, artist and consultant.
*Myron Eshowsky is an international mediator, author and shaman.
*Pierre Ramaut is a transgenerational psychoanalyst.
*Thierry Gaillard is a depth psychologist, author of a new thesis on
the Œdipus myth.
Shamanism, Ancestors and Transgenerational Integration
Introduction By Thierry Gaillard
Elders and traditional cultures emphasized active relationships between generations and with their ancestors. These exchanges connected the community with its roots and sources – both symbolic and mythological. When in harmony, these links would assure a balance for the collective as a whole as well as for each of its individual members. When these links were lost, shamans would be called upon to restore them and to heal the symptoms occasioned by this loss.
The healing potential and the importance of these links between generations and their ancestors have been rediscovered in numerous approaches in contemporary therapy: depth psychoogy, transgenerational psychoanalysis, family therapy,
psychogenealogy, epigenetics, etc.
Today we distinguish the conscious transmissions between generations, named "intergenerational", from the unconscious transmissions, named "transgenerational", which call for healing or therapy, that is to say "transgenerational integration".
As explained by the authors of this collection, the Ancients managed these links between generations and their ancestors in a variety of ways. Ancestor cult, for example, kept the memory and transparency of family histories alive to prevent the consequences of unconscious legacies that could affect (or alienate) descendants.
Martin Duffy explains: "In shamanic traditions it is important that the person is not just understood as an individual, they are connected to a network in their society as well as connected to their family lineage. Ancestral healing is very important in shamanism. And they are discovering this through science as
well, in the field of epigenetics, where we can see that we inherit our physical characteristics, but we also can inherit much more.
We can inherit memories of trauma, and generations later this can be manifesting in our current lives. One of the journeys we do in shamanism is to journey back and meet our ancestors to discover the power of our lineage. We often think of the defects we may have inherited, but it is really important to travel back to discover the power that we have from our ancestors too. In all shamanic cultures, working with the ancestors is vitally important because we are the ancestors of future generations to come."
Ancestor cult pre-dates religions. It was widespread in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and was part of a desire for global harmony. When this harmony is not respected, the imbalance can be harmful to humans and to the rest of creation.
Thus African totemism in spiritual tradition was not only concerned with men, but also with other creatures, including animals and plants. No wonder that the ancestral customs have deified their ancestors, or have promoted some to the rank of intercessors with the gods, giving them some special functions: enhancing biological regeneration by their intervention in births and in actions to enhance soil fertility; ensuring the moral and social order; protecting their descendants whose peace, health, and well-being they assure and whom they warn by omen or oracle. These traditional societies were aware of their origins and the life stories of their ancestors much more than we are today. Their collective memory particularly allowed recognizing the liabilities inherited from ancestors to avoid repeating the same mistakes, and to experience healing from them. 1 [Martin Duffy (2015),"Ancient Wisdom, Modern Medicine", Network Irland Magazin, issue 93, Robinstown.]
The great writers constantly remind us of the importance of transgenerational, as Gustave Flaubert, "Many things would be brought to light if we knew our genealogy."
When you start to clarify your family tree, its unsolved conflicts and the missing transmission form previous generations , you are already taking an active part
to the process of integration. Without being aware of our transgenerational inheritance, profitable and/or distressing, our entire connection to our origins, to being and to life may be diminished.
Anyone could find and get in touch with their roots through their ancestors, showing many ways they care about them (anniversary ceremonies for exampl
e). The ancient wisdom says it is important to cultivate our rootedness and treat it when necessary - in the same way as we would care for a tree.
Deepening these ties to ancestors is a way to reconnect with the healthy parts of our roots, to our mythological and spiritual origins. In transgenerational integration work, what counts is to be pro-active vis-à-vis our roots, to integrate them instead of passively undergoing our transgenerational inheritance.
In order not to be possessed by this unconscious inheritance, Goethe said, "what you have inherited from your forefathers, acquire it to possess it."
