#reunion process

“You said to imagine a great big sphere, and inside is all of time and space. All of it. And outside are these intelligent entities, and all they are is curious; all they want to do is experience.” “Go on,” Alice said. Her eyes are so bright.… “One might say: ‘I want the experience of being a seventeen-year-old girl in the fourteenth century who was burned at the stake.’ Or ‘I’d like the experience of being a four-month aborted fetus in 1994.’ And they just dive in and do it.” I looked at Alice. She was waiting for something. I thought about what I just said, and then I remembered: “They have to create what happens. Write a script.” She still waited, so I said, “Not only the experience itself; the house, the city, the country, the whole world where it happens. All of it.” “Which makes that entity responsible for all of it,” she reminded me. “So that’s who the ‘little man watching’ really is—that, that thing—” “Not a thing,” she said, interrupting for the very first time. “It’s you. You’re living a script that you wrote. Which is why free will and predestination are the same thing.”

― Theodore Sturgeon, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume XIII: Case and the Dreamer

First off, what is inherited trauma? It’s the emotional, psychological, and biological imprint of your family’s unresolved trauma—passed down through generations. You might feel it as: - Chronic anxiety - Fears you can’t explain - Unexplained health issues - Obsessive thoughts and habits But let's see what science says ↓

Scientists have discovered that trauma changes your genes. When your ancestors experienced trauma (war, poverty, abuse), their bodies adapted to survive. These changes—called epigenetic tags—alter how genes are expressed. Translation? You inherit more than their hair color. You inherit their survival responses.

Trauma doesn’t just shape your emotions—it rewires your biology. Studies prove it. - Offspring of Holocaust survivors exhibited altered stress hormone profiles, predisposing them to anxiety disorders and PTSD. - A study of Ukrainian families affected by the Holodomor famine revealed transgenerational impacts such as anxiety, shame, food hoarding, and authoritarian parenting styles. These biological adaptations were once survival mechanisms but now they are inherited...

How do you know if you’re carrying inherited trauma? Here are common signs: - Recurring family patterns (addiction, conflict, failure). - Fears or beliefs that feel irrational. - Chronic stress or illness with no clear cause. These patterns will persist until they’re consciously addressed.

But here’s the good news: You can break the cycle. Healing inherited trauma doesn’t just change your life—it transforms future generations. Epigenetics changes are not permanent— they can be changed through therapeutic works at any time. As a holistic therapist, here’s what I’ve seen work best:

Step 1: Explore your family Genogram. What unspoken events shaped your family? - Loss, war, migration, abuse, or betrayal? - Secrets, silences, or "taboo" topics? Understanding these root events is essential to healing.

Step 2: Recognize inherited language. Listen for repeating family phrases: - "We never get ahead." - "It’s hard to trust people." - "Love always ends in pain." - "Money doesn't grow on trees" These beliefs often reflect unhealed trauma passed down to you generationally...

Step 3: Rewire your nervous system Inherited trauma isn’t just emotional—it’s stored in your body and nervous system. In my experience as a therapist, neuroscience-based tools are the most effective at directly healing trauma in the mind-body system. Talk therapy often falls short at this. Here’s what works instead ↓

Proven Neuroscience tools for healing: • Somatic therapies: TRE (Tension Release Exercises). • Breathwork: Polyvagal breathing to calm the nervous system. • Meditation and mindfulness: Rewire emotional responses. These tools directly reset your body’s stress response, creating lasting change...

Step 4: Rewrite the narrative. Trauma may have shaped your family story, but it doesn’t define you. Use Narrative Therapy (CBT) to shift limiting beliefs: - “I’m safe to succeed.” - “Love doesn’t have to hurt.” - “I’m free to create a new path.”

You’re not broken. Inherited trauma isn’t a life sentence—it’s a calling to heal what others couldn’t. When you do the work, you don’t just free yourself. You free your family’s past and future.

This is a time for self-examination and quiet preparation to ready yourself for great fulfillment.

[DIVINATION: Oct. 26, 2025]

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Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

— Chuck Klosterman,

THE THIRD MAN 1949 British Lion film with Joseph Cotten

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“The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”

The Consciousness of the Heart

I am a big fan of public television mysteries, especially those made in Europe. Good acting, intricate plots. So here’s a summary of a French mystery I just saw:

A woman gets a heart transplant and immediately begins having nightmares involving the heart donor and her own teenaged daughter, whom the woman and her husband had adopted at birth. Turns out the heart donor was a young woman who died in a car crash, but the nightmares indicate to the woman that the girl’s death was not an accident.

