Intergenerational Karma

August 2022

‘Watching the moon
at midnight …
I wonder
whose village
he watches it from’

Izumi Shikibu, The Ink Dark Moon

Some years back a ten-pound Pom migrated to Australia from England along with her husband. They temporarily stayed in a camp where they had two children, a boy and a girl. While the children were still very young she ran off with another man. A couple of weeks later she returned for her children but was cornered by her abandoned husband, so left and never came back.

As the years went on, her grown daughter decided to search for her mother and the agency she went through did indeed find her. She had married the man she ran away with and had two more children. However, when approached, she angrily denied ever having any other children.

Upon hearing a story such as this, many would have questions as to how she could have abandoned and denied her children. Some may try to enter into her “thought” processes, more accurately described as subjective reasoning, which I imagine may have circled around ideas like,

There’s no use - he’ll just take the kids from me anyway
I don’t want to disrupt their lives
I don’t know how we could merge two families
What if they have questions I can’t answer?
It’s too hard
It’s too much
What if they don’t love me anymore?
They’re better off without me

Any empathic person reading this would be able to feel the fear, insecurities, sadness and shame coming from these words, or, in general, the feelings anyone is trying to avoid when they use any type of subjective rationalisation.

After facing this dead end in her search, the daughter the English mother bore and left ended up migrating back to England where she gave birth to a daughter at a young age and, despite knowing how it felt to be abandoned, gave that daughter up for adoption. She then went on to marry, have other children and made a life there.

One of those children was a son who himself had a son at a young age. The boy’s mother made it very difficult for him to see his son and, in time, had no contact with him whatsoever. As his son slipped away over the years, I imagine his thought process may have gone something like…

There’s no use - she’ll just take my son from me anyway
I don’t want to disrupt his life…

So we have mother, daughter, grandson, all caught living in the same karmic cycle of not knowing where their child or children are in the world.

How does an ultra-rationalist society account for seeing patterns pass down in families? Learned behaviour is a major explanation, and rightly so. Research from Victoria, Australia, shows that 12% of adolescents smoke when neither parent is a smoker. However, this figure jumps to 21% when one parent smokes and 28% when both do (http://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-5-uptake/5-7-the-home-environment).

Though learned behaviour clearly doesn’t account for everything - the grandson of this story was raised in a nuclear family, for instance, but still left his son.

Genetic factors also undoubtably play a significant role as some of our lessons and experiences here are inherited. Our genes will shape what we come in and experience here in our lifetime. Some are unavoidable like eye colour but others affect what we are predisposed to and are not inevitable.

For instance, bipolar disorder is the most heritable psychiatric disorder, and 10% of those who have one parent with bipolar are affected. This rises to 40% when both parents have the disorder https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/resources-support/bipolar-disorder/causes/

We are all aware that the expression of genes relies on multiple, complex factors, so just because we have a genetic predisposition for something, it does not mean that it will come to fruition or play any role in our lives.

Bruce Lipton has done extensive work in the field of epigenetics, or “above” genetics, the meaning of “Epi” in Greek: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6438088/. When Lipton speaks of epigenetic control, he says,

“It reveals that the environment and our perception of the environment are what control our genetic activity… We are capable of changing the environment we live in and we are capable of changing our perceptions. Therefore, we are not victims, but we are actually masters of our genetic activity.”

His work outlines how we ourselves play the biggest role in our genetic expression and not only this, that how we live affects the evolution of our genes over long periods of time.

We can see quite clearly how groups of people have adapted in countless ways all over the world according to environmental, cultural and behavioural factors. This can also occur at an individual level involving specific families and lines of descendants.

But going further than “mind over matter” and further again than “biology is destiny”, the missing piece, that is well-known throughout Asia and Traditional Chinese Medicine, is our qi (chi) or spiritual energy.

We shape the expression and evolution of our genes through how we live and experience life, and nothing affects this more, for better or for worse, than how balanced and flowing our energy is.

