Generational Healing

This series of posts is part of a book. See dynamic outline here.

Generational Healing

If you look close you will find me.

One of the presuppositions of my work is that everyone is doing the best they can with the resources they have consciously available. This perspective implies our parents and our ancestors did their best, so we shouldn’t blame our parents or their choices. Yet, it is useful to know about these choices, because our parents’ lives influence ours, through DNA and epigenetic imprinting. Epigenetic means “on top of the genes.” Traits and tendencies such as an unhealthy love of chocolate and a disposition to anxiety are not technically on the genome map but are handed down by a kind of imprint on top of the genes.[1] The poet Rilke wrote beautifully about these legacies that exist in us:

Our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still continue on in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.[2]

Though our ancestors passed on strengths and gifts, they also passed on the accumulated garbage. Here is what gospel scholar Truman G. Madsen says about it:

And, therefore, as you look back at your seventy or so forebears . . . you might recognize that you have inherited the blood of many generations. And blood may not be a correct word scientifically, but in the scriptures it stands for seed, which means heredity, the inheritance of tendencies, and all of us have them. You have the blood of this generation, from which we must become clean––“clean from the blood of this generation” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:85). If you do, you will be clean from the blood of every generation, because it is compounded and accumulated into now––and that includes the blood of some degeneration.

So perhaps you do have problems that you can blame on your ancestors, and if you forgive that and choose to stand close to the Lord in the process of purifying your life, that will affect your whole family in both directions. You are not alone. There is no way you can gain solitary and neutral ground. You are in it––you are involved. And this, I believe, is one of the profound meanings of the tame and wild olive trees. If you take a wild branch and graft it into a tame one, if the branch is strong enough it will eventually corrupt and spoil the tree all the way to the roots. But if you take a tame branch and graft it into a wild tree, in due time, if that branch is strong enough, it will heal and regenerate to the very roots. You will have then been an instrument in the sanctification even of your forebears.

To be that kind of branch and achieve that kind of transformation backward and forward is perhaps the greatest achievement of this world. But to do it one must be great, one must be linked, bound to the Lord Jesus Christ. One must be mighty. One must be something of a savior. And that is exactly what the Prophet Joseph Smith said we are: “saviors on Mount Zion.”[3]

As Madsen states, in order to do this great work—savior work—we need great power. Every aspect of Kundalini Yoga and Meditation works generationally, forward and backward. For example, Kirtan Kriya (page xxx) and Ganputi Kriya (page xxx) are known for powerful generational healing, as is every complete shabd (mantra). Dr. Gurucharan Singh says, “Each complete shabd adds an inheritance, a spiritual DNA, that establishes your identity and lineage with Infinity—the unknowable unknown, itself.”[4] Scientific evidence has also documented that mantras containing primordial sounds can help the DNA replicate more perfectly.[5]

I believe one of the reasons that Kundalini Yoga was restored in our day is to aid the many souls who have come (and will come) to help complete God’s saving work. They are willing and able advanced-placement spirits, finishing their premortal lessons on becoming like the Savior. To become like Him, they need to complete saving work within their bodies and minds, as well as in the temples of the Lord. If they succeed, thousands of their progenitors and posterity will rejoice and praise them. As Isaiah 58:12 says, “Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in” (italics added).

[1] Tim Spector, Identically Different: Why You Can Change Your Genes (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012), 8. "Just over ten years ago researchers found that the diets of pregnant mothers could alter the behaviour of genes in their children and that these changes could last a lifetime and then be passed on in turn to their children. The genes were literally being switched on or off by a new mechanism we call epigenetics––meaning in Greek 'around the gene'. Contrary to traditional genetic dogma, these changes could be transferred to the next generation. In this case the mothers just happened to be rats, but recent similar findings in humans have created a revolution in our thinking."

[2] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1986), 62.

[3] Truman G. Madsen, The Temple: Where Heaven Meets Earth (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2009), 84.

[4] Qtd. in Khalsa and Stouth, Meditation as Medicine, 120.

[5] Ibid., 119.