The 7 Principles Of Ancestral Healing

Ancestral healing isn’t abstract — it’s deeply personal, profoundly spiritual, and rooted in energy. The patterns we inherit from our family line don’t just shape our past — they influence our present choices and the future we’re creating.

In this illuminating episode, Keith shares seven guiding principles for understanding and transforming ancestral patterns, offering both the big-picture view and the deeply human dimension of this work.

Keith is the primary speaker on this episode with Christabel Armsden contributing as well.

Transcript

Ancestral healing.

This is a heavy subject for many people,

And that's because working through family,

Working through ancestry,

Is amongst the most challenging and intense inner work we can do.

We can talk as much as we want about focusing on ourselves as individuals,

But the context,

When we get real of who and what we are,

Extends into family.

It extends into the dynamics of mom and dad and caretakers and siblings and grandparents and ancestral generations that we don't even know about,

That we just hear stories about.

Why does this particular belief system or emotional reactivity or pattern of stress keep reiterating itself from generation to generation?

This is about some of the deepest and most significant work we can do,

And I've put together a series of principles as a kind of guiding force.

These principles are meant to bring clarity to this very important component of everyone's inner journey.

Welcome to The Future of Wellness,

Exploring self-transformation and holistic healing to unlock your inner potential,

Hosted by Christabel Armstron and Keith Parker.

So the first principle is,

It didn't start with you.

And I take that term from Mark Wollin's work,

But in general,

It's a reference to the seven-generational principle.

If you go and see certain traditional shamanic practices,

You're going to see that there's this idea of clearing back through seven generations.

That's a lot of people.

You definitely do not consciously know of your ancestral line going back seven generations.

Basically,

Nobody does.

And the point being,

We inherit a lot of information,

A lot of conditioning that we're entirely unaware of.

There is a passing on of information from generation to generation,

And it's valuable to consider,

Do you want to learn more about your ancestry?

There are some great tools out there now where you can research ancestry.

You can learn the story.

Now,

Do you need to know the story?

No.

But sometimes it helps to contextualize what's happening.

This is principle number one.

It didn't start with you,

But it has manifested in you.

What grandma experienced,

You're experiencing.

What great-great-grandpa experienced,

You are now experiencing.

You're working through the momentum,

The pattern that began in them,

Or maybe began well before them as well.

Think back,

How far might some of our ancestral patterns go?

So it's really interesting to think that we are a pattern,

A memory continuation of sorts,

That has had quite a long existence.

But in the immediacy of our ancestry and the generations that we can take account of,

There is a lot of value in engaging there.

Principle number two,

It's not all in the genes.

Not the Levi's you might be wearing,

But the genetic code.

We might be led to believe that what comes through our ancestral lineage is going to be from nature,

The nature versus nurture conversation.

Is it what I'm born with,

Or what happens after I'm born?

From the nature standpoint,

What we inherit,

We understand that we come in through genetics.

Is that the only place where the information exists?

Well,

Let's take a quick look at some research that's being done in genetics,

Epigenetics,

And the perpetuation of traumatic experience from one generation to another.

If you take a mouse and you expose that mouse to water in which it fears that it's drowning,

It has had a traumatic experience of almost drowning.

If that mouse,

Let's say it's a female mouse,

It's a grandma,

Has a child and then has another child.

So now that mouse is a grandma mouse.

You expose the grandchild mouse to water,

There can be a spontaneous reaction,

A trauma response to the water,

And this is without any kind of interaction with grandma mouse.

What that's showing us is that the information from the experience that grandma had is being passed on to the grandchild without the nurture part,

Without communicating it or showing the behavior.

Is that just then encoded in the genes?

Does a trauma response to water get encoded in genes?

Is that the only thing that is happening?

Is there a mental-emotional structure here that is somehow being passed on?

This is the mode of transmission we're considering.

Is it all in the genes or not?

Is genetic inheritance a satisfactory and complete mechanism?

