Mike and Chaya sit down with Anu Dayal-Gulati, a certified ancestral healing practitioner, to explore how inherited emotional patterns can create subconscious blocks in our lives. Anu explains how everything from our relationships to our finances can be impacted by these generational traumas, including how they can uniquely affect neurodivergent minds, and provides practical tools to begin the healing process.
Mike and Chaya sit down with Anu Dayal-Gulati, a certified ancestral healing practitioner, to explore how inherited emotional patterns can create subconscious blocks in our lives. Anu explains how everything from our relationships to our finances can be impacted by these generational traumas, including how they can uniquely affect neurodivergent minds, and provides practical tools to begin the healing process.
"One of the ways in which the universe speaks to us is through patterns."
"Forgiveness is actually just letting go of the expectation that someone... is going to say sorry, going to make amends, going to recognize what you've gone through."
"When you cut your chains, you free yourself. When you cut your roots, you die."
Anu Dayal-Gulati, Ph.D is an ancestral healing practitioner, certified flower essence therapist, and author of the book Heal Your Ancestral Roots: Release the Family Patterns That Hold You Back. She specializes in helping clients recognize and break deep-seated ancestral patterns to foster healing and reconnection with their personal energy. Combining her 15 years in finance and academia with a holistic, spiritual approach, Dr. Anu bridges analytical perspectives with intuitive emotional healing practices.
Dr. Anu has guided clients for over a decade, offering private sessions with customized flower essence blends, workshops, online courses, and speaking engagements that empower individuals to set boundaries, release limiting beliefs, and discover self-growth. Her compassionate and accessible approach has earned her international recognition.
Mike 00:31
Hello there. I'm Mike.
Chaya
I'm Chaya.
Mike
And today we'd like to welcome Anu Dayal-Gulati, a certified ancestral healing practitioner who helps people break free from inherited emotional patterns. Through her practical empowerment tools, she guides clients to address deep -rooted patterns that may be carried through generations, helping them set healthy boundaries and reclaim their personal energy. Welcome to the show.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 00:57
Thank you so much. Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Mike and Chai, both for having me on your show.
Chaya 01:02
You're welcome, Anu. And I'm very intrigued with the topic and inherited ancestral patterns. What does that mean? If you can enlighten us about what it is and how it shows up in our daily lives without a knowledge, maybe. Yeah,
Anu Dayal-Gulati 01:22
so I... I do believe that one of the ways in which the universe speaks to us is through patterns. And we don't often think about them in our lives. But, you know, if you think about something that you want really badly in your life and you might have tried really hard to get it and you've done everything you can and it might be, you know, financial success or some kind of personal or professional success. It could be, you know, a certain kind of relationship or a better relationship. Sometimes even with your parents or siblings, it's not necessarily just a romantic partner. And you feel like you try your best and something feels stuck. That often has ancestral roots. And then there can also be patterns that run in your family, like emotional patterns of shutting down, sarcasm, anger management. And also there can be patterns in a family of... you know, constantly moving, not having a home or patterns of like financial bankruptcy, starting a business and not succeeding or in a workplace, like backstabbing bosses that don't support or appreciate or acknowledge you. So there's all sorts of patterns, relationships where you feel betrayed or taken advantage of. And you don't always think about it, but underlying that pattern, something is speaking to you and that something, could be ancestral. And so it's actually an invitation to look inward and to shift and release that pattern. So that's how I see it.
