PDF I have just finished watching the first episode of a new series called “Who Do You Think You Are?”. On NBC, it’s an adaptation of an award-winning British television documentary series where celebrities are given the resources to trace their own family trees back in time, as far as is possible given recorded information and DNA testing.
The first episode was filmed with US football legend Emmitt Smith, who was able to track his family tree back as far as Virginian slave owners living in Alabama, and his DNA testing led him as far back as the Benin Republic of South Africa, a country which was considered to be part of the original ’slave coast’ area.
For Emmitt Smith, this was at times a painful and emotional journey, yet ultimately fulfilling. At the end of the programme he was discussing the experience of his journey and said “My personal story shed light on a whole lot of issues. History is not history anymore, it’s really MYstory right now.”
From the perspective of a personal energy practice, I have come to experience that our history comprises a large part of who we are and what we are able to bring to the world in the present moment, whether we have become fully conscious of this or not. A while back I connected with some people through a British ancestry web site, and discovered a whole host of Lawrences who had pretty much done a wide range of research on my behalf, and were interested to discover if my mother was the ‘Lawrence’ in the chain that they were looking for. She was, and my mother and I were both interested to discover relatives we didn’t know we had, plus some interesting corrections to our family history. For instance, my mother had long thought that her mother, my maternal grandmother, was called ‘Millie’ or ‘Millicent’, according to her wedding certificate. It turned out that my grandmother’s name was actually ‘Amelia’, and that my grandfather had a stutter, and had spoken his new wife’s name to the registrar at the time, who had got it wrong! More was learnt about the family than we had ever known before, and it really made us think.
So energetically, how is ‘the past’ or ‘our memories’ stored? Neurolinguistic Programming, or NLP(TM) states that we recall memories using eye accessing cues, in that our eyes move to specific places in order to recall body states that activate specific memories from our neurons. Try watching a friend or colleague sometime when they’re talking about different memories and watch where their eyes go, it’s really interesting! Other research indicates that sound and smell can trigger old memories, like an old favorite record or the smell of fresh cut grass, for example. The scientific theory behind this states that our limbic, or mid-brain, is our emotional center and activated via hearing or smell, so memories with a strong emotional content can be stored there.
From the perspective of the EMF Balancing Technique, our electromagnetic memories of this life, hereditary patterns and even past lives, if you resonate with that belief system, are stored in the three long informational fibers behind us, along with genetic traits, plus hidden talents and latent abilities. In a number of phases of the technique, the back fibers are cleared, balanced and gauged (strengthened) so that memories or energetic events which may be holding us back (by holding too much of our energy and attention) can become resources for where we are in our life now, instead of anchors that hold us back, cause us pain, or distract us from the present moment.
So here’s a quick energy exercise that I learnt a while back to enable you to connect with your history in a new way. If you know the names of your parents, grandparents and perhaps even your great-grandparents, you can say them in the form of an honoring affirmation - if it feels like a comfortable experience to undertake. So, in my case I would say, I am Sarah, the daughter of Margaret, who is the daughter of Amelia, who is the daughter of Elizabeth. Take a deep breath, connect with the fibers behind you either by thinking, feeling, sensing or imagining, and see what you notice. Perhaps their stories are really also your stories, after all.
Who Do You Think You Are? programme information http://television.aol.com/episode/emmitt-smith/who-do-you-think-you-are/11667971
NLP Eye Accessing Cues game http://www.nlp-practitioners.com/interactive/nlp-eye-access-cues-game.php
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