Releasing Family Imprints
How we shift the paradigm of Love & Power.
Family - a collective noun.
The types of relationships and people who make up our collective is different for different folks.
For some of us, family includes only those who are blood-relatives who once lived in same household. Those relationships are given preference in conscious and unconscious ways; maybe we give them more time or we expect more from them.
Sometimes, our chosen friends, our roommates, our pets become our family. This can be an addition to our biological unit or instead of it. This is more of an emotional or soul house-household than a physical one.
Regardless of what we believe family to be and who it includes, I feel we are now collectively, at the edge of a massive inner revelation on the subject.
This revelation isn’t necessarily about the members of our family - who they include, if they are related, if they are alive today, what comments they will make about certain subjects, how we feel about them, how much money they owe us, their quirks and personality and the likes.
Instead, the revelation is Inner in nature. The nature of this revelation asks us questions like:
Who are we now truthfully as Whole, Present, Radiant Beings in relation to our Family?
How does the current and evolving version of us show up at gatherings and during phone chats?
How much of the past are we bringing to the Present moment, and to the Present expression of the relationships?
Are we ruled by the expectation of what the relationship should give us?
If we have been evolving ourselves, are we able to activate new relationship patterns, regardless of how our family chooses to engage with us?
As we walk along the path of our life, we have been practicing the Mastery of the Present Moment and allowing the Truth of our Hearts & Souls. And now, we take this fullness of Self so and bring it into our family dynamics - without expecting a return on our investment.
Beginning to answers these questions is an exploration of current and present truths about our family relations - in our biological family, work family, friend-family and soul-family, as well as new family that we may want to create.
This isn’t easy, as often family relations can be a big blind-spot.
There are a few ways I have learned to navigate this. One of them in the learning and understanding of family imprints.
Imprints
For most of my life, my experience of conversation with my Mom involved defensive battle strategies. I experienced great judgement and so I would hide, fight or deflect, never trusting her with anything real or true.
One of traps with family and any intimate relationships is that it gets really easy to blame the other person.
I would tell myself and my friends stories (as I remembered them) of how this was my mom’s fault and how she didn’t understand me and never had. As I repeated these stories to myself and to others people, I became completely entrenched in them.
Sometimes, when we tell ourself something enough times, we believe it to be true.
Although years past and I gave the outward impression of maturity, I still related to my Mom as if I was 12, on an unconscious emotional level. A topic of conversation about anything, even a new subject, was something I would get defensive over. I did it unconsciously, as it was a familiar and practiced state of protecting myself from the inevitable battle that lay ahead. The conversation would often end up in the trench.
There was little space of receiving the other person or coming to peaceful understanding between us in those years.
Many families stay here for lifetimes, holding grudges or having the same fight over and over again. On the superficial level, this is enraging, and there is also a comfortable absolution all responsibility. Since, in our mind, it is always someone else’s fault and they need to do better to improve the relationship.
In our mind, as in theirs, there is a clear right way and wrong way. We each believe that other is wrong. We are at a relationship impasse, which results from a rigid view or right and wrong; a distortion of the paradigm of power and love; a weakness and impossibility associated with vulnerability and choosing to change.
On an emotional and energetic level, it is a place of stagnation. To me it felt like a dense swamp of past stories repeating in an unpleasant infinite loop, with an air of unresolved rotting emotions and blame, giving off the stench of my impotence and ignorance.
This is an imprint.
Imprints are repetitive entrenched patterns of the personality, identity and behaviour that we continue to fall into unconsciously and mindlessly.
We believe that this is who we are and this is who our family members are.
We believe that neither us nor them can ever change and so we do not bother.
We believe that the personality is the Soul and cannot believe that anything different is possible.
We do not realize that this is an imprint.
Imprints that do not serve us can hinder, distort or drag us away from our Truths and or our Life-force; that is until we health them. But instead of thinking of imprints as ‘bad’, I think they exist to remind us of our Power of Choice. This Power can only be realized from the Soul-Self, and not the personality-self. So it serves as a bridge reminding us that we are more than the sum of our likes, dislikes, preferences and rejections. We are more than we think we are, and so we are the change in our own life.
Our imprints get entangled with the imprints of family members over lifetimes and generations, like a hairball, they create big messy knots. This is why they are hard to see and realize and untangle from. They form the patterns, sometimes genetic ones, that we see around us, that we grow up with and that we recognize and there is sense of safety in adhering to them.
One of my closest friends did this in her life as well. She found herself one day with breast lumps, something that plagued the women in her family for some generations - the reason they were no longer alive.
Instead of following the pattern of those who came before her, she embarked on a massive healing journey. One of the things she ended up releasing was the emotional family imprint of chronic repression of Self. When her lumps released, without clinical intervention, on an energetic level, without exactly intending to she freed the lines of women in her family. You can tell when you are with her family, how the dynamic is so potent even today, because such a massive healing occurred. This was decades ago, but since then, no woman in her family has been diagnosed with breast lumps.
