The Lineage of Light: Breaking the Inheritance of Fear

What if the most powerful thing you inherited wasn’t the wound… but the light that survived it?

In this deeply personal episode of Untamed Voices, Lizzi reflects on the stories we carry through our families, the beliefs we inherit without choosing, and the profound realization that lineage is not the same as identity.

We explore the idea that while our ancestors may have passed down fear, silence, control, or grief, they also passed down resilience, hope, love, and the quiet determination that allowed us to exist today.

Through a vivid dream of a child born from a lineage of destruction, a transformative retreat that challenged her relationship with family history, and reflections on healing generational patterns, Lizzi invites listeners into a new understanding:

Blood may remember. But the soul chooses.

This episode is for anyone who has ever wondered if they are destined to repeat the past, struggled to feel pride in where they came from, or longed to believe that healing can change the story—not only for themselves, but for generations to come.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why lineage is information—not identity.
• How generational patterns shape us without defining us.
• The difference between rescuing the “destroyer” and protecting the innocent child within.
• What dreams can reveal about healing and belonging.
• The possibility that intuition is your future, healed self reaching back to guide you.
• Becoming the ancestor your younger self needed.

A gentle blessing closes the episode, reminding us that while wounds may be inherited, so is the light that has refused to go out across generations.

Because your truest inheritance has never been the wound.

It has always been the light.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Untamed Voices. So there is an old belief shared in many wisdom traditions across the world that blood remembers, right? That the stories of those people who came before us continue to live beneath our skin, that maybe our laughter carries echoes, that our fears are sometimes older than our names, that when we're born we inherit more than eye color and family recipes. We inherit grief, silence, ways of surviving, unspoken loyalties, promises no one remembers making, and sometimes destruction. Not because destruction is who we are, but because destruction was what our ancestors knew. For much of my life I believed lineage meant obligation. It meant carrying what had been handed to me. If pain ran through my family, then perhaps pain would always run through me. If fear had shaped generations before me, perhaps fear would shape me too. If control had become the language of love, then maybe, just maybe, I would spend my life trying to untangle it without ever fully escaping it. There was a time when I thought that that was really just simply how lineage worked. And honestly, I searched for things in my ancestry that made me valid. That it didn't really matter if it was real or not. I just wanted to believe it, right? And her saying that, by the way, made me stop and think and made me start digging in a little bit more into well, where is this coming from? What does it really truly matter in the first place, right? Hence this podcast. You know, I guess thinking about like the idea that maybe we inherited not only our ancestors' faces, but maybe they're unfinished stories too. Years ago, I attended this retreat, right? That kind of changed something inside of me. At the time, I did feel pretty triggered, right? But looking back, I understand why I experienced that. So one by one, people stood before the group and introduced themselves, right? And it wasn't by their profession or their accomplishments or even where they lived, right? The leader of this group wanted everybody to introduce themselves through their lineage. I, of course, you know, didn't want to do that. So they were introducing themselves as I am the daughter of, the granddaughter of, the great-granddaughter of. And you can see how this could be triggering for me. I mean, I didn't grow up around any extended family. I I didn't even know my grandmother here in the United States until I was 13. I met her when I was 13 and visited with her for a few weeks. That's it. You know, as I got older as an adult, I got to know my uncle and aunt a lot better. And I met some of my other uncles and in family from the United States. But I never met, I only met my aunt from Holland. That's it. I never got to meet my grandmother or anybody else in in my mom's family. So I guess introducing people in this way at the time, I didn't really feel like it was really helpful for me. I didn't want to be there. I didn't like the feeling, but everybody seemed to be. Everybody seemed to be kind of, you know, proud of their lineage, you know, and I'm sure that there were more feelings in that room than I could tell because I was so stuck in my own feelings, right? But it just it seemed like everybody, it was just kind of flowing for everybody except for me. You know, that's how I felt, anyways, right? But as each person spoke, it was like generations were quietly entering the room beside them, which is again why I didn't feel comfortable with this. So their ancestors were no longer names in an old photograph. They became living threads woven into the fabric of who they were. Again, another reason why I didn't want to speak, my ancestors. And nothing about my ancestors' ancestors, right? But all I knew was my parents. And that wasn't wonderful. That wasn't something that I wanted to carry through. So when it was my turn, obviously I couldn't do it. Words wouldn't leave my mouth. And I wasn't necessarily, well, actually, I was a little bit ashamed, but it was much deeper than that. It was like every cell in my body whispered, that's not the whole truth. This isn't everything. I stood there feeling really disconnected from the very roots everyone else seemed so eager to claim. For years afterwards, I wondered why. Why couldn't I say those words? Why did my body resist something that felt so natural to everyone else? What's wrong with me, right? You know, and obviously I hate that question. That's not accurate, right? I know like Bruce Perry and and Oprah's book, What Happened to Me, right? That's a better way of phrasing it. What happened to me, right? That that that I couldn't say that, that I couldn't, you know, speak those words. Or I guess I felt like I needed to be proud of my lineage, and I was not. I didn't know, I didn't really know much of my lineage, you know. So this happened, you know, so many years ago, but I think I finally gained an understanding. So for years I believed I wanted nothing to do with my lineage, and it's not that I hated the people who came before me. It's because somewhere inside of me, the lineage had become synonymous with pain. And I looked backward and I saw fear, control, silence, generations surviving however they knew how, religious certainty that left little room for questioning, really. Trauma passed quietly from one heart to another. If someone had asked me then where I came from, I would have pointed to the wounds. I couldn't see the love that had surrounded and survived alongside of them. So recently I had a dream. One kind of different than what I had experienced. Lately, I've been getting some really, really vivid dreams. Really vivid. And I found myself on this other planet. It was a world that had already fallen. It was it had failed, you know, destruction everywhere. The mountains looked fractured, as though they had split under the weight of something ancient. Buildings were scattered across the landscape, smoke drifted through the sky, the air itself felt so heavy with endings. Everything around me whispered, this has already happened. So somewhere close to that, you know, nearby, there was a creature that was searching for survivors. It was pretty terrifying. I mean, also glorious in a way.

