Recently I cleared out my garage. Well, I cleared out a chunk of it anyway, there’s plenty more cardboard and old notebooks in there to sort.
The part of my garage I was clearing was the things I’d inherited from family members. Not the things I’d lovingly chosen and held onto, or that had been given to me by living family, but instead the extra boxes I didn’t know what to do with, and neither did anyone else.
In my garage lived generations of doom boxes. You might have heard the term “doom box” or “doom bag”, it basically stands for “didn’t organise, only moved”, and it’s a tendency neurodivergent people like me have when tidying. Stick it in a bag, put it out of sight. My garage has plenty of my own doom boxes.
But it looks like my ancestors also had a little neuro-spiciness too
Because many of the things stacked in my garage were clearly doom boxes.
Some were in old cardboard with brands long since forgotten displayed proudly across them. There were plastic tub doom boxes, some even containing older relative’s doom boxes within them. Like little Baltic stacking dolls of boxes.
There were old tea caddies, writing desks, locked chests. Containers of well-loved and collated memories, and boxes of the shrapnel of emptied drawers hastily tidied elsewhere. Some were a combination of both.
It was like one big metaphor for a growing part of my work.
Healing ancestral patterns.
And don’t we all have our own doom boxes squirrelled away in our subconsciouses. We’re a combination of lovingly passed down traits and memories, and things our ancestors tried to shove into a box and forget about. As I work through my patterns and beliefs, I remember those boxes inside boxes inside boxes. Baltic stacking dolls holding the energy no one has wanted to deal with and release for generations.
Except my garage is full.
And so is my metaphoric garage. The stacks of things I’ve inherited from my ancestors are piling, I don’t have room to walk, to think, to craft and store my own choices. Some of the boxes are ringing alarms I can just catch on the wind of my consciousness. Others are starting to ooze, leaving a trail of discomfort I can’t ignore anymore as my feet stick to the remains of trauma past.
I don’t know what’s in a box until I open it – both real life and metaphoric. When I find one and open it an explosion of emotions occurs.
Some things make me feel sad. Others make me smile so hard I think my face might melt. Some make me laugh and my heart go gooey. There are plenty of objects and metaphorically beliefs I have no emotional reaction to at all because I don’t know what they represent or what they’re for. I don’t know why they kept it, and I definitely don’t know why it’s taking up space here, in the present day.
Once all the things are out of the box, we have to work out what to do with them.
The ancestral work is exactly the same.
We take the energy out of the boxes and then we have some decisions to make.
Bin it.
Keep it.
Repurpose it.
Pass it on.
Because ancestors don’t just leave us trauma and limiting beliefs, they also leave us amazing skills, love stronger than we can ever imagine along with the capacity for passing that love on, personality traits, freedom, success.
Like the boxes in the garage, some of what they pass on is now redundant, it’s purpose long forgotten. But until we make a decision to let it go we’re still holding onto it. Some of the redundant thoughts and patterns can even become a burden, dragged around, once beloved now oozing mess.
But they were kept and passed on with love, and to truly hold onto that energy we can choose to accept them with love and clean them up and repurpose them.
That independence that stops us trusting friends can become independence that helps us question authority and ask the government the right questions. We don’t need to be alone, but we could use that sense of self protection.
The pride that stops us doing the things we want to do can become pride in doing the things we want to do instead.
When we work with our ancestors, we look at what they passed down and why, and then with that additional knowledge we can see the value in our stubbornness, or the meaning in our phobias. We can accept them with the love they were given to us with, and as we hold them and know them, we can carve something new. We can melt down that metal and reuse it. Hold that energy and not just release it into the ether but flow it into something new and important we could do with right now.
And we can release the energy we no longer need, removing blockages and allowing the energy we do need to flow freely.
Whatever we keep from our ancestors (and whatever we choose in this generation not to open) we know one day someone else will inherit.
The same is true of our own doom boxes. That we don’t process we pass down wholesale. And we also bequest our prized skills, beliefs, and traits which one day may become someone else’s forgotten stacking dolls.
What do we hold onto from our ancestors, and what do we pass down?
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