HEALING ACROSS GENERATIONS: Re-authoring our Core Struggles into Core Blessings

Lana Jelenjev
Oct 16
7 min read

The last Refugia session on Healing across generations is still reverberating inside of me. It was soulful, open, and transformative. One remark was how fascinating it was to come into an online space as strangers and leave as friends. The depth of sharing was palpable, and the insights gathered from the exercises were revealing of their core struggles. What was gratifying to witness was the re-authoring of these core pains into blessings.

I know how difficult it can be for people to take the time to join a 2-hour session. Having been a part of healing circles and hosting them for the past years, I have seen how transformative these spaces can be. I'd like to offer you this as well - a space for you to reflect and reconnect with your essence.

This guided audio invites listeners into a reflective journey of intergenerational healing — tracing the hidden stories we inherit and transforming them into sources of strength. Through grounding, family mapping, and reauthoring practices, it weaves together the teachings of Mark Wolynn and Virginia Satir with personal reflection and ancestral remembrance. Listeners are guided to uncover core language patterns, map family dynamics, and rewrite inherited narratives as blessings. Rooted in belonging and compassion, Healing Across Generations offers a path to honor lineage, release inherited burdens, and embody renewed wholeness across time.

Healing Across Generations: Reauthoring Our Core Struggles into Core Blessings — Transcript

[00:00] Opening — Welcome and Invitation

Welcome to Healing Across Generations: Reauthoring Our Core Struggles into Core Blessings. I am so glad you’re here. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Take a deep breath with me and let your body arrive, wherever you are in this moment.

This audio, Healing Across Generations, is a tending ground for what’s alive in us. It began as a live healing circle created on my mother’s birthday — a day that has become for me a portal of remembrance and renewal.

We inherit so much from those who came before us — not just the color of our eyes or the shape of our hands, but the stories that were never told, the silences that shaped us, the patterns that keep repeating without our conscious knowing. These hidden legacies show up in our fears, our struggles, our language — in the way things are said or not said when we feel stuck or alone.

This space is an invitation to slow down, to listen, and to begin to reauthor stories that live inside us and in our families.

[03:00] Overview of the Three Paths

Over the next few minutes, you’ll be guided through three interwoven paths of learning and healing.

The first is the core language approach — a way of listening to emotionally charged words and phrases that we carry, drawn from the work of Mark Wolynn in It Didn’t Start With You. Here, you’ll learn to recognize hidden sentences that might belong not only to you but to generations before you.

The second path is the family map, inspired by Virginia Satir. This is a way of making visible the relationships, dynamics, and strengths within your lineage — not a tree of facts, but a living web of connection.

And lastly, reauthoring into core blessings. You’ll take the stories you’ve uncovered and transform them into medicine — affirmations of belonging, safety, and love that ripple through your lineage, backward to your ancestors and forward to those who will come after.

[06:00] Setting the Intention

As Mark Wolynn reminds us, the unspoken experiences that live in our unconscious are all around us. Once we dig them out, we take an essential step toward healing trauma.

This work is about that step — bringing what’s been hidden into light and giving it new shape. This is a practice of ventilation — of looking at what happened when you were young and seeing it in a new light as an adult.

Expect that these exercises might stir emotion. Move through them at your own pace; there is no rush. You can pause after each one, or return later. Healing happens in spirals, not straight lines.

[09:00] Arrival Ritual

I invite you to create a small ritual of arrival each time you sit with this work. It might be lighting a candle, opening a window, or placing a photo of your family nearby. Let each practice be both an honoring and a release.

Take one more breath. Imagine your ancestors behind you, both known and unknown, and your future descendants ahead of you. Whisper when it feels right: May this work serve as medicine for those who came before me and those who will come after me.

[11:00] Exercise 1 — Belonging and Whakapapa

Before looking at what we’ve inherited in terms of struggle or pain, we begin with belonging. Every healing path starts here — in remembering that we are part of a much larger web of life.

In Māori tradition, this remembering is called Whakapapa — to place in layers. It’s a practice of naming who and what we came from: ancestors, family, land, and waters. It reminds us that identity is not isolated, but a living lineage.

