Heaven on Earth

teachings from the realms of light for a life of joy

Ask Sananda 16: Birth Family and Soul Family

Questions: How important are family of birth and genetic ancestors in terms of who we are in this lifetime? And what is the difference between birth family and soul family?

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Welcome. This is Sananda. Let’s begin with the genetic side of things, your genetic family, your human blood related family. You will perhaps not be entirely surprised if I begin with a paradoxical answer. How important are they in terms of who we are in this lifetime? the questioner asks, and the paradoxical answer is very important indeed and not important at all. It all depends how you look at it. So let’s start from the very important side of things. First of all, by being human, you’ve chosen to identify with a particular group of cells, that is to say, your physical body. Before you came, you took good care, you had advice, but you took good care yourself to choose the parents who would be most appropriate for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean the most loving parents, the wisest parents, the most beautiful parents. That’s not the criteria. It’s much more about what I’ve called appropriateness: which parents are going to, so to speak, feed into your life purpose and, more than your life purpose, the ongoing developmental exploration that you are making as a being, as a soul. So that from your human perspective, your choice of parents, for some of you, might feel a little hard. It’s not at all unknown for some of you to speculate that surely you must be adopted. These parents couldn’t possibly be anything to do with you. And maybe if you’ve had those feelings when younger, as time has gone on, you found yourself admitting that actually maybe you are rather more like your parents than you thought you were when you were a child or a teenager. So the choice of parents – and it’s mutual, they choose you, you choose them – is of great importance in setting up the particular conditions, the particular skills as well, that you wish to explore in this particular lifetime. 

03:01

As you appreciate, you are a complex being and your parents are complex too. So that when we talk about selecting parents to fulfil a specific purpose, that specific purpose may be quite broad, maybe not so specific in the sense that it can be summarised in a single sentence. It might actually, in truth, take many volumes were you choose to do this, to describe what your purpose is. So that you find that you are engaged in the relationship with your genetic parents – and this, by the way is true whether you know your parents, whether you had a father present or an absent father, whether it happens that you left your mother at a very early age. None of this affects the importance of these fundamental genetic connections and connections that I’ll go into that are related to the genetic but not actually genetic of themselves. So these choices are complex. The interplay between your own physical body, your own genetic blueprint, and that of your parents is complex. It’s subtle. So that from your parents, you will draw, bring forward if you like, particular characteristics. Others, you may leave to one side: they’re not really relevant to you, you’re not carrying them forward. 

04:53

So of course, as you appreciate, you find yourself a mixture of the genes of your parents, and at some level you are choosing the mixture. Again, this is not done by you alone, but you play a very important part in that choice. If you are wise, you are working with wise guides in this. So there is a lot of selection going on in the creation of your physical body that is not just about the choice of your parents, but is also about the choice of the genes that you inherit from them, that you are involved in that choice. 

05:50

There’s a combination there then of freedom and of definition, of limitation. When you choose to be physical, when you choose to take on a human life, you are at this time by the nature of the choice, choosing all kinds of limitation. To put it very simply, as a soul, you’re not really limited by time and space. When you take on human form, you experience considerable limitations of time and space. That’s the deal you make. That’s the way you are exploring what it is to be. Now, clearly again, you appreciate that the genes of your parents play a considerable part in your physical appearance. What you look like, you may have your mother’s nose and your father’s chin or whatever, and it operates in more subtle ways so that you may find that your digestive system is rather like your father’s, that your adrenals are rather like your mother’s and so on: all sorts of physical conditioning that you take on and that you pick from what your parents present you with. All of that’s fairly straightforward, nothing particularly unexpected in that. But what you can also find is that there are many other more subtle forms of inheritance that are not really down to the genes, or at least at this time, the influence of the genes is not at all apparent. 

07:45

Now, that’s just step back a little bit and say a bit about genes and the whole process of inheritance. Understand that inheritance is certainly connected to the genes and the functioning of the genes, but that is by no means all that conditions inheritance. The field that is called epigenetics is relevant here. From our perspective, what we could say is that the genes themselves are the product of extremely complex, very beautiful etheric networks of energy, of light, that essentially give birth to your genes. So one of the ways of understanding your journey to earth is to say that you as a being, because you’re choosing to be on Earth, begin by going to the Sun, the centre of your solar system, and working with a multitude of wise and loving beings, highly evolved, working with the subtle light of the Sun and creating in effect an etheric body out of that light that is, in a sense, magnetic. 

