Heal Your Family Energy Field

Heal Your Family Energy Field

by Anuradha Dayal-Gulati, Ph.D., author of Heal Your Ancestral Roots

Surrounded by nurturing relationships, working creatively in your zone of genius, you have adequate time for self-care, enjoy effortless awareness of healthy boundaries, and are filled with feelings of gratitude, contentment, fulfillment, inner confidence, and harmony.

How does that sound? Does that sound like your life? Do you feel that you are living your life in full bloom?

Or do you feel stuck in one or more areas of your life? You know what you want, you even think you know how to get it, but somehow you can’t get there. You see your own limitations and blocks but are not able to break through.

You might have tried several different approaches—such as shifting jobs, moving, cutting what you feel are toxic people out of your life, or even hiring a life coach. You may have tried alternative healing approaches such as acupuncture, meditation, or other modalities, and perhaps, you even felt that things were changing. Yet, despite starting the journey to healing and changing things in your life, you still feel as if some things in life are “stuck.”

What if you could see that this feeling of “stuckness” may not have originated with you—that its roots extended further back—to way before you? The sensation of being stuck is a feeling of being in a situation where things are not changing, despite your efforts. If you look closely, you might notice that behind this is a pattern. Perhaps some of these patterns are obvious to you, but sometimes you may not see them.

For instance, you might notice that like you, your parents were disconnected from their siblings or their parents. Sometimes, themes reappear in a family for several generations in a row—of financial distress, bankruptcy, business failure, sibling rivalry, divorce, or, conversely, long, happy marriages, good health, extended family sing-alongs, constant bantering, and good humor. You might have always noticed these themes or patterns, thinking little of them, or treating them simply as a coincidence. Or you might have felt the influence of these patterns so strongly that you felt this was fate that you were powerless over. But what if there is more to this feeling of “stuckness” than meets the eye?

What if these patterns of events, experiences, and emotions that repeat in your life and relationships are indicating that something in your life needs healing? What if the source of these patterns is your family—but not as you know it? What if family is not just a nuclear entity with your parents, siblings, or even grandparents, but an energy field that includes those who are no longer alive? Like the backstories of a character in a novel, the experiences of your ancestors affect your life, even if you are unaware of them. This family energy field or family karma tries to keep coming to your attention through the repetition of patterns, events, and emotions. If you look closely, you might even feel that the same patterns and attendant emotions show up again and again through the people who come into your life and the events that repeat, leaving you feeling the same way each time.

If the “stuckness” had no emotions attached to it, you would not feel its burden. The earth is an emotional plane and a karmic energy plane. You feel frustrated tied to a job you dislike, or despair that your family relationships don’t work, or sad that your dreams have expired. Perhaps you feel discouraged that there’s a ceiling on your prosperity or you keep waiting for your soul mate, leaving each date dispirited and disheartened. You keep a tight lid on feelings of frustration, despair, hopelessness, and anger that keep circling within you, but sometimes these feelings escape, hurting others in their wake.

What if the emotions that keep you prisoner may not be your own? Emotions are the connecting element between two worlds, the physical world you live in and the invisible world that you cannot see.

You Have the Power to Change

When I started working with my client Sally, I drew her attention to the patterns I noticed, offering the possibility of her family energy field that was preventing her from achieving what she wanted. Sally then started to talk about her family, and how her older brother died before she was born. No one had ever talked of him. Using some of the exercises outlined in my book, Heal Your Ancestral Roots, Sally honored his death and her parents and grandparents. In connecting with her ancestors, she started to be able to let go of feelings of resentment and being ignored and invisible in her large family of six siblings.

Working with the family energy field can bring up a lot of emotions. You may experience a resistance to letting go of the past, of hurts, grievances, shame, the grief of betrayal, heartbreak and so much more. Is there a way to work with them, hear their message, and more importantly recognize that these emotions are carriers from the family energy field? The answer is yes.

Working with your family energy field, you too can transform these patterns or family karma so that you are no longer burdened by them and condemned to repeat them. You may be the one your ancestors have been waiting for: the one who will bring about healing and repair of the family energy field. When you start to do that, you lift the ceiling on your own life and also for those who may come after you.

Sally found it possible to get support for the journey of healing she went through. She was able to shift the emotions that seemed to grip her so tightly. Using different tools of healing, like flower essences—a form of energy medicine—she was able to create change in her life. While essential oils are widely known and used, flower essences have been around for thousands of years—rediscovered about a hundred years ago. In my book, I share the key flower essences that can shift your emotions to create the change you want alongside practices and rituals for working with your ancestral energy field to understand where those emotions originated and how they influence you.

My book will show you that your ancestors live within you. When they are forgotten, disliked, or disrespected, they cast their shadow in order to be seen, triggering patterns or feelings of unhappiness, unfulfillment, or disconnection that act as a ceiling on your life. You do not, however, need to know your ancestors to do this work.

In my book, I outline the principles that govern the family energy field and how their violations may impact your life. You can learn to see the patterns and themes that manifest in your life and the effect of your backstory. Through simple exercises and rituals that work with your ancestral energy field energetically and easily, you can shift the burden of this field on your life. Rituals such as these existed in almost every tradition across the globe, and I offer step-by-step instructions for them adapted for modern-day life so that they are not onerous or time-consuming.

You are the flower of your family tree. And you can find the capacity to reconnect with your ancestors and bloom.

Here’s an example of a practice to get you started:

Stories Play Out in Many Ways

As you think about your family story, try this exercise. Write down your family’s story, starting with the words, “In my family, we . . .” This isn’t about morality and ideals but about what you and your family members typically experience. It’s a way for you to see the patterns that might run through your family. For example:

“In our family, we give too much to others at great expense to ourselves, and no one ever seems to appreciate that.”

“In our family, marriages never seem to last. The men are always betraying the women.”

If you have trouble identifying your family story, think of some of the sayings and tales your family tells over and over again. What’s the takeaway of each story? Do you see a common thread of how you “always” seem to have some experiences and “never” seem to have others?

You might add some detail about why you and your relatives believe your family has certain patterns of experience.

Next, write down some examples of how that story is true for you and your family. How has the story played out? Think about yourself, your siblings, your parents, and your grandparents. Then think about your cousins, aunts and uncles, and more distant relatives. Now try to think of some examples of how the family story isn’t true. Who did something different and broke the pattern? Was it hard for that person to change your family’s “karma” and experience something different? How did the family respond to this relative breaking the family pattern?

Go back to looking at your family story as you wrote it. How does it make you feel? Does it make you sad? Frustrated? Proud? Helpless? Then think about any example or examples of a relative trying to break the pattern that you identified. How do you feel about what happened when that family member rebelled against the story? What, if anything, does this tell you about your family story and its power? See if you can identify the emotional, behavioral, and experiential patterns that run in your family.

One Important Flower Essence for Ancestral Healing

Chestnut Bud: This essence helps free you from the repetitive and habitual patterns that repeat in your life. What are you resisting seeing? What are you resisting learning? What causes you to repeat the same experiences and same mistakes? Your soul is trying to speak to you. This is the essence that helps you learn the key lesson or lessons embedded in those experiences, releasing the karma that keeps you tied to those resistant patterns. It makes you observant, perceptive, and discerning, helping you understand the wisdom and knowledge of those past experiences. While Wild Oat flower essence gives you direction for the future, Chestnut Bud teaches you the lessons of the past. It’s also a great essence for children in helping them learn.