The Ancestors Within: Recognize and Embrace the Gifts of Your Origins

By Amy Gillespie Dougherty

Your ancestors have waited your whole life for this moment. . .


. . . and the next!

What if you had an opportunity to discover and connect with your ancient origins, and the gifts passed on to you from those ancestors? What if those discoveries brought healing you never thought possible?

Amy G

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brave Healer Productions
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781954047563

Amy Gillespie Dougherty

Amy is a results-driven innovator, speaker, and bestselling author with more than twenty years' experience creating impactful self-discovery, awareness, and life coaching programs. As a 38-year old woman who had never traveled abroad or even learned a foreign language, she beat the odds in Mozambique, Africa, where she started a nonprofit with $150 and the idea that all children deserve the right to keep themselves and their siblings alive. Over six years, she became a finalist for CNN Heroes and received accolades from embassies and aid organizations.Thriving as a trailblazer, Amy created Irigenics™ Ancestral Eye Reading as a survival skills program for teens and young adults in an effort to reduce self-destructive behaviors and suicide patterns. Amy believes in the power of the ancestral pulse within each of us, and our ability to reach the best of our best. She emphasizes this connection to our gifts and our origin in her new series, "The Ancestors Within." The first book (Reveal and Heal the Ancient Memories You Carry) places emphasis on the repeat patterns that show up in your life and how they have ancestral ties, which can be resolved. Her second book in the series will publish in October of 2021.

Book preview

Chapter 1

EMBRACE YOUR ANCESTORS

RECOGNIZE THE GIFTS YOU WERE BORN WITH

Amy Gillespie Dougherty

MY STORY

I found myself in the principal’s office again. Why couldn’t I just shut up?

Why did I have to yell at the home economics teacher, You’re cooking that too long! Who was I to say such things as a 13-year-old? Was that moment a product of my ancestral memory? Or the upbringing of my adopted family? How did I know she was cooking the milk too long?

My genetic gift for profiling took me half a century to recognize and validate, so I can teach you how to discover your own gifts today.

As a 13-year-old teenager, adopted from birth, I didn’t know I was French. I didn’t know that at least eight of my biological ancestors came from four regions of France and both my birth mother’s and birth father’s lines of the family. Back then, I didn’t know that one pair of my great-grandparents were Pincemailles, which translates to a French kind of honey mustard, meaning just a pinch of such a delectable French treat.

I knew my adopted mom was a good cook. Okay, she was a great cook and an impressive baker. Imagine; she won a baking contest when she was 13 years old using a wood-burning stove. Imagine winning an oven from Betty Crocker in 1952! Still, I was obstinate with my mom, as many first-born girls are. I refused to learn how to cook from her. I had to take Home-Ec to learn how to do it myself!

My mom not only set an amazing table for guests and loved to entertain (as most fourth-born children do), but she was also a master of all kinds of cooking. I recall the delicate texture of her butter-brown potatoes, gently turned in the sizzling pan to have exactly the perfect amount of toasting and puffing. They were indeed the original French Fry.

But wait, she was German–and Norwegian. How would she have known about French cooking and baking? Her ancestors were forced to change their name from Foelker because there were too many Foelkers in Germany at the time. Their surname became Gronewold (meaning green forest). How did they come to choose this name? One could only guess.

So, who were they, really? Could one even track the family name back to Germany? Was there a record of this name change? And was it one sibling, or did they all change at once? Was there a family battle over this?

What I knew from my childhood was my mom would recant the story of her grandfather disowning her uncle because he ran away from home as a child and changed his name. In his will, he left farms and estates to each of his children. Yet to that son, he only left five dollars and wrote that he could forgive everything, except that he changed his name as a fourteen-year old.

My mom’s world included an old ancestral pattern regarding identity and name changing that was not quite yet healed, and challenges regarding names came up more than once during my life. This included a passionate battle I had with her as a child.

Though I was young, I remember the battle over my middle name all too well. Sometimes it started when my brother called me Wheezy. Other times I instigated it by trying to find a creative alternative that my mom would accept, such as Layelle, or Lisette. After all, it wasn’t like Louise was a family name. It was one she’d chosen because of a little girl who came into her work, and she liked the name.