Maybe,

Because of what we do at Field Dynamics,

Just maybe there's an energetic component.

Maybe the domain of emotions,

The domain of mind and thoughts and memory is not just encoded in genes.

This is an open-ended question as far as science is concerned,

And when it comes to understanding how energy healing works and how we can engage with healing through the aura,

We find that the field is a very good domain to consider the transmission of the trauma,

At least components of it.

Maybe it's not all in the genes.

Maybe there are other places that we need to look in order to understand where conditioning comes from.

That takes us to principle number three.

You're a field in a field,

And family comes first.

So we work with a model in which the field does,

In fact,

Hold some of this information,

And in particular,

Genetics encodes physical information.

Potentially,

The architecture of the field may have a lot to do with the more psycho-emotional information.

How does memory and emotion and,

In a sense,

Thought and belief pattern get modeled and passed on from generation to generation?

So imagine you have an energy field.

It's an electromagnetic non-physical aspect of you,

And you can imagine that field surrounds and interpenetrates the physical body.

It contains massive amounts of information,

Including memory,

But that field of yours is nested within other fields,

Fields within fields,

Spheres of influence.

What we're looking at now is how the individual field is nested within the family field,

And in particular,

It's the immediate family first and then to previous generations.

And if you think of these fields as containing identity and emotion and thought patterns,

In a certain sense,

You could imagine that stress is a kind of pressure in the field.

The pressure in the field exerts a certain influence.

So imagine if you're nested within a family field,

Within an ancestral field that has various layers of pressure,

And you're within those cavities of pressure.

This is a simple way of starting to think about how does the influence from previous generations get passed on to us.

Where there is unprocessed stuff from previous generations,

There will be a transmission of that unprocessed stuff to us.

So the pressure,

The psycho-emotional pressure,

The energetic pressure that's not dealt with from the previous generations gets passed on to us.

What of those traumatic events that have happened in our ancestry?

So there becomes certain really significant events that are hard to miss,

Things like war,

Genocide,

Famines,

When a family goes through ruin or bankruptcy,

When there are tragic deaths or illnesses.

Those big events in many family histories have those big events,

Whether collectively involved or more specific to that lineage.

Those experiences,

If not processed well,

Can get passed on to future generations.

We can have phobias.

We can have pathologies.

We can have heightened emotional sensitivities and triggers.

Yes,

It's possible that genetics explains certain mechanisms physiologically,

Biologically,

But there's good reason to consider how the field,

The energy,

And the information contained therein is a mechanism of transmission that goes from field to field to field,

And that that information doesn't disappear just because the body disappears.

That that information from previous generations going back three,

Four,

Five,

Six,

Seven generations is continuing to exert a pressure on us here today.

Principle number four,

The energy anatomy of ancestry matters.

So here we look at the actual structures in the energy field that underlie the kind of interaction and transmission of this ancestral memory and familial memory in our system.

There are two primary ones I want to share with you.

The first is known as the astral body.

The astral body is very interesting in that it has two primary kinds of interaction.

Number one,

Whatever you think immediately manifests on the astral,

And the way this is often termed is thoughts are things.

Things are thoughts.

So this is where lucid dreaming practices describes this perfectly.

In lucid dreaming,

The goal is to wake up in the dream and to start to create within the dream world.

So when you're awake or conscious or lucid within a dream,

And you think of riding a roller coaster,

Boom,

There you are riding a roller coaster.

There is a kind of ecosystem to the astral,

And it is distinct from the physical.

There are people who are absolute experts at astral travel and projection,

And it is a kind of a plane of consciousness,

As it is sometimes referred to as.

So thoughts are things,

And things are thoughts in the astral,

And the idea here is that when we have these particularly strong psycho-emotional events in our lives,

The traumas and the unresolved patterns,

That where our emotions exist,

Where our traumatic memories and associations and thought patterns exist,

Are partially structured through this level of the field,

And that there is a transmission of that through the different generations,

Through the astral plane and through the astral body.

