Healing My High Blood Pressure – Ancestry of Immigrants
I’m in the depths of studying Meta Medicine at the moment and part of that study is looking at psychogenealogy, which is treating the transmissions of unconscious issues across generations in the family.
I’ve been told that my blood pressure issues are genetic, and so can’t be sorted fully via diet and exercise etc, so I have to just accept I have this genetic condition. My father being diagnosed with it at age 40. As I’m 51 the doctor told me that women are often 10 years older when diagnosed than the men in their families.
I felt quite unsettled at the thought that I was going to have to take this medication for the rest of my life, as it doesn’t make me feel great.
I asked myself if this is genetically handed down to me from my father’s side of the family, then where on his side of the family tree do I feel drawn to? I noticed his father, who had died when I was a toddler, and his mother had passed away before I was born. I realised that my grandfather’s father had also died young in a fire, and his mother died young too.
I took this dynamic to Heike McCahon who does family constellations work, and we set up a scenario using little figurines as representatives of my lineage of fathers.
I was first drawn to my great grandfather who died in a house fire, I felt I was carrying some part of his experience in me. It literally felt as if my blood was boiling, realising that I like my father and probably his father before him, were quick to temper.
Then I could feel the long line up of abandonment of sons through death and family discord.
Heike introduced my great great grandparents. I intuitively felt that they were anchorless and felt lost. At that time I couldn’t remember if they were the generation who had settled in New Zealand and were immigrants.
She brought in representatives of my ancestors from Great Britain, and for the land and rivers. I felt this strength and solidness embody me. I was reconnected again and had arrived home. My ancestors were welcoming me and my father and grandfathers back home.
The first part of the session I felt as if the heat was rising to the top of my body, the second part of my session I was way more grounded and in the lower part of my body.
When I came home I looked up my family tree and found that my fathers came from Walthamstow in Essex, England. The meaning of Walthamstow is *A Place of Welcome*.
This was my blood line.
A lot of the time, people emigrated because they weren’t the eldest sons of the family, inheriting the family land. So they travelled to new lands to establish their own foundations.
I remember when I was a child, my mother’s father used to recite Robbie Burns and talk about Scotland in a longing way. But in fact he was born in New Zealand, as were his parents. It was his grandparents that came from Scotland.
Heike’s observations are that often times the descendants of immigrants still carry this disconnection from homeland in their psyches. A feeling of restlessness and uprootedness still lingers. There’s often a longing for “home” in our souls, but these are the unhealed memories of our ancestors, which reside in our dna, in our blood.
150 odd years in a new country is nothing compared to thousands of years of lineage in the motherland.
Do you have a sense of disconnection that could be explained by the decisions of your ancestors to leave their homeland?
