Blessings from a Thousand Generations: What Our Biblical Ancestors Can Teach Us about Healing Our Families Today
180
Blessings from a Thousand Generations: What Our Biblical Ancestors Can Teach Us about Healing Our Families Today
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Overview
The God-Realization Process offers you the opportunity unravel the mystery of the divine light within and recieve the blessings from a thousand generations. The Ten Spiritual Keys (Commandments) were a gift from God to secure our relationships with him, to awaken the light within us, and to manifest and transform anything in our lives and most of all to heal our families and bless them and generations to come.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781452531922 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 02/14/2011 |
| Pages: | 180 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.38(d) |
Read an Excerpt
BLESSINGS FROM A THOUSAND GENERATIONS
What Our biblical Ancestors Can teach Us About Healing Our Families TodayBy Donna Evans Strauss
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2011 Donna L. StraussAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-3192-2
Chapter One
Realizing God Within the FamilyEmbracing and healing our Family Tree of Knowledge is our journey home into oneness with God.
The sacredness of the family spiritual journey begins, and rightfully so, with the oldest story told in the Bible. We learn from this story that in the beginning, Adam and Eve stood naked before God without fear or shame (Genesis 2:25), as pure as the luminosity of God's unified love, seeing only God's blessings and grace. But when they listened to the serpent's words over the words of God, their relationship with God and the unified field of God's love was changed. By forsaking God's only Commandment, they betrayed God—and their deepest selves. They suddenly felt the need to lie, blame, and deny responsibility, and they began to uncover the mystery of the knowledge of good and evil. They would move from the spiritual world into the physical world.
With veils of separation now covering their eyes, Adam and Eve recognized their differences and wanted to hide themselves from each other and from God. They found fig leaves to cover their nakedness, which was a symbol of their individuality and descent into the physical world. They could now learn to discern the difference between good and evil, blessings and calamity. They were now responsible for their choices and the outcomes. As they tried to hide and then talked to God, Adam and Eve's behavior revealed their veils of illusion. Instead of seeing only unity, they now experienced separation, differences, and divisiveness: Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. It was no longer possible to stay in the Garden of oneness with God. By turning away from God to follow their own desires, Adam and Eve had fallen from immortality and unified love into duality and illusion. God clothed them in skin and they became earthbound. They were sent out of the Garden of Eden to create their own family. Eve would now bear children while Adam would work the land. Their Family Tree of Knowledge would become our journey home to oneness with God.
In the fractured family relationships of today, you might see yourself or your family members suffering these same symptoms of disconnect that Adam and Eve felt. The experience of being banished from the garden mirrors the same journey and pain that is experienced when a family member becomes an outcast or a scapegoat. On your own journey, personality and character flaws (such as blaming others for your shortcomings) can be unconscious ways to cover internal and external feelings of separation from God. To heal these fractures and the separation, it makes sense that our first steps must be toward God. The journey home will be one of listening, prayer, and forgiveness, and it will provide us with hope, direction, and enlightenment toward communion with God. That unity is what I call God-Realization. Attaining God-Realization is the foundation for healing a family—and it is our goal in this book.
The God-Realization Process
Our search for truth, a deeper knowing of God, and the answer to the age-old question, "Who am I?" will require us to again become naked, uncovered, and undefended before God's omnipotent grace, love, and luminosity. Surrendering our separation, blaming, vanity, arrogance, defenses, and sinful nature, as well as taking responsibility for our actions, words, and deeds are key requirements to finding God's grace and compassion and releasing the blessings from a thousand generations.
On our journey toward God-Realization, we are meant to walk a certain path in the world, but each personal journey is unique. You are the only one who can dissolve the illusions that separate you from God. Spiritual leaders, teachers, psychotherapists, energy healing practitioners, or complete strangers may guide you toward the mystery behind the journey, but it is you who must make the ultimate choice to integrate your negative splits and embrace spiritual wholeness. Hidden beneath the veils of your perceptions, the immanent light calls you home. Your sweet surrender to the journey—embracing with love all that emerges, both positive and negative, and listening to the still, small voice that guides you—will lead you to knowing the greater mystery. This journey will help you to unravel the mysteries of your family and ultimately to find your spiritual destiny.
The image above illustrates the path in its simplest form. First, you must focus on your core, where you must connect with and claim your Divine heritage within. You are the light, and knowing this will support your very being. Second, you will bring that light into relationship with your partner and cultivate a Divine oneness that will include your children and then the rest of your family. Third, you will foster and bring your light and wisdom to your career choice and passion. And finally, you will serve your community from a place of balance and Divine service. You'll soon discover that when you are fully grounded and your life is balanced, the power of living in right order moves from your core Divinity outwards. However, when these four pieces are out of order, your life can become chaotic, leaving you, your family, your work, and your life imbalanced. For example, if you spend more time at work than with your family, your family life will suffer from the loss of your presence and guidance.
