Articles: Ending the Cycle of Re-Creating the Familiar by Kathleen Downey

Ending the Cycle of Re-Creating the Familiar

Kathleen Downey, Shamanic Counselor/Past-Life Therapist

Our will to survive illness, to meet our full potential and materialize our dreams is the miracle we often times pray for; yet we undermine ourselves by our emotion. Fear is the emotion that undermines our will to survive and prosper. Fear of the unknown keeps us embedded securely in our familiar. Fear of being unloved or accepted for who we are keeps us enslaved in beliefs that may not be our own. We may unconsciously role play in every relationship that same part that we have played from birth and before. The familiar is an energy we’ve brought with us throughout our past- lifetimes.

Calling in familiar energy is a normal occurrence otherwise we would all, from the onset of life, be willing to take a step beyond the precipice of all we know into the unknown. Allowing ourselves to re-create the familiar, the ”old” family until we feel love or acceptance from that familiar is a theme we have seen in literature, as a reflection of our lives, throughout the ages. The Oedipus trilogy written by Sophocles in 441 B.C. is a potent demonstration of this. Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. He takes his father’s identity in an effort to gain the love he has always longed for from the woman who gave birth to him. An all encompassing, unconditional love from the mother who’s womb we grew in is something we all long for. Odysseus was carried away by the sea meeting challenges of his ego identity for more than half his lifetime before he reached the fiery depths of the earth, there, in a place that symbolizes the depths of his own soul, he faced his mother’s spirit so that he could release from it and her beliefs, issues and ideas of who he was and move on, committed to his own life and new family.

If we examine our relationships and the personality and energy we are drawn to in a partner we will see that it is the personality of one of our parents. Most often it is our mothers personality that we have called for in a partner. As we are still seeking acceptance and love, unconditionally from that personality and energy. We are re-creating the "old" family until that personality, that we have called in to replace the familiar personality of one of our parents, admits to the wrong we feel it has done us and/or finally loves us the way we believe we need to be loved.

There is a safety net involved in playing the same role we have always played. If we stay in our familiar we will never have to face the fear that has run throughout the family for generations, we will never have to risk being ousted from the family for being "different" or creating our own belief systems and chancing being labeled "The black sheep".

Through Shamanic journey work we have an opportunity to look at the Past-Life our soul has experienced and recognize the energy we are trying to heal by acknowledging the role we have been playing. Through this experience we will not only recognize the need for change, we will also experience a substantial shift in energy. This shift allows us to create a healthy boundary from taking on the energy and issues of others, which will facilitate our claiming personal power to become who we were meant to become. We can thus claim our individual creativity and start creating miracles, including health and prosperity, in our lives now.

Many years ago a client in New York came to me with an issue of feeling stuck in her life and resentful of her husband. She was helped considerably with past-life work. Her husband’s affection and supportiveness, something that should have made her happy, bothered her. After discovering a little history through Soul Retrieval, I found that she had brought a considerable amount of energy into this life from the past which quickly manifested in her kidney function. She lost one of her kidneys when she was three, the year her brother was born. The Kidney system energies are the inherited energies that unite past, present and future and bind all three in the individual person with the roles they have played and continue to throughout their energetic/soul history. The Kidney system also has a psychological vulnerability to fear. The repression of feeling leads to frozen will and a stagnation of Qi or life force.

We discovered, through the Past-Life journey, that her brother had buried her alive in the past. Through research we discovered that this was a common occurrence in North African/Middle Eastern desert tribes in times of war. The situation we found involved infidelity on her part in the past. She admitted that in the present she had been involved in a long term affair while being married and that she had a deep and discomforting dislike of her brother from the time that she was very young. We worked on this for six months after which time she became devoted to her husband and was able to release her anger for her brother which she had been projecting onto her husband. Through the healing of this energy between herself and her brother she found a dormant creative gift in art and blossomed as an artist very quickly having a successful first show within a year.

Kathleen Downey is holding a Past-Life workshop, Map of the Soul through the Incan Medicine Wheel, in Encinitas on June 7th and 8th. She can also be reached for private sessions in Del Mar at 858 646-9808 and in Boulder at 303 449-1349. Please see her website www.corelevelhealing.com.