When I was about ten years old I felt I’d come up with the perfect solution to this battle that had gone on most of my life. How about Laroy?

What?! Where did you come up with that!? my mom asked with raised brows.

Well. It’s Leroy’s name. She hadn’t shot me down yet, so I pressed on, and we all like our neighbor Leroy; but that’s a boy’s name, so maybe it could be Laroy. I spoke faster as I gained a bit of hope, it still starts with L so it wouldn’t change my initials?

That’s where I made my mistake. It came out sounding like a question, which my mom was happy to answer. No.

In my career doing Irigenics® Ancestral Eye Reading, the marker for ancestral identity challenges is at 12:00 in the right eye. It also reveals a gift for pioneering, those willing to push forward in new lands, knowing they may never see their family of origin again—an emotional situation of the parents having a different name from their child. This pattern is often seen in genealogy records from Ellis Island, lost records, and other mishaps regarding surnames over decades of time.

As an adopted child, I wanted to know so much more about where I came from.

What was my nationality?

Why did I have a gift for music (playing for up to 14 hours at a time)?

For writing, researching, and innovating?

Why did I love animals and want to become a zoologist?

Why did I choose pharmaceutical sales at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, as my first career choice? (Though I was never able to complete my college education).

Why was I so passionate about changing my name to Laroy?

And why did my dad always nap, wrapped up like an Irish corpse, covering his head, feet, and entire body in a sheet that was eerily like a mummy?

Why did I feel so connected to my dad and struggled with my mom?

Why’d I always have to do it myself! And accept no help from my mom when I was a second-born after my brother?

And what was this bizarre otherworld, divine connection I always felt, calling me into a spiritual career (and even the weird), but then begging me to back it up with research and fact?

Could I really be that complex? Or could I be exactly like you, shuffling through childhood, feeling a bit off-kilter from the world around me, trying to find my placement?

As I came to be an adult, all those clues finally found their exact placement in the story of me. Genetically, I was born a first-born girl. That’s why I didn’t connect with mom and fought with my brother. That’s why I had to do it myself!

One of the amazing gifts we’re born with is the cellular knowing of our birth order. If we’re missing a sibling (from our genetic father), whether we realize it or not creates a feeling of being out of place.

In 1984 I met my birth mother. Alas, someone I looked like. Finally, I could validate my gift for stitching, crafting, poetry, puzzles, and writing. My birth mother had owned a yarn shop and was quite skilled at needlepoint. My maternal grandmother was a published poet. My adoration for the smell of woodwork, sawdust, old hardware, and renovating houses threaded back to my maternal grandparents and great-grandparents.

Before I met my birth mother, I’d already won many awards for the gifts, skills, and talents of my ancestors.

I must admit this included my challenges with commitment, finishing projects or following through with careers, or even dinner dates. It seems epigenetics are a package deal—both our incredible gifts and those personality and professional quirks we might wish we didn’t have.

Adopted parents, relax; it’s not you!

In fact, even though my birth mother and I didn’t meet until I was 19, we had uncannily similar childhood experiences. We even worked for the same company when we were each 18 years old (including sitting at the same desk) though it was three hours from where either of us had grown up.

Still, I had to wonder about my gift for music, my interest in the metaphysical, and my uncanny gift to move the line as I became a systems performance manager for a major theme park, further revealing my ability to diagnose and fix things. And there enters the genetic line of my birth father.

I didn’t meet him until I was 54, and I just about fell over when I discovered he was the one with the interest in the metaphysical. After all, his father was a doctor who originally studied for a career in zoology. His brother played in a band, as I had, and my cousin pursued pharmaceutical sales through his education at the University of Minnesota in Duluth (several years after my application and without ever knowing about me).

How was this possible? The world of epigenetics was clearly encircling my life. Upon our first meeting, my birth father held up his hands, saying, Give me fingerprints! As I pointed at my eyes, saying, Give me eyeballs! We both laughed at recognizing our matched interest and gift for profiling and analyzing information as it relates to a known aspect such as eyes, fingerprints, and even birth order. We both have the Connected eye structure, and we both have high academic rankings for skills in diagnostics and connecting information.

