Ancestral Abundance: Reclaiming Your Karma and Healing Your Lineage
- Erin
- Sep 3, 2025
- 10 min read
“When we heal ourselves, we heal the past, the present, and the future (…).There are four things our ancestors need from us: acknowledgment, validation, understanding, and forgiveness.”
Steven Farmer
Your ancestors are not gone. They are still here, present every day — woven into your cells, your nervous system, your instincts, your longings. Every grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, and forgotten name from the past lives on through you. They are part of your spirit team, your unseen council, your living inheritance.
Healing ancestral trauma isn’t about living in the past — it’s about finally listening to what has been carried forward in your body, your nervous system, and your life. When approached with care and respect, ancestrally-aligned rituals becomes a bridge: between past and present, pain and healing, inheritance and independence.
“On a very energetic level, we are all connected to our ancestors. The same eggs for example, that were in your mother’s womb, she was holding that life before you came. So you are actually absorbing the traumas, the perceptions and the programs and patterns that came before you."
Jena-Sophia
Quantum physics shows us that time is irrelevent and everything is energy. When we change the energy in one place, it has a ripple effect in all directions, including back to the past and forward to the future.
You Are the Bridge Between Worlds
Each of us comes from a long line of tough fighters and survivors who survived extreme hardships, including poverty, plagues, famine, war, oppression, displacement, child mortality and more. The beliefs, coping strategies, and survival mechanisms that kept our ancestors alive were often forged in these unthinkable tragedies and traumas.
Our ancestors did what they had to do because they had to survive. The beliefs, coping strategies, and survival mechanisms that kept them alive were often forged in extreme conditions—war, displacement, poverty, oppression, and invisibility.
You are living proof of your ancestor's resilience, and their love, and you now you carry that legacy forward and shape the future that the next generations will inherit.
Your existence is the result of countless generations who endured, adapted, and hoped, often against impossible odds. You are the seed born from their resilience. That is the superpower they gave you. You are their continuation, their legacy. You are the living representative of your whole lineage. What an honor and privilege!
"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
“There are four things our ancestors need from us: acknowledgment, validation, understanding, and forgiveness.”
Steven D. Farmer
Connecting With Ancestors
Your spirit guides and ancestors are always close. They arrange synchronicities, offer subtle nudges, align people and opportunities, and gently guide your path. Their presence is constant—but intentionally quiet, waiting for connection and consent.
Actively cultivating a conscious relationship with your ancestors can have psychological, emotional, and spiritual benefits. Building these relationships can...
Connects you to a sense of belonging, purpose, and continuity, helping you feel grounded and supported in your own life.
Promote emotional healing, self-compassion, and reduced anxiety by releasing unspoken guilt, inherited anger or shame and opening space for healthier patterns in your own life
Encourage intergenerational empathy, compassion and perspective, allowing you to break cycles of trauma or limiting beliefs that may have been unconsciously passed down.
Ritual offers a grounded, intentional way to reconnect with your ancestors — not to romanticize their suffering, but to honor their endurance, release what no longer needs to be carried, and consciously choose what wisdom moves forward through you.
These ritual creates a sacred container for connection, gratitude, and healing. Adapt it to your beliefs, culture, and intuition.
No pressure but, the ancestors of the past and the descendants of the future are connected through YOU. YOU are the bridge between the past and future. And as such, You are always supported and never alone.
1. Acknowledgment: Recognizing Ancestors’ Presence
Simply recognizing that your ancestors existed and contributed to your life affirms that your identity is part of a larger lineage.
Ancestor Altar: Create a small altar with photos, heirlooms, or symbolic items representing your ancestors. Light a candle and place offerings like flowers, incense, or food.
Calling In: Light incense or candle and say aloud their names, inviting their presence and guidance. Visualize your ancestors surrounding you. If it feels right, say their names or whisper affirmations below. Sit in quiet meditation afterward to sense their energy.
Affirmations:
“I remember you, see you, I hear you, I trust you, I respect you, I value you, I honor you."
"I acknowledge the lives you lived and the paths you walked. You matter.”
“I stand in the light of my ancestors and recognize the strength of their presence within me.”
"Our ancestors lived for us; they died for us; and they dreamed for us.”
Sherri Mitchell
2. Validation: Honoring Their Experiences and Choices
Many ancestral experiences involved struggles, oppression, or sacrifices that are invisible to us. Validating these lives honors their choices and acknowledges that their experiences mattered.
Letter to Ancestors: Write a letter to a specific ancestor, affirming the challenges they endured and their contributions to your life. Leave it at your altar or safely burn it as a symbolic release.
Storytelling Ritual: Speak or record stories you know about your ancestors, emphasizing what they accomplished or endured. Narrating validates their experiences.
