Before I came to Ancestral Lineage Healing in 2020, I spent seven years deeply tending intergenerational trauma, mostly through Family Constellations. A lot of people ask how these two powerful modalities overlap and differ.
*Both approaches are powerful paths toward intuition reclamation. Through participating in many hundreds of constellations, I learned how to trust the sensations in my body as not only signals to my own feelings and needs, but as indicators of what was happening for those I energetically represented. In healing six of my ancestral lineages, I’ve learned to trust my ancestors are as real and accessible as any living family member, as each one shows up with unique gifts, personalities, and ways of relating with me.
*Both approaches seek to repair the places in our relational systems where trauma disrupts the flow of love, blessings, and support.
*Both approaches are a form of systemic healing that goes beyond the individual enlisting the healing work, with potential to benefit others in the system.
At the same time, Family Constellations and Ancestral Lineage Healing have distinct approaches with different strengths:
Different approaches to ritual safety
Constellations work involves allowing the energies of other people, places, and qualities to come into our bodies and give us information about what is being excluded from the system and what needs to be named and known for the constellation to find a better balance that allows an unobstructed flow of love.
As powerful and exhilarating as I found that process, and as much as I learned from it, I felt heavier and heavier as time went on, particularly when using the approach with ancestors (as opposed to living family, organizations, parts of the self, etc., which don’t require the same degree of ritual safety). It didn’t seem like the simple releasing process of those troubled energies at the end of sessions was entirely successful, and over time I felt an accumulation of unwell ancestral energies that landed on me and some of my colleagues doing this work.
Which is why I was so taken by the emphasis on ritual safety in the Ancestral Lineage Healing approach, where we never directly engage with the troubled ghosts, but instead connect with and enlist the wisest and most vibrant of our ancestors to bring understanding and healing to the troubled ones. With each lineage healed, I felt lighter and more supported.
Different agents of healing
Constellations use humans as the agents of healing, which imbued me with a palpable sense of the power of the relational field—how energetically interconnected we are, how our bodies can hum in resonance (or quake in dissonance) with each other, how we can literally feel the emotions of someone else, and how to distinguish which sensations belong to me and which sensations are coming from an energetic field that includes me. I expanded so much from this process, and while I enjoyed feeling the rage, terror, agony, and loneliness of both the living and the dead, that process took a toll on my body and also had a imitation to what it could reach with the help of humans alone.
With Ancestral Lineage Healing, the living humans are not the agents of healing, only the initiators. Neither practitioner nor client engage with the unwell dead, instead calling on the bigger spiritual powers (for example, deities, nature spirits, and powerful energetic forces like universal love), and wise and loving ancestral guides to do the healing work on our behalf. These bigger powers can take on more entangled problems that happened long before records of names and conscious memory of stories, heal the places of rupture, and reweave the healed ancestral bonds all the way back to us.
Ongoing ancestral relationship
I tended my own family’s trauma many times through constellations work. Coming from a family who is largely silent about our massive intergenerational pain, loss, and rupture, I found it relieving to engage those stories in groups, and for the first time not feel alone in being willing to look at and tend those stories. Yet after the constellation sessions were over, I felt a very special and often lasting closeness with the people in the room who were part of the process, but I wasn’t left with a lasting sense of closeness with my own ancestors.
Ancestral Lineage Healing offers less connection with the other members of the group, since each of us are tending our own lineages and not each other’s, but it leaves us with a specific and lasting relationshipwith a wise ancestral guide who, once carefully screened, is someone we can safely connect with 24/7 for the rest of our lives. We may also find that, once the healing on a lineage is complete, our relationship with the recent dead (our parents, grandparents, and/or great-grandparents if they have passed) can become surprisingly healed, repaired where needed, and deeply nourishing on a daily basis, long after the lineage healing process is complete.
Experience the transformational power of
Ancestral Lineage Healing for yourself
While I still live the constellations approach as a worldview and use it for dynamics within oneself or among other living people, I now turn to the Ancestral Lineage Healing approach for working with the dead, and I love supporting others in doing the same.
If you feel curious, if you’re ready to build a relationship with your own wise and loving ancestral guide, if you’re longing to tend the recent (and ancient) dead in your family in a ritually safer way, join us TOMORROW for the start of our Autumn Ancestral Healing Circle.
There’s no better time to resource yourself, your living family, and the ancestors who came before you.