Once you learn about imprints, in a way they are easy to recognize. It is being caught in the repetitive, like the familiar feeling of repression, defeat, anger or resentment when you parents treat you like a child, even though you now have children of your own.
When I started learning Energy Healing, I was able to return to my breath, my heart and a more neutral state at certain points in my day, enough to realize and feel into these imprints as and when I found them.
There is a simple Truth here that requires accepting: just because someone or something has been a certain way, does not mean it needs to always be so.
This isn’t a Truth that absolves us from our responsibility, but rather lifts us to rise to the joy of what is possible with the Truth of our Hearts and Power of our Love and our Will.
Love & Power
We think of change as hard and since we cannot see an exact outcome, we tell ourselves that we need not bother trying.
The truth here that I came to accept was this: Since change and transformation are the most natural universal Truths, there is a soft and sweet pleasure in allowing and surrendering to it.
Certainly it is hard.
But what is also hard is living in unsatisfying, struggling relationships. It is hard and exhausting to pour your life-force energy into ancient power struggles and egoic structures and expectations. It is hard to maintain pain, judgement, expectations and discord in your physical, emotional and mental body, day after day, year after year.
This was my learning around Power and Love and how in my confusion it was pouring into my relationships - not just with my mom, but with other people as well, and in other aspects of my life, like my relationship with money.
This confusion and the beliefs I held around it, were the next layer to my entrenched pattern.
That’s how this stuff works - you keep peeling the onion of your Being, and weep your tears, knowing that it is a key ingredient in savouring Life.
When I realized my imprint exists, it was the initial lighting bolt that helped me see the swamp of complacency and blame I lived in generally, not just with my Mom. Imprints in one area of life layer in other areas of life too.
For the first time, I could step outside of my trench of always blaming due to unconscious power struggles, just for a few moments and see the other thousands of possibilities that existed.
It is not possible to be here if you shame or hate the Self. It is only possible in a space of inner love, compassion and understanding.
For me, I realized that I felt powerless in relationships - all of them. And so the defensive strategies I had employed all this while, made sense. I was in a power struggle - I wanted to be right, loved, seen and the only way I knew how to do that was if she was wrong.
This is where I learned what I brought to many aspects of my life and to my relationship dynamics - a lot of them. I brought war and battles over power, because I understood power to be love.
Letting go of that was a journey unto itself. This included relinquishing ideas and beliefs of power that I desperately held on to.
Without love, you are powerless, and yet without power, you can be full of love.
If you can love yourself in nothingness and despair, then you become infinitely powerful for then, you hold the gift that is the power to feel love in absolutely every moment.
- Rhiannon Heins, The Keepers of the Light Codes
I also had to create a new paradigm and understanding of Love and Power that was in resonance with who I was.
Releasing the identity of who you were yesterday, so that who you are today can grow, is Soul-medicine.
This is the what is available to us now with our new inner revelations around Self and Family - we get to relate to our intimate circle of people from the seat of our True Power in Absolute Love.
True Power is not being right and proving the other as flawed or wrong.
True Power is living fully in the knowing that we connected to Infinite Divine Grace and holding that as our truth in the moments even when we cannot see or feel it.
True Power is living in the knowing that ‘Otherness’ is separation from Oneness and that in truth… there are no others.
And from that place of integrated Oneness and interacting with our families around dinner tables and over zoom calls, we become a living breathing new paradigm of Love and Power.
When become sufficiently free of our imprints and we get to choose how we actually want to relate. We get to change the entire fabric of the relationship - not by forcing or expecting the other to change - but by trusting Soul-work and transformation within ourselves.
A few years ago I would never have imagined being able to share and have certain conversations with my Mom and other family members.
Now, I am able to. And what is even better, so is she.
To be honest, it still surprises me.
For the first time in my Life, I get to see who my Mom is, as her own person, which allows us to have a much more honest, authentic and brave relationship with each other.
Now we are free from the prison of our past battles, giving us the option of starting anew each time.
This isn’t just about her and I, it has expanded into how I relate to other members of my family, as well as coworkers, friends, in my own creative projects, in my work and with my money.
Whether this is our biological family, our family of pets, our soul family or work family, we are now in a place where we can Create new pathways - inspired, reformed and nourished by realized Truths - that dissolves our imprints and projections.
To free our Self from the swampy trenches of our imprints, is to reconnect to the True Source of Peace and Power within us.
We are able to allow our family members their journey and their time - the battles are done; the wars are over. They need not understand everything about us; they may or may not choose to come with us; they may not even know what we are working through, but it does not matter. We are blossomed in love from the Loving seat of our own Power.
From this place, we are not the same and as a result, neither is our family dynamic.
Dedication
This piece is dedicated to my family - my greatest teachers and cheering squad.
I see and understand and you now…. finally! :D
To understand the energy medicine of Imprints, you can explore here:
So wonderful! Thank you for breaking the ceiling on imprints in the family. It opened the path for all of us.