Giving life to one's ancestors within us becomes then a practice for oneself, a practice which, particularly in shamanism, extends to animals, plants, minerals, always with the aim to live in harmony with all creation. And finally, it is this love relationship in the world, including the ancestors, the heavens and the earth, animals, plants and all the life that animates the world, which is our relation to the "source".
This is a kind of guarantor of a happy and prosperous life that all traditions have always taken to heart to protect. As we will see in later chapters, these ideas are reflected in many ways in the ancient wisdom, in some rituals and especially in the first shamanic societies. They are also present in ancient sacred texts, including the Bible, Job (8.8) "Ask those of past generations, attend to the experience of their fathers. For we are of yesterday and we know nothing."
Gustav Glotz explains that before the cult of individuality that we know today, the person (or the subject) was considered in relation to his family and not as individual. One blood was transmitted from generation to generation, forming a single being. In this perspective, a person who acted against the gods or against the laws of life, exposes his family and his descendants to pay the moral and spiritual debt that he or she had contracted, even if he or she does not personally suffer the
consequences, [2 Gustav Glotz, (1931), Histoires grecques, PUF, Genève.
The "cult"of individualization and repression (instead of psychological integration) that characterizes modern societies here shows its weaknesses. Too many secrets, non-integrated traumas, events and unfinished stories, are replayed between
generations and disrupt the bonds of filiation. Due to an accumulation of alienating transgenerational inheritance, our society has lost the thread of the stories that bind generations together. Compared to the life of the ancients, it seems we have lost the feel for a living, spiritual parentage, rooting the sensation of being the architect of the creative updating of our heritage.
The recognition of transgenerational unconscious legacies comes right on time to apply not only therapeutic needs, but also to important cultural issues we are confronted with nowadays (increased infertility, disruption of natural forces,
endemic epidemia, questions about parenting, Alzheimer's disease, etc.
The articles in this collection share this perspective of re-appropriating, or updating, the old knowledge about transgenerational phenomena for the mutual enrichment of cultures, traditional and modern.
Pierre Ramaut will develop the relationship between the transgenerational psychoanalysis and shamanism, particularly around the issue of healing ghosts. "As transgenerational psychoanalysis, shamanism considers 'Ancestors disease' and their ghosts. These are dead 'not completely gone', who departed with an encrypted secret, in tragic circumstances, and still have a score to settle, or those who have not accepted the loss, or those whose body we never found, making it impossible for a mourning process to take place."
In an illuminating reading that combines anthropology, psychoanalysis and shamanism, Olivier Douville will return in his article to the question of ancestors and initiations.
Inspired by the ancestral methods, Elisabeth Horowitz will present ten therapeutic rituals to heal one's family tree. And to stay in the field of therapeutic applications,
Myron Eshowsky addresses the issue of collective healing rituals for transgenerational trauma. As he explains: "The unhealed ancestral past
stories exist in the spiritual space and are considered as factors causing disease and conflicts within the community. We pay past debts. If we have not cleared the slate, an invisible loyalty prompts us to repeat a moment of joy or unbearable sadness, injustice or a tragic death."
For her part, Iona Miller invites us through the doors and thresholds that separate us from the world of our ancestors. She will develop this theme, as well on the psychic, spiritual and material level, recalling the function of some monuments from the shaman and druidic culture, sculptures of aperture (vulvas) in the world of Mother Earth, the Sheela-Na-Ghi, for both initiation and protection.
Pre-Pub http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/x.html
In my article I will return to the source of the conflict that opposes the traditional culture and the modern since more than two millennia. To cope with the profound changes generated by the birth of our modern civilization (in Athens in the 5th century BC), Sophocles had to rewrite the old myth of Oedipus. He leaves us a model of healing the conflict between tradition and modernity that restores harmony between worlds. A model that gives pride to the integration of transgenerational inheritance as he said through the initiation of Oedipus to self-knowledge, knowledge of the gods and of the universe.
Finally, this collective book ends with an interview of C. Michael Smith on themes such as transmission, adaptation of ancient traditions to today's reality's world and
to the way of the heart, honoring the earth, heaven and all the living.
http://www.ecodition.net/en/livre/shamanism-ancestors-and-transgenerational-integration/
The Importance of Clarifying Your General Tree
Excerpts from the book "Integrating her transgenerational heritages", Th Gaillard, Ecodition 2016.
