Ahimsa & Our Ancestors
As we approach the season of the ancestors ~ we are apt to discover the perfect junction to take pause and to remember memories we have locked up within us for lifetimes. Through the practice of ahimsa, we can begin to release negative memories and unproductive ancestral patterns that prevent us from owning our personal freedom and ability to prosper.
In the Hindu calendar, each year during the dark fortnight and starting at the autumnal full moon (September –October) comes 15 days of premium time for honoring and nourishing the ancestors; this powerful ahimsa-practice for the ancestors is followed by nine days of celebrating the Divine Mother. Timeless millennia of unbroken practice in my tradition inform that this is the perfect time to identify and release ancestral memories and inured habitual patterns that impede your happiness, health and well-being. If you are striving to break seemingly impregnable blueprint of being ill and stuck and unhappy in your life, do not miss this precious occasion to invoke and re-orient your ahimsa psyche and by so doing, reorder yourliving freedom from ancestral baggage and hurt.
Since personal hurt stems from the karmas of our past, indelibly linked to our ancestral heritage, Honoring Ancestors as a proven ahimsa-practice is one of the most effective way to free ourselves from the pile-up of ancestral hurt, illness and despair.
Take the Ancestral Vow of Ahimsa (set out below), with the intention to heal your ancestral lineage:Start gainingaccess to your ancestral memory. You will find this potent intention dissolving obstacles in the way of your joy, abundance and healing. They are easy to incorporate and use in your daily lives as a powerful guide to bring forth healing, health and spiritual freedom to your family life and yourselves.
Honoring Ancestors helps you to unearth traumas and hurt of the past carried through family lines. Without realizing it, we often carry the ancestors on our backs. Because their memory patterns deeply embedded within our vital tissues and cells, we continually re-enact patterns that originate in the history and memory of our family lines. When we do not recognize ancestral traumas we are likely to ferry them into every aspect of our lives. But we can resolve our karmic history through honoring ancestors; we can trade in hurt and grief and illness for celestial guidance.
Do not miss this opportunity to reclaim your living freedom from ancestral baggage & hurt while you take to healing your entire living history with the blink of the Mother’s cosmic eye.
This article is adapted from Maya Tiwari’s article originally published in Kripalu Center for Yoga’s Brochure, Fall 2005
Notes:
- For more information on practices for Honoring Ancestor’s, refer to Bri. Maya Tiwari’s book, The Path of Practice by Ballantine Press, NY.
- Check out the itinerary for Maya Tiwari’s Living Ahimsa Tour; come and take the Vow of Ahimsa and learn the proven way to cultivate inner harmony and good health.