Blog by Valerie
Earlier in my ancestral healing journey when I set boundaries, I would tell ancestors who couldn’t support me and my core values to go. I had heard a few people advise to only work with healed ancestors, though I’m still not quite sure what that means. All our human ancestors are somewhat healed and somewhat wounded. Sure, some are wiser and more healed than others, just like people living now. And even ancestors we may refer to as ‘enlightened masters’ have blind spots and things to learn. No one’s infallible.
It felt important for a while to build my strength and skills to take space and even reject some behaviours and values, to avoid certain conflicts. But I find that what we reject tends to comes back to us seeking deeper acceptance. And since I don’t believe in existential judgement, I needed to learn to coexist with all my ancestors. If there’s a crocodile in our environment, we need to learn to live with it, how to protect ourselves and avoid it as best we can. Because that’s where we are living now, and that being has just as much value here as we do, whatever feelings we have about them. (Image from here)
Aboriginal people, through thousands of years of living with crocodiles never have considered that they are dangerous animals. We have always lived with them. They lived their own life and we lived our own ways, as long as there is common respect for each other.
–Gularrwuy Yunupil’u in Living with crocodiles (ABC documentary)
How do we respectfully, even vigorously disagree when we feel that others are acting in ways that are disrespectful and undignified? From arrogant ‘I know better’s to moral judgements, to shameful denials to self serving greed or even something as deplorable as genocide, so many of our behaviours are rooted in existential judgement. Such judgements take us out of the web of life and create existential hierarchies. Wetiko creeps in, and we start to believe stories of supremacy. If we want to embody connection, then we have to make space for really tough stuff like experiences of existential judgment from others and the painful impact of destructive behaviour.
I have written before about estrangement from my family of origin. I still have dreams about many of them and experience connection. Sometimes I feel like we have worked through things in dream states, and other times I feel like the same dynamics that I walked away from are still present.
For a few years I took space from some members of Lukas’s family due to unacknowledged behaviours that had destructive impacts on both me as an individual and us as a couple. We started slowly reconnecting after our little one was born because Lukas wanted her to get to know them, and I respected that. I don’t feel that different than I did before, but I feel like we are better equipped to maintain boundaries and protect ourselves than we used to be.
Interestingly more of Lukas’s ancestors who have rejected me have been coming to me in dream states and telling me how they feel and why they’ve been so hard on us, that I’m not Christian and pull him away from Christianity, I’m not focused solely on his career and have one of my own, I took too long to have a child and am only having one, I ask too much of him around the house–all sorts of criticisms. In another culture (like my Jewish-Sumerian lineage), someone would have yelled at me about all that, but the Anglo Celtic culture struggles to speak directly, and often struggles to speak their truth. I now have more stories for what I’ve been feeling and behaviours that still play out, whether it impacts me directly or helps me witness patterns and struggles in the family with more clarity and compassion. I don’t yet feel like I’ve been welcomed into the family or have social belonging. I feel overall like I’ve been begrudgingly accepted, especially since I’ve had ‘their’ child, so that I’ll always be in the family tree now and there’s no point trying to break our marriage now.
For a while I resisted working with Lukas’s ancestors. I felt like that was his responsibility, and I was pretty full working with my own. As work with mine calmed down and we decided to get pregnant, I figured if some of Lukas’s ancestors would rather work with me that I had capacity. I want to support healing and prevent my child from inheriting intergenerational trauma as best I can. It’s been interesting if pretty unpleasant for the most part. But making space for such experiences feels important in the inner and outer world right now. Grace and compassion are so valuable. There’s a lot of conflict in the world. I think it will be a lot easier to work through it when we collectively accept as a baseline that all of us on the planet, human and nonhuman, are inherently worthy of dignity and respect.
Existential judgment may be the most destructive behaviour we humans engage in. And when we do, we add to our sense of shame. I have been noticing lately how efforts to avoid feeling such shame seem to be linked to an increase ghosting behaviours. So much to make space for and pray for healing about. We can be very spiritually enriched at the moment if we can avoid overwhelm! (Image from here)
If you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving.
I was raised to hold family sacred, and so processing the initial childhood betrayals, followed by the adult estrangements, has been incredibly painful. It felt like a sudden orphaning that was out of my control, a genocidal loss of everyone I deeply knew, had learned to rely on and share my life with. I am still in touch with one friend from childhood, one from middle school, and my nanny’s daughter who knew me as a baby. Though I am not close with them, it feels quite precious to me that they are still in my life and knew me when I was young. My husband and a few friends have walked with me through my estrangement and have met some of my family members, but hearing stories and seeing photos isn’t the same as having witnessed me as a child in the context of my family and seeing how far I’ve come as an adult.
In every culture there are structures of 
It is a big deal to estrange, and I have counselled people who have told me they were considering it that it’s like the guy who got stuck in a crevice while rock-climbing and had to saw off his arm to survive – it’s drastic and changes your life forever, and sometimes just has to be done. There’s little accurate Western scientific research about estrangement, with 
As with any loss, my experience of estrangement has created opportunities for a lot of self-knowledge and spiritual growth. It has given me the time and desire to do gift economy work supporting people’s healing, as well as community-building, knowledge-sharing, and our other humble activities through Earth Ethos. If I had family obligations and relationships taking up my time and energy, I would not be able to serve in this way. So you can thank my family for estranging from me, as it has gifted these insights to you today. And if you know anyone who is estranged, don’t assume that their situation can, will, or should change.
Earth Ethos 