The ancestors and the unlived life

Deep in the somatic unconscious, the ancestors continue to live within us, emerging-into-now by way of their sensitivities and gifts, as well as through the shards of their unlived lives.

Their lost joy, broken dreams, and unfulfilled creativity have a way of taking up residency in our cell tissue, subtle bodies, and in our bellies and hearts.

As we enter into the mandala of descent – downward into body, mud, roots, and Earth – these ones begin to appear: as symbol, image, feeling, and synchronicity. They have a way of shifting shapes in order to find us, through color, tree, water, and sound.

What is it that we’re carrying on their behalf? What dreams remain undreamed and unmanifested for them? What are their deepest longings? What secrets have they never been able to share?

What keeps them awake at night? What brings them alive and unleashes their creativity and unique essence? What visions are not permitted to take form, of the divine within and of the divine world?

What were they required to disown in order to fit in to a place that had lost its sensitivity and soul? What became buried in the shadows? What story were they unable to tell, what feelings were they unable to feel?

In what way are we being asked to open a portal into re-emergence, re-enchantment, and revisioning?

As we open to receive this offering, an inner sanctuary forms to illuminate and transmute this transgenerational soul-material. Inside that structure, the seemingly solid lines between past, present, and future begin to fall away.

Being “in the present moment,” we share this moment with the ancestral ones and the spirts of the Earth who are with us.

In this way, past, present, and future co-emerge and interpenetrate, opening a diamond-like passageway into the mysteries of self and other, being and becoming, and a new alchemy of separation and union.

The individual self is an emanation, a manifestation, and an ornament of the Totality, a unified expression of the clear-light nature. Unique and differentiated, while at the same time non-separate and one.

Overwhelm and the inner friend

In moments of overwhelm - when we’re unable to access the internal resources or relational support to process what we’re experiencing – fragmented shards of emotion and pieces of soul are stored outside conscious awareness in soma and shadow holding areas, where they remain available for metabolization at a future time.

Though out of conscious awareness, this material continues to color our perception and polish our heart with its energies and fragrances. In its unilluminated form, it affects our capacity to feel, play, imagine and dream.

Prior to the ages of 4 or 5, we’re not able to repress that which is potentially shattering and have no choice but to experience it directly, or sequester it deep in the underworld, by way of those more archaic defenses of dissociation and splitting.

The lost ones who carry the material for us long to release this burden and return home. Sometimes we hear or sense them around us; they appear in our dreams, fantasies, and unexpected moods and physical symptoms.

At times they even appear as natural phenomena - the sun, moon, wilted flower, or star - even as our lovers, friends, and (real-life) children.

An alchemical, cellular healing would then require that we send our awareness and devotion into the neural-soul network which is holding the shattered one, containing its unlived life, and infuse that network with qualities that weren’t available at the time of the fragmentation - empathy, warmth, centering, and companionship.

Where, instead of disintegration, there is reintegration. Instead of dissociation, re-association. Instead of a necessary dis-embodiment, re-embodiment. A re-imagining where imagination was once foreclosed. A relinking of psyche-soma.

At the root of this wounding is the absence of a companion to make the journey with us, the Friend that we long for to bear witness as the shards disassemble and then come back together.

The nature of who and what this “Friend” is must be discovered in the fire of our own direct experience.

May you discover and come to know this Friend, living with it as an inner partner, in its infinite forms and expressions in your life. Though it can seem otherwise, the Friend may be nearer than we think.

Into the healing temple

The tragedy of relational wounding presents itself as a cellular fragmenting, more primordial than a mere cognitive dissonance, neurally-encoded and rooted in the soma-soul temple.

Here, we simultaneously long for and are terrified of “the Other,” not knowing whether to move toward or turn away. This sort of disorientation runs through the entirety of our psychic and bodily circuitry.

For a young child, the attachment figure is God(dess), magician, and idealized best friend - without them, the end is near. But when this figure is also the very source of terror for the little one – or are traumatized themselves – we find ourselves in uncharted waters.

It takes everything to sit in this field with another who has been touched in this way, an “other” outside us as well as the “other” within. If we really allow that in, the vessel may shatter.

In addition to empathic failure and narcissistic injury which goes to the very core of our sense of self, even more devastating is a deep, cellular knowing that “I’m alone in this.” The absence of companionship, the lost friend, is at the heart of trauma and devastating to a human being wired to rest and play within a relational field.

To provide even a sliver of hope, a moment of safety, where the other can feel felt and understood; just one moment when there can be a relinking, re-association, and re-imagining; to bring into the shared neural network a new experience, can soothe, repair, and open a new way forward.

Never underestimate the power of love and what we can do to help, listening and trying to understand how another is making sense of their experience and the meaning it has for them.

Attuning not only to the verbal narrative, but the story of the body and of the soul, of the shattered spirit. It, too, has a story to tell, but by way of image, dream, feeling, and symbol.

And to provide a sanctuary in which it can all be illuminated and held.

In the inner room of that temple, we may notice that the veil that appears to separate self and other begins to fall away, revealing the beauty and the mystery of this place and the endless depths of the human heart.