I honestly have no idea how far back this story begins.
A month ago?
20 years ago?
Five generations ago??
It began simply enough, but get settled in for this wild ride of ancestral healing that I've been on this summer.
A little over a month ago, I was chatting with my online friend Dawn Williams from 4 Leaf 4 Life. We were planning to swap Instagram accounts for a day.
At the end of the conversation, she asked if I wanted to swap services with her.
She's a reiki master and offered to give me a remote session in exchange for a property reading, which sounded like a great idea to me.
She asked if there was anything I'd like her to focus on in the session and I had to think about it for a day or so.
But then I had an idea.
I'd had pain in my left hip off and on for at least 20 years and had never found any kind of reason or relief from the pain.
The first time I saw a doctor about it was in my early 20's. He sent me for an x-ray and then said that there was nothing he could see that would be causing the pain.
Since then I've seen many massage therapists and chiropractors, had acupuncture and acupressure and energy healing of all kinds. And everyone says some version of the same thing…
There doesn't seem to be any kind of injury or issue causing the pain.
So I've just lived with it.
Sometimes it's been excruciating, causing me to limp around for weeks on end.
And sometimes it's been barely noticeable. But it's never been completely gone.
So I asked Dawn if she could focus her healing work there and see if there was any intuitive information she could pick up about what was causing the issue.
I had no idea the wave of energy I had just put out into the universe with my request.
A few days after setting the appointment with Dawn, but before my reiki session, I called to make an appointment with a naturopath.
I had been meaning to do this for a couple of years.
Yes, years…
It wasn't particularly urgent, but I hadn't seen a doctor since moving to Montana and I had a variety of things I wanted to discuss.
When I called to make the appointment, the gal who answered the phone was kind of surprised. There had been a cancellation for the following day, if I wanted it.
Typically it would take a month to get in to see the doctor so I booked it and went to see her the next day.
In reviewing my health history, she mentioned that she could help me with the hip pain and asked if I would like an injection of a homeopathic medicine called prolozone that would help my body heal itself.
Uhh, sure.
Why the heck not?
Sure enough, within a day, most of my localized hip pain had disappeared, although all of the muscles around my hip and down my leg were still very sore.
The following day was my reiki session with Dawn. After the healing, she sent me a report detailing the session.
To tell you the truth, I kind of skipped over the first part where she'd detailed her pre-session notes, mostly because they didn't ring a bell for me.
She noted that the left side of the body is related to the feminine and the hips hold beliefs and programming from our lineage.
She had a vision of knitting needles in my hip and said that the pain was related to a deep-rooted set of beliefs or issues that had been adopted by my family, but not by me.
Furthermore, the issue was related to a grandmother and when she worked on my sacral chakra, she found a stack of old contracts that needed to be burned.
I genuinely had no idea what that could be, or which family member she was referring to.
Or the depths of the ancestral healing that was about to occur.
Exactly two weeks later, on the day of the new moon and first eclipse of the month, I was planning out my travel schedule to Salt Lake City later in the month and remembered that I had chatted a few months earlier with someone who reads this blog who lives in the area and wanted to meet up while I was in town.
I checked in with my guides and asked if we should still meet up when I was in town and heard a resounding YES!!!
So I sent her a quick message to let her know what day I would be in town and available for a hike and lunch.
While sending her the message, I heard in my head…
There's something important you have to do together.
Uhh, okay…so I told her that as well.
She asked if I had any more details so I decided to sit down and ask for more information from spirit.
My ancient ancestors on my father's side stepped forward and first impressed upon me how serious the work was that we would be doing.
They informed me that I was being sent back to Utah for ancestral work and asked that I learn more about the family before I traveled.
There was a cord still attached to the earth there that needed to be cut, both to the places they lived and to the church they belonged to.
That cord was still holding energy in my ancestral line.
At this point, I had COMPLETELY forgotten about Dawn's reading from a few weeks before.
And I almost didn't mention this information to Katrina, my friend in Utah, because it seemed like something I could handle on my own.
But since that was the bulk of the information I received, I shared it.
And this is where my head nearly exploded. For the first time.
As it turns out, Katrina and another practitioner she knows are former members of the Mormon church. The same church my family members belonged to.
The two of them have been instructed by their guides on how to remove these cords to the church.
It was much more complicated than I understood.
And somehow, my ancestors had managed to lead me right to the doorstep of the people who could help them.