The soul lessons (our karma) can follow us across lifetimes, but can also be shared with our soul group (monad) or passed on through the bloodline to be completed, meaning things your parents and ancestors have not resolved could be passed onto you…

Which brings us back around to the ten-pound Pom who who started this chain (though we don’t know what came before her or the forces at work in her life to shape and influence her). After her death, her daughter from her second marriage was rifling through some photos and came across one from before she was born. It was her mother, at a much younger age, with a man and two small children she didn’t know. It looked like a family, but that would surely be impossible…

The image of that photo kept lingering in her mind, which prompted her to do a bit of digging and not only did she discover her mother’s past, but reached out and made contact with her newly-discovered half-siblings. She let them know about other relatives, some of whom, coincidentally, share the same first and last names.

The first daughter could just not believe that her mother had kept a photo of them all this time after having denied her and her brother and that her half-siblings had never known of her existence.

Having experienced some family unification, the first daughter went and looked for the daughter she put up for adoption, but couldn’t locate her. So she made sure that it would be very easy for her daughter to find her, should she decide to.

Adding to this rising tide (of energy change), her son tracked down his (now adult) son on Facebook, who bears a striking resemblance to him and shares the same taste in music, but stopped short of contacting him. Will he reach out? That will come down to a tipping point where his love becomes stronger than his fear.

The great-grandson in this story, who is now at an age where he could get someone pregnant, knows he was abandoned by his father, but likely has no idea of the intergenerational karmic cycle he might be caught up in.

This is where a lot of people can go wrong in their healing as they’ve taken on irrational statements they’ve heard like, “Only you know the answer,” or, “You know if it’s true for you” or, “You know yourself best”. However, as exemplified in this article, there are many instances in our lives where others know more about things directly pertaining to us, our life path and our destiny. We reading this article, amongst others, are in a position where we have more knowledge about a major issue likely to affect this young man’s life than he currently does.

That’s why your healing journey will often require collaboration at different times coupled with your own inner work as you combine the best of both worlds of personal responsibility and inner wisdom with support, strategies and an uncovering of potential blind spots.

It is also important to note that while awareness is helpful, healing is not really about knowledge. The daughter in this story knew she was abandoned by her mother, but still abandoned her first daughter, just like John Lennon abandoned his first son - at the same age his father abandoned him…

Energy healing is a skill and the more you heal and transmute, the more likely you are going to be resolving deeper, more entrenched issues - including ones that span beyond your physical lifetime.

Will the great-grandson be the one in the family to heal it and stop the cycle? It could be any or none of the family members I’ve mentioned, but whoever heals that energy will then go onto heal and transform their psychology (thoughts and behaviours) as well as their gene expression and, in turn, the hand their bloodline are dealt.

And the process has already started thanks to the leadership from the daughter from the second marriage.

Psychology, the study of behaviour, and metaphysics, the study of our existence beyond the physical (our energy), sometimes overlap, but often couldn’t be more different, because thoughts, words and actions are no true indicator of the reality of what is.

You can forget the past, never think of it, change continent, home, name, relationships, jobs and distract yourself in any number of ways and, in time, things often do fade out of daily consciousness.

But your energy doesn’t forget.

It will simply lie in wait until another event re-triggers you (or one of your descendants), even decades later. All the feelings you thought were safely packed away, that you had “dealt with” or moved on from are dredged up from the depths and felt just as intensely as before.

Healing your energy is how you not only heal yourself emotionally, but how you heal things you may not know exist - things that are transpersonal and are part of a greater cycle than your individual existence.

The wheel of karma is always turning with the aim of restoring balance, even if it’s blocked for a time by our own choices, and will continue turning beyond our physical lifetime if balance has not yet been restored.

When you tune into people’s energy after they have died, the depth of feeling is often greater because they’re made of pure energy and they’re no longer being blocked by psychological constructs and ego defences. But still, even in life it crept up into consciousness, in this case, enough for the mother in this story to hold onto a single photo of her babies and her descendants to take some steps towards unification.

So even if someone cuts you out of their life, denies the connection or even denies your very existence, their energy, which is the real story, could be running towards you with open arms.

Our job is to clear the blockages by actually feeling, expressing and releasing all our feelings, being highly attuned to our internal navigation system and living as authentically as possible so the wheel of karma can do what is was designed to do - keep turning to complete its cycle and set you and your descendants free.