Chaya 02:56
So it's something subconscious and we don't even realize that we have it is what I'm thinking. And it shows up and you're facing the same pattern of obstacles. It's not happening. You desire it, but it's not happening. And you're saying that the gap between the want and the actions possibly could be because of ancestral trauma. Yes,
Anu Dayal-Gulati 03:26
that is the ancestral block that you're carrying. We all carry, to some extent, different kinds of ancestral blocks. So we are all carrying that. And the way in which it becomes visible is through the constant roadblock and repetition and pattern. You know, that's what makes the ancestral trauma visible to us. And we can then choose, if we bring that to our attention, we can then choose to work with it and release it. So
Chaya 03:57
I think the key is to first recognize it, that it's happening. And I think over a period of time, you can notice the pattern. And why is the same thing happening to me? Why am I? attracting the same kind of partner, the same kind of boss, the same kind of a situation. And it keeps happening to me. Why am I so unlucky is what people might think. Yeah.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 04:23
Yeah. But actually what it's doing is the sheer repetition brings to our awareness, our blind spot or, you know. What we are not able to see otherwise. And often it's an emotional pattern that we are repeating. You know, like I had a friend who felt that she always got a boss who never supported her, never saw her work, like never gave her credit. And it's like she felt like, you know, she was unlucky, like the new universe was against her. But actually what she was doing is she would. hold herself back, like not claim credit for her work and always looking for that support and validation from outside. But really, the moment you can start to give that to yourself, then you have a bit of freedom. You're no longer looking for something outside and you start to reclaim some of the power that you've leaked or given away to somebody else. And that's, you know. Those are things that get built up over time from childhood, from parenting, from our life experiences. But our journey back to wholeness is part of reclaiming all of that power that has been taken away from us when we were too young to know any better. So
Chaya 05:36
with the example you gave, what could have possibly happened in their past? I know there could be different scenarios. It can happen in school. It could happen with families. So what kind of messages might have been given to that child that it actually plays out as an adult and they don't even realize it and the parents are gone and they leave this trauma behind, which nobody intentionally does it because parents love their children. There's no doubt about that.
Chaya 06:16
the trauma gets passed on because they are wounded themselves. Yeah.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 06:21
And I really like how you said it. You said parents love their children and everyone loves their kids. And I think what happens, one of the first things that happens when trauma happens in a family, and we're talking about layers of trauma. right ancestral trauma then you live in society things happen there's war famine bankruptcy migration immigration you know all sorts of things happen so that can be overlaid with whatever happens in a family and the one thing that gets lost is the expression of love so while we may love and if you ask a parent even if you ask a parent who's very authoritarian or you know very big believer in discipline. And he asked him, do you feel you've been a good parent? He said, yes, I've been a good parent. I feel like I've done my best to raise good kids. But the question is, is it more important to be the good parent or what you define as good? Or is it more important to be a loving parent so that your child knows and feels loved for who they are? And I think we confuse the two things, you know, so that's kind of where it starts because, and sometimes I feel it's put such a burden on mothers because in the ancestral healing training that I did, one of the first things we talk about is the connection between the mother and the baby. And many times that connection can be imperfect. The mother can be hospitalized when the baby is born. The baby can be hospitalized when the mother is born. They can be too many siblings. They could be a sibling who's sick or, you know. But what happens is the mother is not fully available for the child, emotionally available for the child, for the mirroring to happen. You know, the baby smiles, the mother smiles, mother smiles, the baby smiles, the baby cries, the mother like holds it. patterning of mirroring and attachment to make the baby feel secure, that gets broken for so many reasons. And the mother herself may have been not able to receive that from her own mother. So again, the patterning is interrupted. So that movement towards closeness and security gets interrupted. And children, babies pick that up early on. And that sets in motion this idea of there's something wrong with me. And this process of not trusting yourself, not believing in yourself, you know, which then goes on over time. And as you don't have that, you start to search for it outside. But the school and the workplace is not going to replace what you couldn't get. And it becomes our life journey to sort of reclaim that power. We're all entitled to reclaiming it and owning it.
