Blind love, bound souls

The book It Didn't Start With You by Mark Wolynn was an eye opening introduction for me into understanding ancestral patterns and the shapings on our lives.

The basic premise: not everything you're carrying originated with you. Not every pattern you feel stuck in belongs to you.

This is what Bert Hellinger spent his life mapping and developed into Family Constellations. Descendants may take upon themselves their ancestors' stories out of what he called blind love. This creates what, through a constellations lens, is understood as an entanglement. Oftentimes, it manifests as fate, the unconscious shaping of our lives playing out.

Some of the common entanglements in constellations sound something like… I will not be more successful than my parents. I will carry the grief that was never mourned. I will stay small so I still belong to a family that couldn’t be big. I will repeat the abandonment so the system remains balanced. I will include the excluded one by becoming just like them.

These are not personal failures. They are movements of love. Blind love, but love.

From a shamanic view, the soul incarnates into a specific ancestral river because there is unfinished material there that matches its curriculum. This is what I call a lineage contract. Not just an entanglement inherited through blind love, but a soul level agreement to move through specific material in this lifetime. And I'll be bold enough to say that some souls enter these contracts specifically to learn the single most important movement in this work.

The movement from blind love into conscious love.

From my immersion in shamanic traditions, I've learned that contracts can be renegotiated. Just by coming into conscious awareness of what part of our soul work we needed to complete through this contract, we already begin to rewrite it from a place more true to who we are now.

When the contract is a lineage one/an entanglement, acknowledging and releasing the blind loyalty rewrites it for us. It allows us to step forward.

The release of lineage contracts in constellations often sounds something like… I see what you carried. Out of love, I tried to carry it too. Now I leave it with you, with respect. And I live my life fully.

When that lands for all parties involved, a large space for conscious awareness of the patterns that have been playing out becomes clear, and the capacity for genuine forward movement is created.

The ultimate peace is being in right relationship with our chosen lineage. Connected, absolutely, but not fused, entangled, and blind. Respectful, yes, but not burdened, guilty, and small. Belonging fully, knowing we each have a place and our ancestors each have a place, while living our own soul's unique expression.

This is what it looks like when blind love matures into something that can actually sustain you. The soul, freed from the weight of what was never its own, expressing itself as what it actually is. One with the Divine. Just Being. Free.

I've been sitting with the idea of contracts lately. I recently chose to honor a physical contract, bringing it to completion, and it was genuinely challenging. What struck me was how much weight a contract carries, on every level of our being.

Words have power. Vows have power. Promises, agreements, the things we said in pain or fear or from a version of ourselves that no longer exists. We are constantly creating them.

And they are binding.

Every contract we enter carries weight and must be honored. Which is exactly why the unconscious ones need to be made conscious. If we don't, we fulfill them anyway, living out entanglements we don't understand, wondering why the patterns won't shift. And when we don't honor them at all, there are real repercussions, physically and spiritually.

This is where conscious participation becomes everything. The more awareness we bring to what we have entered into, inherited or chosen, physical or energetic, the more choice, autonomy and freedom we actually have.

 If the soul is to be moving in alignment with Truth, it cannot carry what was never its own. This work gives us the clarity to know what contracts have a place, and the courage to choose again from a more whole place.

It is important to remember that when we choose to rewrite or renegotiate a lineage contract, it does not mean that we are abandoning our lineage or rejecting our history. We are simply stopping to confuse someone else's fate for our own soul's truth. That is the true honoring of our ancestors.

We are powerful beings. Let's stay awake to the impact we have, the way we move, the agreements we make and carry. Conscious love is the force that can elevate us into freedom and into connection with the Infinite Divine Source.