09:16

So that as you approach the earth plane, as you begin to move into the density of the earth plane, that etheric blueprint is magnetising to you the forms and structures of physicality. These are given you by the soul of the Earth. So in important ways, we could say that your mother and father are both a physical human, father and mother, but also the Sun and the Earth. And there’s a tendency to think of the Earth as mother and the Sun as father. If that’s useful for you, go with that. But don’t feel that you have to assign gender to these beings. Both the Sun and the Earth are of course, as you know, magnificent beings. And although they may demonstrate many qualities that you might associate with masculinity or femininity, they’re not bound by gender. Okay, that’s just a side note, but you can certainly consider that in very important ways you are a product of a loving intercourse between the Earth and the Sun, just as may be the case with the love of your parents. 

10:46

This also opens up an important way of understanding more about the whole process of inheritance. So the process is, as I’ve suggested, complex and broad. It’s not just about a man and a woman coming together and out of their union, a new body coming into being. Ultimately, the entire Universe is involved. Certainly a multitude of conscious beings are involved. And, of course, not least of those is you. 

11:34

So you are willingly choosing certain kinds of limitation because – here we have a paradox again – those limitations liberate you. Imagine yourself as a soul. As a soul you are magnificent, a being of unconditional love, of immense wisdom and understanding, but you’re still growing. And as you reflect upon yourself as a soul, you may consider that your growing is in want of some particular quality or that there is a particular quality that you would like to develop further. So you begin to enter into conversation, a communion with the Universe. You say to the Universe or you say to yourself and the Universe together, what kind of exploration would help me to develop these qualities further? How might that be done? And the Universe may draw your attention to a particular solar system, the relationship between a particular star and a particular planet, and say to you as a soul, ‘Observe, observe the flow of energy between these two great beings. Do you see within all of the light that they exchange?’ And here I’m not talking just about the physical light that a sun obviously gives off, but the spiritual light that a sun and an earth both give off. 

13:12

And in that conversation there may be a sense, ‘Yes, I see precisely the frequency, patterns of light that I would love to engage further with, to understand more about.’ And then you might say, ‘Okay, so how can I accomplish that? How might I engage with it?’ One way would be to take on a physical body that is the product of this conversation, the love that is exchanged between these two great beings. The light that they share, a physical form that is a template made out of the light of the star and a template that attracts to it, the substance, the body of the Earth. 

14:05

‘And to do that in the context in which I’m interested in exploring, there is going to be a process of physical birth to a physical mother. And in doing that, I’m going to be looking for two particular parents who in themselves are in some way engaged in working on the same qualities of light, developing those or carry those forward. Something like a catalyst, facilitating it without necessarily being deeply engaged in it’. 

14:46

So that at that soul level, what you’re really looking at is not, ‘Do I like this man’s hair? Do I like that lady’s legs?’ It’s not really that at all. It’s much more what is the energy of these beings when it comes together, when it weaves together? How does that align with this deeper purpose that I have? How can I use that to grow in the ways that I wish to grow? And at soul level, many conversations happening simultaneously. All of this is happening outside of sequential time as you know it. So you can be having a conversation with your parents before they are born, let alone before you were born, because that’s the kind of environment you’re in. You can imagine just how complex the network of connections is, that transcends time, that brings a group of people together to choose a set of genetic relationships. 

15:56

So in this sense, then, your choice of parents is immensely important. But at the same time, the choice is designed to grant you freedom, so that from a different point of view, you can say that, ‘Well, really who I choose doesn’t limit me in any way, because it furthers my quest for a fuller realisation of my being. It takes me in the direction of freedom. It is granting me a gift of life’. So there is both limitation and freedom combined in the deal. 

16:48

Now let’s talk about this a little bit closer to the human life that you’re actually living. You may have observed, perhaps in a stately home, generations of portraits and been able to see remarkable family resemblances passing down perhaps over hundreds of years. Or now that photographs go back quite a few generations, it may be that if you have photographs from ancestors a hundred, 150 years ago, that you can see family resemblances, continuing generation by generation. That’s familiar. You may also recognise that there can be characteristics, patterns of behaviour, desires, intuitions, inner knowings, fears, doubts, all sorts of things that you mightn’t immediately think would be inherited. But actually there they are: something that your grandfather loved, even though you might never have known that grandfather, turns out, surprisingly, to be something that you love too. And there’s no obvious connection. The genes, as far as you know, don’t seem to dictate whether you like cabbage or not, or whatever it might be. They may do, but it’s not clear that that’s the case. And the taste may be something much more obstruse, much less directly connected to the physical. You may find that there is a particular colour, for example, that were you able to, you could find was a favourite of a great great grandmother. 

18:46

Is that in the genes or is something else going on? So there are two things to bear in mind here. First of all, your ancestors aren’t dead. They may have left their physical bodies behind many years ago, but they’re still around. And usually speaking, you’ll find that your genetic ancestors have a deep interest in you. Now, there are all kinds of laws governing that interest that we needn’t go into right now, but the interest is absolutely there. So that you can find that you are overlit by the presence of ancestors, that they have an interest in your journey. And in a sense, you could say that that interest is to some extent a selfish one in that how you are in this lifetime flows back through time. Your resolutions for abiding issues within a genetic line can flow back through time and help your ancestors. Remember that from your soul’s point of view, those ancestral lives are concurrent. You can very readily be a liberator for your ancestors. 