Affirmations:
“I honor your struggles and your triumphs
"Your life mattered, and your journey shaped mine.”
“Your experiences are real, meaningful, and acknowledged by us today.”
3. Understanding: Empathizing with Their Life Context
Understanding the context of your ancestors’ decisions helps you see patterns, behaviors, and traits as part of a lineage rather than personal failings.
Meditative Walk: Walk in a natural setting and visualize walking alongside your ancestors. Reflect on the societal, cultural, or personal pressures they faced.
Guided Reflection: Use journaling prompts like: “What challenges did my ancestors face that shaped their choices? What lessons from their lives can I carry forward? What traits or lessons have I inherited? How can I honor my lineage through my life? What patterns am I ready to release?
Affirmations:
“I seek to understand your journey, your choices, and the forces that shaped you.”
“I honor the wisdom embedded in your life story.”
4. Forgiveness: Releasing Judgment and Resentment
Holding onto judgment or resentment toward ancestors (or yourself for what you inherit) perpetuates cycles of trauma, blame, or shame. Forgiveness is a conscious release.
Water Cleansing Ritual: Fill a bowl with water, write down resentments or judgments about your lineage on paper, and gently place the paper in the water. Meditate as you visualize forgiveness flowing through your lineage.
Fire Release Ritual: Safely burn symbolic items or papers representing old grievances, sending forgiveness to the ancestors and yourself.
Affirmations:
“I release judgment and resentment; I offer compassion to you and myself.”
“I forgive the limitations and mistakes of my ancestors, and I free myself from their burdens.”
To honor your ancestors is not only to acknowledge their suffering and oppression—but also their joy, creativity, humor, brilliance, and wisdom.
Appreciation: Showing Gratitude
Showing gratitude to ancestors is important because it honors their sacrifices and wisdom, strengthens your connection to your lineage, and fosters emotional and spiritual continuity across generations.
Create Sacred Space: Cleanse your space with incense, sage, cedar, or rosemary. Create a small altar with: Photos or mementos of ancestors, A white, yellow or red candle, A bowl of water or a grounding stone (smoky quartz, obsidian), Offerings of food, drink, flowers, or herbs,
Offering Ritual
Grounding: Sit comfortably. Close your eyes. Breathe deeply. Imagine roots extending from your body into the Earth, connecting you to your ancestral line
Light a Candle. As you do, Say aloud or silently: “I call upon the wisdom and love of those who came before me. I honor your lives, your sacrifices, and your gifts.”
Offering of Gratitude: Place your offering (food, drink, flowers, herbs, salt) on the altar and say: “Thank you, ancestors, for your guidance, your love, and your presence in my life. With gratitude, I offer this to you in exchange for sharing your continued strength, resilience, wisdom, and guidance. I am grateful for all that I have received from this lineage, including the gifts of the challenges I face.”
Other Ways to Honor Your Lineage
Ancestral Feast: Cook traditional recipes from your heritage and share them with others.
Storytelling: Record or write family stories to preserve their memory.
Divination: Use tarot, runes, or intuitive tools to facilitate connection and deeper listening.
Art and Music: Collect ancestral art or play songs from your heritage
Long before you were born, stories of survival, loss, resilience, and love were etched into your lineage, shaping patterns you may feel but not fully understand.
Clearing Ancestral Patterns & Healing Ancestral Trauma
Many of the survival strategies our ancestors used didn’t stop with them. They were passed down through stories, behaviors, nervous systems, and even DNA. This is the science of epigenetics.
Beliefs that once ensured survival can become constraints generations later, long after the original danger has passed. They may show up as fear, hypervigilance, chronic stress, self-sabotage, or a deep sense of limitation around abundance—especially money, safety, and visibility.
Ancestral patterns often live below conscious awareness. They operate through the subconscious—formed early in life and reinforced through family systems, culture, and collective trauma.
You may be holding ancestral patterns if:
You replicate family habits or coping strategies that no longer serve you
You experience hypervigilance that doesn’t match your current reality
You carry beliefs that feel like you were “born with them”
Family success or failure stories loom large in your identity
Thinking about your family history feels heavy or dense
You feel stuck and don’t know why
You notice certain beliefs echoing through your lineage:
It’s not safe to pursue your dreams.
Stay below the radar.
Work yourself to the bone just to scrape by.
If this is the case, you may encounter intense resistance—internal and external, when it comes to pursuing your goals and reaching your potention. The key is to not just change your mindset—but also our nervous system. You have to create a new relationship to safety, and give yourself permission to receive.
True ancestral guidance feels supportive, grounding, and expansive—not frightening, coercive, or disempowering.
