Clarence Dalton Hicks (“Grandad” circa 1918)

“Heart Feet: Walking with the Ancestors” is the Workshop title for the next Inner Constellation Workshop on Saturday March 4, 2023.

For many years of my life, I did not realize the importance of my roots. I was focussed on my individuality and the blessings of my wings, rather than the deep embodiment of my roots.

I was unaware of the division and lack of peace this isolated paradigm was creating in my life. I felt as though I was an alien in the world, and therefore sought my belonging within the spacious light of mystical dimensions. In these moments I felt a belonging in a spiritual or timeless sense, but not on the ground. I was very connected vertically (with soul in God/source) but the flow did not continue easily into the horizontal (relational) dimension much of the time. My becoming and belonging were not synchronized. 

The traits of our genetics and DNA, and the way our ancestors have treated one another, create the substance of our horizontal realities. We are born into them. In my case, I experienced the horizontal landscape as hostile towards the inherent grace of soul’s vertical resonance. The fragmentation between our “wings of becoming” and “roots of belonging” is ubiquitous. It has created famous sayings like “be in the world, but not of it (Jesus),” or “engage but don’t enrol (Thomas Hübl).” If we are going to live in peaceful ways, we are tasked with befriending these disparate parts of ourselves—because the ground we stand on is where peace begins.

The science of epigenetics is now showing how unresolved wounds continue through the generations. Like our hair and eye colour, trauma patterns are passed down through the generations. Until they are seen, felt, and integrated into life, they are experienced as a lack of belonging roots (as in my case) or a lack of becoming wings (experiencing the light)–or both. Many times we are not aware of where our divisions are, we just feel the symptoms as some kind of gnawing discomfort or suffering. Eventually, we may come to accept our “symptoms”  as normal and just “how life is.” 

Collectively, we share a wounded humanity that is still largely in unconscious denial of that wound. Where denial is active, projection is strong and we make “how life is” someone else’s fault. A blaming syndrome is driven by fear and separation.  It alienates us further as life  happens “outside” of us rather than through us. We become limited by victimhood rather than free to participate.

According to Ken Wilber the evolutionary movement of our consciousness is one of transcend and include. Like me, you may have been pretty good at the transcending part and have forgotten about the including – the roots of your authentic belonging. Although painfully challenging at times, I have found new ground in my heart through walking with the ancestors. It has freed me from entangled ways of relating that were habitual (survival oriented) rather than authentic. Contact with ancestral patterns helps us to befriend—rather than distract from—the wounded life we are born into and walk with. When vertical transcendence includes horizontal embodiment, we gradually become everything we have longed for–eventually realizing that we have been looking everywhere else for a very long time.