Connecting To Ancestral Resources
Our forebears possessed enormous reserves of courage, creativity and resilience. Lisa Schwarz's Comprehensive Resource Model helps us to reclaim what we've lost.
“When the client’s brain, and psyche, and heart and soul, and trauma history is preventing access to the deepest truths — truths that we’ve been programmed not to even believe — the ancestors come in like a big sword and cut through all of those obstacle and blocks.” — Lisa Schwarz.
This edition of Resonant World is based on the second and final segment of a podcast I recorded with Lisa Schwarz, developer of the Comprehensive Resource Model, a unique system for healing trauma. After diving deep into her approach to clearing inter-generational trauma in the last episode (Resonant World #26), we went on to explore the life-enriching benefits of reconnecting with our ancestors; the importance of facilitators doing their own ancestral work; and Lisa’s vision for making ancestral healing via CRM much more widely available. You can jump straight in and listen here. I offer some discussion, and an edited transcript, below.
Resonant World #27
Starvation. Wars. Raiding parties. Dispossession. Slavery. Plagues, disease and pox. Wild animals. Ice Ages. Generation upon generation of soul-sapping poverty. Curses, feuds and sorcery. Genocide. Feudalism. Incest, concubinage, trafficking and torture. The rise and fall of empires, religious persecution, purges, and witch hunts.
Our ancestors saw it all and more. And yet we’re somehow here.
Collective trauma work is about coming together to create a safe enough space for the imprints we’ve inherited from past generations to come into our awareness, be safely experienced, and released. That can be profoundly liberating.
But it’s important to remember that the work isn’t just about the trauma we may have inherited. It’s also about claiming the gifts our ancestors bestow.
Eagle’s Eye View
Lisa Schwarz, developer of the Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM) of trauma healing (Resonant World #26) refers to these gifts as “ancestral resources,” and they can come in countless forms.
Examples could include courage; creativity; resilience; connection to nature and the land; religious faith and spiritual practices; magic; healing arts; clarity of communication or — my personal favourite — shrewdness.
And that’s just a tiny taste.
When we go deeper with ancestral work, Lisa explains, we may find that we can access specific pieces of information that can help us to clarify our dilemmas, or understand why we get caught in unhelpful cycles of behaviour. If we’re feeling stuck or constricted in our lives, our ancestors may help us remember what it feels like to experience success; to live with total freedom — or remind us of what it means to freely choose our path. Ancestral connection can help us to access both an eagle’s eye view — and a feeling of having more ground under us.
Embracing The Perpetrators
Lisa also reminded me that we should be wary of dismissing ancestors who may have done terrible things. The perpetrators in our lineages can teach us about ethics; karmic laws; and perhaps pass on some of the cunning and focus they used in pursuit of nefarious ends to help us achieve healthier goals.
Above all, our ancestors channel an unbroken stream of compassion that can help us to integrate even the most painful wounds from our own lifetime.
As Lisa told me:
“Part of the truth of the human condition is loneliness; and feeling lost; feeling unloved; feeling unrecognised; feeling not known — feeling that if I die tomorrow, nobody would know, or even care. Even if you’re surrounded by lots of people, a lot of people hold that fundamental, primitive, existential sense of loneliness.
“And when you have a connection, and start to connect to these ancestors in the way that’s possible — because it’s real — and you start getting to have a relationship with them, in the way you have a relationship with human beings you can see, there is something about that — because it’s your people, it’s your blood — that brings a richness to your life that can really help with that really deep feeling of loneliness.”
Her concluding remarks aligned perfectly with the mission of Resonant World:
“Working with clients one-on-one is helpful — but it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of how severe the crisis in our health, hearts and psyches is right now.
“Hopefully we can find a way; and find the money; and the creativity; and the blessings of the ancestors; to provide what is needed to get this done on as large a scale as possible.”
I hope you’ll find this second part of our conversation as nourishing and inspiring as I did. You can listen to the podcast here, and the transcript is below. Thank you.
Podcast Transcript:
Trauma Healing Tribe
Accessing And Remembering Generational Resources
Matthew Green and Lisa Schwarz
(To read or listen to the first segment, please visit Resonant World #26).
Our conversation continued:
Lisa: “One of my teachers — an indigenous teacher — told me: ‘There is so much focus on trauma. Everything is about trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma. Everybody has forgotten and disconnected from the resources that are in their lineages.’
“And she said: ‘Some time in your career, just try to focus on that [ancestral resources].’
“And so I did.
“And I’ve found that you can do just as deep work to clear trauma if you use correct and impeccable strategies to access ancestral resources, and then juxtapose them with trauma symptoms.
“And so that’s what I think I’ve learned: Don’t just focus on always having to dig up trauma, and open things up that the client isn’t ready for.
“Finding their ancestral resources, and connecting to those, is just as powerful as working directly with the trauma — and it makes it much safer to do ancestral healing work in large groups.”
Matthew: Are you able to say more about general principles of best practice for working with individuals, but also particularly with large groups, when you are inviting this ancestral material into the room?
Lisa: “You have to have done your own work.
“You have to have experienced the majority of your own ancestral issues that are unresolved in your lineages. You cannot just go and do this work with clients — and definitely not with large groups — if you yourself have not gone in and done the majority of your own [ancestral healing] work.
“It scares me when I see people facilitating generational work, and they haven’t ever done true, thorough work [on their own ancestral trauma]. They haven’t done the re-membering work; the resourcing work; the work of connection to these other dimensions; and how to stay embodied; with narrative, somatic and emotional memory. (For more on this topic see the first part of the podcast in Resonant World #26).
“If you haven’t done this for yourself thoroughly — or are least on your way — then there is no way you can do this for other people in a way that will have a thorough, transformative impact, that maintains over time.
