Free From Bondage

By Elisa Novick

In my first sessions with my clients, unless an immediate issue is pressing, I almost invariably work on generational karma, that which comes through the family. When I’ve asked my inner guidance, I’ve gotten that, for most people, at least 75% of our karma, the unresolved “stuff” we carry around, comes down to us from the family. Yes, we have past-life karma and we may have created karma in this life through our actions, but those will almost always be reflected or engendered by the families we’ve embodied into. Though the issues may seem to be about something current, they usually stem from the family.

Delving into the family system may not be as exotic or glamorous as past-life regression, vibrational remedies, or many popular quick-fix methods for healing your life and creating health, wealth, and happiness (all of which I’ve used and have value), but it is foundational and essential. Some will say, “But I already did that in therapy. This isn’t psychotherapy, is it? I thought you were a spiritual healer?”

While I do not disparage the understandings gained through the therapeutic model, if there is still more to handle, it is always worthwhile to explore what has not been addressed yet. Going in with spiritual guidance and attunement and the assistance of the Light often reveals new information and transmutes the root patterns at levels either previously unreachable or impervious to change.

Last night I had a dream, somewhat nightmarish, that gave me a deeper understanding of something I’ve worked with for years. There were three parts to this dream, and the identities and ethnicities of the people involved kept shifting, which I believe is significant.

First scene:
I am in my late teens, at a boardwalk park bench by the water with my younger sister, except this bench is facing away from the water toward the buildings. Our parents are nearby but not seen. I sit on the bench, wearing a grey hooded sweatshirt with the hood over my head (reverberations of Trayvon Martin’s “hoodie”). I explain to my sister that I used to get beaten by my parents for doing something like this. As I sit there, I am aware that I might be beaten even now for this, but I don’t move.

Second scene:
Two people I know are newly married, standing before the judge and his large family or group of cronies. The family is wearing outfits that show them to be of Middle Eastern origin and are sitting around close together on cushions. The couple is presented with an antique glass vessel of perfume with a large sprayer nozzle. The husband politely takes it, and then proceeds, to the shock of his wife, to spray and spray until the air is saturated with the nauseating perfume.

Third scene:
The previous scene morphs. This time the couple has just gotten married, but she has a young son already. The wife mentions, somewhat humorously, to her husband and the family they are marrying into (though the blood connection is unclear), that her young son wants to have sex with her, with the assumption that she would never allow that. The husband starts screaming at her, insisting that she must do it. They are fighting in front of the family. I, witnessing this, go back and slow the scene down and repeat it, not understanding how he, who seems to be the good guy, can do this. I hear him scream, “You don’t get it. These are Chinese people. You have to do this!”

In horror at the turn of events, I begin to wake up, but took a last look, and what I saw was a family now bonded to each other, holding a group frequency, albeit one of misery. Through the wife being forced to accept the rape of her son, they are all in a common vibration. The husband has said, in effect, “By doing this, by sacrificing yourself, you implicate us all in the crime, and therefore we are together, we are one.”

This multi-layered dream was demonstrating, at a deeper level, something I’ve known and worked with for years in sessions, that loyalty to the family is a driving force. It has nothing to do with morality or what we think of as a conscience. (Here is a transcript of part of a talk and workshop given by Bert Hellinger, Peace Begins in the Soul: Ethnic Conflict and Reconciliation, published by my friend and colleague Dan Booth Cohen that explains this beautifully.) It is a survival mechanism, reinforced by the primal fact that without parental/tribal acceptance we die, as well as that babies come in so loving that they accept whatever fate the family hands down to them.

This need to be a member of the group then extends out to friends, gangs, institutions, governments. In its more positive aspect, it forces families and other groups to take care of each other. It its extreme negative aspect it takes the form of Mafia-style family businesses, fraternity and secret society pledges and hazes, killings in the name of tribe or country, and suicide bombings. But for most of us, it takes the form of remaining in unhappy relationships and jobs, procrastination, limiting ourselves, emotional turbulence, addictive behaviors. We are compelled to “sin” over and over to maintain the bonds of the group. Shared guilt is a powerful bonding agent.

When I thought about this dream, I wondered whether the shared guilt of those who can exonerate the killer of a young unarmed boy, either in the recent case of the murder of Trayvon Martin (assuming the common understanding of what took place is accurate), or of the policeman who killed a boy hiding in a shed after being caught hitting a fellow student, as well as the shared outrage of those protesting the killings, are examples of this bonding that we all crave.

I’ve spoken before of negative thought-forms that blanket the planet, which you might say are the work of a fallen angel, a darkness that pervades our world. The ideal of self-sacrifice, purveyed and anchored by our earliest family experiences, is one of them. You can serve without sacrificing yourself, but in this thought-form they are identical. Loyalty is also a two-edged sword and the dark edge is what runs so much of our behavior.

People cry out to me that they want to let go of something that is sabotaging their lives, blocking them from fulfillment, and yet what I see in their bodies and hear in their voices is another story — one of willing, though unconscious, loyalty to the group, usually to a parent. It says, “I must sacrifice myself, let myself be whipped, raped, compromised, be a failure, to meet the expectations placed upon me, to fulfill the bad things they said about me, or to pay for others’ crimes.” In other words, we are “duty-bound” to continue or try to balance the family karma.

Assisting people (and of course in working on myself as well) to get free of this is not easy, but so worthwhile. It takes tremendous holding power and total presence on my part to catch even the most subtle evidence of the deeper levels in which we hold these patterns of loyalty to the family system. It takes tremendous love and the Light and angels working with each person, and a fair amount of persuasiveness — to convince the psyche that it truly is good for all concerned for us to get free. Nothing less will work — for ourselves, our families, and our planet — if we want to end this long-enacted woeful legacy and to thrive.

The rewards of releasing the bondage are magnificent. The “wow factor” alone is one that always delights me, when the one before me begins to emerge and begins to embody the true self. The insight, radiance and peace of someone who has stopped being the sacrificial lamb and stepped into their own power, able to love and have compassion without getting sucked back into the maelstrom, into the chains that bind, is so exciting. This is usually achieved by layers, as we uncover and recover from the atrocities on each side of the family, gross and subtle, and then extend that healing out to our current families, friends, groups. I envision the entire world awakening, throwing off the chains, the negative thought-forms, coming alive, singing a new song.

To listen to and read past conversations with Elisa Novick on Planet Waves, plus her articles, please use this link. You’re invited to visit her website and Facebook page.

Elisa Novick, MSS does profound work as a healer, teacher, counselor, coach, minister, and facilitator of workshops and trainings in personal, professional, and spiritual development. She can assist you to clear personal, karmic and genetic patterns that have limited you and teach you exquisite attunement skills so you can become the magnificent master of life and Light that all of us are destined to be. Elisa has been assisting people in their growth since 1982 through her counseling practice and in facilitating over 1,000 workshops in holistic health, human development, family constellation, systemic constellation, organizational dynamics, planetary healing and spiritual awareness. You may email her directly at elisanovick [at] thrivingplanet [dot] org.