A past participant named Gus shared his transformational experience of the Bloodline Healing process. He attended 2 intensive 4-day workshops in the span of less than a year.
Q: What made you want to experience Bloodline Healing?
Gus: : Just my trust in those people, my trust and love for those people (the facilitators). They literally saved my life. I had been on the verge of a major heart attack and I didn’t even know it. I just knew that I felt miserable. When I first went to see her as a new patient, Aviva asked “What brings you here today?” and I said, “I think I’m dying of a broken heart.” I didn’t mean it in a romantic sense, I meant it literally. I could feel that my heart was breaking down somehow, and I didn’t know what to do about it. She asked me to tell her more.
I told her I didn’t think I was able to give my heart what it needed, and she asked me what, exactly, I meant. I didn’t have to think it over. I knew that I was suffering from a lack of loving interaction with other people, and that I felt like I was starving at an emotional and spiritual level. My heart and body were starving for blood, and the energetic effect upon my psyche was equally crippling. It seemed like I just didn’t have it in me to show up for my own life anymore, and I sadly said so. The amazing thing was that Aviva really heard deeply into what I was saying – I felt that she could feel the full complexity of it all, which instantly lightened my burden. That was the first step of her healing procedure. She put on her stethoscope and listened for awhile, and then she looked me in the eye and said, “I think you have some plumbing problems in there, and we’ll have to fix those first. Then we’ll work on that other stuff.” I hoped she really meant it. A week later I was having heart surgery.
After I came out of the hospital, Aviva directed me to Jessica, who became my therapist. Jessica helped me to realize that the next step in my healing was to learn how to keep my “heart-presence” open and flowing. I learned that the quality of the feelings that flow through your heart are every bit as important as the blood. In the midst of our work, she recommended that I see George to explore some specific issues in greater depth. Aviva’s promise to “take care of that other stuff” was coming true, and I was deeply grateful that she hadn’t forgotten what I really needed most.
The opportunity to do a workshop with these life-changers was a no-brainer, although it did intimidate me.
I wondered if I would prove to be fully up to the challenge. Finding the courage required to work on yourself should never be underestimated!
Q: What was your experience of working with the facilitators?
Gus: It’s marvelous to work with George. I was surprised when I met him, because Jessica had told me that he was a Native American Healer, and I thought I was going to be meeting some wizened old-timer who wore a lot of ceremonial feathers. I mean, that’s the image that jumped to mind! Then I meet this guy in his mid 30’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I thought “what’s the gag here?” But the most powerful healers always appear in the most convincing disguise. . . and my original image of him may have actually been very accurate.
I realized that a lot of George’s strength comes from his ability to listen to people deeply. To really hear what their whole being is trying to say even as they struggle with words. He seems to become a safe medium through which people can express the invisible and difficult things inside of them.
I quickly realized that he wasn’t working from some cookie-cutter procedure. Every person had a unique complexity, and he was totally open to whatever came up. His genius is his ability to comprehend people in their wholeness, and perceive what’s inside of them, in a completely unprejudiced way. He just quietly moves into this deeper state of presence, right in front of everybody, and you can feel everyone in the room moving with him, through these new levels of awareness. By the end of the workshop you’ve been so radically opened by witnessing this magic over and over, that it’s hard to go back into the regular world and function in your old ways. And that was a good thing for me, because those old ways were what had been making me sick.
Q: When you worked with your family tree in the workshop, did you gain any new insight about your family or your ethnic background?
Gus: I was surprised to realize that all the men in my family, on both sides, had died young, mostly of cardiac issues. My dad died at 60 and I probably would have died at 52 if I hadn’t gotten the heart surgery. So I realized that I had been able to veer around the old family pattern and claim a new life that had been denied to my elders. I was surprised to realize that I carried a lot of guilt about that, which was getting in the way my being able to live fully and freely. Ordinarily, that kind of knowledge might have been too intense for me to deal with, and I would have tried to repress it. But since it came up during the workshop, I was able to work through that stuff and claim a new sense of my right to be here, to be as fully alive as possible. In the workshops, there is a constant flow of new revelations, and an increased ability to see more clearly into the context of everybody’s inner struggles. It’s really quite powerful. It’s incredibly moving to watch people awaken out of the intense pain of their repression and fears, into a new sense of their own aliveness.
Q: A major event at the workshop is the Ancestral Dialogue where participants get to speak out loud to their deceased loved ones. Can you describe what you remember from the experience of doing your Ancestral Dialogue?