In general, the work of integration is a symbolization of the unthought (unconscious or secrets) in a family tree. It begins in infancy with the unconscious body image, first experiences and methods of communication through their body. Psychological elaborations, the search for truths, rational and irrational, will gradually counterbalance these unfinished or unintegrated stories of ours.
In order to analyze this transmission, Serge Tisseron [1] proposed a modeling over three generations: which does not and is not integrated with the first generation, becomes unthinkable for the next generation (because it is deprived of a verbal transmission) and can cause disturbed passages and other symptomatic behaviors to the third generation.
With Françoise Dolto's idea that it takes three generations to produce a psychosis. In other words, an unspoken or a secret in the first generation can lead to neurotic complexes to the second and psychotic complexes or passages to the third "Act".
These unconscious legacies have multiple consequences. In all cases it is a difficulty to be oneself, because subjected to unconscious forces that lead us to adopt behaviors that we would not have if we were not the victims.
Etymologically speaking, the word that best describes this kind of influence is alienation [2]. It derives from the Latin alienure, "to make another" or "to make alien" to oneself. It refers to a "state in which the human being is detached from himself" and, in a more general sense, the "loss by the human being of his authenticity".
"I am another," said Rimbaud, to signify that one can be inhabited by something other than oneself. And that is little saying that we are not authentically ourselves most of the time, but adapted or conditioned by our "education". An idea shared by Freud that explained this presence in each of us unconscious: "The ego is not the master in his own house."
The knowledge of self advocated by certain ancient Greeks certainly bore on the knowledge of this authentic part in itself. And as we shall see later, the knowledge of oneself, that is, knowing that part which is inalienable in itself, plays a great part in the work of integrating our alienations. The integration of our transgenerational heritages is to be included in this broader perspective of the new psychology of the depths, which combines the analysis of the unconscious, the integration of alienations and self-knowledge.
Once they are unconscious and have been transmitted unconsciously, we are generally unaware of the inheritances that alienate us. The aim of the analyzes is precisely to make us aware of them. The more we become aware of the transgenerational heritages that inhabit us, the more we change the way we respond to them. And as we will see examples, it becomes then possible to transform these symptoms as well as other existential difficulties. This work makes it possible to differentiate what we inhabit unconsciously (i.e. what alienates us) from who we are and from whom we would be if we were freed from it. A process of becoming oneself or of the future as a subject can then take place. "
[1] Serge Tisseron (ed.) (1995), The Psychism in the Test of Generations: Clinique du phantom, Dunod, Paris.
[2] See the full definition of alienation in the glossary.
Excerpts from the book "Integrating her transgenerational heritages", Th Gaillard, Ecodition 2016.
In general, the work of integration is a symbolization of the unthought (unconscious or secrets) in a family tree. It begins in infancy with the unconscious body image, first experiences and methods of communication through their body. Psychological elaborations, the search for truths, rational and irrational, will gradually counterbalance these unfinished or unintegrated stories of ours.
In order to analyze this transmission, Serge Tisseron [1] proposed a modeling over three generations: which does not and is not integrated with the first generation, becomes unthinkable for the next generation (because it is deprived of a verbal transmission) and can cause disturbed passages and other symptomatic behaviors to the third generation.
With Françoise Dolto's idea that it takes three generations to produce a psychosis. In other words, an unspoken or a secret in the first generation can lead to neurotic complexes to the second and psychotic complexes or passages to the third "Act".
These unconscious legacies have multiple consequences. In all cases it is a difficulty to be oneself, because subjected to unconscious forces that lead us to adopt behaviors that we would not have if we were not the victims.
Etymologically speaking, the word that best describes this kind of influence is alienation [2]. It derives from the Latin alienure, "to make another" or "to make alien" to oneself. It refers to a "state in which the human being is detached from himself" and, in a more general sense, the "loss by the human being of his authenticity".
