One of the most strengthening resources I have experienced is how to see more behind me.

What I mean specifically is to see who is behind me and all the love and gifts that they bring through them to me. The feeling of the ongoingness of life moving through me from people who I receive an experience of love, safety, strength, or healing with and from.

Who is behind you can include the image of all the family, teachers, friends, colleagues, strangers, therapists, animals, spiritual figures and others that have been loving and supportive.

Because we came into this life through a specific family and in a particular position, there is an essential and inevitable connection to family lineage.

If you had all of your lineage in order and facing towards the future, you would have many people standing behind you. How easy is it to see what is there? Who is there? What does it feel like to sense them or for them to look towards you?

Sometimes seeing who is behind you in your lineage brings up who has appeared to not have been supportive, or who has brought challenges, frustration, sadness, or upset into your life. All of this brings a kaleidoscope of emotions, experiences, and aspects of the whole that your soul wants to integrate … Whether your mind and ego want to or not.

Resourcing Your Family Lineage

When I was first asked to picture my family system behind me, it was extremely challenging. Not only was it hard to picture them, as visualizing was new to me, but I felt loss and pain when I brought them to my attention. I also noticed that there were so many people in my family that I did not know – how was I supposed to visualize them if I never had a face or photo of them… if I didn’t know them?

Some of this was me being numb to what I experienced, repressing it, so that I could move forward. So that I wasn’t paralyzed by it.

But I wanted to know what this was all about. Something intrigued me – my soul knew that I needed this and wanted all the love and fullness that I could dig up. I wanted to be strong to experience it all in my life, and so I could start here – experiencing what my first place of belonging brought to me.

So, as I practiced, I began to feel enough safety in me to see my parents and feel my reactions. I felt alone. I felt sadness and fear, not good enough, pain and loss, depression, emotional disconnectedness, distance.

If I looked farther beyond my parents, I found love and strength. I noticed that my grandmas and aunts were incredibly strong and present for me. I noticed how healing it was to have my great-grandma on my dad’s side see me. I became aware that my maternal great-grandmother was a midwife, which enlivened and gave power to the parts of me that were birthing myself, supporting others to birth themselves, and also the part of me that wanted to be a doula, to literally birth babies.

I also felt quite angry to think that somehow the love that I felt from my grandparents didn’t seem to reach my parents and therefore didn’t reach to me through them. There was a break in the connection. Little did I know at that time, this was the key to the healing. But I won’t go into all that here today.

And as I saw of those people behind me, when I faced the world, it was as if I was seeing a mirror to that. I noticed I felt shaken by the pain of the world, just as I was shaken by the pain of being a child to my parents. I noticed depression and at times remember myself “feeling the sadness of the entire world.”

Of course, I did, because this was my relationship to my family system and mainly through my parents – that I felt responsible for the feelings that they seemed to be unable to feel. And of course, it was my experience of my and my lineage’s past coming through me, overlaid onto my future. This was hardly my pure Self or freedom! This was being chained to the past.

There were worlds of healing that I wanted and needed to do with this.

Family Constellations

In the Family Constellations Healing Work, there are complexities to family dynamics, yet all of it is quite simple: we deeply desire and need to belong and be loved, and it is innately vital that everyone in this system belong and be loved — and we will do anything as a brand new child in this system to achieve this.

This means we might take on the loss that our grandmother couldn’t feel when she lost her first baby, or we might bond with an uncle that became outcasted from the family, or we might hold and feel the tragedy and violence of war as it wasn’t seen and honored two generations back… all or most of held in our beings unconsciously.

My experience of certain emotions and ways of being began to unfold as bonds to certain people in my family ancestry. This continues to unfold in and to me.

The Depth and Distance of Our Awareness

I am constantly reminded of how much more expansive I feel the more healing I do with my ancestry. It’s not essential in life to do this, but I found that the people in my family are great placeholders for certain energies and dynamics that I hold and relate to in different ways with the whole universe and world around me.

I realized quickly that as I transformed towards more peace and freedom in my inner image of who was behind me, I was instantaneously able to experience and see more peace and freedom in my life forward. And the farther back I can see behind me, the farther I can see in front of me, into the future. I have a clearer vision of what my personal purpose and authentic life possibility looks like. The conscious and unconscious (whatever is still not brought to awareness) images of my past and the people before me were mirrors to my outward world and future.

The farther back you can see behind you, the farther you can see forward into the future.

Ancestral Medicine

So where is the medicine? The remedy and antidote?

The medicine is in noticing the resource that is already there behind you, the acknowledgment of what happened behind the scenes that made a relationship into what it is now, the seeing and awareness.

The awareness of what is truly there at the surface and underneath catalyzes organic healing and transforms the hurt. It may take some time and practice, but true acceptance and seeing is the power itself.

So look behind and see what you see!

Here’s a practice that you can try if you’re curious about this.

Practice Seeing Your Lineage

• Ground yourself and feel into your body.
• Imagine your mother behind your left shoulder and your father behind your right. If you have step-parents or adoptive parents, you can imagine them also behind you to the side of your biological parents (this may be unfamiliar or not).
• Notice any reactions in your body, what you’re aware of, what you feel emotionally, and what you sense right now. Release any mental story about what and who everyone is at the moment and feel the present moment’s feeling.
• Take as long as you need or want to feel this. Stop here if that is enough.
• If you want to go further, picture your grandparents behind your parents. Do the same and notice any reactions internally and what you’re aware of if you look at the sense between your parents and their parents and all the dynamics that show up in the present image.
• Then add in your great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and so forth, all unfolding out in a triangle formation. Go 7 generations back if you can. Perceive what there is to perceive in this moment.
• Let the sense of it continue to be felt and evolve moment-to-moment. Take a break if it becomes overwhelming or pendulate.
• Thank yourself for practicing this and going into your deeper inner sense.

Enjoy this resourcing of your family system and honor what may come up. It can be normal if this is challenging, hard to visualize, or upsetting emotions or body sensations come up. Feel free to reach out if you’d like support or to unfold more resource, strength, love, and power through your lineage.

Read more articles about family constellations including How Unconscious Relationships Influence Abundance, Money, and Love and What Family Constellations Can Do For You.