Intergenerational trauma: tantra yoga’s response
A small glimpse of my own familial ancestral trauma
I am the custodian of a diary kept in 1876 and 1877 by one of my forebears. In the period of this diary my forebear buries two of his sons, killed in farming accidents. At the time the family were settler farmers in the mid-north of South Australia. In all the entries of the diary there is no mention of the original inhabitants, the Ngadjuri people. Yet the traumatic events of their displacement must have been very fresh, and the white settlers, whether they admitted it or not, would have suffered moral damage, for they couldn’t have not known the deep harm their being there had inflicted on the displaced and decimated Ngadjuri. The diary keeper and his wife had immigrated in the 1850s from England, and for some reason, we don’t know why, they changed their name sometime after the birth of their first two children in Australia, and lived by new identities.
On the other side of my family, the immigrants to South Australia came from Ireland in the 1850s. They were poor. After arrival the wife and children were resident at the destitute asylum in Adelaide for periods of time. They eventually moved to western Victoria and later to Penola in the south East of South Australia. The husband later abandoned his wife and apparently had another family in Victoria.
These brief outlines of my ancestors, just four or five generations back, hold the seeds of trauma in the family. Poverty, cultural violence, survival struggle, tragedy, family breakdown. What happened before they came to Australia I really do not know. We can imagine that the Irish famine may have affected the Irish branch. Since then, our men fought in wars, our families have lived through the Great Depression and other economic hard times, and our families have known their share of dysfunction.
Modern recognition of ancestral trauma
We live in an age when trauma is at last becoming acknowledged and treatments for its terrible psychological effects are being developed. Psychology and psychiatry are also now recognizing that something is happening intergenerationally, and that trauma can not only affect the person who directly experienced it, but can be carried on through their children, grandchildren and so on.
This can only partly be explained by the disrupted behaviour of an individual who is suffering the psychological aftermath of a trauma, creating unpleasant, dysfunctional conditions for the developing psychology of children, although that is very real. For example, if the parental response to stress is violence, this is modelled behaviour for a child who grows living out the same kind of response.
In the 1990s researchers began to study changes in the genes because of traumatic events that are passed on to future generations, whether they were even conceived at the time of the traumatizing event or not. This area of research is known as epigenetics and it has shown that trauma can cause DNA modifications that are directly inherited, meaning that a past forebear’s trauma could affect you even if you or another forebear in the intervening generations were adopted.
In most cases, intergenerational trauma is acting both through the genetic path and through the environmental path.
Families can be affected in various ways. There may be disconnection, denial, detachment, estrangement, neglect, family violence and abuse. Individuals may likewise be variously affected. Associated conditions include chronic pain, anxiety and depression, sleep disorder, substance abuse, and various physical dispositions towards illness such as heart disease and diabetes. Psychologically individuals may be beset by shame, hypervigilance, low self-esteem, difficulty in relationships and interpersonal attachments and intrusive thoughts.
There is a related trauma pattern that is societal and cultural, known as historical trauma. This is when a particular geographical area, or cultural grouping, for example, has been subjected to traumatizing events, such as war, genocide and natural disaster. In areas which have been subjected to repeated invasion over a long period time there is often a more warlike culture than in places that have largely been left alone. Locations where there has been a long history of civil war display the effects of historical trauma, generation upon generation.
As I read about intergenerational trauma, and as I learn about my family history, I can see how it all has played out in my generation, in me. And as a mother and grandmother I am acutely aware that it goes on. Though we may make a lot of effort not to repeat the parenting patterns we found damaging, it is still deeply rooted. Many of the traumatic events that are affecting us happened in past generations and we do not even know about them. Yet they are there in our bodies and they are still coming home to roost. Was this what was meant in the Old Testament quotation about the sins of the father?
“The Lord is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation” (Numbers 14:18).
Ancient answers to intergenerational trauma: digesting ancestral Karma
I have seen karma and intergenerational trauma conflated as if they are synonyms, but they are different. Karma is an energetic pattern created by action. It is not trauma. However, they are closely related, and never more so than in this realm of intergenerational patterns. Ancestral karma and intergenerational trauma are correlated.
In layperson’s speak, I prefer to talk about our “stuff.”
We talk about digesting our stuff. The term digesting is metaphorical, but it is an excellent metaphor. Just as our food is taken into the furnace of our digestive system to be broken down, all the goodness extracted, and the waste excreted, so it is with all our experience.
Ideally, we would be a blank slate, and all incoming inputs would be digested in the same way. It would enter the body-mind, which would process it, extract the useful and shed the waste.
The trouble is that we have the blockages of our “stuff,” and as we have seen, some of that “stuff” is not even of our making, we inherited it. We also accumulate it when we are too young and/or vulnerable to digest it at the time, and when the inputs are just too huge and the system is overwhelmed (fresh trauma). The system gets clogged, constipated to continue the digestion metaphor and our stuff accumulates – and remember, we are passing this on to the next generation too. It deserves to be cleared.
The ancient spiritual traditions of India developed techniques for dealing with what they would have termed ancestral karma. There are two techniques from the tantric tradition that I teach, having learnt them from qualified teachers, practiced them and experienced their power for myself.
iRest® Yoga Nidra comes from the yoga nidra practices, but has been a little updated for the modern audience. It guides us in a process of unravelling the grip of deep “stuff” in the body. It is effective because it is somatic (rooted in the body), it allows us to take things at a pace we can manage, it provides tools for staying grounded, and a safe container for meeting what arises. What arises may be purely sensation, feeling, and not be understood by the mind at all. It doesn’t need to be. The effects began to kick in quickly and after just a few weeks of regular practice I noticed a change. A regular daily practice of iRest over several years resulted in my experience of being able to flow through life more skillfully and less stressfully, as well as a marked shift and opening to essence nature.
Ancestral karma practice on the other hand involves visualization, ritual and mantra. It may involve a physical practice of prostrations, though there is also a seated meditation version as well. A committed practice of Ancestral karma practice for several months left me feeling lighter and freer. I return to the practice periodically.
I invite you to work with me and have the chance to learn these practices as well. I deliver two yoga nidras a week, during my two regular online classes, Somatic movement and yoga nidra, and Exploring non-duality. You might also catch more iRest learning when I offer a six-week course in it, and learn ancestral karma practice on workshops and retreats. I am also available to instruct you in these techniques in private consultations.