Healing Our Bloodlines by George Kamana Hunter (G. K. Hunter) is Available Now:
Click Here for Paperback and Kindle: Healing Our Bloodlines on Amazon
eBook available now on:
Filled with carefully gleaned insights and actual client success stories, my hope is that it will empower those Catalysts out there who are already making the world a better place. This book was written for the future generations just as much as it was meant for the current generations. Let’s make the shift to a greater awareness happen, together.
Read about what Motivated me to Write Healing Our Bloodlines
It was 12 years ago that I began taking notes after my healing sessions with clients. In these notes, I documented the insightful contributions from a few thousand clients. Those notes were full of personal breakthroughs, quotable moments of wisdom, and heartfelt stories. They helped me to recognize the common threads in the healing process that were shared between clients who came from vastly different cultural and religious backgrounds. These common threads blossomed into the 8 Realizations of Generational Liberation featured in “Healing Our Bloodlines“.
When Dr. Aviva Bernat invited me to Los Angeles to share my unique brand of Intuitive Healing with her community, I didn’t know that I would be working with families that survived the Holocaust. They found me. The children of the original Jewish Holocaust survivors were called 2nd Generation Survivors and the grandchildren called 3rd Generation Survivors, because the astonishing impact of such an atrocity was so often carried by other family members. Even after a decade of conventional therapy, the 2nd & 3rd Generation Survivors came to me feeling anxious and emotionally fatigued. They were the first clients that showed me the invisible burdens that we all can inherit from our families.
Invisible burdens are the emotionally heavy stories that get passed down from elders to the children, the unfinished business that somehow becomes the work of the next generations. It’s like inheriting an old house from a deceased loved one. The house will have secret leaks and necessary repairs. The amount of work that is required to maintain the neglected house can feel like a burden. In the same way, we inherit stories of those dreams that the older generations of your family didn’t get a chance to live. We inherit their responsibilities and expectations. You may be expected to become a lawyer, because your mother or father never had a chance to go to law school. Or perhaps you had to take care of a grieving loved one so intensively, that you never had the time or energy to find a mate and settle down. In situations such as these, you are living your life to maintain the lives of others, but in doing so neglect the shiny gift of your own life. If you feel like you can’t fully live the life that you are dreaming for yourself, this is a clear sign that you are carrying an invisible burden. You can feel the pressure and weight of this burden, even if you’re not able to fully see it yet.
I wrote “Healing Our Bloodlines” for the Catalysts, those people who face their invisible burdens and discover what they’ve been carrying for most of their lives. Once the burdens become seen, you have the choice to continue to carry those burdens or release them in order to make room for your most authentic life. Those Catalysts who chose to fully live a life founded on self-honesty discovered that not only were they happier, but that their communities benefited greatly from how they shared their gifts with others.
My courageous clients became my inspiration for writing this book. They are the Catalysts of their families, the guardians of the younger generations who have been confronting the repeating cycles of abuse that have been passed down for several generations. They were fed up with the emotional and physical abuse that came with generations of alcoholism. They were the ones who intervened to protect the children of the family when no one else would. These Catalysts were making personal sacrifices to ensure that the abuse they had personally endured would not be re-inflicted on the future generations of their family. The abuse would end with them.
Too often, these Catalysts were fighting alone, with no allies to support them in a virtual vacuum of validation. In fact, too often their family members didn’t praise them for their bravery, nor did they thank them for their sacrifice on behalf of the younger generations. More often, the family attacked the Catalysts for challenging their comfortably scripted lives. They ridiculed them. Their families stopped inviting them to holiday parties and spat mean things about them behind their backs. As brave as the Catalysts had been, they were still human beings who often felt lonely, needing support and validation for their good intentions.
While writing “Healing Our Bloodlines“, I envisioned Catalysts from around the world opening this book to discover solace and support. I daydreamed about each client success story inspiring them to keep going, because the readers would see that there were other Catalysts out there who were also shedding their invisible burdens. It’s my hope that the careful guidance provided in this work will help each Catalyst find validation and encouragement for the work that they’ve already begun to undertake.
It’s my personal mission in life to prove to the world that we are able to heal from the most atrocious historic events. If Holocaust surviving families can find a way to thrive, then there is hope that whatever wounds your family may have endured, those too can be mended. Perhaps all we need to heal is some step by step guidance, the reassurance that we are not doing this work alone, and a burgeoning courage to break free.
