Diana Rankin

We are both human and spiritual beings. The spiritual part of who we are lives in joy; the human part of us experiences the joy . . . but to experience the joy, we also take on the experience of a whole set of human emotions, some of which we judge painful. We just down right hurt, and we don’t like it. Whether the suffering comes from grief, an illness, disappointments, or a myriad of painful experiences, we hurt and we hurt deeply and sometimes we can’t understand why the pain doesn’t seem to lift.

It is because we are healing on multiple levels, and as we heal, we are help to heal and evolve the world. This is big stuff. I mean BIG stuff.

Let’s start with the multiple levels. On the first level, we all have childhood issues, some of which are horrendous; some of which come from that which we understood as a child, but when revisited as an adult, we can see through different eyes; some of which hurt us as children because we were so innocent and unable to protect ourselves, but all of which we—as a soul agreed to take on, which brings us to the next level.

At this level, we visit the soul line. This is every life experience we have had so far and are yet to have, all of which can be healed and rewritten. In our travels through our multiple lives, we have had experiences where we have been harmed or have caused harm to others. Either way, we­­—as a soul—may have chosen in this life to heal the harm by experiencing it for the understanding of it, or because we were unable to heal it in other life experiences and are now taking it on again for healing.

The next level is the healing of ancestral wounds. We carry within us the genes of our parents and their parents and the parents of their parents, and so on. We are the collective DNA pattern of all our ancestors going back to the beginning of time . . . including the ancestral patterns of all our ancestors throughout all our lives experienced by our soul.

My heritage in this life is Celtic, Irish and Scot-Irish, and Delaware Indian. The ancestral healing is that of betrayal. I have seen this played out in my life. Looking at my life from my soul’s story, I understand why I chose my family. My father abandoned our family when I was two and my brother only a couple years older. Although I lived with my mother part time and full time when I was older, I lived much of my early childhood with my grandparents while my brother lived with our mother. My human self has struggled with abandonment issues while my spiritual self understands the healing that is taking place as I continue the healing on the human level.

As I heal these abandonment issues from my childhood and grow to understand they were chosen by me as a soul so that I might help to heal my ancestral patterns of betrayal, I am able to release any suffering that has come about because of feeling abandoned or betrayed. At the same time as I heal my pain that the little girl Diana suffered, that the young woman Diana suffered, that I suffered, I am also helping to heal all women and men who have felt abandoned and betrayed.

How can this be? We are all connected. Go back to the ancestral healing, all the way back. If we trace our DNA, which science is now able to do, we find amazing connections among people. As science advances, we may find that we all come from a common genetic ancestry. But that’s only one way we are all connected. We are also connected in the Divine Energy, that which all is made of. Whether we call ourselves light beings, God seeds, or spiritual beings, we are all part of the Divine Energy, which brings us to the importance of being aware of how we live our lives.

Think of your brain. Now think of a thought as being a streak of energy, like a lightening shooting across the sky. Every time you have a thought, this streak of energy shoots across your brain. After a while, your brain has grooves worn into it from the same type of thoughts, which have formed a thought pattern. Once a though pattern is set, it is harder to change because every time you are in a trigger situation, your thoughts automatically run toward those grooves. These thought pattern grooves are from experiences in this life and from your ancestral lineage. But is doesn’t stop here.

We also carry the DNA of our gender and of our nationality. Again, if we look at our lives from our human viewpoint, we feel the pain of gender issues and societal-regulated roles. Seeing these issues from a soul perspective, we are better able to understand our role in the healing. One of the greatest examples in our lives today is that of Malala Yousafza, the 14-year old girl in Pakistan who was shot by the Taliban when she was walking home from school because she had dared to speak out and act for the rights of girls to be educated. As a human, her suffering is unimaginable, as is that of her family. As a spiritual being, she may understand she is helping to heal and evolve the need for education for females in this part of our world.

We are all on this planet with a soul mission to heal and evolve our lives and in doing so we heal and evolve our world. We heal by changing our patterns, at times one breath and one step at a time. This is not easy work we do, but it is what we have come here to do. It is the work that takes us to joy.

The patterns of pain go deeper than our individual lives, but we experience the suffering in our human lives by our involvements and our direct relationship to the patterns. Because of the depth of the pain and the depth of the pattern, healing takes time and work. Indeed, it is the work of our lives, and although often challenging, it need not be unbearable. Certainly, some pain is more difficult to heal than others. We can heal fairly rapidly from the loss of a job, but not from the excruciatingly painful loss of a child. Yet even with this unthinkable grief weighing heavy on a parent’s shoulders, many have used the grief to reach out to help others.

This is the healing. As we heal, we can then reach out to help heal others. We cannot heal the other, but we can provide tools for the other to use, a shoulder to lean on and a hand to hold, and an understanding of the other’s suffering from one who has been there. We may not always understand our pain or the suffering of the world.

We may never do anything we think is helping to evolve the world, and yet every time—every time—we exchange a moment of pain for a moment of joy, we are changing the old patterns and healing the suffering by evolving our world one breath, one step, one thought at a time.