I often talk about the fact that as Black women, we've only hit the tip of the iceberg of our full potential. Why is that? Because you can only authentically dream as big as your unhealed wounds will allow!
Let that sink in. Think about however big you think you can be, however much potential you dream of in your life, there's actually SO MUCH MORE waiting for you. We are all limited by the wounds of our past. Those unhealed wounds have created conditional living - dictating what we allow ourselves to have, how we move through life, how much we must work, how easy does life get to be, how much abundance, love and, and even how much fun we allow into our life! You think you’re free, but in so many ways we are all shackled by the past.
The more I continue to do this work for myself and through coaching others, the more I see just how much of our future potential lies in better understanding and healing our past. Where it gets really deep is when we realize that we are actually carrying a lot of generational traumas that aren’t even yours, but unhealed experiences from our parents and their parents and their parents, etc. that continue to get passed down from generation to generation.
One of the most empowering things you can do for yourself is to spend time doing the healing - doing the work within your family, within your roots. To recognize where these traumas and wounds exist and do the work to shift and heal them. For example, in my family, heart disease, kidney disease, obesity, and diabetes are all genetic traits that exist. But why? There’s such deep connections to food and unhealthy eating habits that have been passed down across generations, both as means to show love and as coping mechanisms. When I was 25 years old I found myself morbidly obese, living out the same path as some of my cousins and uncles. I had to stop and look at why. I reflected on the messaging that was passed down about food, the examples set through informal family gatherings, even how my mom constructed meals on a nightly basis (protein, carb, vegetable, bread, dessert - so TRIPLE carbs!!). These were all things I had to reprogram within myself so I didn’t wake up battling the same issues. Luckily I had a couple of aunts who set great examples of breaking the cycle. They inspired me to do that for myself as I lost over 100 pounds.
This was just one small example of how we carry the weight and pains of our past generations into the present. There are so many wonderful things to be learned and treasured and passed on from our past, but we don't also have to carry our wounds to carry the strength of our ancestors.
We all tend to have issues or triggers because of unresolved issues, trauma, or things you haven't come to closure with for yourself. That's the first part of understanding your family connections: how do we do the work to support ourselves as it relates to our family right now? What healing do we need around our family, whether it is the family we have or the family that we don't have? Sometimes the healing is around who's missing in our life, and we're not even in tune to that. Then, as we dive deeper, we get into our roots and deeper reasons for some of the traumas or some of the patterns and conditioning that we’ve experienced. We have to go deeper to understand the hows and whys of who we have become.
A lot of the work I do with my clients is the undoing of what was put upon us. We don't even realize how much we say, "Oh, that's just what I know. That's just who I am." But why are you that way? Did you really come into this earth that way? No. You were taught that.
On top of that, where did our parents or parental figures get their messaging from? It was passed on to them, and that was passed on to them. We begin to realize there's traumas and patterns that aren't even ours that have been put on us that we continue to carry. It’s practically in our DNA for who and how we have learned to be and how we show up and how we are. It's not even us.
It’s really time that we break these generational patterns.
That’s the power of healing your issues with your family and roots. We must get in touch with the true depths of the potential of who we are. That is part of the key that will ultimately set us free, because there’s nothing worse than being bound by invisible chains you never even realized were holding you back. We are truly amazing, powerful people, and it’s time to start expanding into our fullest potential!
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