When I feel into the healing possibilities of nonlinear time, I think about how my reiki teacher’s teacher says she survived (survives) her childhood trauma because of all the reiki her adult self sends to her younger self.
If this sounds strange, take a couple minutes and try sending some love and care to a “past” you who could use warm holding, and see how that feels for your body.
One of the healing processes I offer clients is time-travel rescues, where we go back in time to be with, listen to, protect, and ultimately recover past selves who are in hard situations. I understand that when done correctly, this neurobiological process moves trauma memories from the ever-present of the amygdala to the stored memory of the hippocampus—and I also hold that we are genuinely traveling through time to rescue your ever-present past selves.
I wonder about time-travel repairs for ancestors and for cultures. What could our world look like if more and more people living in what’s colonized as the United States “go back in time” and make heartfelt relational repairs for the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people and colonizing the world with our military and all our other massive cultural harms? What beautiful outcomes would suddenly not only become possible but actually inevitable?
When we time travel, we experience heart-and-soul level consciousness shifts that lead us to choose reparative actions in our todays and tomorrows. When we resist learning about and taking healing actions around our personal, ancestral, and cultural history because it’s “in the past,” we are locking ourselves into never-ending loops of repetition.
I long for everyone to lovingly, fiercely, honestly reckon with our personal and collective pasts, presents, and futures, for collective liberation of all beings. Perhaps that’s why everything I do is in support of this effort:
—My Restorative Empathy sessions offer you loving connection to repair early attachment wounds, be held in your losses and longings, and recover and reconnect with parts of yourself who are looping in traumatic times. This work naturally extends to supporting you in living in right relationship with those in your past/present/future.
—My Ancestral Lineage Healing sessions reconnect you with ancient ancestors (those before the systemic cultural troubles), middle-lineage ancestors (those who were part of recorded history, who enacted/received harm from the systematizing of the cultural troubles), and the recent known dead (those with whom we’ve often personally experienced a complex mix of love and harm).
–The documentary film I’m making, In the Wake of Our Ancestors, is the story of my father and me reckoning with our ancestral harms as a process of discovery, accountability, reparation, reconciliation, and seeking right relationship with ourselves, each other, descendants of those our ancestors harmed, and all of life.
Thankfully, there’s no expiration date on repair. It’s never too late to recover parts of yourself, to extend an offer of a repair conversation to a loved one in your ever-present past, to reckon with your people’s history, to cultivate right relationship with your all-times self.
I’m here to support you in showing up fully for your past, present, and future.
Angela