As they instructed me to do, I reached out to my parents who have done extensive genealogy research over the years to ask about this particular family line.
My paternal grandmother was baptized into the Mormon church but requested to be excommunicated as a young adult when my grandfather complained about the missionaries visiting their home every week.
She wasn't a practicing Mormon and didn't attend church and asked them to stop visiting her. They refused and said it was their duty, so long as she was a member of the church.
The only way to leave the church (at that time) was to be excommunicated, so she filed the paperwork to do so.
And man….I would LOVE to get my hands on the transcripts of that hearing. But I doubt the church will ever release those.
Anyhow, her mother was also a member of the church but none of us recall her attending. The records show though that her husband became a member at some point after they were married so it must have been important enough to her or to her family at that time.
Her parents, my great-great grandparents, had met and lived for some time in Harrisville, Utah.
Harrisville, Utah is present-day Ogden.
The city Katrina lives in.
This is the second time my head nearly exploded.
If you go back one more generation, Martha and Thomas Williams homesteaded in an area just north of Idaho Falls, Idaho in the late 1800's and Martha's mother (as far as I can tell) was the first Mormon of this line.
She came to Utah from England.
Some of my other family members came via Sweden and it was very common in the mid to late 1800's for the church to recruit members throughout Europe.
Once I learned a bit more about the family, I tuned back in to spirit to ask for further details.
I was told that their free will was being violated and that they were waiting for their salvation, which would also release me from the binding.
I was a bit confused as to how I could be bound to a church I never belonged to or how anyone's free will could be violated, particularly in the afterlife, so I asked Katrina and Alyson (the other healer doing this work) to help me understand.
As they have come to learn, the founder of this church was not likely connecting with source energy, but with another energy with different motives.
When church members take their oaths in the temple, there is a very specific part where they bow their heads deeply while pledging themselves for eternity.
That pledge and bow actually hooks their crown chakra into the energy of the church and those oaths remain like a millstone around their necks until they are able to consciously and deliberately remove them, which is a whole lot more difficult in death than in life.
But not impossible.
Basically, their higher self has to make the choice.
The second piece is that the church works very hard to bind people to it after they have passed, even if they weren't members in life.
Their obsession with ancestry is actually an effort for church members to find the names of extended family members who were not members, so they can be brought to the temple and baptized by proxy by a current church member.
When I heard this, I had a very strong reaction.
In fact, I might have shouted something like….THEY CAN'T DO THAT!
That would definitely violate free will.
So I googled it.
In fact, I did so much googling about the church in the past month, I half expected missionaries to knock on my door and ask if I'd like to join.
I asked the guardians to keep an eye out, just in case.
As it turns out, the church admits that they can't just bind people in spirit who don't wish to be bound. They have to make that choice for themselves.
Whew.
But it kept gnawing at me for a few days and then I realized what the problem was.
We have a real issue in our culture with helping our dead get all the way crossed over.
There is an epidemic of earth-bound spirits, especially in North America.
So…if you die and don't cross over and then a family member comes to you in spirit and explains that you haven't found salvation because you didn't join the church, but can choose to do so now….might you choose to do that??
I'll bet that happens all the time.
So it definitely feels a bit tricky to me.
Now that I understood the problem, and that it was a bit more complex that simply cutting cords for them, Alyson offered to help release these oaths for any of my family members who wished to be free of them.
This is part of her life's work and she is sought out in Utah for this healing work by many people who have left the church and are trying to find their footing.
As the date of my road trip got closer, I received more and more downloads from my ancestors and my hip pain kind of ebbed and flowed.
The morning I was to leave, I had a vision of collecting living water from the place I live now to give as an offering in the place where my ancestors lived.
On my way out of town, I stopped at Flathead Lake, asked permission to collect a jar of water, and left an offering of rose petals (which my ancestors had also requested I bring to honor them at their graves).
My first stop was in Coltman, Idaho where some of the family had homesteaded and been buried.
When I located their graves, it was Thomas and Martha who came forward to say that they were busy gathering the family and were very excited about the oath removal.
I wanted to ask them other questions and they had no interest in chatting. They took responsibility for passing these oaths down through the ancestral lines and were very anxious to fix it.
I assured them we would be doing that the following day and also let anyone else in the cemetery know that they were welcome to step forward when we called if they also wanted their oaths removed.
Quite a few heads popped up and seemed interested in the offer.