Gus: What I started to realize, was that with every meaningful relationship I’ve ever had, there is a deep memory in your body of exactly what it feels like for your own personal aliveness to interact with the unique living energy of somebody else. That complex body-memory is safely stored within us at a deeper and more profound level than the simplified sort of intellectual memory-data we usually live within.
You begin to recognize that it’s still possible to access those vivid sense-memores of being in the presence of other persons, whether they’re living or dead. This is because the people you love are always alive within you, whether you recognize that or not. And when you make genuine contact with that awareness, all kinds of lost knowledge floods into you. And that can rock your world. I don’t know if it’s just our deep memories that are being awakened, or if we are literally reaching across the veil to another dimension, but the experience is richly infused with an otherworldly quality of the living truth of your connections with those precious others. The workshop gets you to that place long enough for you to do some serious exploration, and realize some precious gifts.
Even so, I had a hard time accepting the experience in the moment because it was beyond anything I had ever known, so the whole time I was doing my process work, I was going on pure faith. I thought, “Okay, I’m just going to believe that this thing works, even though I can’t really feel it yet, and I still have all these problems with the technical issues of speaking to dead ancestors, but I’m just going choose to go with it, and maybe something will happen here that’s bigger than I can understand.” I was afraid, perhaps, of feeling the power of that kind of connection and not knowing what to do with it, or of finishing the workshop and then not being able to have access to that stuff in my everyday life. I was afraid, perhaps, of feeling an amplified sort of loneliness for those lost loved ones that might be too much to deal with. But really, I was afraid of feeling the depth and power of the love for them that still lived deep inside of me. That realization was a hard but necessary wake-up, and dealing with it directly was one of the biggest lessons and gifts of the whole experience.
Afterwards, It took me awhile to realize that the radical openness I discovered in the Bloodline Healing could continue to thrive and be present in my daily life. Realizing this was like discovering plutonium, and I wanted to share it with everybody, but I realized that these realizations were light-years ahead of the comfort-zones of most of the people that I knew. Many of them had no interest in diving into their depths, and did not take kindly to my eagerness for discussing these things. Finally, a big surprise came when I finally learned to how share this new kind of aliveness, not by talking, but by listening …. deeply and soulfully.
I suddenly realized that this sort of high-quality, empathic attunement to others might be one of George’s special “super-powers” for advanced healing. He has this ability to really hear what’s deep inside you, and to mobilize a transformative warmth of compassion from within himself that can radiate into your own heart and release you. All the facilitators have this super-power as well …Dina, Aviva, Anna, Jessica. They’ve all faced and fought with their own demons, and this has given them the depth and insight to face the demons that torment others. They know that new life is possible, because they have lived that journey for themselves. That’s the message that they’re radiating out of their presence the whole time. Part of what the Bloodline Healing is all about is this process of learning to move through those difficult obstacles until you can begin to feel fully and openly conscious in every moment, without hiding behind the protective armor of intellect or denial.
Q: Have you noticed any changes in your relationships to others since the workshop?
Gus:
The workshop has helped me learn to look at people in terms of their potential wholeness, to see into what’s blocking them and how they’re trying to break through into a fuller aliveness. I find that if I can somehow touch upon an awareness of what they’ve been blocking out, it can open them up to a more conciliatory viewpoint toward their own existence, and ease them into a clearer sense of flowing presence. It also makes them easier to get along with, if they are still talking to me!
In the workshop, you watch in amazement as each person discovers the courage to decisively confront their wounding, their deepest fears, their rage and anger and memories of spiritual humiliation…. and then there’s this beautiful awakening into the natural state of wholeness that’s always been inside of them. Seeing this happen time after time, with so many completely different sorts of people… it gave me a new faith in humanity, and a deeper appreciation for my own struggle to discover my own life. It just made me fearless in the world. I noticed that after the workshop, I was so happy to be alive and awake, that I always seemed to be radiating a joyful presence, and people would beam it right back at me. It was a delicious surprise to realize that my simple joy in living was provoking so many smiles.
Q: What is your advice to someone who would like to try Bloodline Healing for the first time?
Gus:
This workshop is all about re-discovering how to live from your heart, and how to reconnect to a fuller participation in your own spiritual presence. Be prepared to realize how much your hard working intellect has not been able to see. Be ready to rediscover all those other aspects of your consciousness that are ready, waiting and willing – as designed – to put you in touch with your whole life.
And be sure bring a journal so you can capture some of the significant details and feelings that come up during this process of unfolding, because after you have returned to the “regular world,” they will provide essential clues for guiding you back into the depth of your own personal work, as well as your deep body-memories of the powerful magic of this experience.