Subconscious Blocks & Beliefs
The conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg—about 5%. The remaining 95% is your subconscious - the vast structure beneath the surface.
Between the third trimester and roughly age seven, our subconscious programming solidifies. During that time, we absorb beliefs about safety, worth, money, visibility, and survival from our caregivers and environment.
This is how ancestral abundance stories persist.
Centuries of fear, scarcity, and loss have traveled down familial lines, shaping your relationship to abundance without realizing it.
Abundance is not just personal. It’s ancestral. And when you claim it, generations before and after you are changed.
Common Ancestral Abundance Blocks
Healing ancestral trauma means bringing it into the light with compassion.
Money is often the most common block, resulting in habits like avoidance, hypervigilance, emotional numbing, or shame around finances. These are not personal failures—they are adaptive responses.
1. Scarcity Mentality: A belief that abundance is limited and life is a zero-sum game. If someone else has more, you must have less. This mindset often originates in systemic oppression, poverty, or historical exclusion.
2. Net Worth = Self-Worth: When value is tied to income, status, or productivity, self-esteem becomes fragile. One loss or setback can feel like personal failure. This belief often comes from family systems where love or respect was conditional.
3. The Comparison Game: Comparison breeds scarcity. It starts early—among siblings, peers, and families—and later manifests as envy, competition, and chronic dissatisfaction. Gratitude and self-trust are the antidotes.
To release these blocks, first notice how money was spoken about in your family. What messages were passed down about worth, safety, and possibility?
Identify the Pattern: Where do you feel stuck—work, health, money, relationships?
Name the Belief: What belief might be driving this pattern?(“It’s not safe.” “I’m on my own.” “I don’t get to rest.”). Write it down,.
Trace It Back: Follow the belief back through time—first in your own life, then beyond your birth. Trust sensations, images, or intuitive knowing.
Understand Its Purpose. Ask: What did this belief protect? What did my ancestors need to survive?
Honor the Ancestors. Imagine your ancestors standing behind you—parents, grandparents, and generations before them. Thank your ancestors for their intelligence, resilience, and sacrifices: "Thank you for everything you endured. Because you survived, I am here."
Release the Belief. Light a candle, hold a bowl of water or stone. Let them see your current life. Tell them you release the belief in honor of them—and that doing so allows healing through the lineage. Ask for their support as you live with greater ease, abundance, and joy. Burn the belief while claiming, " “I release what no longer serves me from my ancestral line. May healing flow backward and forward through time.”I give back the struggle, the fear, the invisibility, the scarcity. We no longer need these to belong."
Closing. Visualize heaviness dissolving. Pour the water outside, bury the stone or extinguish the candle when complete. Say: “I honor you, your wisdom, and carry it forward.”
Write a New Belef. What do you want to believe instead? Feel it, integrate through your body and nervous system. Feel your ancestors behind you again—supporting you, not burdening: Claim the new story: “It is safe for me to thrive. I can be abundant and connected.”
To those we have loved and those we have lost,
your presence, your energy and essence remains,
A gentle light through snow and rain,
Your warmth and care will never part
Forever held within our heart.
You are the portal, the doorway between two paradigms, two realities. Between the past and future. Between survival and possibility. Between what was endured and what can now be transformed.
Speaking With Authority, Not Permission
Free will is the highest law your ancestors honor. As such, they will not interfere, override your choices, or force healing upon you. They can walk beside you, surround you, encourage you—but they wait for your consent.
The moment you ask or command, the energy changes. Support becomes clearer. Guidance becomes stronger.
You are not meant to beg, plead, or shrink when working with your ancestors. You are meant to speak with authority. Not from ego—but from truth. Not from fear—but from leadership.
Your ancestors are waiting for direction. Waiting for you to name what needs healing, releasing, or transmuting. Their role is to support, protect, and help restore balance—but the activation requires you.
“To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love, and die.”
Alice Walker
Now that you know the old stories, it's time to write new ones. You get to choose differently.
Choosing Differently
Remember, you have the power to write a new story. You can choose ease where they endured struggle. Joy where they knew fear. Abundance where there was scarcity.
You are not betraying your ancestors by becoming the healthiest, wealthiest, happiest version of yourself. You are simply completing their work. They survived so you could thrive.
When you choose abundance, rest, visibility, and joy—you are not abandoning your ancestors. You are fulfilling what they could not. Due to timing, race, gender, social status, finances, or so many other reasons.
You do not heal your lineage by suffering longer. You heal it by deciding to live more fully and do the things they could not.
And when you step into your authority, speak your truth, and live with intention, the entire lineage shifts—past, present, and future.
We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Thank them, walk with them, invoke them.
Erin is a certified feng shui consultant, energy healer, wellness coach and holistic growth strategist.
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