Healing ancestral wounds with Avi Esther

Before I opened Sacred Pleasures last summer, I met a wonderful Humanist Celebrant at my aunt’s funeral. I told her about my plans and she told me that it was going to be a powerful journey for me. Why? I asked. She replied, “Your family has a tendency to shut down. You are trying to stay open. That’s deep ancestral work. It’ll be intense. Do it, but do it carefully – and with love.”

She was right on all counts. The 15 months since then have been the most exciting, challenging, intense and wonderful of my life so far. I have cried more, laughed more, rejoiced more, ached more and grown more than I imagined possible. I have met amazing people and I have learnt a lot about myself. It has been a ride.

During the year I recalled the Celebrant’s words often. I frequently felt the desire to shut down: I experienced a lot of fear about keeping things going, particularly in relation to money. This is in large part due to what my Psychic Life Coach Avanti calls “the Jewish thing” – a tendency to hold on to what we’ve got rather than letting go and allowing things to flow. I profoundly resonate with this description of my Jewishness, a deep energetic imprint on my way of experiencing the world.

In July, a year almost to the day since I’d met the Celebrant, I was chatting to the wonderful Avi Esther. We had not met in person but knew each other through mutual friends and were friends on Facebook. Through the course of a 2-hour chat, initially on Facebook and then on Skype, it became clear that we had a lot to offer each other as practitioners. She was ready to face childhood traumas relating to her mother, and I was ready to begin healing my ancestral wounds and addressing “the Jewish thing.” Who better than this beautiful, diminutive Israeli-American healer to work with me on this?

So we arranged a session-swap. She came to me for a Shadow Healing on the morning of my sister’s wedding. I delighted in working with someone so in tune with their process and their needs, and it was as deep an experience for me as a practitioner as it was for her as a client. Her powerful and eloquent account of her experience is on her blog.

Between my trip to America, a busy patch and Barbara Carrellas’ extraordinary six-day Professional Training programme, it took two months for us to find a time for me to see her for my session. As it turned out, there was a good reason for this. Today is in the middle of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year: a day to look back at the past, let go of what no longer serves us and move forward. A perfect day for me, it transpires, for me to connect with my ancestors.

It was beautiful this morning, a delicious late Indian Summer weather before the descent into Autumn. I met Avi outside her London practice room in West Hampstead. I was nervous – I had been putting off thinking about the session all week. I had been pretending that “nothing much was going on around this” (ha!) – but on the way to the session a passage from The Devil Wears Prada made me burst into tears. The main character buys coffees on her hideous employer’s expense account and then distributes them to homeless people on the walk back to the office. “There was something so fantastic – invigorating, really – in making sure that these overpriced, Elias-sponsored coffee faves made it into the hands of the city’s most undesirable people.”

This sentiment reminded me fiercely of my dad, who believed that people could only be rich if they were callous, greedy and corrupt. Reading the character’s mild defiance of her corporate employer brought home to me how much this had become part of my belief system too.

We went into the room. Avi was incredibly gentle. She knew this was a big deal for me – she said she’d been feeling it through her for a few days. She pointed out that it was Jewish New Year – something that would’ve passed me by, since Judaism is an energetic reality but not a religious practice for me. She said that she could feel the energy of this ancestral work not just for me but for many others. I found her awareness interesting, but I was still guarded and skeptical.

After a brief chat and some time eye-gazing in the first space, we moved into the second room and sat together on cushions. She said that there were already beings present to support me: my little boy and the old wise version of me who’d seen everything before. I welcomed them in and she invited me to voice any resistance. I said that I was feeling doubt and she invited me to welcome it in. I let it be present and then invited it to leave, but it wanted to stay so I allowed that instead.

I felt myself relax as I saw how present Avi was, how intuitively she worked with me. She opened herself up and my father’s spirit joined us. She moved out of the way and invited me to greet him. Then she said that there was a lot of disapproval between us, both ways. I hadn’t thought about that, so hung up on the idea that my dad should love me without judgement that I clean forgot he was also human and needed my love and approval in return. She tuned into this feeling more and we found that it went back another couple of generations, to the ‘original grandfather’ as she called him. She welcomed him in and we sat with the disapproval for a while. She asked me if I could let it go, and I tried to do so. Then I felt my father’s energy fill me up, a grounding love that I’d never felt from him so clearly when he was alive. It was amazing.

After a while I mentioned that the men on my dad’s side were all blind or nearly-blind, and she asked me what we weren’t able to look at. Then something moved and she ‘knew’ what it was. She asked me to move the energy using my body. I felt frustrated and stuck until she said that I needed to move my hips. Then it moved. And boy, did it move! It was so intense, I was grinding around and shouting and thrashing the pillow. Fierce!

When it was over she asked me what I’d experienced. I didn’t really understand it rationally so she explained what she’d been told. My grandmother on my mum’s side had been raped, and no one had been able to talk about it or look at it. She had wanted to love my grandfather but she couldn’t. I was overcome with a feeling of sadness and grief, knowing how much pain my ancestors had carried with them. I felt grateful to be able to do this work, to clear the energy and to move forward – for them and for myself. What a relief!

Then it was time for us to welcome in my mother’s energy. This was a very intense moment – Avi said that it felt sticky and tangled. I felt that too. Then she said something amazing, with tears in her eyes. She said that our family carried a story that it wasn’t safe to be loved, and that my mother had embodied this story for the whole family. I had had a similar sense just before she said it: that my mother had become a pariah, representing something much deeper that belonged to all of us.

I felt incredibly moved, overcome with emotion, as she invited me to tell my mother that I loved her. It was hard for me to say this but I did it, and as I released my anger and frustration towards my mother, something profound shifted in the room. I felt everything become lighter and brighter, and my mother’s energy changed completely. At last someone was seeing how much she had suffered! It was such an amazing moment, intense, extraordinary, unforgettable.

We did some more work and then Avi asked me if I was full. I felt like I’d had enough but she said there was one more thing she was being told. She said “I’m not going to tell you who this is, I’ll let you figure it out.” For a moment I felt like I was ‘under test’, and I was afraid I wouldn’t ‘get it.’ But I looked in front of me and I felt a sense of joy that belonged to me. Although there was nothing there, I sensed a radiance before me that was incredibly shiny. When she asked me what I saw, I said it was me.

“That’s right,” she said. “You keep your brilliance separate from you so you don’t have to be all you are.” As I looked at her, her eyes shone with a brilliance I can’t put into words. We gazed into each other’s eyes and I felt totally alive. It was beautiful.

The session concluded with her piling up the pillows behind me and inviting me to fall back into them. I lay there for a long time, feeling the relief of having done such profound emotional clearing. Skepticism, doubt and fear had evaporated, allowing me to commit fully to this deep work under Avi’s loving guidance.

This evening I feel tired, cranky and sad. A lot has been stirred up and I’m sure there will be more processing and integration to do before this chapter is complete. Tonight I will probably have crazy dreams! But something very profound happened in that room, and I feel the shift beginning towards a New Year – for me, and for my ancestors.