In The Wake of a Lunar Eclipse — Clearing Family Curses

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Today we're going to talk about the lunar eclipse that just passed through, in light of the fact that this lunar eclipse was ruled by Jupiter, and as such, a lunar eclipse ruled by Jupiter can mean that we are clearing old family karma relative to religious or philosophical themes that we were raised with.

A lot of times, people come to me as an astrologer and say that they feel like they are living through a family or generational curse. I've heard that language used a lot, and I want to talk about that language today, not as a scary thing, but sort of stripping it back and looking at what that might actually mean.

And so, I hope that this will be useful today, especially if you feel like your relationship to spirituality has a complicated past, religiously, philosophically, in your family of origin, because an eclipse like this, a lunar eclipse in Pisces ruled by Jupiter, can actually be a really unique opportunity to clear old patterns relative to religion, philosophy, spirituality in your family past or your personal history.

So we're going to talk about that today, and I hope that it will be interesting and you know not at all something that needs to be super scary. So hopefully, again, this will be useful.

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So let's take a look at what's just happened. Here we are, Friday, August 28, and what I really want to emphasize is, you can see the full moon that's just passed through. We had a lunar eclipse in Pisces last night into early this morning, depending on your time zone and place in the world.

This eclipse in the sign of Pisces is hosted by Jupiter, who is with the south node of the moon. What that means, broadly speaking, in addition to everything else we've talked about, is that Jupiterian karma, Jupiterian patterns, let's say, or patterning, especially from the past with the south node of the moon in, can be brought up for review.

This means it is an especially good time to be looking at generational karma, family karma, past life karma with respect to things like religion and philosophy, things that Jupiter rules. So, what I want to talk about today is something that I have been dealing with as an astrologer for many, many years, which is people that come to me and say they feel like they have heavy ancestral generational blocks or karma, family karma, and sometimes people feel cursed by it.

And I want to talk about that word specifically because it's actually got some really enigmatic etymological roots that I think once you hear about may actually make you feel a little bit lighter if that's a word you've ever entertained and been like, man, I just feel like you know my family's been cursed or I have generational you know curses or blocks, negative energy around my upbringing, my roots. A lot of people deal with that, so my hope is to just shed more light on all of this today.

And I want to talk specifically about five different generational blocks with respect to religion, philosophy, spirituality that many people encounter, and that it might be your work in this lifetime to try to overcome or to work through in some way.

So, I've got five generational blocks relative to religion, philosophy, spirituality that maybe you have encountered or are in the process of encountering and five prayers that can go with it. Some practical ways that we can pray or focus our spirituality, if you want to think about it that way, instead of prayer, to try to overcome some of these things.

So this is kind of an experimental talk, but I've been thinking a lot about it because of what's been coming up for me with this eclipse and with the energy of South Node Jupiter, and just thinking about well, this would be I would have loved to have heard a talk like this at certain points in my life when I was really working through things that came from my religious history, my spiritual family history, but check this out. I think you'll enjoy it.

So, let's talk about this word curse. So, I was as I was thinking about this, I thought, well, I don't want to name the title of the talk with the word curse because it's a very evocative word that can scare people. But then I thought, well, I think that this can be actually the real and really interesting subject of the talk, especially when I went down the etymological rabbit hole.

The English noun comes from Old English, and it comes from a verb, cursian. It looks like I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but it means to wish evil upon someone, to condemn, or to excommunicate. But the deeper origin of the word is actually unknown.

It has no securely identified root or ancestor or obvious cognate in other languages, and I thought that was really fascinating. There's been attempts to connect it with words like cross, but it hasn't gained. Broadly speaking, it hasn't gained acceptance. And so, isn't it interesting that the origins of the word curse are obscured?

Something inherited from the past, whose ultimate beginning cannot be clearly known or articulated or located, is actually present in the word itself. I think that's important because words carry evocative power, and one of the things that can be most obscure and troubling about the word curse is the feeling that, especially when you think of a family curse or something like that, that the effects are visible, but the roots are forgotten or unknown or unseen or unidentifiable, and that can make us feel incredibly overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed by the feeling that we can't get to the bottom of something, that we can't clear something because we can't find its source or its roots. That's actually present in the actual etymology of this word.

A curse to me can be seen in a family through patterns that are present, and I've this is just my personal observation through working with a lot of people. Whether a curse is or isn't a real thing, we all know what we're excuse me talking about when we use the word. When we curse someone, when we verbally curse someone out, or whatever. It's usually to say something like, "You're never going to be successful," or "You don't belong here," or "Nothing good is going to come for you," or "People like you can't be trusted," or if you are born into a religious faith and you leave. It's like if you leave this faith, you'll be lost. That's a curse. The world is dangerous. If you hear that over and over again, you start to inherit the view, and then the roots are obscured.

