Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
expecting them to fulfill it and they can't do it. No one can carry
that part of our self.
TRIP: Speaking of families. Well, most of us come from a
dysfunctional family, and your father held you firmly in his
shadow, which you felt powerless not to recreate. And you say,
"When we can undo the family shadow for ourselves and stop it,
we stop it for generations to come". Is the family shadow
something we all need to attend to, and is this spiritual work, or is
it more like storyline therapy that gets us into the game of spiritual
work?
JERRY WENNSTROM: Well I think it's probably the most
powerful work we all need to do. I like what Robert Bly says,
"Beware the man who thinks he had a happy childhood". I mean,
in some way there's no other… if you do your personal work, your
family shadow is going to come up, even if it's the shadow of being
loved too much, and over attended where you don't know how to
fend for yourself in the world, and you don't know anything except
how to be loved, and when people don't love you you're lost. I
mean, there are a million ways the shadow manifests but all
families come through with some level of shadow. And so how do
you do the work?
At some level I felt part of that total surrender, that stuff came up
for me, and it was just part of the miraculous healing. If you
remember the rest of that story, that's one of the most bizarre
stories in the book, and so much so I was hesitant to tell it, about
healing the bloodline, where I realized I had recreated my father's
life. I don't think he held it over me; he couldn't get out of it
himself, that's how he handed it on. We unconsciously pass it
along, and we hide our fears, and our limitations, and that's what
gets absorbed by way of the unconscious of our offspring. And my
father was just doing what he did, he was as much a victim of it as
I was, except for me I think it came undone and was healed as a
result of total surrender in the way that I had done it.
288