unknown 9:54

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

You know, dreams. But it was kind of like part man and part something older, like ancient and big and strong, right? Almost like mythical. A force of destruction moving across like an un already broken world, right? And then in my dream, I found this little boy. He wasn't human. He was the son of the destroyer. He carried the lineage of the one who had brought devastation to everything around him. But when I looked in his eyes, I didn't see destruction. I felt so much love. I just saw this child. He held a little blanket, and it was actually the same exact blanket that my youngest son carries everywhere. His eyes weren't filled with violence. They were filled with longing, with uncertainty, with hope that someone might still choose him. I mean, he was pure love. So I picked him up and I carried him home. And I loved him. And I remember trying to hide him. And it's not that I was ashamed of him, I was trying to protect him. You know, I was afraid others would only see where he came from. I was afraid that they would believe that blood was stronger than love, that maybe ancestry was stronger than innocence, that lineage was stronger than choice. But here's the deal: dreams have such a remarkable way of speaking directly to the soul. Sometimes they bypass all of our explanations. They don't argue, they simply reveal. And somewhere inside that dream, a sentence showed up. Not in words, it just I just knew. The child carries the lineage of destruction, yet he is not destruction himself. So I woke up with those words just echoing through my entire body, and suddenly I wasn't looking at an alien child anymore. I was looking at all of us. How many people have spent their lives believing they were destined to become what wounded them? My father was angry, maybe anger lives inside me too. My mother lived in fear, perhaps fear is my inheritance. My family survived through silence. Maybe silence is simply who I am. But what if? What if lineage is only information? It's not identity. Blood remembers, but the soul chooses. So just pausing here for a moment. I think so many of us have confused these two things. We think that because something has been repeated, it must continue, or it's embedded in us, it's a part of us, it's a it's who we are. Because something has always happened, it always will, because it lived inside our family, it must live inside us. But history and destiny are not the same thing. Information is not identity, inheritance is not obligation. So there's something that I came to believe. Love has always, always, always been stronger than inheritance. Maybe not sentimental love or performative love, right? But the kind of love that sees clearly, the kind of love that refuses to confuse a child with the wounds of the generations before him. So when I held that little boy in my dream, I wasn't rescuing the destroyer. I was protecting the part that destruction had never been able to touch. The tenderness, the innocence, the longing, the capacity to trust, the ability to love despite where he had come from. Which, by the way, is different than in my past. In my past, I wanted to save the destroyer because I was trying to save myself. You know, I kept trying to save people who who were going on these paths of destruction, including trying to destroy me, you know. And as I was doing that, I was really trying to save my lineage. I was trying to save myself because I felt like that's where I came from. I came from destruction, I came from failure, I came from hurt, I came from horrible patterns, right? And so somewhere I identified with that. And I guess maybe an a subconscious belief, our subconscious is so wild and interesting, but a subconscious belief was more along the lines of if I can save this person, if I can change this person and their destructive behaviors, then maybe, maybe, maybe I can save myself and my own lineage and where I come from, you know? But that was the wrong path. The right path was saving the innocent, which was inside of me all along, right? So maybe that's what healing really is. Healing isn't pretending the past never happened. It isn't rewriting the story or the history. It isn't pretending our families were something that they weren't. It's not ignoring it for sure. Healing is learning to recognize the child hidden beneath all of the rubble. The part of us that somehow remained untouched. The light that destruction could never, ever, ever extinguish. You know, and the image that comes to me is like I put a stop to this, right? I I build that wall. I decide what passes, what crosses that generational line, and what does not. You know. So there was another moment in the dream that has stayed with me. Eventually, people discovered the little boy. And immediately what they wanted to do was send him back. Back to the world he came from, back to the lineage everyone believed belonged to him. And it's not like, you know, in my dream, it wasn't like they were being mean, you know, it's almost like they were like, well, he belongs there, so we need to get him back, right? But back to the only identity that they could imagine for him. And I fought to keep him. I didn't want to possess him, but it's because his home no longer existed. He needed somewhere safe to be. He needed a new belonging. So after I woke, I couldn't stop thinking about that. How many of us keep trying to send ourselves back, back into these identities we've already outgrown, back into roles that once protected us, back into belief systems that don't fit our souls anymore. We've outgrown them. Back into family stories that explain who we were. I don't know how many times I've heard from clients like when they go back home to their original families to visit or, you know, family gatherings or whatever it is, that they revert back