You can't remember someone was actually telling me this all the time. These are curses in a way. Now, I don't think it's important to think of them literally as curses. But rather to think about how we frame what they are. They're things that we inherit worldviews that have somehow been uttered and come to hold some power over us. Never show weakness. I remember my grandfather used to say something all the time: "You have to be tough. You've got to be tough." And the idea is never show weakness, and this can become a kind of curse in so far as it becomes a pattern, an adopted way of seeing or experiencing something, whose roots you can almost forget.

As someone near me that uttered this all the time, and is something that I came to adopt, sort of unknowingly, I was an impressionable little kid when he said this all the time. For example, it doesn't have to be a curse. Doesn't have to be something super evil or malignant or cruel or violent. It can be something that's roots are obscured, but it sort of permeates our worldview. We, you know, or if you grew up in a family where we don't talk about that, we don't talk about these things, then suddenly you never talk about things, and the roots of that may become somewhat obscure. See how simple the idea of a curse actually can be.

And I think it's important. What I'm trying to do is sort of demystify it a little bit and say, like, a lot of the times what we mean when we talk about a curse is something that it feels like something we've inherited or stepped into that we can't clearly see where it came from because we're so in it. At some point, we just it just became part of how we see or experience the world, or something like that's just the way you are. You know, someone repeats that over and over again, so sometimes I think curses begin with mantras or ways of seeing the world or things that are uttered or said over and over again that come to permeate the way we experience things, even though it's not necessarily our own.

I'm sure everybody knows what I'm talking about. Even right now, talking about the very word "curse" carries with it. Like I, I sat with this and I was like, even talking about this is evocative of something that could be a little troubling, you know. And that's why I, but I felt like let's, but we can. I think we can do this mindfully, talk about this mindfully, without feeling as though we're invoking something negative, because in a way, the last thing a curse wants is to be named, to just be clearly named and called out. Hey, I adopted a view that I'm not safe because I grew up with parents who consistently told me nothing in the world is safe. Felt like a curse, but I'm just naming it. Right?

Stuff like that can actually be lessened significantly by trying to locate something and just name it and bring it into the light, bring it into the light of our awareness. And it's, I think, a lot of these things are transmitted through pretty benign, like they seemingly benign things, like just repeated things that a parent says or the religious or political landscape you were brought up in, or the kind of silence or words that were used when pain or suffering came up, or roles that were taken on in the family-caretaker, scapegoat, peacemaker-you know-all of these things that I'm sure a lot of you are aware of. Parenting styles, emotional response patterns, addictions, and coping mechanisms.

When we when they're present, especially when we're younger and we're very impressionable, some of these things we end up taking on, and then we lose track of their roots, secrets, shame, things that were never apologized for beliefs about God or love or sex or money or the world. I remember there was a when I was in my 20s, I had a longer term relationship, and when I met her family and I heard them say this, you just never, never rely on anyone, and I thought, oh my God, this explains so much.

And then it caused me to think about some of the things that I've heard over and over in my family. My again, my grandfather and grandmother on my dad's side, in particular, it was very like you never questioned religion, and that was something that they didn't even have to say to understand that they thought, and then because it wasn't said but thought and sort of silently but very intensely held, when I was in their presence, that became something that I had to hold too. Right? You see how this like the thing that's unnamed, and I think that's so fascinating. It's actually part of the etymology of the word curse, and it can make what we think of curse as a lot simpler.

Anyhow, there's also because it doesn't have it doesn't we don't feel all the time like we chose the family that we were born into. Or the stories that were already taking place when we came into the world in that family, or the beliefs that were in that atmosphere, or the grief that was there, or the unconscious patterns, it can it can take a lot of work to discover them and differentiate ourselves from them.

I think probably everyone listening to this, if you're into astrology, part of what astrology does is to help us become more aware of these things and do that differentiation, so we can say, well, this is who I am, and this is maybe different from the way I was raised. A lot of our youth is spent making those differentiations clear, and some with a lot more trauma and baggage than others, obviously.

Well, anyway, I have today five generational blocks, curses, whatever we want to call them, right? And five prayers that have been meaningful for me, and that I've seen over and over again in my family work, in my work with family karma, in my astrology practice, and I wanted to bring these up again specifically because a South Node lunar eclipse in Pisces with the ruler Jupiter can help us clear some of these things from the ancestry of religion and faith and beliefs and philosophy and teachers and teachings about life that are maybe in our background somewhere and asking to be looked at right now.