I later learned that another church teaching is that you have to remain with your body after you die and wait for the resurrection. So if you go to a Mormon cemetery (like this one) you're going to see a whole lot of spirits just hanging around with their old bodies because that's what they've been taught.
I shared the water and rose petals with all of my family members buried there and then continued on my way to Utah.
That evening, after 10 hours in the car, a walk around the town I was staying in and a short (but steep) hike up a hillside to watch the sunset, I realized that I didn't have any stiffness or pain in my hip.
I hadn't even thought about my hip all day, which was pretty unusual.
When I arrived in Ogden and met Katrina and Alyson the next day, we spent quite awhile chatting and discussing all of the different information we'd been receiving before we got down to business.
Then, Alyson and I settled in for a QHHT session that she facilitated. It's basically a hypnosis session where you're able to connect with past lives as well as your higher self and purpose.
But as part of that session, we called forward everyone in spirit who wanted their oaths to the church removed.
A large group of my family showed up, along with some of Alyson's family and another group of people not related to us, but who also wanted their oaths removed. It felt like a giant party.
They were all so excited that it felt kind of like a New Year's Eve countdown and they were just waiting for the ball to drop so they could celebrate.
Alyson explained what we were about to do and asked if there was anyone who did not want their oaths removed.
Two people in the back raised their hands and said….
We didn't know that's what we were coming here for!
Apparently, my ancestors had been light on the details while rounding people up for this ceremony. Ha!
But regardless, we gave them the option to leave and they did.
That's how free will is supposed to work.
For the remaining souls, Alyson called in her guides and performed the ceremony, releasing them of their oaths to the church.
And they were thrilled.
The next morning, we all gathered to hike to a plateau over Ogden to do some energy and grid work we'd also been asked to do.
As it turned out, it was exactly two weeks after I sent the first message to Katrina about visiting.
And it was the day of the full moon and the second eclipse of the month.
I couldn't believe how much had happened and how much healing had occurred in just two short weeks.
After our hike, we visited the cemetery where the rest of my family members were buried outside of Ogden.
Including Thomas' mother who had drowned when their wagon fell through the ice on a January day in 1879.
Her body hadn't been found until the spring and when we found her gravesite, I realized that she hadn't crossed over.
We spoke and I explained what her options were. When the door to transition was opened, I saw my grandmother, her great-great-great granddaughter was there to meet her.
While we were there, in another Mormon cemetery with so many spirits, Katrina explained that they did not have to remain with their bodies and also gave them the opportunity to transition.
Many chose to do so, although some were a bit suspicious of us (which would be fair since we just turned up there out of the blue).
I asked Katrina who they would trust, since I'd learned that Archangels aren't really a “thing” in the Mormon church and Archangels are my usual go-to transition guides. She thought that Jesus would be a trusted friend to these spirits so we asked for him to assist.
That definitely did the trick and quite a few more chose to move on.
On my way home from Utah, I decided to drive by the land that was homesteaded by the Williams family and there happened to be an empty parcel (that was for sale no less) that was part of their original property.
I parked my car and walked onto the land and connected with my ancestors once more.
The urgency and anxiety I had felt at the cemetery on the first day was gone and they told me they were at peace.
I offered the last of the water in my jar in gratitude and then headed back home.
Two weeks have passed since then and my hip pain is still gone. Hopefully for good.
As it turns out, Dawn was right…I was feeling the remnants of ancestral contracts that were not mine.
And in releasing them, I too was released.
I feel the need to add a bit of a post script to this story.
To tell you the truth, I'm a little nervous about sharing this story on the blog to be picked up by the Google machine and found by people using who knows what search terms to arrive here.
Some of what I've written could be considered inflammatory so I want to make it clear that I have no axe to grind with the church, specifically.
In fact, I knew almost nothing about it or its teachings six weeks ago.
This is a true account of my personal healing journey and I've tried to share it as honestly and accurately as possible.
That being said, there is far more that I've learned that is just too much to share here so if you have questions or are looking for resources to assist with oath removal, feel free to send me an email. I can connect you with the appropriate people.
I understand that it's an incredibly delicate process when you choose to leave the church, but there are many resources available from those who've been through it themselves.
Furthermore, one of my core beliefs for this website and blog is that it is always a safe place for anyone experiencing a spiritual awakening. I always welcome questions and discussion in the comments, but please know that I delete all hostile or inappropriate comments.
All are welcome here to learn, explore and respectfully share your own experiences.
