During our lives, we deal with all manner of pain and difficulties, whether expected or unexpected. We’re also exposed to toxins and traumas. As part of our survival drive, the body has developed mechanisms to neutralize these damaging influences.
One of the ways the body does this is by packing issues up and moving them aside so they don’t interfere with our daily function. These issues can be physical, emotional, psychological, or a result of trauma or exposure to toxins. They get packed up and stored in certain parts of the body. I often refer to these areas of storage as “boxes.” These boxes are complicated because we don’t just hold our own issues from the past within them—we can also hold on to current difficulties or inherited genetic and epigenetic patterns.
In Chinese medicine, we can actually feel these boxes when we take a pulse. The body stores these boxes in different parts of the body, based on which tissue is most suitable for long-term storage and which organ system the issue relates to.
Multigenerational Trauma and the Path to Release
I’ll use my own family to give an example of an inherited epigenetic pattern and a “boxed” survival reaction. My grandparents both survived the Holocaust, but they responded to it very differently. My grandmother was strong, and my family was saved by her strength and instincts. She insisted they board a ship from Romania to Turkey one night in 1944, even after she was told they’d have to leave all of their belongings behind. If she could wait until the next morning, they could take their belongings with them, but she decided to take the first ship. The night ship my family boarded made it to Turkey, but the morning ship was attacked by the Nazis, and everyone on board drowned. She continued to be strong and utilized her survival instinct throughout her life—she overcame two forms of cancer and lived to be ninety-eight years old.
My grandmother was always on the alert. But this came with a price: smiling and being happy were never her forte. Epigenetically, she passed her remarkable strength on to her only daughter, my mother, who came to Israel as a refugee at the age of eight. My mother was able to create a supportive family of five children while maintaining a stellar career as an appellate court judge.
My grandfather, on the other hand, had a different reaction to the horrific experiences of the Holocaust. Five of his eight siblings as well as his parents were killed, and he couldn’t stomach what had happened to them. He literally couldn’t digest it, and he never talked about it. It was boxed deep inside his stomach. He developed stomach cancer and died at the age of fifty. His name was Isaac, and I am named after him. And while I never met him, I not only carried his name but his unresolved pain, something I was not aware of.
Loop Patterns: How Family Habits Become Cellular Programming
What happened with my family is an example of how we can manifest experiences in our bodies and how that manifestation can be multigenerational. The habits we inherit or develop have a profound impact on our lives and the lives of our family members. Sometimes a thought or tendency can be so strong it becomes a dominant trait within a family.
These repetitive cycles are called “loop patterns” in Chinese medicine. These patterns can permeate through every level of a person all the way down to the cellular level. However, epigenetics is a dynamic process and gives us the ability to change these patterns and ourselves. It allows us to create an inner change, but it can only happen when we recognize that we have the capacity to change.
Every cell in our body has up to one million reactions per second! And If we look at the quantum level, everything is always in flux—nothing is static. Everything is possible because everything is changeable. Quantum physicists have found that the mere act of observing something affects what is being observed, known as the “observer effect.” To use the words of Max Planck, father of quantum physics, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” We are not bound by whatever genetic material we have but rather can change and create ourselves all the way down to the biochemical level.
My Journey from Buried Pain to Emotional Freedom
Let me share with you my own epigenetic healing story. All my life, I experienced tenderness and pressure in my sternal area. I had a deep sense that this pain and pressure represented something significant that I had been carrying my entire life. After decades of training and practice in meditation, combined with insights I had gained on how to use meditation for multigenerational healing, I was finally able to touch the source of this pain. It was unresolved pain and trauma from my family’s experience in the Holocaust passed on to me.
How was I able to locate and understand this pain? It is a deep and complex process that is a result of the integration of meditation and healing practices I have developed over decades. And although it can be complicated, some of the guiding principles are easier to grasp, especially as you start applying them to your daily life.
The key tenant is connecting with our heart and learning to transform the survival response into compassion and harmony. We each have hidden sources of pain that we carry, and sometimes simply being motivated to unlock them can trigger a change.
Once I acknowledged and released my inherited trauma, the memory and somatic response* simply vanished. It’s still hard for me to comprehend the sense of openness I now experience in my chest, accompanied with a deeper sense of emotional freedom and spiritual well-being. This healing process involved a deep acceptance and forgiveness taking place within me.
And as part of the multigenerational, epigenetic transformation, my mother, who was not aware of my healing process, was suddenly able to watch television programs about the Holocaust for the first time ever. This is the power of multigenerational healing and of creating a shift in the survival response.
*A somatic response is a bodily reaction—physical sensations or movements—that occurs in response to an internal state, stimulus, or emotion. Examples include increased heart rate, sweating, muscle tension, trembling, shallow breathing, stomach butterflies, or a startle reflex. Somatic responses can be automatic (fight‑or‑flight reactions to danger), conditioned (muscle tightness linked to a traumatic memory), or intentionally produced (breathing and relaxation exercises). They reflect links between the nervous system, body, and emotions and are commonly targeted in therapies for stress, trauma, and chronic pain.
