Happy World Day of Families!

There is nothing as emotionally vulnerable as talking about your family, whether the one you grew up in and how that was, or the one you’re having yourself, or not having. While we all know that people you call family doesn’t have to be the one you were born into, today’s blogpost is about reconciling with your birth parents. 

I was born in Sweden, by Swedish parents and grew for the most part up here together with my four-year younger brother. However, we moved and travelled a lot, so I never felt rooted and thus not safe. On my mother’s side was poverty and her Polish mother survived two workcamps during World War II. On my father’s side was nobility and my dad spent summer vacations in Italy every year. His mother came from Belgium but passed away before he turned 18. My mother worked as a language teacher in various forms and a little as a secretary. My father worked as an ethnographic author and art critic, and giving talks occasionally. They were both young when they had me, after meeting at the university where both studied.

My dad had just gotten a scholarship to study for his dissertation in Heidelberg, Germany, where we moved for about six months, when my mother suddenly began to get early contractions. After a tumultuous train-ride back to Sweden, she almost bled to death and was taken with an ambulance into the hospital where she had an emergency c-section and gave birth to my brother, two months premature. I was put on a train by her girlfriend to go and live with my grandparents, while my dad finished up in Germany. While I adored my grandfather’s second wife and always called her grandma, it’s one of my first memories and was very much a trauma. In fact, another time my dad left us travelling for several months again and I can recall trying to comfort my crying mother in her bedroom a late night. He was always on the go and I never felt prioritized. While we always had good food and wore nice clothes, we didn’t have color TV until I was 18 and none of my parents had a driver’s license and thus no car. It was seen as a bit odd, where we lived in a small town, down south of Sweden.

Not too surprisingly, my parents filed for divorce and battled whether they should or not, and for child alimony for altogether almost five years. They had loud arguments and I tried to keep myself busy with schoolwork, or after school activities such as taking drama and dance classes, when I wasn’t horseback riding and immersed into the riding club’s competitions and stable care.

I often didn’t sleep well, and I wasn’t always feeling well growing up. My parents sought psychiatric help but only to find out I was one of the healthiest kids they had ever encountered and simply showed symptoms of how their marriage was deteriorating. My brother used to stay with one of his classmates’ mother after school, so he was already taken care of. My mother went to England several summers in a row to be a teacher there for summer courses. One summer, my dad just wanted to write on another book and therefor sent me away to a foster family for six weeks. It was terrible and they just wanted me to be a perfect babysitter to their perfect newborn, in a perfect pedantic house where nothing was to be touched. I cried to get out of there and was eventually allowed to leave and go live at a kid’s type of emergency shelter.

However, when I turned 15 years old at the last year of Junior High, I was offered to go and live with my school counsellor for a couple of months at her dairy farm. She was an older woman, who had helped many kids and had her own large family. Here, I got to see a cow giving birth and a whole different type of family dynamics. I began to understand how dysfunctional mine had been and how affected I and my brother had become.

High School was easier and more fun. I went on my own language course trip but to France with a classmate for six weeks. I worked after school and during summers. And my mother started dating an American through the firm where she was working. We went to see him and his son in Hartford; Connecticut and I got my first taste of the Big Apple at a daytrip. A friend of his, also working for the same firm, offered me to come and live with them for a year as an exchange student upstate New York, which I also did! They, however, ended up in a divorce too and it turned out that my mother was more into him than her fiancé, so she remained in Sweden. Here, she unfortunately started dating married men and I began to understand how her boundaryless life, was in one way giving me lots of freedom, but in another way, forcing me to be the adult of the family, my entire life. And while she sought my validation all the time and not sure of how to deal with my maturing, my dad tried to give me a bad conscious for not wanting to spend time with him weekends, when I rather meet my friends or horseback ride. My mother wanted me to talk about my dad’s life and my dad about my mother’s. I didn’t want to deal with either.

Fast forward to 2004, when my mother’s cancer got worse, I understood how I had assumed a parental role in my family and in most of my relationships and decided to heal this and any generational traumas, and to break any destructive patterns. I began to look for my inner child and work with forgiveness.

Through several travels to Hawaii, which you can read about in my books, I learned to pray the Morrnah Simeona Ho’oponopono prayer. While many native Hawaiians think it’s controversial to let white people use it, I’m so glad I found it and learned it. The beginning part of it reads: Divine Father, Mother, Child as One. When I said this the first time, in my own apartment in Sweden 2008, I became very moved and understood at some plane how I carried these pieces within and now could mend them together. I wrote down examples of events and hurt in all my relationships and used this prayer. And little by little, my life changed and improved. I, changed and improved! Step by step, I felt myself reconnecting to my inner child and learning what had scared her away, now being able to embrace her and comfort her myself.

The Ho’oponopono prayer works, besides as a prayer, by finding within how you might have hurt someone else and provoked the same kind of feelings, you now are experiencing or someone is accusing you of. By taking responsibility for how you have made someone feel, you can ask for forgiveness at least within and in spirit, and therethrough let go. The forgiveness prayer also incorporates a tracing of ancestral lineages both backwards and forward in time, to make sure the hurt stops.

It reads:

DIVINE CREATOR, Father, Mother, Child as ONE:

If * I (insert your name), my family, relatives, and ancestors have offended you (insert the other’s name) in thoughts, words, deeds and actions from the beginning of our creation to the present, please forgive us.

Cleanse, purify, release, sever, and cut all the unwanted energies and vibrations we have created, accumulated and/or accepted from the beginning of our creation to the present.

Please transmute all the negative, unwanted energies to PURE LIGHT. WE ARE SET FREE! AND IT IS DONE!

Working with Ho’oponopono, visualization and breath, enable us to also heal the connection between our Higher self, Middle self and Lower self. All to become whole again with faith in God, who handles the rest.

Now: What and who can you forgive and ask for forgiveness?

To listen to this blogpost as a podcast, find The Source Podcast on Spotify, Apple or YouTube.