20:07

For example, it is highly likely that you’ve had ancestors, that you have ancestors, who’ve suffered from hunger, maybe even from starvation and developed all kinds of ways of dealing with that. And some of those ways may continue at some level to be an unresolved issue, that if you find a feeling within yourself that there’s never quite enough, not necessarily of food, but of anything, you may find that, yep, that’s something to do with you. But you may also find that you are in a sense hearing the echo of your poor ancestors’ cries of hunger, that those still resonate within you. These are the kinds of things that are transmitted through epigenetics, not through the genes themselves, but through that etheric pattern that gives rise to the genes. 

21:13

And so that if you, within your own lifetime, come to a state where you feel there’s always enough, ‘I always have plenty. I know that the Universe supports me and loves me’. If that becomes truly real for you, it travels back through time. It reaches your ancestors, it brings healing for them, it brings resolution for them. So that in some part, the issues that you find that you’re focused on in this lifetime may also be your ancestors’ issues. Not exactly because you’ve inherited them, but because in the first place you were interested in those issues and therefore you decided to buy into a family, a genetic lineage, which was also exploring those same issues. 

22:05

So now we begin to move into the idea of soul family. Putting it very simply, you may find that there is a strong overlap between what you might consider to be your soul family and what you know as your birth family. But they’re not by any means necessarily identical. You may have a soul family spread across the world. You may have a soul family, many of whom are not incarnate at all, but those who are incarnate may be spread across the world, many different nations. You may not meet them, you may meet some of them, you may work with some of them. Some of them may be part of your family and so on. Again, it’s the complex picture. One of the things I think that can be useful to point out about soul family is, it doesn’t necessarily mean because someone is part of your soul family that you’re going to have here on earth a deeply loving, easy relationship. Indeed, quite the contrary, you may find that some of the most precious members of your soul family, if I can put it that way (though, in truth, all souls love all souls – so it’s just a manner of speaking), but you may find that some of those who are most precious in some way closest to you, may give you some of the most testing experiences, maybe the people who you often find really difficult in this life. It’s part of the whole process of growing. Now at the same time, recognise that as you grow, as you grow in consciousness, as you grow in unconditional love, those kinds of configurations begin to fade out and begin to be not quite the way that they have been. That’s work in progress. 

24:08

If then you inherit much from your parents, from your ancestors, both genetically and energetically, who are you? To what extent are you ‘you’? And to what extent are you a sort of by-product of all of the leftover issues of your ancestors? Is it like that? Are you just a kind of walking dust bin of unresolved stuff? No, you’re not. Rest assured, you may find that you have, one way or another, inherited or brought forward or are hearing the echoes of issues that your ancestors worked on, but you are your own woman, your own man. You are yourself. 

25:03

However, when we come to consider what self is, then it starts to get interesting again. So that the self you think you are may indeed be made up to a considerable extent of inherited characteristics, not just the obvious physical characteristics, but the more subtle ones that we’ve been talking about. And that as you make peace with all of those inherited characteristics, whether they’re positive or negative, but as you just accept them more and more, so what you can find is a kind of dissolving of identity. Whether you have said to yourself, ‘I’m a chip off the old block, I really admire my parents and I’m glad that I’m like them’, or whether you’ve reacted against them and thought, ‘These are terrible people. They have no idea what they’re doing. I’m a really special person. I need to mark my difference from them, indeed to survive,’ (and this can be the case) ‘I need to get away from them’. Either way, what you find is that as you make peace with, as you accept the beingness of those who brought you into the world, primarily mother, father, then you may find that you don’t any longer really know who you are. 

26:51

But if that is the case, let that be an indication of liberation, that you’ve resolved the issues that you selected in your parents to help you with, and that you no longer need to identify with the characteristics that those issues gave rise to. And so you find yourself in a kind of free-floating state, that you know yourself as a being of light, a beautiful presence here on Earth, that you can feel deep gratitude whether you loved your parents deeply, or whether you found your parents very difficult, or whether it was a mixture, that you can just have a sense of unconditional gratitude for the path that they gave you into this world. And of course, you can still carry forward many of their characteristics, not least physically. And yet there can be the sense of, ‘I’m not them. I’m not even sure that I am the being I thought I was, because in truth, I’m born anew in every moment’.

28:15

Good. So let’s come to a close with that. Wherever you are, however you think of yourself, know that you are deeply loved. Go well.

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