Embracing Impermanence and Inner Change
Our bodies are extremely complex, and much of the complexity comes from our multigenerational issues. While we may be susceptible to certain hereditary illnesses or conditions, we can avoid many of them by making healthy lifestyle changes. There is a Hebrew saying that describes this: “Everything is predicted, but we have a choice.” Certain outcomes may be quite predictable if we continue along the same path as our ancestors, but if we travel in a different direction, we can change it. Changing the outcome requires making a change in our habits; we must shift from the expected to the unexpected.
To give a simple example, if you stay on one highway to drive from one city to another, you expect to arrive at your destination at a certain time. However, if you took a completely different road, you could end up in an unexpected place. These journeys happen in our lives all the time. Shifting away from the expected can move us away from the reactivity that drives the survival response. Blocking the damaging influences of galectin-3 is a critical element in creating this shift.
Targeting Galectin‑3: A Key Step Toward Cellular and Multigenerational Healing
Years ago, before I discovered the role of galectin-3 in inflammation and fibrosis, I witnessed an interesting phenomenon: Modified Citrus Pectin (MCP), an extract of citrus pith with a reduced molecular size for absorption into the blood, quickly reduced pain in my patients. They reported that their arthritis, back pain, and sometimes even pain from cancer had resolved or improved in just a few days. I asked myself, “How can this be?” I thought maybe it was due to MCP’s ability to remove heavy metals, but the resulting pain relief happened so quickly, it was puzzling.
Now, after years of research, we know that blocking galectin-3 reduces inflammation and fibrosis, and can therefore not only help relieve pain but also positively impact a wide spectrum of conditions.
At its core, both acute and chronic pain trace back to inflammation. While inflammation is a normal and necessary immune response, it’s meant to shut off once the threat passes. With chronic pain conditions, these inflammatory signals continue unchecked, creating an ongoing cycle of discomfort.
It’s especially striking to look at the benefits of MCP in inflammatory-driven cardiovascular conditions. There are close to twenty animal studies published in major journals reporting the consistent ability of MCP to stop and even reverse arteriosclerotic damage. Only one single study showed that MCP didn’t work, and when you read it carefully, you can see that it didn’t work because it was a different type of MCP with a higher molecular weight. This demonstrates the importance of using the correct MCP—MCP is only effective when it is properly modified.
Final Thoughts
Everything is ever-changing and impermanent. Modern quantum physics knows it, science knows it, and our bodies know it.
We tend to forget this truth. So much time and energy is spent worrying about things we hold to as fixed, even while they are actually changing by nature. Yet if everything changes at every moment, there is the potential for anything to arise. This is where miracles can happen!
This potentiality is unbounded and inherent within each of us. From a spiritual perspective, we could perhaps think of this as being the “divine within us.” From a Buddhist perspective, not recognizing the impermanent, changing nature of everything causes us to suffer since we lose our openness and equilibrium by holding on to things so tightly. Yet if we step back and see the ever-changing scheme of things, we can begin to relax, and in turn, the grip of our experience begins to loosen. As a result, change can happen, and the doorway to our unbounded potentiality can begin to open. This unbounded essence is naturally expressed in each of us as innate, unconditional love and compassion. We don’t have to invent or create it—it’s present within us, and it’s who we are. What we need to do is become aware of it and integrate it into our lives.
This is an ongoing journey that continually unfolds, and it holds within it the potential for infinite healing and transformation—there’s the potential for a miracle to happen in each second.
References
Linda O’Neill, Tina Fraser, Andrew Kitchenham, and Verna Mcdonald, “Hidden Burdens: A Review of Intergenerational, Historical and Complex Trauma, Implications for Indigenous Families,” Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma 11, no. 2 (2016): 173–86, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-016-0117-9.
Jorge Alejandro Alegría-Torres, Andrea Baccarelli, and Valentina Bollati, “Epigenetics and Lifestyle,” Epigenomics 3, no. 3 (2011): 267–77, https://doi.org/10.2217/epi.11.22.
Debra Umberson and Jennifer Karas Montez, “Social Relationships and Health: A Flashpoint for Health Policy,” supplement, Journal of Health and Social Behavior 51, no. 1 (2010), https://doi.org/10 .1177/0022146510383501.
Isaac Eliaz and Avraham Raz, “Pleiotropic Effects of Modified Citrus Pectin,” Nutrients 11, no. 11 (2019): 2619, https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11112619.
Salvatore Sciacchitano, Luca Lavra, Alessandra Morgante, Alessandra Ulivieri, Fiorenza Magi, Gian De Francesco, Carlo Bellotti, Leila Salehi, and Alberto Ricci. “Galectin-3: One Molecule for an Alphabet of Diseases, from A to Z,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences 19, no. 2 (2018): 379. https://doi. org/10.3390/ijms19020379.