Mike 09:17
It touches on so many things that I often feel, especially in my own life, really reaching for the external for everything I didn't get. That's something true of pretty much all of us. Even if we did maybe get something that we felt like was enough, there's always this feeling of needing something else fulfilled. There's something more out there. And our jump is always to go to the external for those things. It's never to... to validate ourselves or really look inwards for us, really look inwards for ourselves and introspect into what we specifically need and what we need to create. And I think all part of that is also what we need to excise in so many ways, especially when you go back to families and sometimes excising members of your family is kind of part of the thing that you didn't know you desperately needed. So that kind of like goes back to playing into. boundaries and creating those and the importance of building boundaries, not only for the other people or negative, unhealthy things, but also kind of with ourselves and our own viewpoints.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 10:21
Yeah, yeah, you know, you're so right, because you talked about the boundaries. And one of the things that happens from childhood is our boundaries are getting ruptured. And we don't know it, you go to a school and you know, the teachers like you got to sit down, you got to do this, you got to conform, you got to do things their way. In a family, you got to do things the way the family tells you to do it. So if you have the loving parents, there's room for being different. Otherwise, if a mother is insecure, there's also a lot of like, this is what you got to do. And in a lot of Eastern societies or homogenous societies, there's a lot of pressure to conform. And I think that's one of the things that insists in certain societies. You have to conform in certain societies, like in America, there's more freedom of independence and thinking. And yet I look at a lot of school kids, they all want to look the same, dress the same, sound the same. You know, it's a lot of pressure for conformity. So if you feel different, think differently, look different, want to be different, the first thing you're going to get is there's something wrong with me. And so to start that journey.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 11:33
into reclaiming all of those parts of yourself that you've given away to somebody else. I mean, I felt sometimes the best analogy I heard was in the Harry Potter where he, you know, of course, in that case, he's recovering bits of somebody else's soul. But it's like our soul, bits of our power is being held by so many different people over time. Like, can we reclaim it all and be whole again? And I think that's... In some ways, although we look at the challenges as like, I don't want them, I hate it. There's so much resistance to it. In some way, it's an invitation to go back to who we can possibly be. And that brings a certain amount of peace and calm. And
Chaya 12:19
the act of reclaiming the power within a neurodivergent community looks like they are being rebellious.
Chaya 12:30
I looked, I was always, I've been this quiet rebel reclaiming my power. That's exactly what I was doing and still doing my duty in my way. And that's been my life journey. So when I was a teenager, of course, it looked like I was arguing with my parents, with my mother, who had a lot of rules. Anytime people gave me rules, I wanted to break it because the rules were putting me in a box and not giving me freedom. They didn't allow me to just be wild and express myself the way I wanted to. I was finally able to do that with my art because nobody was policing me. And I found this beautiful rhythm.
Chaya 13:24
So with neurodivergent children, ADHDers, autism, they're just different from the society. And we experience it a lot more because the world is trying to put us in a box. Even though the parent could be neurodivergent, because most likely could be the case, they might not recognize that themselves.
Chaya 13:48
might unknowingly be passing on the trauma that they experienced in their childhood onto the child. I saw that myself, doing that myself to my son until I recognized it. Because I went to a very strict school. My mother was a bit strict. She had rules. I'm glad for the structure she gave. They were rules. So I blindly started doing the same. And when my son rebelled, I realized that was not me. That was actually not me. I was doing it because it was done to me. And that recognition is so important because that recognition is what transformed our relationship today to something beautiful. So,
Anu Dayal-Gulati 14:37
yeah. And so two things that you've said that I want to touch on. You said your mother made the rules and you rebelled. And then I've seen clients that I've worked with who have internalized those rules so much. And they've arrived at this stage in life. And it's like, I just want to break free. I've just had enough. But it's been so internalized and socialized that literally their voice has been choked out of them. And that is also hard to see. But nothing is ever lost.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 15:11