So here are five generational blocks and prayers that I sat with and wrote down, and there could be others, there could be more, there could be less, in case they're useful, right? That's all. So the first prayer, and I'm framing these in terms of prayers because whether you pray this way or make a mantra or a visualization or a vision board or whatever it is, whatever way we invoke this kind of antidote, I wanted to frame it positively.

The first one I put is just, "Please give me faith." Now, the way that I see this prayer is for those of us who were not given any kind of meaningful spiritual, religious, or metaphysical orientation. That doesn't mean that your family was necessarily bad or unhealthy or toxic or whatever, but it can be that you were raised in a family that rarely engaged any kind of questioning about why we're here or what life is, and it doesn't mean that you know us. Let's call it a secular household can't be moral, loving, meaningful, you know.

But it doesn't have to be just that you weren't raised with organized religion either. It's the absence of any language or practice in our upbringing that might have related to mystery, suffering, purpose, sacredness, transcendence. So, in this case, I meet a lot of people who just they were brought up, and life was framed in practical terms: succeed, survive, achieve, earn, behave, remain comfortable.

That doesn't mean that your message was to go be a total asshole or consumerist or you know, you know, materialist or whatever. But it's just life was framed maybe very, very earthy, just and difficult experiences may not have been placed in larger containers about meaning or suffering or purpose or spirituality. What might this be teaching me, or how can this deepen my soul? May have been just absent from the vocabulary.

In other words, there may have been not just an avoidance about death or eternity or destiny or things like that. Your worth in some situations may be tied to things like how productive are you, or your status, or appearance, or intelligence, or material security. None of this has to mean that you were raised with those things being like super gross either. Just it. It can again just be sort of like a just a material or more secular orientation, and you may have come out of that for one reason or another, just hungry for prayer, sacredness. You know, you were the seeker in a family like this that just didn't have a lot of seeking, and so the generational task for this kind of karma, as I've understood it, is not necessarily to become religious. It's to recover the capacity for reverence, sacredness, an enchanted cosmos.

It doesn't have to be that you know exactly what's going on, it's just that that seeking becomes something that you have to do on your own apart from the orientation given to you by a family. And for many people, that can feel alienating. It can feel challenging. It can feel difficult. You can feel sort of on your own, or you can end up feeling like a black sheep, or your quest is not necessarily seen or understood by the people that you love that are part of your family, or worse, it could be that you were born with people who think that kind of thing is shallow or naive, or you know something like that.

But the prayer in this case is the courage to take that path up on our own. Even if we weren't raised with the orientation or don't have the support of going in that direction from our family, and right now can be a time where we recognize, you know, what bravery and courage it's taken to strike out that path on our own. So that's the first one on my list. And for those of you who are experiencing, you know, the difficulty of carrying something like this on your own-it's a good time to know that that's hard work, that's generational work that you're doing. So good job, right? It's just that's it.

Number two, the next one I said, please grant me forgiveness. Again, if you want to frame this as a prayer or a visualization, it doesn't matter so much as far as I can tell.

But this is someone who was raised in a family where things like apologies or accountability or introspection and the need to repair were just not modeled in the best way. So it's not everyone makes mistakes. That's not the issue. The issue is when deeper woundings or mistakes can't be admitted, and repair and introspection and self-reflection is not modeled. An adult doesn't say, "I was wrong. I'm sorry." Conflicts may have been about avoidance, or intimidation, or pretending that nothing happened, or you know, just like let's skip over that was uncomfortable. Let's skip over it. You can kind of feel an awkwardness and maybe some sense of accountability, but it's not talked about. Or blame is projected or displaced. There's a scapegoat. If you're wrong, then you should feel humiliated. It's dangerous to be wrong, you know this kind of thing.

Family members, if you're raised like this, will frequently defend their intentions rather than just saying, "Hey, even though my intentions were this or that, I can see that it hurt." You know, and we're in such an environment, you may be taught to justify, hide mistakes, minimize them, deny them, and then you know later in life that can cause a lot of challenges because if shame is all we have when we've messed up, then the feeling you're trying to overcome is mistakes are irredeemably bad, or I'm a bad person because I made a mistake, and if that's the underlying shadow of the family's religious spiritual orientation with respect to the cultivation of character and learning, that's a really tough thing to overcome.