"I am another," said Rimbaud, to signify that one can be inhabited by something other than oneself. And that is little saying that we are not authentically ourselves most of the time, but adapted or conditioned by our "education". An idea shared by Freud that explained this presence in each of us unconscious: "The ego is not the master in his own house."
The knowledge of self advocated by certain ancient Greeks certainly bore on the knowledge of this authentic part in itself. And as we shall see later, the knowledge of oneself, that is, knowing that part which is inalienable in itself, plays a great part in the work of integrating our alienations. The integration of our transgenerational heritages is to be included in this broader perspective of the new psychology of the depths, which combines the analysis of the unconscious, the integration of alienations and self-knowledge.
Once they are unconscious and have been transmitted unconsciously, we are generally unaware of the inheritances that alienate us. The aim of the analyzes is precisely to make us aware of them. The more we become aware of the transgenerational heritages that inhabit us, the more we change the way we respond to them. And as we will see examples, it becomes then possible to transform these symptoms as well as other existential difficulties. This work makes it possible to differentiate what we inhabit unconsciously (i.e. what alienates us) from who we are and from whom we would be if we were freed from it. A process of becoming oneself or of the future as a subject can then take place. "
[1] Serge Tisseron (ed.) (1995), The Psychism in the Test of Generations: Clinique du phantom, Dunod, Paris.
[2] See the full definition of alienation in the glossary.
Back cover: This book responds to a need for synthesis in the multitude of therapeutic approaches that today refer to "transgenerational". As a trunk binds the branches of a tree to its roots, knowledge of transgenerational dynamics allows us to associate some of our life experiences with unintegrated stories that we inherit from our families and society.
These inheritances are repeated in symptoms or in uncontrollable situations that are repeated. By integrating this past, we renew our origins and develop a better knowledge of ourselves. In addition to the classical notions, in particular the mechanisms of transfer, the author refers to the knowledge of the Ancients to better understand these transgenerational dynamics.
He shows that with his work on Oedipus, Sophocles has left us a model of alienation and emancipation rich in teachings. By combining traditional and contemporary knowledge, the author allows us to better understand the extent and importance of transgenerational phenomena. A simplified edition of this book has also been published by Éditions Ecodition under the title: To take root in the present moment.
Preview
https://books.google.com/books?id=_8xCBgAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=Rooted+in+the+Present,+The+Emergence+of+the+Self+By+Thierry+Gaillard&source=bl&ots=sgePs-mKEu&sig=hz8-_otrO0u3ve0lHsusWYC7gHM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi63I7Eg8HKAhUCsoMKHVf3BocQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=Rooted%20in%20the%20Present%2C%20The%20Emergence%20of%20the%20Self%20By%20Thierry%20Gaillard&f=false
These inheritances are repeated in symptoms or in uncontrollable situations that are repeated. By integrating this past, we renew our origins and develop a better knowledge of ourselves. In addition to the classical notions, in particular the mechanisms of transfer, the author refers to the knowledge of the Ancients to better understand these transgenerational dynamics.
He shows that with his work on Oedipus, Sophocles has left us a model of alienation and emancipation rich in teachings. By combining traditional and contemporary knowledge, the author allows us to better understand the extent and importance of transgenerational phenomena. A simplified edition of this book has also been published by Éditions Ecodition under the title: To take root in the present moment.
Preview
https://books.google.com/books?id=_8xCBgAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=Rooted+in+the+Present,+The+Emergence+of+the+Self+By+Thierry+Gaillard&source=bl&ots=sgePs-mKEu&sig=hz8-_otrO0u3ve0lHsusWYC7gHM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi63I7Eg8HKAhUCsoMKHVf3BocQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=Rooted%20in%20the%20Present%2C%20The%20Emergence%20of%20the%20Self%20By%20Thierry%20Gaillard&f=false
"The deposit of man’s whole ancestral experience—so rich in emotional imagery—of father, mother, child, husband and wife, of the magic personality, of dangers to body and soul, has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and even of political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic power." ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 337
The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 240.
The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 240.
(c) Iona Miller, 2017; All Rights Reserved