Ancestral Healing - 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

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.

[Read more…]

While the Past Cannot Be Altered, Our Hearts Can Be Restored

June 28, 2013 By Angela Watrous

Heather Sellers experienced so much pain in her relationship with her father that she disconnected from him for decades. Then, in the last year of his life, when he was placed in a nursing home after a debilitating stroke, she began having weekly Skype calls with him: “Those conversations don’t cancel out the years of trauma and neglect. But neither does the bad cancel out those final moments of grace. Both are true. I hold both in my heart, and I am grateful. In the year before he died, I got to love my father—some.”

Heather’s poignant story, recounted in a recent New York Times Modern Love column, reminded me of a family I’ve been working with for the past year, helping them articulate and soothe deep pains that were formed over forty years ago and have been restimulated countless times since. The restorative process—which has involved individual, pair, and family empathy sessions—has been vulnerable for each of them. At the end of many family sessions, they say how hard this process is, and yet how “worth it” the experience has been. They’ve developed new understanding of each other’s feelings, needs, and perspectives, and a much greater capacity to speak and listen from their hearts. Whereas in our early sessions, the word “hate” was bandied about, now various family members will often interrupt a heated moment to say, loudly, desperately, “I love you!” Like Heather, they are getting to love each other—some. What could be more important in this life? [Read more…]