“Anybody that is doing this without doing the ongoing, multiple, nuanced, complex layers of the work — and the fractal of time, space, place and dimensions — I think it’s risky. Because you don’t know what you’re doing, really. And you don’t know what you’re coming across. Because you haven’t done enough of it in yourself to understand from the blood and bones level what it is.
“The second risk is having a very limited conceptualisation of what’s going on — or having a very vague, amorphous, amoeba-like conception of what the work really is. There’s no judgment: This is normal. I’m sure that there’ve been times in my own career when I’ve done the same thing: where I’ve jumped on a bandwagon. But in reality, that’s a move for our own ego needs — a separation from discernment, impeccability, responsibility and common sense.
“Here’s another good way to look at it: What’s the source of the belief system that you’re working from? Where’s that coming from? Is that all benevolent? What’s the ancestral lineage of your teacher’s line? What’s the lineage underneath the ‘expert’?
“How clear and clean is that? What kind of fraudulence is in there that perpetuates the trickster energy that is perpetuating all of this [unconscious behaviour] on our planet?
“Where’s the source of my information coming from?”
Matthew: How does life expand when you cultivate these ancestral resources?
Lisa: “Part of the truth of the human condition is loneliness; and feeling lost; feeling unloved; feeling unrecognised; feeling not known — feeling that if I die tomorrow, nobody would know, or even care. Even if you’re surrounded by lots of people, a lot of people hold that fundamental, primitive, existential sense of loneliness.
“And when you have a connection, and start to connect to these ancestors in the way that’s possible — because it’s real — and you start getting to have a relationship with them, in the way you have a relationship with human beings you can see, there is something about that — because it’s your people, it’s your blood — that brings a richness to your life that can really help with that really deep feeling of loneliness.
“Now I’m not saying that makes up for our desire and longing for a human to be with us; and hold us; and sit with us; and have a pizza with us; or whatever. But it definitely helps. And it enriches your life when you have a relationship with your ancestors; with the truth of your line; the courage in your line; and even the perpetration in your line. Because by the way: The perpetration has its own resources. It takes a lot of smarts, and good resources and skills and characteristics, to be a really good perpetrator. So you can flip those and harvest them into something positive in this lifetime.
“[Connecting with ancestral resources means] your life will be more enriched. It’s creating connection through the fractal of ‘all is one’; ‘all is connected’; the fractal of the geometry of our DNA strands; the fractal of our human third dimension, to where beyond even our ancestors connected to, in the cosmos.
“The highest expression of love, the highest expression of these precious energies and care, can be received — even drip by drip — if you keep your connection to your people in this way. A lot of them have a lot of wisdom, just like you were able to go to your grandma or grandpa.
“There’s no way that I could have done what I’ve done in my own personal work and healing, or what I can do with clients in terms of generational work, without the relationship to the ancestors.
“I have a particular couple [of ancestors] that work with me. They are like my assistants. They are regular; they are there; they are just in ancestor form. I couldn’t work without them. I can’t access that information as a human being. Same with the clients: How are you going to get the resources; the support; the actual download of information that’s so ancient, that the human Rolodex brain cannot get to it?
“When the client’s brain, and psyche, and heart and soul, and trauma history is preventing access to the deepest truths — truths that we’ve been programmed not to even believe — the ancestors come in like a big sword and cut through all of those obstacle and blocks. So without the ancestors, you can’t do the ancestral healing. They are part of the healing team.”
Matthew: What’s next for CRM and this trans-generational work?
Lisa: “One of my truly authentic goals, and what I’ve realised is part of my mission, is to make this kind of healing available to everyone. The kind of healing we do in CRM: to transmute, transform, to alleviate our separation from joy and loving our life — no matter what the conditions.
“People are living in very challenging conditions. There is so much suffering going on, and the possibility of learning to navigate it; to tolerate it; to learn from it; to grow from it is so limited because the conditions are so challenging financially; politically; or because of the power structures that be.
“And the trauma in the generational lineages is so big. It isn’t just in the presentation of a client’s heroin addiction: It’s in the presentation of what’s happening with climate change; it’s in the presentation of what’s happening politically; with racism; it’s manifesting everywhere.
“Climate change for me is all entwined with generational trauma, and how generational trauma is unresolved in people in power.
“In CRM, there is a group of advanced practitioners, and we have our generational trauma healing club: I just call it Gen Club. We want to take CRM generational healing to groups across the globe — poverty-stricken areas that couldn’t afford it, but also to people who can afford it, but are blind to it.
“Because the scale of the problem is so huge, the scale of the healing possibility needs to be big.
“We’ve already started to put together a programme and a protocol in which myself and other clinicians can offer this work to groups of anywhere from 20 people to 200, or 500.
“We want to find a way do it, so that it’s available, so it doesn’t take forever, so it’s doable logistically; it’s affordable, if not free and funded; and do it in a way that’s safe, that is not going to be opening up 50 people to realms of multi-dimensional low vibration energy, and then sending them home.
“That’s the goal: To get this out on a larger scale.
“Working with clients one-on-one is helpful — but it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of how severe the crisis in our health, hearts and psyches is right now.
“Hopefully we can find a way, and find the money, and the creativity, and the blessings of the ancestors, to provide what is needed to get this done on as large a scale as possible.
“A big order. But I’m going to try.”
To listen to this episode, please click below:
I write Resonant World in my spare time from my editing role at DeSmog, a nonprofit news service focused on investigating the vested interests blocking action on climate change. Support from readers is a huge boost — and that includes reading, sharing, or commenting in response to my posts. Any variety of coffee gratefully accepted! Thank you.