It was 12 years ago that I began taking notes after my healing sessions with clients. In these notes, I documented the insightful contributions from a few thousand clients. Those notes were full of personal breakthroughs, quotable moments of wisdom, and heartfelt stories. They helped me to recognize the common threads in the healing process that were shared between clients who came from vastly different cultural and religious backgrounds. These common threads blossomed into the 8 Realizations of Generational Liberation featured in “Healing Our Bloodlines“.
When Dr. Aviva Bernat invited me to Los Angeles to share my unique brand of Intuitive Healing with her community, I didn’t know that I would be working with families that survived the Holocaust. They found me. The children of the original Jewish Holocaust survivors were called 2nd Generation Survivors and the grandchildren called 3rd Generation Survivors, because the astonishing impact of such an atrocity was so often carried by other family members. Even after a decade of conventional therapy, the 2nd & 3rd Generation Survivors came to me feeling anxious and emotionally fatigued. They were the first clients that showed me the invisible burdens that we all can inherit from our families.
Invisible burdens are the emotionally heavy stories that get passed down from elders to the children, the unfinished business that somehow becomes the work of the next generations. It’s like inheriting an old house from a deceased loved one. The house will have secret leaks and necessary repairs. The amount of work that is required to maintain the neglected house can feel like a burden. In the same way, we inherit stories of those dreams that the older generations of your family didn’t get a chance to live. We inherit their responsibilities and expectations. You may be expected to become a lawyer, because your mother or father never had a chance to go to law school. Or perhaps you had to take care of a grieving loved one so intensively, that you never had the time or energy to find a mate and settle down. In situations such as these, you are living your life to maintain the lives of others, but in doing so neglect the shiny gift of your own life. If you feel like you can’t fully live the life that you are dreaming for yourself, this is a clear sign that you are carrying an invisible burden. You can feel the pressure and weight of this burden, even if you’re not able to fully see it yet.
I wrote “Healing Our Bloodlines” for the Catalysts, those people who face their invisible burdens and discover what they’ve been carrying for most of their lives. Once the burdens become seen, you have the choice to continue to carry those burdens or release them in order to make room for your most authentic life. Those Catalysts who chose to fully live a life founded on self-honesty discovered that not only were they happier, but that their communities benefited greatly from how they shared their gifts with others.
My courageous clients became my inspiration for writing this book. They are the Catalysts of their families, the guardians of the younger generations who have been confronting the repeating cycles of abuse that have been passed down for several generations. They were fed up with the emotional and physical abuse that came with generations of alcoholism. They were the ones who intervened to protect the children of the family when no one else would. These Catalysts were making personal sacrifices to ensure that the abuse they had personally endured would not be re-inflicted on the future generations of their family. The abuse would end with them.
Too often, these Catalysts were fighting alone, with no allies to support them in a virtual vacuum of validation. In fact, too often their family members didn’t praise them for their bravery, nor did they thank them for their sacrifice on behalf of the younger generations. More often, the family attacked the Catalysts for challenging their comfortably scripted lives. They ridiculed them. Their families stopped inviting them to holiday parties and spat mean things about them behind their backs. As brave as the Catalysts had been, they were still human beings who often felt lonely, needing support and validation for their good intentions.
While writing “Healing Our Bloodlines“, I envisioned Catalysts from around the world opening this book to discover solace and support. I daydreamed about each client success story inspiring them to keep going, because the readers would see that there were other Catalysts out there who were also shedding their invisible burdens. It’s my hope that the careful guidance provided in this work will help each Catalyst find validation and encouragement for the work that they’ve already begun to undertake.
It’s my personal mission in life to prove to the world that we are able to heal from the most atrocious historic events. If Holocaust surviving families can find a way to thrive, then there is hope that whatever wounds your family may have endured, those too can be mended. Perhaps all we need to heal is some step by step guidance, the reassurance that we are not doing this work alone, and a burgeoning courage to break free.
Come hear me talk on my G. K. Global Tour. I’ll be adding more stops on the tour throughout 2019-2020.
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