When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

She confessed to Nadja how authoritarian and strict her own mother (Nadja’s grandmother) had been and talked about her mother’s excessive demands regarding cleanliness and proper behavior. This was reflected in her mother’s favorite saying, “Children should be seen but not heard.” Nadia’s mother then emphasized how lonely she had felt during her whole childhood, being the only girl with two much—older brothers, and how much she craved to have playmates. According to the mother’s narrative, Nadia’s grandmother used to invite many relatives for family reunions on Sundays and made food for everyone. Her description of the house exactly matched Nadia’s LSD experience, including the large porch and the steps leading up to it. She also mentioned the dresses covered by starched white pinafores that were characteristic of her childhood. There were no family photographs capturing this scene, and the house had been torn down before Nadja was born.

  RETRIEVING MEMORIES OF THE STOLEN GENERATIONS: The Story of Marianne

  The third example of verified ancestral memories involves experiential exploration of family history that reached back several generations. It is the story of Marianne Wobcke, an Australian midwife who participated in our training in Holotropic Breathwork and transpersonal psychology and eventually became a certified practitioner. I am using here her real name because she decided to share her story with the public and presented it in June 2004 at the Sixteenth International Transpersonal Conference in Palm Springs, which I organized jointly with Christina.

  Marianne’s extraordinary genealogical quest began on her thirteenth birthday, when her parents told her that she was adopted. When she shared this secret at school, she was teased and chose not to mention it again. She also found it very puzzling why so many of her dreams and nightmares, as well as experiences with magic mushrooms and LSD she had had in her adolescence and during her twenties, featured Australian Aborigines. However, it was not until a very intense emotional experience she had as a midwife that she began seriously to ponder her adoptive status.

  In April 1991, Marianne began her midwifery training at Toowoomba Base Hospital. Her first delivery involved a full-blood Aboriginal woman from Western Australia whose pregnancy was a result of a rape. Marianne was a student midwife, full of enthusiasm, and in her eagerness to support this woman, she repeatedly invaded her space. Not familiar with the tradition of the Australian Aborigines, she also tried to make eye contact with her, which is something that is forbidden to full bloods.

  To protect herself, the woman crouched with her back to Marianne, covering her nose and face with her hands. She was also responding negatively to Marianne’s smell; to her Marianne reeked of soap and perfume, which made her feel sick. Finally, responding intuitively to this situation, Marianne stepped back, squatted at a respectable distance from the delivering woman, and granted her the privilege to birth silently without her interference.

  The Aboriginal woman’s birthing experience, culminating in her abandoning the baby, had a profound impact on Marianne. The baby stayed in the nursery for three weeks while Family Services searched for the mother, who had effectively disappeared. Marianne was deeply moved and strangely infatuated with the infant. She tried to rationalize her reaction by assuming that her maternal instincts had been triggered by witnessing the delivery, but was nevertheless shocked by the intensity of her emotional response. By coincidence, she was on duty the day three elders, all of them grandmothers, arrived at the ward to claim the infant, and she relinquished the baby to them. This triggered in her an intense grieving process that heralded her personal journey into her ancestral heritage.

  It was not until this experience, which she had as a beginning midwife, that Marianne started to feel intense curiosity considering her adoptive status. As her parents had never alluded to it again, she was reluctant to approach them with her concerns. Instead of questioning them, she wrote to Family Services. Eventually, she received a parcel in the mail, including a brief outline of her adoptive status, her birth mother’s name and age at the time of her birth, and a book called No More Secrets. In the following decade, there were times when she gave up on ever unraveling the mystery of her past. On the way, she experienced many disappointments, many trips up dry gullies.

  Marianne’s quest received a new impetus when she met Mary Madden, a therapist who had trained with us in the United States and was a certified Holotropic Breathwork practitioner. Mary became the facilitator for Marianne’s breathwork sessions and eventually her dear friend. With Mary’s help, Marianne embarked on a challenging journey of self-exploration during which she had many difficult experiences, some of them in holotropic sessions, others in her dreams and in the course of her everyday life.

  Among them were memories of repeated sexual abuse as a child and of being raped by a man who spoke Italian, no English. Marianne was puzzled by these experiences because she was reasonably sure that the events involved did not represent anything from her present lifetime. She started having migraine headaches that seemed to be related to her traumatic birth, involving a forceps. As she was reliving this part of her history, bruises would appear spontaneously on her forehead and body. She was desperately trying to remember if these experiences had actually happened to her and if it was possible that she had blocked them from her consciousness.

  At this difficult stage of her self-exploration, Marianne withdrew from her partner, family, and friends. She was confused and disoriented, and temporarily lost all points of reference and the will to live. Retrospectively, she reported that only the loving support of the breathwork community, facilitators, and peers, made it possible for her to survive this crisis. She was convinced that without it, she would have taken her life during this challenging time.

