Embracing Roots & Remembering Ancestors
Many times in our healing journey, there are moments from our past that we don’t wish to recall, however, the more we run from it the clearer the recollections of those memories become. In my personal journey this is something I continuously have to face. A pattern that shows up in my life is the further I go towards the future the deeper I also go into the past. Hence, this is probably one of the reasons why I remember my past lives.
Growing up, traumatized, I had distanced myself from my culture and its traditions for many years because of anger and misunderstanding. With 2023 being a year of continuous healing, during November, I made the decision to reconnect with my roots as a Hmong descendent, and then from December 2023 to January 2024 I chose to continue down the path of awareness. Here’s what I have seen and have come to learn.
Image Credit: @Mai Ka Yang
Every Hmong New Year as excited as I am to experience the lively celebratory vibes, carried deep inside of me is a heavy burden of the unknown - with a tight knot around my chest which becomes unbearable if I put on too much decorations. As I embrace this emotion I get pulled back to the time of my ancestors and the preparation that leads up to the festival.
I am met with this energy of pride and envy, wanting to show off the richness of an entire year of hard work - harvesting, and wanting it to the best. As I continued to channel this ancestral path, I then experienced this feeling of restlessness, fear, sadness and disappointment. I saw ancestors cry silently as they struggled to survive through the hardship of life with additional harvest and war trauma. I saw teenagers growing up too fast into parenthood because that's all they've known. I saw little kids experiencing orphanhood and being mistreated because they're considered a burden to their single parents or their relatives. I saw a festival that was meant to help get rid of the bad in order to welcome the new frozen in time. I saw how imbalanced the energies around me were. With both masculine and feminine energies crying out for help only to be ignored.
As I spent the following months continuing down this ancestral path I came to understand how lost and locked one can become internally - physically , mentally and spiritually; if one keeps resisting.
I'd learned that resistance is the unwillingness to grow and to adapt to time and space and that unhealed trauma is what locks us up in the past. I'd realized the heaviness that I've been feeling every time I talk about ancestral healing and unhealed trauma, which belongs to generations of ancestors around me that are still waiting to be released - for they carried the hope that their now reincarnated self will be inspired by the amount of healed work around them, to wake up one day, to do their own healing work that will help release them from their very own pasts.
People like to think that when we passed on we leave peacefully and cross over easily but we fail to realize the level of impact our human experiences have on our soul, our characteristics and our personalities. We forget that the spiritual realm isn't that far off from this earthly realm. We forget how energetically sensitive we all are to each other, dead or alive. That we can still communicate with each other through time and space. That we can still learn, grow and heal together because we are both our past and our future ancestors. When spirit say, “You are the one your ancestors has been waiting for,” what they really meant to say is, “You are the one you've been waiting for, as certain things are only known to you or given to you because you are what you've been waiting for and only you know what to do with it.” As the saying goes, “One can’t change unless they choose to,” when it comes to healing work and releasing oneself from their pasts, one must do the releasing work. Others are only there to help keep one on track in case one stumbled off.
