Scratching the surface on identity, ancestry and embodied trauma
By: Samantha Natalie
Tags: Ancestry, Prayer, Trauma, Identity, Judaism

Do you know who your ancestors were? Do you want to? What might change if we actively honoured them?

I’ve had a complicated relationship with my ancestry, my Jewish roots. I’ve felt more at home in Buddhist monasteries in India, than the local synagogue — the one in which I went to Sunday School 3 times and refused to go back to. The one in which I could have celebrated my Bat Mitzvah had I any interest in the tradition. I didn’t. I wanted to get as far away from anything religious as possible, and especially anything Jewish. Why? I’m still both asking and answering this question. Firstly, my school friends were not Jewish, and we didn’t live in a Jewish neighbourhood. So anything other than mainstream secular culture posed as a threat to my ‘normalness’. Still, I found myself being bullied and excluded from my group of friends in late primary school. As did my sister when she was young. As did my mother. None of which was directly related to us being Jewish, but there is a thread here, underneath the surface — one that has affected my maternal lines’ sense of victimhood and worth, one that could very well be indirectly related to a history of persecution.

My family were not religious while I was growing up — they didn’t pray or read the Torah, they didn’t live their lives according to Jewish law. But we did celebrate Passover and very occasionally, Hanukkah, as well as Christmas (because I demanded it). So for me, and partly because I chose to turn my attention elsewhere, my relationship to my root culture was elusive. I now believe a huge part of my disinterest and rejection of our Jewish identity was/is actually related to deeply unconscious fear. My parents’ parents, having survived the Holocaust but living in terror and heartbreak for many years throughout, were subject to the insidious belief that Jews were not worthy of being alive. Perhaps, like many other Jews, my grandparents lost faith, or the danger of practicing their belief system was too large to hold. Perhaps they unconsciously internalised shame for simply being themselves. Maybe they chose to form a new identity, one that felt safe and empowering.

My Opa’s whole immediate family were murdered in the gas chambers of Polish concentration camps. He only escaped because he was living in England with my Oma, accessing insulin for his diabetes. It’s difficult for us to comprehend these experiences. The effects of persecution, ostracisation, exclusion, abuse, bullying… are immense. We now know the devastating ways trauma impacts the body’s basic functioning- our ability to respond appropriately to stimuli, the tone of our vagus nerve, our ability to self-regulate the nervous system and emotions. We also know these physiological habits of response are passed down through generations, from parents to children and their children’s children. I am coming to realise the extent of this impact on my physical body, my perspective and my life choices. I am also coming to understand how I can heal and release that which is not mine, that which my ancestral line is ready to let go of, burdens that are ready for liberation. And through this process I am opening the door to my lineage, opening my heart to my own Jewish identity, for the very first time. I am able to feel thankful for the life they gifted me, rather than running in the opposite direction in fear of the tremendous suffering I might ‘remember’ having felt when I was but an egg in my grandmother’s womb.

All ancient indigenous cultures have ways to honour their ancestors. It’s a significant part of their life, because it is to the lives that came before us that we owe our very breath, our heartbeat, our ability to laugh, dream, play and pray. All around the globe, first peoples’ ancestors are seen and known as guides, wisdom keepers, sources of great strength and support, and are the recipients of copious amounts of prayers of gratitude.

It’s ironic that exposure to old ways of indigenous groups around the world has pointed me towards my own lineage, my relationship to my own family of origin. I have been persistently nudged, gently but surely, into the possibility of listening to, embracing and most importantly, thanking, those I have neglected for so long. There is a deep knowing in my bones that cultivating an attitude of gratitude and interest in the culture and people that have quite literally shaped my form and consciousness — will have an enormous effect on my sense of strength, sureness and belonging. I no longer wish to cast away the deepest parts of me. I choose to embrace (and in time, release) any shame, fear or deep emotional pain attached to being Jewish. I wish to understand and celebrate the beauty of this faith.

It’s not an easy ride. Frighteningly intense waves of anguish and despair have moved through my body as I have dived into this topic — in therapy, receiving bodywork and deep in ceremony. And I have found myself asking, who’s tears are these?

It’s a very distinct feeling when emotion feels older than any memory from this life. I don’t need a healer or shaman to convince me that this ache is older than I am. I don’t need any trauma therapist to tell me that epigenetic transmission of trauma is real. I feel it. And what I also feel is the great potential in healing and integrating my history into my present life — to grow in robustness, deepen my roots of compassion, and feel whole. The wholeness that comes from belonging, from finally collecting lost or hidden parts. And this capacity to look back — many generations back — is important, as is our capacity to consider future generations to come. This is how we take care of life. Not just ours, not just our children’s, but all of life. There are so many factors that came together to gift you this opportunity to live, and not only are they worthy of your regard, but the act of turning towards, in thankfulness and honour, will change you.

So I invite you to be changed. If you haven’t, or even if you have, I invite you to join me in enquiring deeper into your ancestry, your roots. To consider or reconsider, who it is that made up those very bones that hold you together. And whether we like them or not, whether they were ‘good’ people or not, how greatly they suffered or astonishingly they survived… how can we show our thanks? Let’s model a healthy and dignified appreciation of our lives to those around us. Let’s remember that we’re part of a much greater web of life than this all-consuming experience of being an individual human. We are a community of living things — inter-related and inter-dependant — and we’ve got endless sources of wisdom to learn from, past, present and future, to support a healthy, healed and life-affirming world.

I’d love to hear your stories of connecting to your ancestry, or fears/trepidations of doing so. Send me a message if you feel to — I am so open to these conversations.