By Sheila Marina, Planet of Peace Energy Healing
She had done the work.
Years of reflection, growth, self-awareness. She understood her patterns. She could name her triggers. She had read the books, sat in the therapist’s chair, and arrived at genuine insight about who she was and why she responded to the world the way she did.
And yet something persisted. A feeling in her body that resisted every effort to resolve it. An emotional undertow that pulled her back into familiar territory no matter how far she walked away from it.
In her session, we followed her body’s intelligence to the source.
It was 690 years old.
The client was a woman in her thirties. Through the Emotion Code, we identified a series of inherited trapped emotions traveling through her maternal lineage — passed from mother to daughter across 23 generations, originating approximately 690 years ago with a 19-year-old ancestor who experienced a profound and violent trauma.
The emotions that ancestor carried — horror, disgust, low self-esteem — had never been released. They traveled forward through every generation, accumulating quietly in each body that received them, shaping nervous systems and emotional responses in ways no one in the lineage could have recognized or named.
By the time those emotions reached my client, they had been traveling for nearly seven centuries. And her body was holding them as though they had happened to her.
In a very real sense, to her body, they had.
The idea that we carry our ancestors’ experiences may sound like a spiritual claim. It is also a scientific one.
The field of epigenetics — the study of how environmental factors and lived experience influence gene expression across generations — has established that trauma leaves biological markers that are heritable. Research conducted at institutions including Mount Sinai Hospital and Emory University has demonstrated that the physiological effects of significant stress can be passed from parent to child through mechanisms that sit above the DNA sequence itself — changing how genes are read and expressed without altering the underlying code.
What this means in plain language: your grandmother’s experience of grief, fear, or shock could be influencing how your nervous system responds to stress today. The emotional weight she carried — especially if it was never processed, never spoken about, never resolved — may have left an imprint that traveled forward biologically, arriving in your body before you took your first breath.
Energy healing has been working with this understanding for decades, long before the scientific language caught up. In the Emotion Code and Body Code systems developed by Dr. Bradley Nelson, inherited trapped emotions are identified with precision — the specific emotion, the ancestor of origin, the number of generations the emotion has traveled — and released from the client and from every generation in the lineage simultaneously.
The release moves in both directions. Forward and backward through time.
Once you begin to see generational patterns, they become remarkably clear.
A family where the women carry a quiet, persistent anxiety that no one can fully explain — present in the grandmother, the mother, and now the daughter, each expressing it differently but each recognizing it as familiar.
A lineage where the men struggle with intimacy, with vulnerability, with allowing themselves to be fully seen — a pattern that appears in the grandfather’s stoicism, the father’s emotional distance, and the son’s difficulty sustaining close relationships.
A family where a specific physical symptom — digestive trouble, chronic tension in the shoulders, recurring headaches — appears in multiple generations, always without a satisfying medical explanation.
These patterns are often attributed to learned behaviour, to family culture, to “just the way we are.” And learned behaviour is certainly part of the picture. What energy healing reveals is that there is frequently an energetic layer beneath the behavioural one — a trapped emotional frequency, inherited and carried in the body, that predisposes each generation to express the same pattern in their own way.
The behaviour is the surface. The trapped emotion is the root.
In my client’s session — the one that traced back 690 years — we released the inherited trapped emotions from her body, from her mother, from her grandmother, and from every generation in the maternal line back to the original ancestor. Each emotion was identified individually: horror, disgust, low self-esteem, and the energetic imprint of the original trauma itself. Each was released through a series of intentional energetic passes.
This is something I have witnessed consistently across 35 years of practice: when an inherited emotion is released, the shift is felt across the entire lineage. Clients frequently report that family members — who were never told about the session — begin behaving differently. A mother who was always anxious becomes noticeably calmer. A father who was emotionally distant initiates a conversation he has never initiated before. A sibling reaches out after years of silence.
These reports are anecdotal. They are also remarkably consistent. The energetic field of a family is interconnected, and when a significant emotional frequency is removed from that field, the entire system recalibrates.
This is also true in the other direction. In my client’s session, we identified that the trapped emotions from 690 years ago had traveled forward through every daughter in the lineage — including my client’s own daughter. When the release was performed, it cleared the emotion from the daughter as well, without the daughter being present or aware.
The healing moves through the same channels the wound traveled. It simply moves in the opposite direction.
Here is what I want you to sit with:
If you have done significant personal work — therapy, meditation, journaling, self-reflection — and something still persists beneath all of that effort, it is worth asking a different question.
Rather than what happened to me — ask: what happened before me?
The answer may live in a generation you never met, in a story that was never told, in an experience that left a mark so deep it traveled through time and arrived in your body as something you assumed was simply part of who you are.
It is part of your lineage. It is part of your inheritance. And it can be released — gently, precisely, and completely — so that what remains is genuinely, entirely yours.
This is a quiet practice. It requires only a few minutes and your own willingness.
Sit comfortably. Place one hand on your heart. Close your eyes.
Think of your mother. Then her mother. Then her mother’s mother. Allow the lineage to extend backward in your imagination — as far as it wants to go. You do not need to know names or faces. Simply allow the sense of a line of women, or a line of men, stretching back through time.
Offer this, silently:
I honour what you carried. I honour the strength it took to carry it. I am willing to release what is ready to be released — for myself, and for all of us.
Breathe slowly. Notice what you feel. You may feel warmth, a sense of settling, a quiet emotion rising and passing. Whatever arrives is welcome.
This practice does not replace a session. It opens a door. It signals to your subconscious mind — and to the energetic field of your lineage — that you are ready.
If something in this post has resonated — if you have long suspected that what you carry is older than your own experience — I invite you to explore this work more deeply.
My article Generational Healing and the Ancestral Nervous System — How Emotional Inheritance Lives in the Body offers a grounded exploration of how inherited emotional patterns live in the nervous system and what becomes possible when they are addressed at the root.
When you feel ready to follow your own lineage to its source, sessions are available in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom.
Your ancestors carried what they could. You are the one who gets to set it down.
Sheila Marina is the founder of Planet of Peace Energy Healing and a certified Emotion Code, Body Code, and Belief Code Practitioner with over 35 years of experience. She sees clients in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom. planetofpeace.org
