Traveling to Finland…

In about a week, I’ll travel to Finland for the first time, called into further ancestral healing and reclamation. I’m responding to a clear invitation from Life to bring my body to the land and waters of my ancestors, meet with relatives, befriend strangers, sit in the sauna often, and allow my body and soul to commune deeply with this place. As I sense into it now, a cool inner breeze of the Spirit moves across the lake of my heart, welcoming me home.

Last week, I attended a collective trauma healing retreat as part of the two-year Timeless Wisdom Training with Thomas Hübl. An insight into my path was clarified and expanded as I explored my family system and the roles I felt compelled to take on to receive the love I needed. The childhood roles I adopted are in part echoes of my ancestry, intertwined with trauma and wisdom.

When I was a kid, I played the part of “unifier”, often using entertainment through music or theatrics to bring my family together, subconsciously hoping that if they were all connected in joy, perhaps they would bring their loving presence to me and my hidden pain.

Ironically, the creative energy I sourced to achieve my covert goal typically meant that externally, I appeared to be in radiant flow with Life. While true to a degree, this energy also animated an ever-complexifying network of numbing, distancing, shielding, and protection, preventing anyone, including myself, from reaching me in the spacetime of my core wounding.

Later, I took on the role of truth-teller, trying to fill in the gaps of family awareness by expressing the often uncomfortable and unspoken truths simmering below the surface. When I sensed or caught wind of resentments, complaints, discomforts, or unspoken needs, it was as if I eventually “had to” bring these things to light, often in ways that likely seemed jerky, spastic, or abrupt to others. I became attuned to the unspoken pains of others and took responsibility for voicing them; an empathetic compensation for the fact that I felt silenced, frozen, and unable to speak my own most painful truths.

During the retreat, what became much clearer is how I carried these roles of unifier and truth-teller into my adult life, and how aspects of these roles preceded me ancestrally.

When I feel back into my ancient Finnic ancestors, I have a powerful, clear, and deeply life-affirming connection with a woman I refer to as my Root Grandmother. She lived in the north near the sea. She was an animistic medicine woman and seer of her [my] people – likely known as a Tietäjä or Noita. She was a healthy embodiment of community unifier, truth-teller, spiritual guide, and healer, who offered the gifts of her seeing, knowing (through un-knowing), listening, healing, and guiding, not because she felt compelled by the destiny of trauma, but because she chose her path and offered her gifts lovingly to her community as an innate extension of herself.

Through my blood and bones, and the mysterious realm of Spirit, she transmits an Earthborn heart wisdom of innate belonging, wild love, creative embodiment, and steadfast presence. It has been my honor to receive her teachings over the last many years as I’ve begun blossoming into my elder heart.

When my people were colonized and Christianized during the Crusades, I believe this role in my family line began to be slowly suppressed, passing from women to men, eventually moving underground, and over time seemingly disappearing. The communal, creative, and healing impulses of these ancestral gifts did, however, survive, passed down from generation to generation, flesh to flesh, and finding expression through a variety of vocations, including Christian clergy.

In my teenage years, my rebellion away from my Christian upbringing stemmed from several factors: my dad was a Lutheran pastor, I saw much hypocrisy in the broader Christian world, and due to my core wounding of childhood sexual abuse by a man in our neighborhood, combined with the ancestral wounds of Christianization, I felt angry and unprotected by the church communities and congregations I grew up in.

I’ve healed through a lot of hurt, anger, resentment, and grief related to these ancestral wounds of colonization and Christianization. I know there’s more to feel in Finland. And I’ve also come to rest in a deeper gratitude that the resilience and wisdom of my ancestors survived, in part because that wisdom found ways of expressing itself through the Christian faith. Holding and loving paradox is integral to the healing dance.

I’ve written more extensively about my trauma history and healing path in other places, and it’s relevant to share that when I was 20, during a psilocybin experience, scrambled memories of the sexual abuse began to emerge. I tried sharing the disorienting thoughts and feelings that were surfacing, but I convinced myself I was imagining things, and I put a lid back on the pain, not to be more fully opened again for another couple of decades.

It makes so much sense to me now why, at 21 years old, after a few years of spiritual seeking for the capital “T” Truth, I became a member of the Baha’i Faith – a religion whose primary principle is Unity. And not only that, I chose a small branch of the Baha’i Faith that focused on an apocalyptic “Catastrophe” that was always looming, but that could be lessened or prevented through our teaching (truth-telling) about the Divine solution that was here.

It was a perfect way for me to simultaneously embrace and embody more of the unifier and truth-teller roles I had become so familiar with as strategies for trying to keep myself safe, seen, and loved, while also externalizing my deepest core wounding onto the world, “out there”, as far away from my core as possible please.

The truth was, the complex trauma that was mostly frozen and hidden in my body and psyche already had me subconsciously feeling like the world was always on the brink of catastrophe, and that only if the truth was voiced loud and clear enough could safety, security, and salvation come. I couldn’t feel what I couldn’t feel. I didn’t know there was so much to heal, so the loving energy of my heart turned outward to the world. Without an embodied base and foundation of inner wisdom, that love was obscured by the unclaimed projections of my pain.

How sweetly dramatic and touchingly sad to feel how seriously and steadfastly the protective parts of my inner world were working to keep me safe, even though the protective patterns were outdated and projected onto everywhere and everyone else. The voices of my inner children were silenced and frozen, and so it felt relieving and purposeful to use my voice to try to save us all.

As I write this, I feel some grief and regret about the relationships that were damaged and people who felt alienated, confused, or worried about me during those many years. My heart and intentions were oriented towards love. My motivation was compelled by existential fears and unhealed pain that I couldn’t sense or feel. I’m sorry if I hurt you, and I’m here to repair if I did.

Side note: there’s some echo in the ancestral shift from animism to Christianity, and my shift from Christianity to Baha’i.

The catastrophe finally struck for me around 2016. I felt like I was having a midlife crisis. I helped destroy my second marriage. I felt like I was unravelling, all of my reactive patterns simultaneously reaching a boiling point. After the crash, I began moving with healing intention inward. It would be a couple more years before a moment of grace revealed the true depth and complexity of my trauma and pain, and I began what has been the most fulfilling, true, healing, growthful, grounding, and loving chapter of my life, supporting an inner union and remembered wholeness I didn’t know possible.

I no longer call myself a Christian or a Baha’i, nor am I making a full return to the animistic ways of my Root Grandmother. However, I’m grateful for all of the people and experiences I’ve encountered on my path, and the wisdom I’ve absorbed through swimming in these streams of light. I’m a mystic, and may that word dissolve into the stream as I cross over.

I feel called, no longer compelled, to live out my chosen role in this human family. I’m grateful for the skills and gifts I’ve developed through what I felt I must do. They’ve served me well in my unlearning, unwinding, re-rooting, and re-emerging. I’ve learned so much. Much remains hidden. That’s good.

Oh, Life, remember me to who I am, and let me dissolve like löyly in the sauna of your Love.

Here I sit at my desk in Basel, Switzerland, far from the land and waters that grew me up, soon to journey to the land and waters of my ancestors. I’m listening through the stillness of my heart. Listening to the breeze of eternity.

Listening.