reparented your son. And I hear from women I talk to that they're like, I don't want to do this to my kid. I want my son to have a different relationship with the person he or she, you know, ends up with. So there are things like that. But the second point that I want to talk to you about, which is structure. You know, when we talked about like how love is expressed. how it gets lost through trauma in terms of like the child feeling love for who they are, for what they bring. And I heard this word and I actually fell in love with it, a secure framework for a relationship. And especially with a mother -child bond, you know, the act and sort of we have these routines for kids, right? It's bath time. You get on your PJs, you get into bed, the parent might sit next to you, read a book. you know, kiss you goodnight. These are all like routines. A child comes home from school, there may be like a snack. The routine creates like a structure of safety and a structure of love. And so if the child is really upset, you know, now we know with so much information on parenting, how we can respond when we're not trying to fix the problem, we're trying to acknowledge how they feel. But the secure framework. the acknowledgement of the feelings that it's okay to feel this way. It's okay to be upset. It's okay to be sad. But in our society, whatever the person may be, whether they're neurodivergent or not, it's just not okay to feel. You're never given permission to feel. So if you feel something, it's like there must be something wrong with me. I'm too sensitive. I'm too emotional. If you're grieving, it's like, you know, you got to get over it. You got to move on. You don't get over grief. You don't get over somebody. You just start to live like you make peace with it. You create an acceptance in your life of your reality as it exists. And the grief can still creep in. So but the messaging that we get, and especially I think even for boys, sometimes it's harder with that messaging, the lack of a secure framework. We're like. I mean, sometimes I wonder how we all actually function to some extent. It's crazy. How do we make a living? How do we go about our day? How do we end up having kids and parenting when we actually are dealing with so much? And that is miraculous, really, that we end up doing all of that. Yeah,
Chaya 17:44
we're carrying our traumas, right? If you don't work with it and flush it out, it shows up unknowingly.
Chaya 17:52
That's why we have to do that inner work and separate the shadow. And I think the clue definitely is pain. And it's by recognizing the feelings and not shoving it under the carpet, right? So it's because they have clues. They have clues. And anxiety has clues. For me, I had so much anxiety because of all these rules.
Chaya 18:19
My soul is a freedom loving soul. And for someone like that, it was very constraining. But it was important for me to recognize that and separate the two and free myself. I didn't need anybody's permission. I just had to recognize it and just let my soul free. And I think if you have pure intentions, you don't have to worry. Intentions is everything. Yeah. That's how you just set yourself free.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 18:52
Yeah. And I think when we do something, you know, if a child is crying and we're like, okay, here's another toy or have a cookie or something, we're doing something reactively, something that we have either learned to do or not something we've thought through. Is this the best action at this time? Is it in? Is this how I respond? Is it love that weakens or is it love that strengthens? But when we start to respond intentionally, we actually set in place a whole new dynamic, a whole new pattern of interaction. And we can start to shift the path. Because although I do ancestral healing work, a big component of that ancestral healing work is accepting the past.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 19:45
Your mother wasn't the way she was. Your father wasn't the way you wanted him to be. You cannot go back in time and be read to or be seen on the dinner table or be loved or you can't stop the bullying on the playground. You can't go back in time and change any of that. But what is the meaning that you make of it today? And how can you rewrite that story in a way that empowers you and takes you forward to answer that calling in your life, what you were really born for. That's that process and that journey because your ancestors could have moved and you end up without family and then your father dies and your mother is a single mother. But all of that happened. But a lot of it also shapes you into who you can become. So we say in ancestral healing work that only an adult can leave the family of origin. And the adult... takes responsibility for their life. So you don't even have to do any work if you decide, I am no longer a victim. I am responsible for my life. And I live intentionally, which is the part that when you live responsibly, you live intentionally. And you're actually free. You are free to create what you want. But we're often burdened by our stories, our narratives, and what we've made out of it. That's what we are taking forward. And
Chaya 21:12
it's so important to forgive. Forgive the incidents that have happened in the past, because maybe there was lack of awareness. Maybe nobody told them. Maybe they were carrying their trauma. Who knows? We can sometimes figure it all out. And so in our hearts, we have to forgive. And that's the only way you can reclaim the whole. heart the complete energy in your heart and then move forward because you're otherwise you're not functioning at 100 energy you're you're because there's that shadow energy that's still there right maybe it's 10 person maybe it's 20 maybe it's 50 person and it shows up unknowingly it shows up and so forgiveness is so important even though it's it can be very hard yeah and
