Reinvent Your Story by Exploring Your Ancestry

Could healing ancestral trauma be the key to our future?

Photo by svklimkin on Unsplash

Did you know about the Middle Eastern tradition of telling fortunes by reading coffee cups?

I didn’t … and I’m of Middle Eastern descent!

It’s like reading tea leaves, but with way more caffeine.

I recently did my very first coffee reading, with a friend. I guess you could say I have “the sight.”

But it wasn’t always that way.

Tapping into, embracing, and really loving my Middle Eastern ancestry has been tricky for me. I’m a white girl from a predominantly Irish, Dutch, Italian and Jewish New York City suburb. My eyes are blue and my maiden name is about as ethnic-sounding as Wonder bread. I grew up a church pastor’s daughter in a wealthy, white town full of nice, hardworking people with good hearts. But I was pretty sheltered from cultural diversity. I had no idea what “ancestral trauma” was. I was ignorant even of my own.

There was always this mystery lurking in my past. My paternal grandfather was Armenian, born near Lake Urmia in what is modern-day Iran (when it was still Persia). I never met him; he died when my Dad was in his teens, and my own Dad died when I was twenty. My grandmother…