So the prayer, the generational task, you could say, is to let self reflectiveness and a conscience, and I can do better. I can learn. I can grow. Not be threatening to self worth. Separate behavior from person. In other words, just like good, healthy parenting is supposed to do. Help me see myself clearly without having to take on unhealthy shame about who I am. So it's about. So if you are someone who has had to carve out a path for yourself and being introspective and accountable and developing integrity and developing self confidence that's separated from behavior that sometimes you have to be called out for or take accountability for, that is hard work, especially if you know maybe it wasn't modeled so great in our families, and we have to remember that this means there's a lot of forgiveness that has to take place because probably the family members that had a hard time with this on the inside feel like being accountable would mean admitting that they're a bad person, and so sometimes we end up you know if you're in a family like this and you grow up having to develop that self reflectiveness and that capacity to separate your own behavior from your personhood, your soul.

Chances are you will sometimes feel like you're more in the role of a parent, a guide, a mentor, a therapist for other people, saying it's not you that's bad, right? And so in that way, sometimes it feels like you end up being a parent, that's really hard work, you know. So for those of you who are out there doing that work, and maybe this is an inflection point where you really recognize what a path it's been to carry this kind of work, you know. God bless you, you know. I just I just thought today let's talk about these things because I think again an eclipse like this can really bring them up in very poignant ways.

All right, let's go on to number three. Please give me non-attachment. So, to me, this is probably one of the more common things that I've experienced, which is that someone is raised in a family that has ideological rigidity, or religious fundamentalism, or fanaticism, or a political, you know, absolute way of thinking, or like a self-righteousness, or an intense need to be right, strong convictions, but not an ability to hold those convictions alongside humility, or curiosity, or open-mindedness, or respect for people who think or see differently.

And I've met a lot of people like this, and this is one of the primary religious wounds that people inherit. So, if you want to belong, you think the way we do. If you question, you're disloyal.

A lot of people experience this in Sunday school when they're kids in the Christian faith. Right? Doubt is not acceptable. It's not healthy. Outsiders are dangerous. Ideas become an extension of your self worth. The right idea means the right self, the right worth. Disagreement, dangerous, defensive, panic. You know what I mean. If you change your mind or open yourself to experiment with different traditions or ideas or philosophies, that's a kind of betrayal. So you get what I'm saying, and this can be part of a superiority complex and overcompensation for a weak or undeveloped sense of one's self-worth that is not rooted in one's ideas.

So the prayer here is: Let me care deeply. Let me search and probe and find the beliefs that are really meaningful to me, but let me hold these things without turning them into ideological weapons. Help me to remain teachable, humble, open-minded, curious, even if I do have beliefs and convictions. So please give me non-attachment to my beliefs, which seems paradoxical. It's like, well, if I hold non-attachment to my beliefs, then do I really believe them? But the answer is yes. You know, the answer is yes. There's just spaciousness in the way I hold them, and for a lot of us, that is deep work that was not modeled for us, or that we have had to cultivate on our own, and that can mean that you've had to do so while feeling alienated, ostracized, scapegoated, banished, treated poorly. Your suspicions directed at you. God bless you if you're doing that work because that's not easy. That's generational work that's being healed, you could say, and it's especially hard to do that work while remaining forgiving, understanding, and compassionate about where people's fears come from in the past, because we just perpetuate the violence if we end up saying, "Well, my view is that those people are all wrong and screwed because they aren't open and hospitable and spacious.

It might be true that they're not hospitable and spacious with their views, but we have to be careful not to develop views in return that can harm others. You know, make them wrong so that we feel right. The same temptation will be there in response. That's close-minded. Those evil, close-minded people. We have to be very careful. We've been very compassionate and forgiving in the way we look at the intensity and attachment of views that we were raised around. This is challenging work, right? So God bless you if you're doing it. That's what I want to say today. Just look, let's just talk about these things because a lot of us deal with them, and these eclipses, this eclipse in particular, can really bring it up.

The next one on my list is please give me charity. So again, whether you frame this as a prayer or not isn't so important. But if you belong to a family where beliefs, ideals, whether they were political, religious, moral, were not consistently translated into compassionate action, this is the family that is centered on being correct rather than being generous, caring, actually helpful. Moral standards are applied, but as a measure of purity or self-worth, and they're not embodied in the heart.

