Leo Rutherford, a shamanic practitioner, explains how ancestral burdens and gifts are carried in the body's energetic patterns and even at the cellular level. He describes inherited wounds as "knots of energy" that shamanic work can untangle, and compares the self to a multifaceted diamond where each facet represents different aspects of identity.
Chapters
Hi, this is Heather Prince, the Root Master. I'm really honored to have with me Leo Rutherford. He's just run a fantastic workshop explaining about how the ancestors and many other factors come into what happens in our life, and I'm holding his great book The Shamanic Path Workbook. So Leo, can you tell us a little bit about this Shamanic Path Workbook and especially about how ancestors influence what we experience in our life?
Sure. We come, we come from our mother line, our father line. They teach us, they inherit, we inherit, we inherit their style of body, They teach us the world the way they know it, they see it, and of course the world keeps on changing. And so we have to then reinterpret and take ourselves on from 12 onwards and start to understand the world for ourselves. And they leave us with their stuff, their burdens, and they leave us with their beauty and their— all the gifts that they pass on to us. For some, the burdens have been really quite dire, but it's our job. We have to sort it out for ourselves. We have to go— when we go into therapeutic kind of situations, we have to go back to the time in memory and unravel the knots of energy that are not serving and get ourselves clear of them. And that's deep, deep work. At the same time, many gifts come down, and of course it's for us to develop and make those gifts flourish in us.
Yes, so for people watching this who have never really thought about this before and hadn't really thought about great-great-great-grandmother or great-great-great-grandfather and perhaps the life that they had, perhaps in a very war experience, or perhaps in a, in a time where there was different hierarchies of those that had and those that that really didn't have— have very, very little, all of those energies would still be carried down within each cell of the genes?
Yes, they still come down to us, but it's for us, it's a challenge for us, is to unravel knots of energy where we have things in knots, to unravel and to sort out which of the many the many me's we actually want to become, which parts of ourselves we really want to develop.
Yes, so there are many aspects, like a diamond, like different facets of a diamond. Is that how you would interpret that?
I would.
Yes, and then we have choices.
We have choices, and it's our job to redesign our life according to who we really want to become.
Yes.
And our job, cosmically speaking, is to become the best self that we can.
Yes.
Develop the best of ourselves.
Yes.
Live in the most harmonious, balanced way possible.
