“Curse” is a word that causes reactions from skepticism to exorcism. I didn’t believe in curses for most of my life, although I would moan to anyone who would listen that I felt like I was cursed.
Like Shleprock, a dark cloud always hung over my head, raining on my parade, peeing in my Wheaties. No matter how hard I worked or how hard I tried, I just couldn’t succeed at anything. I’d get passed over for promotions, I was living hand to mouth, people didn’t treat me very well, my health was just bad enough to keep me from enjoying life but not bad enough to merit someone else taking care of me … and on and on.
By outward appearances, my life probably looked like everyone else’s, but inside I felt awful … a failure to thrive. I had panic attacks and was oftentimes taken down by disabling vertigo. I felt like I had PTSD, like I was constantly flinching to avoid being punched or kicked.
I must have eventually prayed to the right god, or enough generations had passed (seven generations, just like the myths say), because about seven years ago I “just happened” to get a job with The Shift Network. I “just happened” to hear one of Shift’s most respected faculty, one of the most highly regarded teachers of shamanism today, Sandra Ingerman describing the symptoms of a curse. Those symptoms are, essentially, what I described above. I ticked every box. I had all the symptoms.
Jane Burns, an expert in Celtic Shamanism, has this to say about curses:
Many curses and spells are put on us quite unintentionally. We can even curse ourselves by adopting a belief that we cannot do or have something. Self-fulfilling prophecy is a type of curse. While curses do not entail the loss of soul or personal power, they do block our access to what is inherently ours, so that the end result is energetically similar.
As Jane implies, there doesn’t have to be anything magical or metaphysical about a curse. It could simply be the result of feeling guilty about bad actions. This changes our behaviors and outlook on life, which get passed down to our offspring. Or, it could be the result of someone saying they’re cursing us and us believing it, and behaving accordingly. And, sure, there is a lot to be said about the energetic impact of the magical or metaphysical aspects of a curse, but we’ll go into that more in Book 3, Kind Miss.
I asked Sandra Ingerman what to do about this. She referred me to someone local who had trained with her, a woman named Barb, who did a shamanic journey with me. (You can find a list of people Sandra recommends here.)
Barb told me that during the journey she saw an ancestor of mine in Scotland, a high mucky muck (my words, not hers) at a certain period of time, who had caused harm to someone in a lower station. In the spirit of revenge, that person blasted him with a curse.
While I found this interesting and had my fingers crossed that her curse removal process would actually help, I still doubted whether curses are real or that they’re effective, especially after hundreds of years.
When I got home, I logged in to Ancestry.com. There I found in my family tree an ancestor who was a high mucky muck during the time frame she gave me. I hadn’t paid much attention to this person before as it was so far back and the connection hadn’t yet been proven with a paper trail.
I paid attention now. As I dove in to his story, I discovered that he was involved in a famous witch trial. He and his family were the accusers of five people who were tried and executed and he had, indeed, been cursed. It was documented. It was a generational curse, to suffer as the accused suffered … a curse by fire.
Wait a minute, I thought. There have been an awful lot of deaths and injuries by fire in my family’s history.
Aside from the Castle Gate Mine Disaster, during which three ancestors died in a fiery explosion, in more recent years my grandma died as a result of a kitchen fire. My uncle’s house over the years had plenty of fires … so many that he became the volunteer fire chief in his town, and his entire family trained as EMTs and firefighters. He had a fire truck parked in his pole barn.
Still, mistakes can be made with genealogy research, especially tracing so far back.
But then, what are the odds that this information would already be in my tree, waiting to be discovered at the time when I had the shamanic journey? In the realm of spirits and shamanism, there are no coincidences.
None of this man’s children had children (was that because of the curse???), so the bad juju would have shot out sideways into the lives and offspring of his kin. We’re related via that sideways kin, along with thousands of other people on Earth who are offshoots of this family.
I’m not the only person affected by this. We’re all over the world. Fortunately, the severe effects of the curse have been watered down by now. I may not die in a fire, but I certainly suffer from hot flashes. My mom was burned up with radiation cancer treatments, before she died. In the generations before her, it was pretty gnarly.
The next question was, if this is true what do I do about it? I’m only one of many related to the original source.
That may be so, but I just happen to be perfectly placed and well equipped to dig in. I have access to some of the world’s most prominent experts in the topic of ancestral healing and generational trauma, which includes “curses”, through my work with Shift. In fact, I conceived, co-produce and host the annual Ancestral Healing Summit for Shift. I also conceived, co-produce and host the annual Beyond the Veil Summit for Shift, where I get to interview experts on what lies beyond the veil between the worlds, and how to communicate with those on the other side.
And, I’ve been bitten hard by the genealogy bug and it was a joy to dig up the details hidden away in dusty, old records. The trail of breadcrumbs left behind by my ancestors clearly pointed me in this direction. They wanted me to find and tell the story.
I researched the heck out of it. I dug into the story and wouldn’t let go, like a terrier on a rat. I traveled to the locations involved and became part of the story. I visited the site of the witch trial executions and asked how to make amends. I started to write a series of books about this journey, the first part of which is told in Castle Gate.
Book 2, A Curse by Fire ,will tell the fully researched story of the witch trial and the origin of the curse. Book 3, Kind Miss, will wrap it up in modern-day America where the curse is discovered and dismantled by descendants of the original accusers.
No one on Earth has a clean slate. We all have something like this in our family histories — this just happens to be one I share with thousands of others who are related by cosmic threads to the actions of a group of misguided people, back in the days of the witch trials.
Yes, these tales are being told out of order. That’s the way they were delivered to me to tell. After all, the 100 year anniversary of the March 8, 1924 Castle Gate Mine Disaster is 2024. What better time to publish Book 1 and begin the healing that will affect people all over the world?
This video was recorded for the 2023 Ancestral Healing Summit, where
Sandra and I talked about the nature of curses and how to deal with them.
Castle Gate - The Book 