Take a deep breath. Feel the weight of your body supported by the ground beneath you. Imagine the soil, roots, and stones holding you.

Reflect by completing these lines: The land that raised me is...The waters that nourish me are...The people I come from are...The family that holds me is...My name is... and this is how I would introduce myself.

This practice isn’t about historical accuracy, but relationships.

What matters is remembering who and what raised you — by blood, by spirit, by place. You might light a candle or place an object representing your lineage beside you. Once you’ve spoken your Whakapapa, notice how it feels to say your name within that larger context.

Pause the recording and take your time.

[17:00] Exercise 2 — Core Language Approach

Welcome back. In the first exercise, you rooted yourself in belonging. Now, we listen to the stories hidden in our words.

Each of us carries phrases that rise when we’re under stress — familiar, almost rehearsed. They are small doors leading toward the stories that shaped us.

Begin by noticing what you often say when life feels difficult. Write down those sentences that sound like old echoes.

Then, look at your list and circle the words that feel charged or heavy. What begins to surface as your core complaint?

Next, uncover your core descriptors. Think of the people who shaped or challenged you — parents, caregivers, mentors. How would you describe them, especially in moments of tension?

Finally, uncover your core sentence. What belief ties your complaints and descriptors together? It might sound like “I’m not enough,” “I’m not safe,” or “I have to do it all by myself.”Let your body tell you which one carries the truth.

These are not judgments — they are doorways. Pause and reflect before moving on.

[24:00] Exercise 3 — Family Mapping

Now we turn outward — to the family field. Using a blank sheet, draw your family map. Start with yourself, then add parents or caregivers, and grandparents above them. Add siblings, children, aunts, or uncles if you wish.

This is not a record — it’s a living picture of connection.

Once drawn, add details: names, birth or death years, where people lived, significant life events, traits, and stress responses. Let the map breathe.

Next, draw emotional currents. Solid lines for open connection, wavy for tension, broken for distance, and double for enmeshment. Notice what patterns emerge.

What do you observe across generations? Where do you see echoes of your core sentence in your family line? And where do you sense love, resilience, or transformation?

Write what you notice. Let awareness itself begin the healing.

[31:00] Exercise 4 — Reauthoring into Core Blessings

We come to the heart of the work — transforming inherited stories.

Take a few breaths. Feel your body supported by the earth. Remind yourself: I move at the pace of safety.

Bring your core sentence to mind and imagine it traveling backward through your lineage. Who else carried this fear, belief, or burden? Can you see their courage, their longing, their care?

From this place of compassion, begin to transform your story. Beneath every wound is a longing. What truth wants to emerge now?

Reauthor your core sentence into a core blessing. For example:

“I have to do it all by myself” → “I am abundantly supported.”
“I’m not safe” → “I am protected and guided.”
“I’m not enough” → “I am whole as I am.”
“People always leave” → “I am surrounded by enduring love.”

Speak your core blessing aloud.Imagine your ancestors listening, your voice carrying through time as release and renewal.

[37:00] Closing — Integration and Blessing

Take a few slow breaths. You have met the old story and transformed it into new life. This is intergenerational healing — not erasing the past, but changing how it moves through you.

Let your core blessing echo through your lineage, backward and forward. Your story has shifted. You have become a bridge of healing across generations.

Guided and written by Lana, for the Healing Across Generations circle

Recorded as a practice of remembrance, renewal, and belonging. May it serve as medicine for those who came before, and those yet to come.

JOIN US FOR THE NEXT REFUGIA CIRCLE!

FUTURING OURSELVES WHOLE: Radical Practices for Entangled Futures

DECEMBER 3, 2025, 15:00 – 18:00 CET

A Futures Design + Embodied Imagination Experience

The future is not singular. It is plural, layered, systemic, alive, and entangled in parallel lives. It is a living tree, deeply rooted in our past, branching into the present, reaching toward multiple possible tomorrows.

For this coming New Year, let us gather not to choose “one path forward,” but to imagine, design, and embody the multiplicities of futures that call to us. This gathering is an invitation to step into that forest of possibility and explore the metaphor of the Entangled Time Tree, where past, present, and future are always in conversation and connection.