Articles

Our ancestral families form a kind of system or soul that extends across generations and influences our adult lives. We look at one being re-aligned.

Well, some families have soul, you say, and some don’t. It just depends on what kind of tunes they like. Classical types don’t rock. But what’s an “ancestral family” anyway? Well just hold on—I’ll reply—this is not really about music. By “ancestral family,” I mean your birth family two or three generations back. And the question’s really about whether there is some kind of organizing system that distributes roles and functions in that family over those several generations, and whether that system persists and is somehow still active even though various members may have died.

Boy, that’s a mouthful, you say. And this, I suppose, has something to do with this issue’s theme of  “lifestyle”? Well actually, yes—it does. What if, in a great many cases, very powerful influences on your adult lifestyles arise, not from your personal history, but rather from active, present-tense attachments to ancestors already long dead whom you may never have met. By influences I mean chronic problems (or sometimes uncanny good luck) with health, wealth, or relationships. 

While it’s clear that a meditative state requires a relaxed body and a quiet mind, how we do this in our frenzied lives? How do we get there from here?

There’s this video, Ten Questions for the Dalai Lama. Blockbuster has it. I’m sure Netflix must also. If you watch it, apart from stunning visuals of India and Tibet, set to beautiful music--you will see two things. On the one hand, the movie contains a visual chronicle of the atrocities China has committed against the people and spirituality of Tibet. Honestly, I wept. And on the other, you watch images of the Dalai Lama growing up, and an interview with him in which he is asked questions about this whole, terrible experience. And the thing is—he’s laughing. To paraphrase, he sounds like this: “Yes it’s horrible what they’re doing to us, ha ha ha…and we really need to honor them as a people, ha ha—and talk to them with honesty and integrity.” His laughter is not sarcastic. It’s absolutely childlike. Very quickly, you realize, this man is either an idiot or a saint,

Now if he’s a saint, and this present-tense enjoyment of the interview is as real as it seems—how does he do it? Clearly, he’s not in denial. He spreads his non-violent, tolerate-all-religions gospel everywhere, and spends endless hours personally comforting refugees. But the other thing he does, which is much less prominent in the film, is spend equally many hours meditating. What I’d like to suggest here, in explanation of his laughter, is that he’s never not meditating. And that such laughter and easy presence can be the fruit of your meditations as well.

Perhaps surprisingly, transformations through family constellations bring positive change on more than the level of the individual. How is this possible?

At the age of 20, I read Siddhartha… more than once. Herman Hesse’s short novel retold the story of the Buddha so eloquently I thought. Sitting in the back of buses, lonely and estranged from both family and my religious upbringing, criss-crossing Europe on art history tours during a junior year abroad—I dreamed of walking the path outlined so beautifully in the book. Somehow, like the Buddha, I would leave the family for asceticism and training. Maybe I already had. But then would come immersion in business, passion, and wealth, followed finally by that enlightened epiphany in which I saw it all as “illusion”—and realized my essential oneness with everything. It was the classic, heroic, individual quest for unity with a transcendent Divine. I drank it in like a starving child.

Roughly four decades later, that quest remains. But progress has not come in the ways I thought it would. The grand vision absorbed in my youth had some things totally backwards. In some respects, it started me (and many others) walking more or less in the wrong direction.

We know that stress isn’t good for us. But how do we avoid the stress generated in separating the good advice from the not-so-good? You’re the expert.

Reduce stress, we are told. It’s quite bad for you—the source of many ills. OK…  But books, doctors, researchers, and various healthcare pundits are also telling us all sorts of other things. Drink at least 64 ounces of water every day. Non-caffeinated teas count. No, actually, they don’t count. Eat fish for their omega 3’s. Stay far, far away from the mercury in today’s fish. Get rid of your amalgams. No don’t—there’s no evidence for that. If your blood pressure or cholesterol numbers are higher than such-and-such, you must take this drug. No, don’t take the drug because its side effects will soon require that you take other drugs and your natural balance will be out the window. And on and on. All this would be funny, except for one thing. It’s ultimately a matter of life and death. 

And for all of us, in different ways at different times in our lives—it can become a source of moderate to severe stress. But wait a minute. If stress itself is so bad, then maybe it’s one of the causes of the situation we’re in. And now all the differing healthcare prescriptions are stressing us more?  Isn’t this just a nasty little feedback loop! And maybe also a fast lane to the infirmary.