What if “turning the hearts of the children to the fathers” means more than doing our family history? What if it means working through our intergenerational trauma? The scars of racism & slavery, of sexual abuse, of poverty, they all get passed down. Will we heal or pass them on?

The spiritual teacher Gurdjieff taught that one of our most important aims should be uncovering what “grandmother and grandfather forgot.” Trauma is a kind of forgetting, it distances ourselves from what reality is without our reactions. In our fallen state we are all reactions.

So, with this in mind, the Restoration for me means cutting through the jungle of all those tangled traumas we’ve inherited, manifesting in all our anxieties and complexes, until we reach the garden, out of reach of all these noxious weeds that capture us. It’s spiritual, yes...

...but it’s also emotional. It’s physical too. It’s comprehensive. It doesn’t belong to some other time or some other person. Our past not only involves us, it *is*us. “Remember, remember,” the Book of Mormon says repeatedly. Remember “what grandmother and grandfather forgot.”