The key to maintaining the balance lies in our core—with maintaining our connection to Divinity. When issues turn up, this is most likely because a separation happened there first. It was the same with Adam and Eve. As they fell from immortality and omnipotent oneness, they forgot their deep connection with their Maker. Now the process of remembering our Divine roots and our true immortality will come from learning once again how to listen to and follow God's voice. At the same time, we must also master our own self-doubt and negative thoughts and feelings.
To accomplish this, we will use the God-Realization Process. You may consider this process a map for your spiritual journey. It involves four necessary requirements:
An understanding of positive and negative love bonds
An understanding of the Ten Spiritual Keys (Commandments)
A willingness to delve into your family history, with the above in mind
An understanding of the seven Divine qualities
Positive and Negative Love Bonds
To begin the God-Realization Process, we must first have an understanding of positive love bonds and negative love bonds and how they manifest in our lives. Negative love bonds form when reenactments, both conscious and unconscious, of negative family and ancestral patterns—such as addictions, infidelity, or chronic anxiety—disconnect us from one or more of God's Commandments. From a spiritual and psychological perspective, a positive love bond forms when a mother and father both infuse their child's consciousness with grace and love. They provide the security, love and respect that lays the foundation for the child's physiological, psychological, and spiritual health and well-being.
The center (or ground) of the child's consciousness—self-realization and God-realization—can be anchored in the luminosity of God's grace and love as a positive love bond. Or it can be anchored in neglect, abuse, anxiety, and depression as a negative love bond. Directly imprinted into the consciousness of our cellular membrane, positive and negative love bonds are transmitted from and can be traced back through our families, often for generations. Our biblical ancestors provided us with Spiritual Keys that enable us to embrace our positive love bonds, heal our negative love bonds, and live healthy and fruitful lives connected to the grace of God. The Ten Commandments given to Moses at Mount Sinai were meant to be inscribed into the very fabric of our consciousness to ensure our personal relationship with God.
There is a scientific aspect to this as well. Modern research shows concrete links between our ancestors, our emotions, and our very being. In fact, Dr. Daniel G. Amen MD, a clinical neuroscientist and psychiatrist, invites us to consider that our brain is actually "the hardware to our soul." All of our knowledge and the wisdom of our Divine potential is processed within our brains and transmitted to all of our other senses and body systems. Dr. Amen notes that if the brain doesn't work well because it is plagued with automatic negative thoughts (ANTS), the soul cannot truly be expressed. In one of Amen's lectures, he says (and I paraphrase his words): It is not that the person's soul doesn't want to express its Divine beauty; it is that the malfunctions in the brain don't allow it. He suggests several types of treatment for changing negative brain patterns, from medication to meditation and prayer.
Let's go a little further down this scientific path. Most of us know that our genetic code (DNA) is passed down to us from our maternal and paternal families. Bruce H. Lipton PhD, a former medical professor, research scientist, and cell biologist, has discovered that DNA is actually influenced by the membrane or tissue that surrounds it and can also be affected by positive and negative thoughts. In his book, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, and Miracles, Lipton suggests that our cells carry other awareness beyond the genetic code, and the state of our consciousness affects our cells' health. Investigating our familial story becomes even more important when we think about the direct impact our ancestors have upon our cells.
Our most basic emotions, memories, and instincts develop within the brain in what is called the limbic system. This tiny part of the brain developed to accommodate bonding, feeding, and reproductive fight-or-flight responses. The limbic system coordinates the behavioral, autonomic (involuntary), and hormonal adjustments required to maintain homeostasis or normal operation. When humans experience the basic emotions of love, pleasure, hunger, or fear, the limbic system releases neurohormones throughout the body, and changes occur in the heart and immune system. For example, when a child smells her mother (through the olfactory nerve and the limbic system), the child responds with both cardio-respiratory and GI-related activity. In other words, her emotional and visceral nervous systems are directly affected by any interaction with her parents (Ruggiero, David PhD). Simply put, the brain's connection to basic emotions influences each cell through hormonal or chemical reactions.
Here's another example: An infant is bumped and cries, feeling pain. If the mother instantly picks him up and soothes him by rocking him closely, the baby associates soft touch, words, and love with less pain. But if the mother soothes the baby by feeding him even though he's not hungry, the baby associates food with less pain, which sets up a negative bond—needing food to reduce pain—for the future. Repetitions of these need–response interactions become literally imbedded, or wired, within our cellular memory.
Research by philosopher Eva Jablonka and biologist Marion Lamb, as presented in their 1995 book, Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension, suggests that genes are far more fluid and responsive to the environment than we have realized. Information can be transmitted to descendants in other ways than the base sequence of DNA. Interactions are stored in the cellular membrane of a newborn baby.
Our brains record this bonding in the deep limbic system. Using the chemicals of love and bonding for survival, a recycled negative event is recorded in the brain as love based on fear, replacing a more positive bond of love based on nurturance, security, and trust. Unraveling the mystery of our familial and ancestral heritage allows us to recover our spiritual heritage and frees us from bondage to the negative patterns passed down generationally.
