The Path to Forgotten Freedom: Healing Unresolved Ancestral Trauma by Nicola Smalley, Buzzard Press, 2022.

Ok, full disclaimer – I mentored Nicola to write this book.

Nicola was my first coaching client with Writing & Thriving, as we were both setting out on new adventurous pathways that took us through the first lockdown in early 2020. Writing with the seasonal cycles and energies of the Wheel of the Year, Nicola brought her book into being from announcing her intention at Samhain 2019 to writing the full first draft between Imbolc and Lammas 2020. Great going! Nicola writes about her writing process in the book itself, and you can hear what she has to say about the process in her testimonial video here: https://youtu.be/LON-I4L8eY0

So I’ve been part of this book and was often the first reader of many or most sections as they were being written. That said, I don’t think my obvious involvement really changes how I feel about this book or what I’m about to say.

I loved this book from the first time I read it in its early stages, and couldn’t wait to re-read it again when it was published at Samhain 2022. I’d said from the beginning that I felt this was a powerful project, and I knew that I wanted to get a copy for my mum as soon as it was available – since the ancestral stories and healing that Nicola presents felt so resonant for me that I wanted to share her insights and practices with my own family to support us in our ancestral healing journey, too.

I bought a copy for my mum and gave it to her for Christmas. She’s still reading it – she’s finding the historical traumas very resonant and is “looking forward to getting to the healing”!

For me, there’s healing throughout this book – sometimes in the form of cathartic tears shed at the tragedy of Catherine’s story, which Nicola [re]constructs and tells so evocatively – and sometimes in the form of the shamanic and ceremonial practices that Nicola describes and teaches from her own experience as a guide and mentor.

This book is structured using four aspects of the ancestral healing practices that Nicola herself worked with throughout her decade-long enquiry into the story of her great-great-great-grandmother Catherine Riley. Nicola combined genealogical and archival research with core shamanic practices, storytelling and Embodied Relational Therapy to work through and heal the ancestral trauma she had inherited from Catherine’s forced separation from her land and family. A fifth aspect – writing her own story into the book as a form of autoethnographic writing – came up as an unexpected healing modality through the writing process itself.

Each chapter tells a part of the story of Catherine Riley’s life in evocative and emotional detail. Nicola’s research for these stories combines historical and biographical data with intentional ancestral visits to working museums, cities, towns, and landscapes, and includes information that is revealed to her through dreams and shamanic practices. Following the story is an account of the political history that shapes Catherine’s personal narrative, Nicola’s own experience of the ways that the ancestral traumas have played out and shown up in her life, and suggestions and explanations of core shamanic practices to support with specific aspects of the healing process.

Nicola is generous and open-hearted throughout – she gives a rich abundance of resources for anyone wishing to follow up on the stories, practices or histories that are presented here, and she cites many respected writers from the full-spectrum of fields that this book touches on.

Nicola says, “This is my methodology for people who, like me, want to find the names of their ancestors through genealogical research, discover their core language and rewrite the stories using the ancient practices of the shamanic toolkit.”

And that’s exactly what this book does. Nicola so carefully curates and weaves together these – perhaps seemingly disparate – aspects of her own practice of ancestral healing, to share those practices with others like her, who might find this same mix of modalities supportive for their own healing.

And it is.

Not only the practices that Nicola shares here, but also – for me – reading the stories themselves, both Catherine’s story and Nicola’s own story. I found so much resonance in the stories that I do feel a cathartic and vicarious sense of healing has taken place just from reading the book – though I know I could also go deeper by following some of the practices and guidance Nicola expertly lays out in the pages. I’m comfortable with all the shamanic work and the writing practices, but I have a resistance to the genealogical research that I sense would bear fruit if I am prepared to follow it and face it. I’m particularly curious about the story of my paternal great-grandmother, who I always assumed to have gypsy heritage – and I kind of want to find out if that’s true…

Nicola writes about ‘core language’ and touches on the field of epigenetics to explore the ways that we each inherit stories and beliefs about ourselves – our self-worth, our sense of entitlement, our relationship to work and to the earth and to each other, for example – as encoded ‘core language’ in our DNA. Unresolved trauma gets trapped and stored in the body, and if it isn’t healed, integrated or released, it gets passed to the next generation, and so on.

Nicola explores the indigenous concept of ‘seven-generations healing’ and – as the stories in her book show – what our generation is now being called upon so urgently to heal is the trauma we have inherited from our seventh-generation ancestors’ forced separation from their land and families. Nicola shows how this story is one that’s repeated around the globe, and that it adversely affects certain groups of people more than others – particularly women, people of colour, working class people, and all those whose indigenous ancestors were forcibly removed from their land to make way for progress, productivity and corporate greed to enrich the few.

She shows how, in Britain, this finds one of its earliest forms of encoded expression through the Domesday book, written after the Norman invasion as a document of legislation to determine who (specifically which Lord or Nobleman or Aristocratic crony) owned which piece and parcel of land – which had previously belonged to the people themselves who had farmed, worked and lived on that land for generations.

This – in time – becomes land-clearance, enforced famine, poverty, forced migration, city-slums, workhouses, orphanages, and the silent shame of seven generations who have endured and survived until we, here, now, at last have the tools we need to stand up and say for ourselves and all our ancestors: “Enough”.

The Path to Forgotten Freedom is a book that gives us those tools. And it is high time we used them. Nicola’s book is a powerful tool in our own reclamation of self-worth, self-care and self-responsibility. She teaches us how to reprogram our own core language and conditioning – through recognising the stories of our ancestors and rewriting our own life stories by consciously choosing different and more empowered responses to the situations we are facing. She gives us a path to follow and guides us along the way. And this, for me, is a path worth walking – for it not only changes our own lives, but supports the healing of those who have walked before us and those who are yet to come; as well as enabling us to touch this world in a more empowered way that subtly shifts and changes the present reality that we are always co-creating.

You can find out more about The Path to Forgotten Freedom and Order Your Copy, here: https://thewayofthebuzzard.co.uk/books/