The Secret Pain You Inherited: Uncovering and Healing Ancestral Karma

What if what you knew about past lives is just 1% of the whole story...

I stopped entertaining the idea of past lives. That was last year. Before you wonder why—especially given that I’ve been immersed in spirituality, where past lives are central—let me explain. It’s not that I’ve discarded the concept of past lives altogether, but my understanding of them has deepened. I no longer see them as a simple continuation of “me” across different bodies and eras. Past lives are far more complex than that, not the straightforward, 1+1 math that’s often suggested.

Through deep contemplation, I realized that past lives are both the beginning and end of a cause. Let me break it down.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

I. The Ego vs. Soul Lenses on Past Lives

II. The Akashic Records and Collective Karma

III. The Philosophy Beyond Past Lives

IV. The Wounds That Connect Us To Our Ancestors

V. How Ancestral Karma Works

VI. How To Break Ancestral Karma

I. The Ego vs. Soul Lenses on Past Lives

Ego Centered Position

In spiritual circles, we often hear that past lives shape our present experiences and that we choose our family and circumstances based on karma. But here’s where things get tricky. Our typical understanding of past lives often comes from an ego-centered perspective. The ego clings to the idea of continuity, assuming that the “I” we know now is the same “I” that existed in a past life. Even if we think of ourselves as someone else in a previous incarnation, we’re still convinced it was “us.”

The reality? It wasn’t you, not in the way your ego understands it. Your current sense of self, with all its beliefs, habits, memories, and attachments, belongs only to this lifetime. After you die, this specific identity dissolves; it’s not carried forward, sticking to us like glue. The soul, as a vessel, will choose a new story, a new identity, a new set of challenges. We often connect our current ego-identity to another past ego-identity, like a string of linear events, but this is just another layer of the ego holding on.

The Soul’s View: Beyond the Ego

When we shift from an ego-based understanding to a soul-centered perspective, things expand. The soul’s journey isn’t about preserving the “me-me-me” of this lifetime. It’s something much larger, much more interconnected. In The Gene Keys by Richard Rudd, he delves into concepts like Corpus Christi and explains what happens when we pass away—how our different bodies (astral, causal, etc.) separate. He even suggests that we don’t carry our personal karma into the next life, a point I’ll elaborate on shortly.