What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?
There is no disputing that many of our traits and propensities in life originate from the amalgamation of our ancestral past. The stirring of our ancestral inheritance speaks to us daily if we are willing to listen. The voices of family values, generational traumas, and the choices of our ancestors affect us psychologically and influence our relationships with family and friends. Our ability to become acquainted with this circle of life and our family story contributes greatly to our responsibility to pay our actions forward to future generations. The ultimate question posed when engaging in this investigative work is a deeply personal reflection – What kind of ancestor do you want to be?
It is a rare practice to unravel and peer into the keyhole of our ancestral patterns and extract the legacies, and inherited truths until we reach the aging quarters of life. At this time of life, we find ourselves wanting to walk where others walked and to preserve their stories. We also begin to experience the passing of family and we witness the past creep into our daily lives. The transitory nature of life and our indelible mark upon future generations begins to hold a psychic responsibility. Our choices today, both large and small, will affect many people and instead of burdening future generations with damage control we can gift them with a life of greater ease. We can start laying the good human groundwork in place by living our lives with the pondering of a few questions:
1. What kind of ancestor do you want to be?
2. What is your interconnected relationship between nature, creativity and your cultivation of energy towards life?
3. What role do you see yourself playing in change?
4. What aspects of your life support therapeutic work, inner-healing work and health?
5. In what ways would you make changes to improve the lives of your loved ones?
The Greeks believed that “a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”. We live in a time where knowing and preserving family values holds challenge. We know less about our great grandparents than they did about theirs. Knowing that those before us provided the shade of a trees for a supported life is a reaffirming thought. A rumination such as this may also encourage us to plant good trees. Conversely many of our ancestors made unskillful decisions and the reverberations from poor past life choices affect us today. We can begin to look at our ancestral tapestry and each woven thread and leverage knowledge as our North Star to guide us. Each of us holds great meaning and significance in this greater constellation called “family legacy.” When we ask ourselves the question, “What kind of ancestor do we want to be?”, we are encouraged to keep in mind this is not a future question as to how we want to be remembered. We are writing the script to this story daily with each choice and each non-choice. The meaning held in life moment to moment is what will be handed over for future generations.