Along the way, we uncovered inexplicable situations such as visions I’d experienced as a child, seeing a classroom-type setting filled with equipment. To me, it appeared to be a lab or study area. As we came to talk about the experiences of my life, he pondered if I’d been seeing a zoology lab at Northwestern University, where his parents met. We were both perpetual ponderers of life.

Like my birth mother, my birth father and I had passed like ships in the night throughout our lives, and it’s even quite possible we stood in line together at Musicland, purchasing records in the mall.

Our lives passed so closely, with a magnetic attraction, that one can only study in hindsight. I was raised three hours from where he and my birth mother grew up. The odds of us meeting, bumping into each other, or working for the same company should have been astronomical. Yet, I could speak for hours about our quirks, habits, near-encounters, and the incredible parallels between myself and my cousins.

In fact, my ancestor’s name is on a scroll from the battle of Hastings under King William Laroy. On my birth mother’s side of the family, Laroy can be found in historical records of a family name between 1300-1600 in France.

That’s epigenetics, and that’s only a small part of why I tell you your ancestors are within you. Nobody knows their full 4000 ancestors within 400 years. Adopted or not, all of us have lost threads of our ancestry (from inaccurate records, name changes, hidden information, and lost stories of those who came before us).

This is especially true for the general population of the United States, where most of us have some ancestral aspect of lost families and identity traumas in our epigenetic history.

What being adopted gives you is both your experiences with your adopted family and your genetics. Sometimes this gives you a fabulous magnifying glass into the life of your ancestors. Whereas many people would say, Well, I like music because my parents do, an adopted child would question, Why do I like music when nobody else in my family does?

Each of us is tied to a very specific ancestral thread that begins with our birth order from our father. Therefore, siblings can be very different, even in appearance. The patterns of birth order will imprint the child, even if the father has no knowledge of them.

Even identical twins, are threaded to different ancestors. Different fingerprints. Different DNA. Different epigenetic threads to our origins.

Let’s look at your gifts. Let me take you into an experience where you can own one of your gifts, no matter how small or quirky, and let’s turn that into an interactive experience with one of your ancestors.

THE TOOL

Discovering your gifts through automatic drawing (Automatism).

My first experience of automatic drawing was in the early 2000s. The medium began drawing as she was telling me about the images that were coming to her.

Soon I had a full-colored pencil drawing of my face, with many camouflaged images of animals and people, including otters and elephants, an elderly woman, and two men. She told me that she doesn’t realize all the animals and images contained in her art when she’s drawing.

Soon after, I had my first experience with automatic writing, which turned into my morning meditation practice for several years. Yet, on the morning of January 6, I sat down with a sketchbook and colored pencils rather than my usual journal book. I posed my morning question, What is mine to do?

At first, my ever-trained mind brought me words, but soon I began drawing hearts and stems and leaves, bringing the messages together in various colors. At the end, I had two pages of words, encased by hearts, some connected by vines and leaves, and even several symbols that appeared to be of ancient origins.

By noon, The Ancestors Within was under contract with Brave Healer Productions. The following year, in 2022, I will conclude my sixth book on ancestral connection, including four in The Ancestors Within series.

The shift I made to drawing with color put me into a different part of my brain, allowing me a deeper meditation that gave me greater access to my ancestors. I’d held no vision of doing ancestral books prior to that morning.

What you’ll need: Paper and whatever art material you have on hand: pencil, pen, or marker.

Choose a relaxing place in your home or anywhere that has the least sounds of today (doorbells, cars outside, refrigerators, or dishwashers running). Turn it all off. We want to get you as close to your ancestor’s experience as possible.

Think of things your ancestors may have experienced: the smell of a candle, the crackle of a wood-burning fire. Try to immerse yourself in anything you know of your ancestor’s world. If it’s windy or raining, open the window a bit for a sound you know your ancestors experienced.

Note: This is true for any of the exercises in this book. If you know they drank tea, steep a cup of tea. Try to get as close to the sounds and scents of their world as you possibly can.

Steps for this first time:

Choose your paper, canvas, or sketchbook. Each will feel different to your hands, having a different sound and feeling on the surface.

