It has been too long, but long is never gone, for tomorrow, no matter how long, shall arise once again as long as your essence allows it!

Today, I sit in a memoir of my own life. A reality of hurt and pain. A reality of my ancestry. A reality of truth.

Thoughts of my ancestry always slithers into my boggled mind around this time of year. The year of what us Americans call “Thanksgiving”. In my world with my ancestry, it is a time of mourning as my people were part of what become genocide.

If you didn’t know, our internal pain actually derives from our ancestors. The pain they felt, regardless of your heritage and culture is emended in our DNA and we must acknowledge it in order to release it. It is an imprint. An imprint of pain and suffering that is in our DNA .

My blood line arises from the Navajo and Aztecs who all sufferered from colonization and relocation. You may have a lineage from those who were slaves or even ancestors from the Holocaust. All of our ancestors who were stricken with trauma, it is in you whether you acknowledge it or not.

On the other side of the coin, there are the Spaniards’ who were the colonizers, who raped and destroyed lives. Although I have a human instinct to hate and despise them, that won’t solve my ancestral trauma. We must forgive in order to move forward. Can I forgive their actions? I have to say, “no”, but at the same time, I can accept what was and move forward. My blood line is also relative to the Spaniards, so I can’t just wipe that away.

I am a product of both worlds. I come from an ancestry of native living, of those who survived on a spiritual realm of Mother Earth. As I write from portions of my thoughts, I can see my ancestors, sleeping on Mother Earth. I can feel their freedom, their love and their being.

Going forward, we need to remember our past. We need to look within and find our faults that correlate with our ancestral trauma. We are born with trauma whether we feel it or it’s dormant. Although we didn’t have a choice to inherit this ancestral pain, we do have a choice to end it. We need to become conscious and become one with our ancestors. We need to let them know that their suffering is acknowledged.

As one of my favorite Psychiatrists stated,

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to . . .complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.—Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflection

Today, I acknowledge all of my ancestors. All their pain. All the hurt they endured. I’ll end with, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ -Carl Jung

-Cami*Star

November 2022