Anu Dayal-Gulati 22:06
when I work with people on forgiveness. One of the things I say about forgiveness is just like, you know, forgiveness is actually just letting go of the expectation that someone, your parent or anybody else is going to say sorry, going to make amends, going to recognize what you've gone through, is going to acknowledge how you feel. Like it's letting go of all those expectations because that may never happen. You know, oftentimes people have said, You know, if there has been like an abuse in the family, the mother refuses to say it or the father, you know, doesn't say anything or goes. It doesn't happen. That forgiveness that we are looking where someone will make amends for what has happened. It just doesn't happen.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 22:56
It's not that it can never happen, but in most cases it doesn't happen. But if you keep waiting for that to have happened, you never get closure. But when you let go of the expectation and you forgive, as you say, you can move on because now you've pulled all your energy back into yourself. So that's a really powerful way of moving forward intentionally. One
Mike 23:19
of the best pieces of advice I ever got was family will disappoint you. Not can disappoint you, but will disappoint you. Because I think there is that upholding. And it's mostly just from old generational family propaganda, I guess is a good way of putting it. Those places and those people are sacred and they're the safe place to go and they can't hurt you and talk or think poorly about them. That means there's something wrong with you. It's ways of externalizing people who are outliers, essentially. And you do have to kind of shift your thinking with that and kind of prepare yourself. There's a lot that you're probably not going to get. And it's really hard and hurtful to let go of your yearning. For that, from that particular person or from those people, you know, if it's a bunch like being a being a black sheep is a very common trope for a reason, because that's how we tend to deal with, unfortunately, people who do seem like outliers or do show some kind of expression outside of those circles. And you long for the acceptance of them at the same time while also being shunned by them. And you kind of have to let go of the fact that. You're not going to get that from them. It would be great if it happened. If you had acceptance, it would be great if you got an apology for all the horrible things that happened. It would be great if you were seen. Yeah. But there's also a great possibility you will never be seen. And to heal, you have to let go of that yearning.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 24:53
Yeah. And that is so hard, right? The black sheep, the scapegoat, you know, there is the golden child that the black sheep or the scapegoat is compared against. It is really hard. And I think somewhere in this, and when you talk about the yearning, there's the idea that we're doing this alone. And it's very hard to do this alone. And when I mean alone, I think, you know, we often think of resources as in... support professionals or friends or maybe the one family member or maybe an adult who was very supportive. But I mean, I'm an immigrant and I've moved five, six times. Each time the move was really hard. I didn't even have a network and I lost my sense of identity. There was just so many challenges. But over the years, I've come to realize the support that we're looking for or the support that we can access is actually a little different. And so there's an African proverb that says, when you cut your chains, you free yourself. When you cut your roots, you die. And to me, that really sort of encapsulates this ancestral healing journey. Because in many cultures, you know, including in Native American cultures, and of course, in a lot of Eastern cultures, including in Western European cultures, there were ways in which you honored the ancestors. So by honoring the ancestors, It was a way you, and actually Alberto Vildo, who's a Cuban American medical anthropologist, when he went to South America, he found these ancestral altars. And he said, you know, in the Western world, we thought these altars were where you prayed to your ancestors. He said, you were not praying to your ancestors, you were praying for them. Because in a lot of the Eastern traditions, there is a feeling that the souls of the ancestors they cannot really evolve. Like these patterns are their way of asking us to support their healing journey so that they can move on. So a lot of these traditions had, you were not praying to them, you were praying for them, for their souls to be at peace, to move on, like to keep evolving. And so one of those things is, and I've seen so many people who start this practice of praying for their ancestors. actually start to come into that space of peace inside of themselves. And as they start to do that, like a lot of their relationships start to shift in this world. Like those relationships start to change their quality and energy. So that's one. The other thing is we are looking for