Choose a medium you already have in your home: pencil, pen, paint, crayons, chalk, watercolor…

Choose a relaxed setting, and settle in comfortably, keeping your materials within easy reach.

Clear your mind. Don’t have any idea of what you want to draw, especially the first time. Just relax and take a few long slow breaths.

Lightly slide your hand across the paper or canvas, listening to its sound and relaxing your mind. This is a key element in shifting your mind into receiving drawn messages. Feel the paper and let your ears take in the sound for at least 30 seconds. It’s a sound that some of your ancestors experienced.

Relax your eyes and your hands, take a long cleansing breath, pick up your drawing tool and start.

Draw for as long as you can without stopping (at least five minutes). You may find you don’t want to stop; you may go on for an hour or longer.

After your first couple of times doing this, you can begin to ask a question of your ancestors or choose an ancestor. You could ask direct questions like what is my artistic ability? Or what is meant for me to know today?

If you’re adopted, (or don’t know of your ancestors) just direct your question to a specific grandparent such as your father’s mother; you may find you have a desire to use chalk rather than pencil, etc. When finished, journal any sensory experiences, such as the smell of a tobacco pipe.

Tips and experimenting:

If thoughts from your active mind begin to interrupt you (like something you need to do), just let them go. If they persist, stop for a moment, write it down on a different piece of paper and start over.

Don’t play (meditational) music unless you have noises you can’t turn off surrounding you, such as a busy street outside. You’ll find that with a bit of practice, you won’t even hear those sounds.

If a word or symbol comes to you and you feel inclined to write it down, do.

Whatever images come to mind, just keep drawing and writing.

Experiment with different mediums: You may have an entirely different experience with chalk or a calligraphy pen from a pencil. Construction paper will sound different than printer paper.

You may find that the sound of the paper and the drawing guides you into a deep channel of receiving information. If this begins happening and you find you’re receiving a lot of information or sensory experiences, you may want to keep a recorder nearby and gently speak about what’s coming to you as you draw.

Maintain the in-between zone of your relaxed mind and hands. It may be you have finally relaxed your ever-busy mind enough to begin receiving the messages of your ancestors and the automatic (intuitive) drawing puts you into the perfect zone to receive. This is especially true for those who struggle with meditation.

Each time you do this, your ability to drop into the zone will give you a deeper experience of your connection to your ancestors.

Keep in mind your drawings may just be various colors, doodles, or scribbles. There are many great examples of different experiences of automatic drawing on YouTube.

If you’d like my example of automatic drawing, or other methods of creating an interactive ancestral experience, you can get my free download: 7 Ways to Meet Your Ancestors Today at:

https://illuminationstation.org/resources

Chapter 2

An Ancestral Call to Keep the Memories Alive

Lighting the Flame of Ancestral Destiny

Megan Reilly Koepsell, RN, BSN, HTCP

MY STORY

The quiet voices of my ancestors whispered in my ear, guiding me to my eventual vocation when I was just nine years old. I was then in the fourth grade, and watched a movie on television titled I Remember Mama. The movie, based on a young woman who wrote about the lives of her Norwegian immigrant family, was so intriguing and impressive to me that then and there I declared that I was going to be an author when I grew up. I could feel it in my bones. My destiny was to write about my family and share their stories.

The next day I excitedly told my teachers and classmates, I’m going to become an author and write about my family and ancestors when I grow up. I remember the raised eyebrows from my teachers, who seemed surprised to have a child as young as me choose such a career and write about that topic. Except for my closest friends, my classmates openly scoffed at the idea and questioned what would possibly make my family interesting enough to write about? Crestfallen, I let the critics in my life dictate what I could and could not do and quietly put the idea of being a writer out of my mind.

In my late 40s, I experienced a series of health challenges that tested my patience and sanity. For over a year, I battled a broken leg, breast cancer, drug-resistant infection, and nerve damage—all happening one after the other. I’d heal from one only to be faced immediately with the next challenge. No longer feeling like my typical happy, optimistic self, I began meditating each day to empower myself in my healing process. I listened to meditation music while visualizing white light coming down, pushing cancer, infection, and pain out of my body. Meditation calmed my mind and brought me a sense of peace as my body and mind worked together for healing.