  Although she had had very limited connection with the indigenous community up to this point, she had many inner experiences involving the Aborigines, some of them during the breathwork sessions, others in her dreams or spontaneously in her everyday life. She imagined with extraordinary intensity and clarity Aboriginal elders coming to her and showing her practices that strongly enhanced her abilities as a midwife. This inspired her to collaboratively set up, through Blue Care, Queensland’s first, partially state-funded, independent midwifery program.

  Throughout this time, she had no luck in her search for her birth mother. But she carefully documented her experiences in her journal and drew prolifically the scenes that haunted her. This resulted in a remarkable series of paintings documenting and illustrating her stormy inner process. In 1995, Marianne had her first breakthrough, when Salvation Army Missing Persons Service discovered her grandmother and uncles living in Sydney, and subsequently her birth mother, living in New Zealand. However, her relatives did not want to have anything to do with her, and Marianne was devastated.

  Finally, six months later, her birth mother reluctantly wrote to her. The letter was brief and brought unexpected validation for Marianne’s experiences. It described her conception as a rape by an Italian man who spoke no English. At the time it happened, Marianne’s mother was a teenager from a small town in far north Queensland. She was not only brutally traumatized by the rape, but also shamed and blamed by her parents. After unsuccessful attempts to arrange an abortion, she was sent to a home for unmarried girls.

  Following Marianne’s birth, a traumatic forceps delivery, her mother never saw or touched her again. She was put on a boat to New Zealand, where she did her best to forget her past and start anew. In her letter, she wished Marianne well and made no further attempts to contact her, in spite of numerous attempts on Marianne’s part. However, this was not the end of Marianne’s quest. Following this unexpected validation of the circumstances of her conception and birth, her experiences in Holotropic Breathwork continued with renewed intensity.

  In one of her sessions, she identified experientially with a full-blood Aboriginal woman who was tied, raped, and beaten at the hands of two uniformed men on horseback. Her two children were taken away from her, and her legs were doused in petrol, set ablaze, and badly burnt. As
her process continued, Marianne kept drawing and documenting these episodes in an attempt to maintain her sanity. One day, after a therapy session that again featured an indigenous theme, Marianne called at Mary Madden’s suggestion, the directory assistance and made a long-distance phone call to New Zealand. She hoped to make phone contact with her birth mother, and this time her attempt was successful.

  In the conversation that followed, Marianne’s mother told her that her great-grandmother was a full-blood Aborigine, and she graphically described the sexual, emotional, physical, and spiritual abuse that had defined this woman’s life. The mystery seemed to be unfolding at last, and Marianne’s hopes were up. However, following this conversation, her birth mother withdrew again and refused further contact. In desperation, Marianne approached Link Up, an Aboriginal organization, to assist her to verify her indigenous status. They could offer no support without her birth mother’s permission. This was not forthcoming, and Marianne’s frustration grew.

  Marianne’s adoptive parents had staunchly supported her through this process, and one day her father gave her a phone number he had discovered by chance. Marianne was able to make contact with Community and Personal Histories, an organization that was willing to investigate her case. Some months later, she received in the mail pages of documentation from 1895 to 1918, detailing the history of her great-grandmother, who was the illegitimate daughter of an elderly bachelor landowner in far north Queensland. He was seeking an exemption from the Aboriginal Protection Act so this half-caste child could be returned to care for him.

  This man referred to having taken a full-blood Aboriginal woman as his mistress, which resulted in the conception of two half-caste children. There was also the police report concerning two officers on horseback and their ride in the early 1900s to capture “the gin and her children,” who were subsequently sent to the “Nigger camp” and into service. Eventually, Marianne was able to confirm that her great-grandmother’s feet were seriously burnt during this episode, just as she had experienced it in her breathwork session.

  Marianne was referred to a Stolen Generations’ counselor and found the work with him extraordinarily helpful and transformative. In June 2003, a representative of Link Up, an organization responsible for reuniting indigenous families from the Stolen Generations, flew with her to Sydney for a three-day reunion with her grandmother and uncle, Robbie. Words could never adequately ex press the emotion Marianne experienced as she walked into her grandmother’s house. Her grandmother took her in her arms, cried, and turning to her son she said: “At last our baby is home.” Marianne found out that when the Salvation Army had made contact with her grandmother years ago she had just suffered a stroke. As she recovered, she did not remember this episode and did not know where Marianne was and how to make contact with her. A deeply spiritual per son, she had prayed daily for Marianne to find her way back.

  Marianne’s birth mother has limited contact with her family, and she still refuses to acknowledge her daughter. But the pain of that rejection is healing with the combined acceptance and love of Marianne’s grandmother and uncle, Robbie, who wrote in a recent letter: “I was trying to think of why you have made such a difference in our lives. Then it hit me that you completed our family, when you arrived at your Grandma’s door. It was as if finally the circle was closed. We love you dearly.” Marianne’s heroine’s journey came to an end, and she was finally able to find her home.