to their old selves. You know, it's so challenging because it's like a mode, right? And we think that we have to act the same way that we did before, have the same dynamics. But what if that's not the case? What if we get to create new dynamics, right? So healing whispers something entirely different than this. It says, you don't have to go back. You are allowed to build a home your nervous system has never ever known. A home where gentleness is ordinary, where truth is not punished, where your voice doesn't have to earn its place, where love isn't confused with control. You know, where belonging doesn't require abandoning yourself anymore. So then something happened in my dream. Two packages arrived. And honestly, like it felt so good. This part of my dream felt so, so good. They had been sent from the year 2047. Imagine receiving a package from your future. So inside that larger box was a spaceship, and it hadn't been built yet, you know, it was all in parts, but and it needed assembling. And somehow, without anyone explaining it, I just understood. The little boy had grown up in 2047. He had eventually returned to his own planet somehow, sometime. He had survived, he had healed, he had become wise. And now from the future, he was reaching backward throughout time. And it wasn't to rescue or warn us or equip us. It was as though he was saying, I know what you're going to need. Here, take this. You'll understand when the time comes. So maybe that is what intuition feels like. Maybe our deepest knowing isn't appearing out of nowhere. Maybe it's the future version of ourselves, the version who has already crossed the wilderness, already survived the grief, already remembered who they are, whispering backward through time. Keep going, you're closer than you think. Many indigenous cultures speak of time differently than we do today. Time isn't merely a line stretching endlessly into the future. It's a great circle. Ancestors walk beside us, the future leans toward us. The unseen is never truly far away. Perhaps every act of healing bends time. Maybe every moment we choose love over fear, truth over silence, compassion over shame, we become, get this, both ancestor and descendant. Mind blowing, right? Healing those who came before, protecting those who have yet to arrive. So there's something else that you know I could choose to ignore, but I no longer want to ignore. For years I believed that I came from a lineage of destruction. And in many ways, maybe I did. You know? I don't know. But today I see something completely different. Because destruction is not the only thing that traveled through my blood. Somewhere, someone survived long enough for me to be here. If you think of it that way, how amazing is that? Someone loved enough. Someone hoped enough. Someone endured enough, prayed enough, dreamed enough. Somewhere in my family tree, someone chose kindness when cruelty would have been easier. Somewhere, I'm not saying all of it, but maybe somewhere. Someone protected a child. Someone whispered hope into another human being. Someone refused to let the light disappear completely. So perhaps the lineage of light isn't the absence of darkness. Maybe it's the quiet thread that has always run beside it. The grandmother who offered tenderness, the grandfather who chose gentleness after growing up in violence, the aunt who believed in you, the teacher who saw something in you that no one else could see the stranger whose kindness altered the direction of your life. The friend who reminded you who you actually were. Light has always had its own lineage. Sometimes we just have to learn where to look. So maybe this season of my life hasn't been about becoming someone new. Maybe it's been about remembering, remembering the lineage that was underneath everything all along, right? And I've mentioned this in in previous podcasts as well. It feels like remembering. Because that it's been there all along. It's just been in my subconscious, right? And it now is surfacing into my conscious awareness. The lineage that wasn't passed down through fear or shame or control, but maybe something much, much older, much quieter, and infinitely more enduring. Love. Maybe your story begins in chaos. Maybe your family tree holds more storms than songs. Maybe you've spent years wondering whether you'll become what came before you. If that's true, I hope you remember the little boy. The one in my dreams. The child who carried the lineage of destruction. Yet was never, ever destruction himself. Maybe that child has been living inside you all along. Waiting, not necessarily to be fixed or explained, only to be recognized and finally, finally to be held. So today, before we close, I'd like to leave you with a blessing. May you become the ancestor for younger self that your younger self longed for. May you remember that blood carries history, but your soul carries possibility. May you recognize that love is not naive. It is the oldest wisdom there is. When the old world begins to crumble around you, may you discover what was never destroyed. May you gather it gently into your arms. May you call it home. May you remember that your inheritance is not limited to the wounds you can name. You also carry the prayers that were whispered before you were born, the courage of those who endured, the dreams of those who never ever stopped believing another way was possible, the quiet light that refused to go out. And may you trust that somewhere beyond what your eyes can yet see, a wiser version of you is already sending everything you'll need for the journey ahead. Because the truest inheritance has never ever been the wound. It has always been the light that refused to go out. Until next time, may you walk gently, may you love courageously, and may you always, always, always remember the lineage of light has been within you all along.