the mother in the mother. in the birth mother, the biological mother, or another mother, or to be seen somewhere, whether it's in the workplace or with friends, to be acknowledged. But for, you know, in India, there is a popular hymn that says, it prays to God that you are my mother, you are my father, you are my everything. So once we start to acknowledge that the, you know, Mother Earth is like... the true mother, nurturing, supporting, feeding. If you have only one mother that you are attached to, as opposed to seeing mothering in either the divine feminine or in mother earth, you can then be nourished by the earth. And I like Craig Foster, who wrote this and created this documentary called My Teacher, the Octopus. He goes underwater and then he says, He says, the one thing, the more I connected with nature, the less expectations I had of others. And so it's recognizing that we can have other mothering and receive that nurturance and support that we are looking for. And I think the other thing that we forget, and I think this is the one thing that as we move to a more corporate materialistic world, we lose that sense of wonder. And of course, religion, I think is just so, it's got an agenda and spirituality, which I think more of the world is moving towards is more about your experience. It's less about what you're being told and more about finding your inner path and your inner philosophy, really your own philosophy of life. And you start to see that you are supported by the universe. And in many ways, what I think it was Jung who called like synchronicities, you start to see that. oh, there's a little bit of support. Like, and you start to notice and be aware. So you're getting that support of feeling seen and acknowledged in ways that are coming from outside of your family. And you build that strength. And as you start, that first step is the biggest step, I think. And then, you know, it's like a spiral. It takes you in and out and you build your strength. So that yearning while... It may or may not fully go away, but it no longer stinks. And you can be with people as they are because you're with yourself as you are and in peace.
Chaya 30:02
Yeah, so beautifully said. Once we lean into Mother Earth and that's where we are, we are planted on Earth and we have to root ourselves here. That's when we have the sense of belonging.
Chaya 30:16
Stop that expectations, which is unfair on our families and take ownership for our own evolution and trust the universe. And even in the book, Alchemist, one of my favorite, you learn to get messages from the universe, even from a child, from a person from different religion, from the wind, whatever it may be, you start listening and start creating those patterns and finally find that. pot of gold and so yeah let go of what happened or what might have happened or they we came through them and just I think that's the passage and let's honor that and be grateful for that and release them and be grateful there's so many things to be grateful for yeah
Anu Dayal-Gulati 31:07
because often we just notice the challenges and we forget like maybe I got my you know ability to draw or focus or be creative or be scientific or be organized or be a nonlinear thinker or, you know, in ways in which we express ourselves, we get other things. We get a roof over our head. Maybe we get, sometimes we take some things for granted because we only notice what we didn't get. And instead of maybe this is the bit that we might get, you know? I've seen it
Chaya 31:40
shift.
Chaya 31:42
drastically once you start looking at what we have versus what we don't, because then something happens that what you didn't have also starts filling up. Yeah.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 31:54
Yeah. That is so true. Like just noticing, because the moment we notice what we have or what we got, like that sense of inner peace starts to come in. And, you know, I think emotions are on a spectrum. and have different frequencies. So the more we move away from anxiety or anger or sadness, we can move towards like peace and contentment, which have a higher frequency. And so people who are around us, and if we are centered in ourselves, we don't get caught in their drama as much, or we don't really want to be part of it. We can be with them without needing them to change and without us needing to change too. be what they need or adapt or whatever. I mean, I totally hear Mike when there is the urinate. It's not an easy journey, but it's a journey that so many people have made. And when you start to walk it, it just becomes so beautiful. And you cannot imagine life without having walked it. It brings its own gifts. It brings its own peace. brings and i feel like people find what they were born on earth for which is so beautiful and so amazing so
Mike 33:17
beautiful so can i go off of that if you would be okay with maybe taking a little bit of like a personal turn here about how this work and methodology has impacted your own you know relationship with your family and relationship with yourself you
Anu Dayal-Gulati 33:31
know honestly i came to the u .s to study to do a phd in economics i never If someone had told me this is what I was going to do, I would have just thought they were kind of like crazy. Because, you know, growing up in India, the emphasis was on having an education and having a job and, you know, getting married. You know, there was a path. You followed the path. You were not going to like step off the path. But when I had my son and I was struggling to balance my career and motherhood and my personal life, and we were moving.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 34:07