I began asking questions and listening during meditation rather than just directing light. I found myself asking one recurring question. What am I supposed to learn from my health challenges? I felt more centered, present, and aware than ever before and realized I’d received signs to slow down and shift direction to explore energy healing.

A desire to dive deeper into the genealogy hobby I started years before also called me. The combination of meditation and genealogy seemed to call my ancestors to me, and I began sensing them and hearing their voices in my head. They came to me through all five senses and in vivid dreams. Always their message was the same—keep their memories alive and tell their stories. Ancestors lined up to have me find their stories and bring them back to life. I felt a profound sense of satisfaction when discovering long-forgotten ancestors. The more ancestors I found, the more I sensed around me wanting their stories told.

Because genealogy and meditation opened my awareness to the unseen relatives around me, I became interested in exploring the metaphysical world. My sister Kathy soon followed in her openness to the spiritual realm. Noticing an advertisement for a metaphysical fair with intuitive readings, she suggested we go together. Never having been to one before, I was intrigued enough to take her suggestion.

Kathy and I were first in line the morning of the metaphysical fair. One intuitive, Etienne Pait, attracted our attention, so we signed up for a reading with him. Nervously, I sat down for my reading. Etienne asked, Are you a writer? I said I wasn’t, but he said, I see you are a writer and will be writing some kind of manual that will be done in a new and unique way. I told him it wasn’t accurate for me. Everything else he said during my reading was so spot on that I forgave the seemingly inaccurate information about me being a writer. I thought, he must have picked up on someone else in the room and not me. Kathy also found her reading with him incredibly accurate.

So began my interest in getting readings from mediums and intuitives. Over the years, I had many readings from people who called to me for some reason or another. Each person started the reading the same way—I see you are a writer, or They’re telling me you’re a writer. Each time I insisted I wasn’t a writer, but each person said they saw me writing, and I’d write a book or manual that was new and unique. Each time I thought they were wrong, but because it was brought up at every reading, I could no longer ignore those messages. I was puzzled why writing was a message I constantly received, especially that I would write a manual. What knowledge did I have that could become a unique manual? I certainly didn’t see myself having that kind of expertise or ability.

In 2017, the thought popped into my head to schedule a telephone reading with Etienne. I tracked him down online and booked a reading with him. The first thing he asked me was why I wasn’t writing. I told him I wasn’t a writer, but he was insistent that I was a writer and it was time I began. He said that he saw me writing a practical manual about intuition that would be done in a new and unique way and would be helpful to a lot of people. I told him I didn’t have special abilities in intuition to write such a manual. At the end of the reading, he mentioned again that I needed to start writing. I asked, Can you be more specific about what I’m meant to write? He answered, You already know what it is you’re supposed to write.

I felt quite frustrated getting off the phone since, once again, I didn’t see myself qualified to be a writer. Nonetheless, throughout the day, I continued to think about what Etienne said. Before going to bed, I said to my guides and ancestors, Okay, guys. If there is something you think I’m supposed to write, please tell me exactly what it is or stop telling me I should write because I don’t know what to write, nor do I think I’m capable of it. Almost immediately, I strongly sensed that I was supposed to write about my experiences of hearing the voices of my ancestors and their stories. I knew the title would be Listening to the Voices of Our Ancestors.

All through the night, I conversed with my ancestors through dreams, sensing, and knowing while arguing that I didn’t know how I could write a book. They pointed out that I already had an outline for the book. They had already guided me to begin a PowerPoint presentation for a genealogy club about my experiences with my ancestors coming to help me with genealogy research. I sensed that they wanted me to not only write about my experiences in a way that it would raise awareness, but to show that ancestor guidance and communication is possible for those who are open to it. Further, I would write the information on how to do it. I felt this book would begin the much-needed conversations to normalize the topic and bring it into the open. They recommended I invite other genealogists to share their stories of ancestors, reaching out to them to show others it happens all the time to everyday people.

I remembered how Etienne said I’d write a practical manual about intuition in a new and unique way, and I got chills. I realized my ancestors had been calling to me all these years until I finally listened to them. They knew I