Articles - Restorative Empathy

Are my ancient ancestors tech savvy?

August 8, 2023 By Angela Watrous

There’s no predicting the transformations that come from ancestral lineage healing work.

Healing my father’s father’s lineage transformed me—wholly unexpectedly—from a writer into a documentary filmmaker (In the Wake of Our Ancestors began filming last year, and we’re on track to complete filming and launch into the wildly creative world of post-production by early next year).

I was so awed by the unique power of this healing work that I also spent 222+ hours over the last nine months in ancestral lineage practitioner training and completed the healing of three more of my lineages. I became a certified practitioner last month, and in the four days that followed that ritualist initiation, I single-handedly revamped my entire website for the first time in eight years.

What’s striking to me about that swift and sudden overhaul is that I’d never updated my website myself, and I’d always felt an overwhelming amount of tech anxiety, even with someone else doing all the website design and technological updates for me.

This time I felt at ease and even strangely exhilarated as I reorganized my site, making new pages and editing others, reading through articles posted over the past decade and updating them where needed, and even adding an online scheduler so you can book an ancestral healing session with me at your convenience. Whenever I got stuck, I simply googled my question and easily taught myself how to do something that used to feel so overwhelming I’d never even considered doing it on my own before.

I can’t really explain how finding ancient ancestral guides and enlisting them to heal entire lineages of ancestors taught me to update my website—they certainly haven’t reported to me that their talents and blessings include tech savviness—but my best guess is that with all that intergenerational trauma lifted and ancestral-lineage disruption resolved, and with thousands of vibrant and helpful ancestors behind me, things that used to feel impossible now feel like a fun creative project.

There are all kinds of other potential benefits from this work:
–Two of my ancestral healing clients have had their relationships with their living mothers unexpectedly and joyfully transformed after healing one ancestral lineage.

–Another client shared with me that since starting this work he’s having a level of ease and flow in his personal and creative life that he was previously unaccustomed to experiencing.

–Others have discovered a kind of support and solace with the ancient ancestors that their living family members have never been able to offer, or developed nourishing relationships with previously estranged parents who have passed.

–Cultural connection is exponentially growing for multiple clients.

–Synchronicities are occurring at an unprecedented pace.

–And chronic emotional pains and heaviness have been lifting in surprising and joyful ways.

Thanks to the support of my own ancestors, you can now read about my clients’ personal experiences of working with me on ancestral lineage healing, learn more about the lineage-healing process, and book your own session with me today.

This site update also gave me a chance to hone my articulation of my Restorative Empathy sessions, share beautiful testimonials from clients who’ve worked with me for years, and give homage to the many talented teachers who have guided me over the past twenty years in creating my own unique approach to supporting people in living their lives fully.

I’m excited to have these two separate but complimentary healing modalities to offer my clients, and I’d love to share the incredible benefits of this work with you.

Much love and empathy,
Angela

What’s Possible When Your Ancestors
Become a Jetpack Instead of an Anvil?

November 11, 2022 By Angela Watrous

In December 2019, I began studying ancestral lineage healing, a method of ancestral work that powerfully enlists your bright thriving ancestors (often pre-agrarian and pre-patriarchal) to bring healing to any troubled ancestors between them and you, resolving blockages and restoring the channels of ancestral blessings and support so they can finally reach you.

In this work, we focus on our four primary ancestral lines: our father’s father’s line, father’s mother’s line, mother’s mother’s line, and mother’s father’s line. I began with my father’s father’s line, which I knew had been riddled with addiction, depression, and deadly cultural and interpersonal violence. The process was powerful and poignant, emphasizing ritual safety by asking the thriving ancestors who lived before the systemic cultural harms of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonization to do the heavy lifting.

The difference in my somatic experience of life now that both my father’s father’s line and my father’s mother’s line are well is remarkable. It’s like wearing a jetpack of ancestral blessings instead of a heavy anvil of ancestral burden. I have more life energy and joyful momentum than I’ve ever had before.

With this unprecedented life force, I’ve embarked on two harmonized projects this year: completing practitioner training so I can facilitate this life-and-world-changing ancestral lineage healing for you (I’ll begin offering sessions beginning in summer of 2023), and directing my first feature-length documentary film (production began in summer 2022, when we completed 70% of filming during an exhilarating three-month, 11,000-mile road trip).

In the Wake of Our Ancestors follows my 78-year-old father and me on that cross-country reckoning with our 400-year history of settler-colonizer ancestry, exploring the question: When you’re born on land your ancestors stole, can you live here with integrity?

Watch a sneak preview of In the Wake of Our Ancestors today! And stay tuned for ancestral lineage healing sessions coming this summer.

Much love and empathy,
Angela

What Would Your Life Be Like if You Were Warmly Welcomed in Your Wholeness? A Love Letter to Your Nervous System

February 14, 2018 By Angela Watrous

By the time we’re four months old, our interactions with our primary caregiver reveal whether or not we’ll have a secure or insecure attachment—our foundation for all our love relationships.

We learn early and unconsciously which emotions our primary caregiver can welcome in themselves and in us. If they get angry or overwhelmed when we’re scared, for instance, we’ll show less fear, to try to keep their nervous systems regulated so they won’t leave us or hurt us. Similarly, if they can’t rejoice in our joy, we’ll minimize our joy.

Our parent’s window of welcome preexists us, largely established by their own parent’s window for them and any traumatic experiences that are still unheld and unaccompanied. This is one manifestation of intergenerational trauma—generation after generation unconsciously (and sometimes consciously) hands down a “no” to the next generation’s emotional experience and expression, and doesn’t catch our earliest cries for secure resonant connection.

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What Does It Really Take to Not Give Up? A Simple Approach for Difficult Times

February 1, 2017 By Angela Watrous

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

This is the advice our culture offers us about fortitude amidst adversity: If you’re tough, you’ll do something. If you’re not tough, well, toughen up. If that doesn’t work, there’s something wrong with you. Try harder. Rely on willpower. Buck up. Didn’t work? Buckle down. Try harder.

If trying our hardest doesn’t work—or if we can’t even manage the incredible vulnerability of trying—we collapse in shame, blame ourselves and others, numb or distract ourselves, conclude that we’re just not good enough.

We tell ourselves it’s futile to dream impossible dreams, sometimes convincing ourselves we never really wanted that dream in the first place. We give up on ourselves and each other, and our lives get smaller and smaller.

And as this happens with each one of us, collectively we get easier and easier to dominate and control.

This is not the time to give up, my friends—on your own dreams or your dedication to bringing your full heart to this ailing world.

So What’s the Secret to Not Giving Up?

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Wiping Clean the Family Curse: Healing Family Systems, Healing Our World

April 4, 2016 By Angela Watrous

Have you ever felt that you’re carrying pain that’s not your own?

The burgeoning field of epigenetics reveals: “Traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors’ past, leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA….The genome has long been known as the blueprint of life, but the epigenome is life’s Etch A Sketch: Shake it hard enough, and you can wipe clean the family curse.”

Unhealed familial and social violence lives inside our bodies, handed down generation to generation, until acknowledgement and forgiveness wipes us clean.

We can heal these traumas for ourselves, our ancestors, our descendants, our world.

Carrying these burdens in our genetic structure can feel like walking through water, being held back by thick, invisible obstacles.

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