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Your Ancestors, Their Hangout, and You.

Writer's picture: Karen SoleKaren Sole

Whether you like it or not this is a bundle conferred at birth. You may as well accept it and get close to it. There are inextricable links between human kinship, our kinship with the land (hangout) of our ancestors, and the impact of both on our lives and our experiences.


[Approaching Mt Taranaki from the south. Photo Karen Sole]


Land in this case means any part of or all of a country, the actual earth and area of an ethnic or cultural community or tribe or people, or the place where a person was born or grew up or visited often, such as parents' or grandparents' house and garden or farm, or where they pitched a tent.


When I'm going home to Taranaki, and our mountain comes into view, or I go down to the rugged flax strewn land and black sand beach at Ohawe, the glorious feeling of inalienable belonging washes over me. The connection to these places that has settled in my cells stirs when I return to this area/rohe that belongs to the people who came before me.


Beauty is all around us here in Aotearoa-New Zealand, but nowhere else evokes these vibrations. It is surely not accidental that love arises - it can only be love - the deep recognition, unassailable belonging, the urge to dance. And a feeling of being surrounded by people who know me, with whom I am connected, who once walked and worked and celebrated and cried and, yes, bled onto this land. It's not that my mind necessarily goes to all those details, but my body responds to being there.

[Ohawe beach, Taranaki, Aotearoa-NZ. Photo credit, author.].


Here too, is the seat of memories of my early life, the four walls of home,  primary school, summer holidays at the beach, the shock of high school; school and bible class dances, summer days at the town baths (swimming pool), ANZAC parades ending in the upper circle at the Opera House; clandestine cigarette smoking and terrible vomiting afterwards; going out for paua (abalone)  near Kaupokonui wth Dad, and the clamourous reaching of seven arms when Mum put the newspaper lined  roasting dish full of fritters on the table; visiting grandparents, late night parties of my parents and their, as it turns out lifelong friends; winter Saturday afternoons at the pictures (movies), and pages more - oh no, you can't take that away from me!

There are many happy memories, but not all of my memories of my early years are so: far from it. However, the life I have lived and am living, and the benefits of therapy of various kinds have enabled me to understand, to respect and feel more compassion for people who came before me. Most significant among these are my parents, and extending back along the ancestral lines. When we really feel our ancestors/tipuna our individual problems and issues are transformed into human problems.  Everything shifts and shuffles around; all ends up in the right place and the right size.

Even if we  have never seen ourselves as traumatised, when something sends us to therapy, we see the ìnevitablity of adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, showing up in our lives and in our present day behaviour. These days, some of that is popularly referred to as 'being triggered', but that is just a part of it. Beyond that are our choice of partners, our relationships and issues with our colleagues, our parents, our children, our friends - ourselves. Relationally, we are driven by our early environment, meaning the care taken of us, the bonds we formed, the nourishment we received, and the relative inadequacies in any of the areas essential for healthy development.  Simultaneously, our resilience serves us well. Never, or extremely rarely or is everything perceived or felt as entirely negative or entirely positive.

Whether you have enjoyed some benefits of therapy, but feel you have not got to the root of 'it', or you have never experienced any form of therapy,  my invitation is to give a family constellations workshop or private one to one constellation a whirl. I don’t mean that facetiously. It’s a safe and effective therapeutic modality and experience. Generally, in one to three sessions, family constellations gets to the nitty gritty, the core, the root of an issue, or maybe a couple of issues, enabling .fresh perspectives,  greater understanding, respect and compassion for ourselves and the people in our family system. Often this involves handing back of abuse  or neglect to someone still living or someone further back in our family lines, or an institution, releasing us from blame and shame and secrets.

Even so, becoming more conscious and more intentional is a lifelong process. Invite therapy in as a natural part of things. For me the first was the fairly typical couples range, mostly talk with some interesting, but then quite scary somatic exercises, which with hindsight were not taken where they could have gone. Then came more traumatic explosions as my ex and his new partner sought to take my children away, so a three way, radical counselling highway. Then came grief counselling: talk with some Gestalt thrown in, which gave me glimmerings of the family system and what it means. The radical friendship with women in the context of the 70s feminist wave, in which concentrated activism and exploration of (the) patriarchy and its intersection with pretty much everything else was also a kind of 360 degree therapy and wider awakening. In this, we women did not necessarily have the tools to deal with the trauma that arose and which also illuminated the way. Much later came Rebirthing, now known as Conscious Connected Breathing, in several periods spanning a few decades. In the last decade I have been an ardent and attentive follower of Dr Gabor Mate, and found one of the Compassionate Inquiry practitioners in New Zealand for six quasi-miraculous sessions. That was followed by a Somatic Experience course facilitated by that therapist, Dr Luke Sniewski. The most recent therapeutic modality for me is Family Constellations into which I dropped, and into which the foregoing all fell fully into place. For me all of the work on myself has been useful and effective at the time and stage I was at, in every case. I love being here, for which I trained with Yildiz Sethi of Family Constellations Australia. Yildiz trained directly with the founder, Bert Hellinger, and other early luminaries, and I am very grateful to her, and for that lineage.


This first appeared at ksole.substack.com, and is largely taken from an earlier blog here, The Healing Trifecta...



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