We also increase our well-being as we reconnect with our Divinity. As Andrew Newberg MD and Mark Robert Waldman write in their book, How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist, the brain responds positively to spiritual influences. They researched six different structures of the brain to understand how God and spirituality affects the brain. Their groundbreaking research identifies how our concept of God affects our frontal lobe, limbic system, anterior cingulate gyrus, amygdale, thalamus, and parietal lobe. They suggest that the more we meditate and pray, the more likely we are to experience a mystical or transcendental state, and that these states can be measured by taking SPECT brain scans during these peak experiences. Our belief in God, as well as our images, prayers, and meditation practices, activate different areas of our brains and cause different mystical experiences.
I believe the brain responds because we are unlocking a certain part of ourselves. When we do so, we release our negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as well as the crooked paths from generational negative love bonds. This process frees us to receive the blessings of a thousand generations and to offer these blessings to our children and the world.
Unraveling this greater mystery is our true birthright. Our brain is actually wired for God or what we call spiritual experiences. By suppressing this vital information, we miss an essential key to spiritual enlightenment. When Moses freed his people from bondage, their journey involved more than personal freedom. They also needed to free their minds from Egyptian ways and thoughts to restore their relationship with God and find their spiritual roots.
Moses' quest to restore his people led him to the top of Mount Sinai where he had a direct experience of God-Realization and received the Ten Spiritual Keys to restore the health and spiritual well-being of his people. Even today, these keys are necessary to restore our Divine nature and secure our communion with God.
The Ten Spiritual Keys
Certainly, you are already familiar with the Ten Spiritual Keys; you just know them by another name: the Ten Commandments. I prefer to think of the Commandments as Spiritual Keys because in my teaching I've found a lot of resistance to the Commandments. People tend to see them as a set of restrictive, outdated rules, and sadly, that's the way they've often been presented to us. Cross-culturally, these Commandments, universal truths, values, or codes of ethics are the foundation and tenets of all the major religions. They are universally accepted because, when followed, they bring peace and harmony to the individual and to the societies in which we live. Though they may be presented very differently, all spiritual traditions dovetail with these accepted ideas. But the primary reason for the Commandments—communication with God—is overlooked while focusing on the "moral society" aspect instead. Therefore, these rules or moral codes become a punishment, something to push up against rather than a way to walk with and listen to God from within.
Clearing our inner relationship with God will always lead us into peace and harmony with our family and society. In this book, we will review the Ten Commandments or Spiritual Keys as a way to open the door to communication with God within you. As we do this, we begin to understand how we have mapped both positive and negative love bonds into our very wiring, perceptions, and life experiences. I invite you to turn your thoughts away from a set of rules that control society to a set of Keys that exist to unlock or awaken the Divine within you and to increase your communication with God. If these words do not resonate with you or your religious or cultural tradition, please find ones that work for you and practice with your own words and universal truths.
We will give each key its own chapter in this book. You'll be able to explore it from a modern viewpoint and understand its relevance in your life today. Remember, the Keys are to open you to the light within, to sustain your direct communication with God, and to tame the unbridled life force, the serpent or Id, that rests at the base of your spine.
The Secrets of Our Ancestors
Historically, the nuclear family system—the primary family relationship—defines the self and our relationship to our Divine (God-centered) heritage. Each of us has a history of familial, ancestral, and cultural wounds that have led us to the path of self-understanding and enlightenment. You may have felt suppressed by parts of your family heritage and labeled the pattern dysfunctional. Without understanding how to free yourself, you may have tried hard not to repeat the unwanted behavior or concluded that you were doomed to repeat the same patterns.
But the good news is, we can trace our spiritual heritage and unravel the mystery of who we are as evolving spiritual beings by embracing the path of our parents and ancestors. If we learn how to recognize and embrace both our positive and negative experiences with insight, love and acceptance, forgiveness and compassion, we can find the path that will lead us toward true peace and satisfaction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BLESSINGS FROM A THOUSAND GENERATIONS by Donna Evans Strauss Copyright © 2011 by Donna L. Strauss. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................xiSpecial Acknowledgments....................xiii
Foreword....................xv
Chapter 1 Realizing God Within the Family....................3
Chapter 2 Faith Required....................11
Chapter 3 The God-Realization Genogram....................19
Chapter 4 The Ten Spiritual Keys....................33
Chapter 5 The First Commandment: The Key to Wholeness....................45
Chapter 6 The Second Commandment: The Key to Fulfillment....................57
Chapter 7 The Third Commandment: The Key to Meaning....................65
Chapter 8 The Fourth Commandment: The Key to Peace....................75
Chapter 9 The Fifth Commandment: The Key to Belonging....................81
Chapter 10 The Sixth Commandment: The Key to Respecting Life....................91
Chapter 11 The Seventh Commandment: The Key to Unity....................99
Chapter 12 The Eighth Commandment: The Key to Potential....................111
Chapter 13 The Ninth Commandment: The Key to Ourselves....................121
Chapter 14 The Tenth Commandment: The Key to Manifestation....................129
Chapter 15 Restoring Your Divine Qualities....................141
Bibliography....................151