I got really sick. So I was in and out of the hospital. I was in and out of the ER and I had a friend who I had made and she was very different from me, very much into alternative healing. And she came to see me in the hospital and then she said, you know, what is it going to take for you to change? And to me, that is a question that I ask myself still every day when I'm struggling with something. What is it that I need to do to change? And that one question took me on this journey of healing because I, you know, I willed myself out of the hospital. I discovered flower essences, which is a form of healing from mother nature. So much so that I left academia. We moved to Boston. I decided I was done with it. I was never going back to academia. I trained in flower essences. And you can imagine you go somewhere and people say, what do you do? And I'm like, nothing. And they're like, oh. And they start talking to somebody else. Or then finally you muster up the courage to say, oh, I do flower essences. And they're like, oh, okay. And then they turn away. Or what's that? Or, you know, people are not interested. And it took me a long time, bit by bit, to reclaim a sense of identity without a resume. Like, I'm not my resume. I am who I am. I'm me. Yeah, I'm kind of weird. I do flower essences. I mean, clearly in my family, nobody could remember flower essences. People would say, oh, you do aromatherapy. And I say, no, no, they're not the same thing. Till today, people will still say, oh yeah, how's your aromatherapy going? And I'm like, I just let it go. I'm like, fine. And then of course, when I started seeing clients and I started seeing patterns, I thought I'm going crazy. Like, what is this? Like, this is so weird. But I...
Anu Dayal-Gulati 35:53
I went into somebody and I said, I think I'm going crazy. Like I'm seeing all these patterns. And he didn't say you're going crazy or not. You're going crazy. He just wrote down two names and he said, I suggest you go see them. And they actually were into ancestral healing work. They did what is called family constellation therapy. I don't know what they were doing. But I was so fascinated, I ended up training for them for two years. And so got into ancestral healing work. And that's when I started to discover that there are things in so many traditions that have gotten lost. But as I started to work with my ancestors, I started to get a sense of peace, which was kind of something that I didn't expect.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 36:34
a sort of acceptance of a lot of things of myself, my history, my lineage. I became aware of like colonialism, how it had shaped our thinking, how it had shaped my thinking, lots of different things. And my relationships all improved, including with myself. And I was, as a child, I was very quiet, really shy, like always wanting to be on the back, invisible. And a lot of that shifted. I just... became much more at peace. I found a sense of inner confidence that I didn't know I had and a greater sense of peace and contentment. I mean, if I look back at who I was, sometimes I think to myself, oh my God, I've come a long way. And it's like, it's hard to imagine that I could have traveled this journey, that person who was that kid or that teenager or that young adult, but that person who had come this far, is quite a long journey. You brought
Chaya 37:36
about a point, the connection between healing and physical ailment that you yourself experience. Do you see a connection? Because sometimes I hear it does show up as physical symptoms, even as small as a headache or a migraine.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 37:54
Yeah. So, I mean, it's great that you brought that up, Chaya. So under my training as flower essences, I was not allowed to, because it was in the US and then I think in Europe, they're different about it. I could not make any connection with the flower essences and physical symptoms. And same in the ancestral healing work as it's done here. We also did not talk about physical symptoms, but I have seen like European practitioners who basically look at the physical symptom. as an expression of some health trauma from the ancestral field. So that is not something that I do, but I believe that they are connected. I also feel like, again, going back to childhood, what happens is, you know, when you have to sit still in school, all your natural reflexes, or you're in a family where... smiling or laughing or too much noise or, you know, that's not tolerated, whatever it might be, our impulses become like suppressed to some extent, right? And over time, we sort of become kind of boxed all our natural impulses and reflexes are sort of suppressed. And I think that causes like, that does affect us physically. Because that has to have some place to go. It's like a bubble under the carpet. It has to have some place to go. So where is it going to go? And maybe it goes into the body because the body is like the subconscious mind. So it goes there. So I do agree with you. But in all of my training, at least in the US, there was like a separation. It was like you couldn't bring them together.