So, if you had parents that were good, right, but not necessarily empathetic, compassionate, action-oriented people, this is not the worst thing in the world. It's good to have parents that have good morals. It's good to have parents that care, but sometimes there's an emphasis on being educated, smart, spiritually astute, or whatever, but it doesn't actually translate into how people are treated or some kind of action in the world. That's, I mean, however small or however modest, it doesn't matter. I don't think as much as just seeing that people are practicing what they preach. And so the generational task is to take the beliefs and make them fleshy. You know, let the values be put into action in some sphere of life, however modestly. Show me how to make my faith useful in the world. Teach me to give of my faith somehow, in some little way, somewhat regularly.

Now, it doesn't have to be grandiose. Sometimes it's as simple as learning to really listen more than we speak with others, especially if they're dealing with something, it's giving money to things that we care about here or there.

It's caring for children or elders or animals or neighbors or pets or plants. It's a little, maybe it's a little volunteer, or it's some element of service wrapped up into what you do, or if you have your own business, or it's being a mentor to someone, or the charity says just like, what does my belief make possible or real for someone other than just me, or my own self-interest, and I think this one's really subtle and probably, um, I don't know. It's like a first-world spiritual problem or something to be raised with like a good example, but maybe a lack of translation into action. I don't know if that's the right way of characterizing it, but yeah, that's for example.

Let me just give you a simple example. My grandmother was my mom's mom was Catholic, and there were elements of her life that were definitely in service. But sometimes I felt when I was with her, like for all of her Catholic values, sometimes not all the time, but sometimes it felt like they existed intellectually, but not in the heart's connection to the world. Now that's that can I don't mean to sound judgmental because I don't think it's so black or white with every human. A lot of people in their lives will find little ways of doing it, but if you fell into a family pattern where you had good ideas or good education or good intellect or spiritual open mindedness, but it was really insular and sort of self involved, that's an interesting and difficult karma to break out of and to become more action-oriented in your faith is sometimes a challenge.

So if you've had to do that work, and you've had to do it, and you know sometimes that can invoke the resentment of other people, like "Oh, you think you're better than us?" But if you've been doing that work, then good on you. That's not easy work to do.

Last one on my list is please give me Guidance. So, I think this prayer or mantra comes from someone where asking for help was considered weak, or maybe embarrassing, or the adults in the family modeled you should be the one to make all the decisions. You know, you should be a model of self-sufficiency, right? Like that. And if the adults made decisions without the rest of the family, or without if one person, like a dad, made all the decisions and didn't wasn't openly modeling conversation with your mom or something like that. Children were given rules, but they weren't explained, or there were was not guidance, but just like commands. Sometimes you grow up feeling like there's rules, there's commands, there's self sufficiency, right? But there's not a modeling of mentorship and guidance because that would involve submission or automatically any seeking of guidance. You'll be manipulated or disappointed or don't trust anyone, don't trust any religious institution, don't trust any scripture, don't trust any authority, and that can end up making us feel like I can't trust anything outside of myself to aid, not to replace, but to aid the guidance of my life.

And if you have had to be someone that's opened yourself to therapists or counselors or coaches or astrologers or systems or teachings or wisdom against the grain of a family that said you should have all of that inside yourself, it's weak to need anything, especially in our modern, you know, self-driven world where your autonomy is your heroic autonomy and your ability to do it all, know it all, have it all within yourself is like a prized possession. That's a tough thing to work against.

So, if you've been doing that work, then bless you, because I know for all of us, one of these things, all of these things, may be part of the conditioning of our past. And when we say that any of these things feel like a curse, what we really mean is that it's hard to get down to where it came from and where it started. In certain philosophical lineages in India, karma itself is said to be anadi, which means without origin. You can't get down to the roots of it. Sometimes when we say curse, what we really mean is it feels like where? How can I possibly get down to the roots of this thing?

So hopefully we demystified that word a little bit today, and we can also say that sometimes it's not about getting down to the roots of it and eradicating it once and for all, as much as it is about just bringing consistent awareness, a consistent prayer. Please give me faith. Please grant me forgiveness. Please give me non-attachment. Please give me charity. Please give me guidance, and just focusing on that prayer today, and if we focus on that prayer today, then little by little we change the trajectory of how we're in the world.

Our ancestral line experiences healing because our actions move backward and forward in time. I really deeply believe that to be the case. So whether we get down to the roots of it or not is probably not as important as what we're doing today. I think I mean, could reversing a curse be simpler than just retaining the same healthy prayers in our hearts each day, right? And just doing what we can each day to bring light, to bring love, to keep going in a good direction, I know that I needed to hear this right now, and maybe you did too. So I hope it's useful. I hope you've had a great week, and we'll see you again soon. Bye.