Now obviously this is a mode of transmission that has no scientific grounding,

But it is more of an esoteric metaphysical interpretation.

Another feature of the astral is the connectivity.

When you think of something or you think of someone,

You connect to it.

So it's kind of like a liquid or plasmic body,

Different and distinct from the physical,

That when you not only think,

That thought manifests as the thing,

Like an object,

But also what you think about connects you to the thing.

So if you're thinking about another person,

There is a connection made with that other person.

So we all have these kinds of astral connections,

Astral interactions with other people,

Places,

And things.

How this transitions us to another famous form of energy anatomy is relational cords.

Now what cords are,

Is they're well known as being kinds of tubes or strings or cords that connect us with other people.

But what they are in a sense,

Are they are densified astral interactions.

When we think about and interact with another person,

Often enough,

Regularly enough over time,

What happens as opposed to there being just a kind of soft and malleable connection that comes and goes between ourselves and the other person,

Cords are where there's essentially a densification and a crystallization of that connection because of the regularity,

The frequency,

And the importance that that connection has with us.

So cords represent a densified connection.

They're not necessarily bad things or good things.

They simply signify significant things.

So when it comes to ways in which we may be connecting through our parents,

Through our grandparents,

And down the line,

There may be this kind of chordal connection as well,

Especially with people who we've had current life interaction with,

Namely mom and dad,

Grandma and grandpa,

And immediate family structures.

The astral body and relational cords might seem esoteric or irrelevant to you in your life now,

But what it does though is the energy anatomy and the dynamics here of the energy field give us a sense of what it means to be thinking and emoting in particular ways.

Why it's so important to become conscious of our inner world.

Why it's so important to dredge up the subconscious into the conscious mind.

To become aware of what is happening mentally and emotionally within ourselves because what is happening is always having this kind of connective effect,

This creative effect.

And when we become consciously aware of our inner interactions,

Of our energetic interactions,

We can actually start to become not only more responsible,

But we can actually become more free within ourselves,

More clarified within ourselves.

And this is part of the healing journey and a major part of what it means to get into ancestral healing.

Principle number five,

Your parents are more than parents.

Your fundamental relationship is with mom and dad.

This is an unavoidable thing.

Now,

They are more than just mom and dad.

What do I mean by that?

Well,

Mom and dad represent the archetype of polarity,

Like the masculine and the feminine.

They're in essence a divine representation of the psyche.

So for all of us,

We essentially grow into the world looking to mirror or model ourselves on what it is we see,

What it is we interact with.

And mom and dad become the placeholders for the divine feminine,

The divine masculine,

The yin and the yang,

The inner and the outer.

This is a poetic interpretation of our very existence,

Looking at archetypes.

Mom and dad represent the archetype of masculine and feminine,

But other significant caretakers can take up some of these roles as well.

So don't think that it has to be filled in by just them,

But they are the primary placeholders.

So it's really important to work with the mother-father relationship as primary.

See,

Mom represents yin,

Internal.

Dad represents yang,

External.

And again,

The polarities of the psyche.

So however it is that we interact and grow and develop a relationship with the archetypal masculine and feminine,

Which is rooted and reflected in the relationships we have with mom and dad,

This develops the psyche.

This develops the mind.

This develops our sense of self and our overall orientation to the world.

So it's very significant.

And in this way,

Again,

Your parents are more than your parents.

They're archetypes.

They're divine representations.

When we do parental healing,

Which is absolutely fundamental,

Working with the mom and dad relationship first and foremost,

It is not only effective to the relationship between you and those parents,

But also it is effective to the archetypal foundations of your psyche.

This brings us to principle number six.

No matter where you go,

You take your family with you.

I'll say that again.

No matter where you go,

You take your family with you.

How important are relationships for human existence,

For personal growth?

Do you think relationships are really important?

I would suggest that maybe nothing is more important than our relationships for personal growth.

There is a certain kind of spiritual bypassing that sometimes gets very self-involved and very focused on individual liberation,

Focus,

And development.