Chaya 39:38
Yeah, but there definitely is a connection, mind, body, and spirit. We're all connected. And I
Anu Dayal-Gulati 39:45
agree with you totally. So
Mike 39:49
for those, if you could kind of, as we wrap up in part for listeners who may be feeling disconnected from themselves and disconnect from that ancestral lineage that they have, how can they kind of start that healing? process? What kind of like daily practices can they utilize? So
Anu Dayal-Gulati 40:10
in my book, I offer a couple of, so my book is called Heal Your Ancestral Roots. In that I offer a couple of practices, one of which is to create an ancestral altar. Another one is just to offer prayers for your ancestors. And none of these take, I'm a great believer in shortcuts. So none of these are like to take too much time in the day. maybe a few minutes. So that is one. The other thing is just starting the journey to restoring your inner confidence and belief in yourself. Because I do flower essences to integrate the ancestral and individual work. One of the most helpful flower essences just to begin the journey is Larch, which is the flower essence for inner confidence. So that is one that I feel like, you know, anyone can take. It just helps you. find that space of inner confidence inside of yourself, because that's the part that's been taken away, you know, trusting yourself, believing in yourself. So just starting that journey to reclaiming yourself. And that's one place where anyone can start. And they are easily available on the internet. You know, they're very inexpensive and easily available on the internet.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 41:23
Appreciate anything that's easy.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 41:25
Yes. Yeah. And I do feel it should be easy because we're doing so much hard work that our tools should really be easy and quick to support us. I think journaling is another one. It is like the cheapest form of therapy. And I find just not just journaling, like I think journaling to your future self or to a higher power or. whatever you believe in that supports you, I feel like that form of journaling is more powerful. Like, you know, you just let it all out. It goes out from the brain and into the paper. And, you know, it lifts whatever we're carrying. And I've seen people also, when they start the practice, like even ancestral stuff starts to come in the pages and you get a clarity. Well, that's not the story. That's not the story. And you get to reframe your perspective.
Mike 42:17
It's all about how you interface with yourself. These are ways you interface with yourself and everything that you can accomplish is there inside of you already. You most often already know what to do. You already know the steps to take, but it's really, really hard to get there. And you need to be able to introspect with yourself and look inwards. And I think a lot of people fear that in so many ways. Either they fear what they're going to see or... You know, they feel like, oh, that's what you 20 or something like that. You know, it's something that's they're not going to align with. But no, it's like you, you are a whole person. We just aren't utilizing our whole selves. So everything you said has really resonated and is all like excellent points. Excellent things for people to explore. And on the note of your book, where can people learn more about your work and connect with you and find things such as your book?
Anu Dayal-Gulati 43:14
Yeah, the book is available on Amazon or anywhere where books are sold. Helio Ancestral Roots, Release the Family Patterns that Hold You Back.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 43:23
My website is just my name. I know I say Anu Gulati, which is sort of shorter, but it's like Anu Dayal Gulati. And it's like on my website. And I didn't make the book into a course and it's called Flourish because I wanted people to like just break it down into digestible, easy to do, step by step. Like I'm always about making things easier. And so I made it into a course so that people could follow that if that was easier. So those are just in different ways. But I also want to say that I think everything that you said really is so true. We just need to get in touch with ourselves and to recognize that we are whole and complete. and just reclaim that.
Mike 44:03
Yes, definitely. And that's something I think we pretty much, Mandy, about every episode of this podcast. It's kind of like that's why it exists is so people can understand that they are okay, that they are enough, that they are everything that they are looking for already. So thank you for really driving that home and thank you for coming on the show.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 44:24
Oh, thank you so much. It's my pleasure to be here with both of you today. Thank you so much.
Chaya 44:29
Thank you, Anu. It was enlightening, to say the least.
Anu Dayal-Gulati 44:33
It was really great to talk with both of you. Thank you so much. Thank
Mike 44:37
you. And we will see you all next time.