She meets the adoptive father of the young woman; he too believes his daughter’s death was no accident; so they team up to find out what really happened; her teenaged daughter gets pulled into this detective work too.

We find out that both daughters had issues about being loved related to being adopted. Lots of twists and turns in the story due to this, after which...the new heart comes close to failing. But, seeing her mom so sick, the teenaged daughter realizes how much she loves her mother. The young woman’s father becomes aware of how he tried to push his daughter into a career in medicine (his career) rather than letting her be the singer/musician she wanted to be.

In the only way that he can communicate with her now, the father places his hand on the woman’s chest above his daughter’s heart, and, speaking to his beloved deceased child, apologizes to her heart for his lack of awareness of her needs when she was alive.

You can guess the rest: The transplanted heart settles down, the woman gets better, the teenaged daughter gets over her own anxieties —and by the way, they catch the man who murdered the daughter by forcing her car to crash.

Well, it was way better than it sounds.

But here’s what really caught me—that scene where the dad talks to the heart of his daughter. As if the heart carries its own consciousness and he was able to communicate with it.

Even more than European mystery dramas, I love stories about consciousness-- there’s a literary conceit that involves a body part being transplanted into another person and taking control of the hapless recipient—say, someone gets a hand transplanted from an executed criminal and the hand takes over to steal or murder –sinister stories, even tales of horror.

An alien consciousness inside one’s own self. We are familiar with this theme. And part of what makes these stories work is the notion of the implied consciousness of the body part, the power of the body part, for example, of a hand that has its own mind.

In our age, we are used to the notion that consciousness dwells in the brain, we don’t find that strange at all. But many peoples have believed that consciousness dwelt as well in the heart. The heart responds by quickening, by aching, by urging action, or by relaxing into peacefulness. It rises up to greet its love; it sinks into despair. It feels. It seems conscious. Now we can trace the complex biological directives that guide the heart’s functioning, the chemicals and mechanisms that control it. But still, subjectively, the heart feels.

We have a complicated relationship with our hearts from this perspective. The heart as a conscious part of us that may have inconvenient feelings. It is in a sense an alien consciousness within us. I am speaking of course of emotions. And how we can harden our hearts, turn against tender feelings, deny that affective link. I’ve done it and I bet you have, too. Other emotions are there to step in—rage, fear, greed, lust.

Dr. King said he could not figure out how to reconcile the contradictions in humans (we can be so good and also so evil) until he recognized the power of love, which must be our guide.

I had a hateful spell the other day. I was, as my mother cautioned me against in the past, “being ugly.” Judging somebody harshly. Thinking about a situation that had come up that was not gonna be easy to resolve with some other people. Money was involved, of course. Odd how that often happens.

Several of us talked together, trying to come up with a solution. Someone suggested a generous resolution and then someone else countered with another generous perspective. That night, in bed, I lay there imagining how this conflict could maybe turn out to be a victory for love. I crossed my hands over my chest, above my heart, and breathed.

art | Edgar Maxence

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Even during your lowest moments, where you feel nothing but clay against the dark earth, You are never alone.

You have thousands of powerful ancestors behind you; those who have lived through life's wilds and wastelands, griefs and hardships, and do so with you now. Those who carry you in the gnarled and knotted embrace of the Tree of Life, each bestowing a dark seed of promise within your sleeping cells.

Feel their proud voices. Their dreams for you, and advice like moonlight. Feel the loving hands that lift you from the edges of despair, or hurt, or bewilderment - and into clarity. And hear their wisdom. That it is the journey that is the thing and the success is in simply taking it. As they return you back gently to your feet...and into the life you came here to live.

~Rachel Alana

Photo by Valentin Balan on Unsplash

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This beautiful poem is one way to express how glad I am for my work. It is a privilege to help people in this life and to have learned skills and [more importantly] ways of being and living that taught me the value of helping other people. It is almost 50 years for me having graduated an unusual college. In that space I was taught and nurtured by many extraordinary beings. It was truly an education of both heart and mind.  After college the learning and the teachers continued.  They continue all the way up to this present day.  I’ve been reflecting on the singular people who have been my teachers over the years. I hope I have given back some small portion of what I have received.

My Great Grandmother’s Siblings

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