Come hear me talk on my G. K. Global Tour. I’ll be adding more stops on the tour throughout 2019-2020.
Read this article about how the method called Bloodline Healing began:
Recently, while I was prepping my guidebook, “Healing Our Bloodlines: The 8 Realizations of Generational Liberation”, for its Sept 3rd, 2019 debut on Amazon, I found a photo of the core staff who developed a unique form of inter-generational healing called Bloodline Healing. I smiled as remembered this retreat at Brandeis-Bardin where we took the photo. It was one of those heartfelt encounters that inspired me to write “Healing Our Bloodlines“.
Nestled inside a lush corner of Simi Valley, at the end of the aromatic Peppertree Lane, resides the Brandeis-Bardin retreat center where we would have one of our most memorable Bloodline Healing workshops. Across from the convention center part of the campus was a small schoolhouse annex. Our team was busy modifying the schoolhouse into a sacred space for the weekend intensive retreat. Jessica Gelson MFT was gathering up the tiny kiddie chairs and stacking them to the side. Anna Molitor, a group facilitator that specializes in women’s empowerment, put out the grown-up folding chairs into a large circle. Aviva Shira Bernat MD placed a Hawaiian style table cloth over a baby grand piano to begin it’s transformation into an ancestors’ table. Dina Bernat-Kunin LCSW filled a large, glass bowl with water and sea salt. This bowl would go on top of the ancestor table to serve as a universal symbol for emotional cleansing.
The workshop participants were a mosaic of people from different cultural backgrounds and faiths. But they all had one thing in common; all of them have ancestors. After family tree sharing with the group, we gathered around the ancestor table to take turns doing an Ancestral Dialogue. This technique was an opportunity for them to speak aloud to their ancestors in a supportive, non-judgmental environment. Yes, people actually talked directly to their deceased ancestors in this unconventional approach to inter-generational healing. For some people, it is a cathartic theater, a place for them to talk with their lineage in a personified way. For others, they believe that they can still feel their deceased grandmother with them in spirit. Because our workshops always have a mix of people from different backgrounds, it’s essential to maintain an open minded atmosphere that allows for every person to share their personal beliefs.
While our team was developing Bloodline Healing over the past 15 years, we’ve discovered that the purpose of doing an Ancestral Dialogue is multifaceted. Some people have done an ancestral dialogue because they never got a chance to say goodbye to their grandparents who perished in the Holocaust. They didn’t have an opportunity to let the grief come out of their hearts because their was no formal funeral. Some of the participants came because they always felt alone in their birth family, so they wanted to find a connection to an ancestor that would make them feel a sense of belonging. For others, they were stepping into a new role in their family as a matriarch or patriarch, so their ancestral dialogue became a rite of passage from one phase of life into another.
The Ancestral Dialogue has become a multi-use technique that has helped many people to address the unresolved struggles in their families. It’s the great clarifier that helps people understand why their family behave the way they do. It helps participants identify the cyclic patterns of abuse that have been repeating themselves for generations. The facilitators make every effort to creates a safe place for the emotional catharsis to happen. In the secure bubble of the workshop space, the participants can finally slow down enough to release the invisible burdens that they’ve been carrying for years.
After the workshop was complete, the group walked across Peppertree Lane to the cafeteria for dinner. As we walked through the herbal scented air, participants exchanged smiles. They shared about their relief, how the tension had left their bodies and how they could breathe more deeply as they giggled like school kids. I guess that little schoolhouse was the perfect venue for the workshop, because so many people had released the heaviness from their childhood to reclaim a personal sense of joy.
Read about how I became the 2nd author in my family.
My Book, “Healing Our Bloodlines: The 8 Realizations of Generational Liberation” will be published as a paperback and eBook on Amazon on May 1st, 2019. It’s a self-help book that details the 8 Realizations discovered by clients and workshop participants while they were doing intensive inter-generational healing work. Each Realization comes with a real client success story and techniques that can be practiced at home to greatly accelerate the healing process. Join the group of Catalysts who are breaking free from their cyclic family pain to claim their most authentic lives.
Read about how my book “Healing Our Bloodlines” was inspired by the first author in my family, G-G-Great Uncle Chester Berry who wrote about the Disaster of the Sultana at the end of the Civil War. Click Here
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