But the thing is,

We as individuals are in this world in relationship.

So it is at least equally as important that we understand ourselves in the context of relationship.

Furthermore,

In my opinion,

I would say that it is through relationships that we learn the most about ourselves.

Yes,

There is a tremendous amount that we can self-reflect,

But the way in which our society,

The way in which our biology,

And the way in which the human condition has come about,

And the level of development that we are at right now suggests that the natural and organic way in which human beings are to learn and grow is not through deep inner individuated self-reflection,

But by growth through interaction.

Something to consider.

Returning to no matter where you go,

You take your family with you.

There are two primary ways of thinking about boundaries with family.

One is too close.

One is too far.

We can be merged too close,

Or we can be separated too far.

While you can deal with your family issues through avoidance or isolation or running away from them,

There are other people who are too close.

They're over-merged.

They're over-dependent or co-dependent.

Regardless of this overall dynamic,

At the level of the field,

They're always with you.

If you work with psycho-energetic representation,

If you work with visualization,

You'll notice that at all times,

If you tune in,

You're able to get in touch with mom,

With dad,

With siblings,

With ancestry,

Just within your own energetic space.

What do I mean by that?

That it doesn't matter how far away or how close you are,

There is a representation,

There is an energetic influence and connection to family wherever you go.

So if you're trying to run away,

If you're living on the other side of the world and you've cut off talking to your parents or you have no connection to them,

They still live in you.

If you're living in the same town,

If you're living in the same house and you see them every single day,

They are still energetically equivalently represented within you,

Within your psyche.

At the level of the field,

At the level of energy,

Your family is always with you.

So there is no way of avoiding this,

And it is important for us to develop clear boundaries to understand,

Are we too far away?

Are we too close?

Because ultimately,

We want independence.

We want connection and healthy independence.

And so that independence comes from when it is that our connection is clean,

Boundaried,

And when our connection fosters more love,

But it doesn't hinder freedom.

This brings us to the final principle,

How to,

In a sense,

Enact healing now through ancestry.

The principle is accepting love,

Being compassionate,

Giving gratitude.

When we look to heal at this ancestral level,

It's important to consider all levels of interaction.

We highly value at field dynamics an energetic,

Cognitive,

Emotional,

And somatic integration.

We want to engage all facets of you.

Now working with energy anatomy can be very helpful,

Clarifying your astral body,

Clearing energetic cords to the extent that they are ready to be cleared,

And other more nuanced aspects of your energy system can be very helpful.

Understanding the emotional entanglements are incredibly important and the inherited beliefs which shape our worldview.

But in terms of something that we can do right now,

We can ask ourselves three questions.

And I would say that these orientations are the foundation for enabling healing to happen.

The first,

In the context of ancestral healing work,

Is can I accept the love which brought me into this embodiment,

The love which flowed through all of my ancestors and my parents to give rise to me here and now?

Can I accept that love?

Can I accept that act of creation that has brought me here now?

A next question is can I be compassionate towards others who have come before me?

Can I open my heart to their suffering,

Their struggles,

Their sacrifices,

And accept them and their actions?

Can I be compassionate and non-judgmental to those who came before me?

And may I give and express gratitude for my existence here and now.

I am alive and able to experience the richness and beauty of this moment and that is because generation upon generation before me enabled this possibility.

Am I grateful?

How do I express my gratitude for this opportunity here and now to be alive as I am?

Healing at the level of family,

Healing at the level of ancestry,

Is not an easy task.

It means getting into the weeds of the psyche.

And let's be real,

Family stuff is usually the most intense stuff.

For most people,

The most emotional,

The most intense,

Trauma,

The most intense,

Psychic work you'll ever do will be in the context of family.

And so we need to give it respect.

We need to humble ourselves to the power of this field of influence.

These principles are meant to be a guide to understanding it,

And hopefully they'll help you on your path and your journey.

Reviews

Very, very interesting - most profound. I shall listen again. Thank you Keith.🙏♥️