  ANCESTRAL MEMORY OR PAST-LIFE EXPERIENCE? The Story of Renata

  In the fourth example, the portrayed situations reach far back in history, to the beginning of the seventeenth century. This case also illustrates extremely well the conceptual challenges associated with the verification of the information involved. The protagonist in this story is Renata, a former client of mine, who came into treatment because of her cancer phobia, which was complicating her life. In her LSD therapy, she relived various traumatic experiences from her childhood and repeatedly dealt with the memory of her birth. In the advanced stage of her self-exploration, the nature of her sessions suddenly changed dramatically. What happened was very unusual and unprecedented.

  Four of her LSD sessions brought up almost exclusively material from a specific historical period. She experienced a number of episodes that took place in Prague in the seventeenth century, which was a crucial period in Czech history. After the disastrous battle of White Mountain in 1621, which marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, the country ceased to exist as an independent kingdom and came under the hegemony of the Hapsburg dynasty. In an effort to destroy the feelings of national pride and to defeat the forces of resistance, the Hapsburgs sent out mercenaries to capture the country’s most powerful noblemen. Twenty-seven prominent aristocrats were arrested and beheaded in a public execution on a scaffold erected in the Old Town Square in Prague.

  During her historical sessions, Renata had an unusual variety of images and insights concerning the architecture of the experienced period and typical garments and costumes, as well as weapons and various utensils used in everyday life. She was also able to describe many of the complicated relationships existing at that time between the royal family and the vassals. Renata had never specifically studied this period of Czech history, nor was she interested in it. I had to go to the library and do historical research in order to confirm that the information Renata reported was accurate.

  Many of Renata’s experiences were related to various periods in the life of a young nobleman, one of the twenty-seven aristocrats beheaded by the Hapsburgs. In a dramatic sequence, she finally relived with powerful emotions and in considerable detail the actual events of the execution, including this nobleman’s terminal anguish and agony. On many occasions, Renata experienced full identification with this individual. She was not able to figure out how these historical sequences were related to her present life, why they emerged in her therapy, and what they meant. After much reflection, Renata finally concluded that she must have relived events from the life of one of her ancestors. All this happened at an early stage of my psychedelic explorations, and I, admittedly, was not quite intellectually ready for this interpretation.

  Trying to reach some understanding, I chose two different approaches. On one hand, I spent a considerable amount of time in an effort to verify the specific historical information involved and was increasingly impressed by its accuracy. On the other hand, I tried to use the Freudian method of free associations, treating Renata’s story as if it were a dream. I hoped that I would be able to decipher it as a symbolic disguise for some childhood experiences or problems in her present life. No matter how hard I tried, the experiential sequences did not make much sense from a psychoanalytic point of view. When Renata’s LSD experiences moved into new areas, I finally gave up, stopped thinking about this peculiar incident, and focused on other more recent and immediate conceptual challenges.

  Two years later, when I was already in the United States, I received a long letter from Renata with the following unusual introduction: “Dear Dr. Grof, you will probably think that I am absolutely insane when I share with you the results of my recent private search.” In the text that followed, Renata de scribed how she happened to meet her father, whom she had not seen since her parents’ divorce, when she was three years old. After a short discussion, her father invited her to have dinner with him, his second wife, and their children. After dinner, he told her that he wanted to share with her something that she might find interesting.

  In World War II, the Nazis issued an order requesting all families in the occupied territories to present to German authorities their pedigrees demonstrating the absence of anyone of Jewish origin for the last five generations. This was a very serious issue because failure to prove the “purity” of the family lineage had catastrophic consequences for its members. While conducting this mandatory genealogical research, Renata’s father became fascinated by this procedure. After he had completed the required five-generation pedigree for the authorities, he continued thi
s quest because of his private interest.

  He was able to trace back the history of his family more than three centuries, thanks to the meticulously kept archives of the European parish houses that had preserved birth records of all the people born in their district for untold generations. He was now able to show Renata the fruit of many years of his investigation, a carefully designed, complex pedigree of their family, indicating that they were descendants of one of the noblemen executed after the battle of White Mountain in the Old Town Square in Prague.

  Renata was astonished by this unexpected confirmation of the information she had obtained in her LSD sessions. Having described this extraordinary episode, she expressed her firm belief that “highly emotionally charged memories could be imprinted in the genetic code and transmitted through centuries to future generations.” Renata’s letter ended with a triumphant “I told you so.” She felt that this new, unexpected information provided by her father confirmed what she had suspected all along on the basis of the convincing nature of her experiences—that she had encountered an authentic ancestral memory. As I mentioned earlier, this was a conclusion I was at the time reluctant to accept.

  After my initial astonishment concerning this most unusual coincidence, I discovered a rather serious logical inconsistency in Renata’s account. One of the experiences she had had in her historical LSD sessions involved the execution of the young nobleman, including all the emotions associated with it. In the seventeenth century, long before the revolutionary breakthroughs of modern medicine, a dead person was not able to procreate. Death would have destroyed all material channels through which any information about the life of the deceased could be transmitted to posterity.