The Conscious Descendant: What Pitṛ Pakṣa Teaches Us About Ancestral Healing

What do you see when you look in a mirror? Your face? It is your own, yes. However, it is also a museum.

It is a collage of what you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. Things about your body that please you or displease you; or even complex qualities like your sense of balance, susceptibility to illnesses, musical abilities, your shyness in a crowd—all of these are not yours alone. They are features of people, perhaps long dead, but still very much alive as fragments in you.

We carry the past around us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives in facets of our customs. It colours the way we look at the world and how the world, in turn, looks at us. You can go through your days as though you began this morning, choosing your reactions freshly, building your life from scratch. Yet the way you raise your voice, the way you go quiet, the way you hold your money, the way you flinch or don't flinch at affection: much of it was rehearsed in rooms you may never have entered, by people you may never have met.

“Regardless of whether we look down to acknowledge them, we inevitably will always stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We are somebody’s continuation.”

Pitṛ Pakṣa gives us a few days to turn our attention backwards because the present did not begin with us. Maybe we were given this as a fortnight to be set aside to notice just this—to see clearly, and then to choose.

What is Pitṛ Pakṣa?

The words Pitṛ and Pakṣa denote “ancestor” and “a lunar fortnight”, respectively. Traditionally, these 15 days encompass ideals of Smaraṇa, Śrāddha and Tarpaṇa. These translate to frameworks of showing gratitude towards those who made our lives possible through remembrance, acts performed with reverence and faith, and offerings.

However, every ritual observed in this fortnight asks the same quiet question: “What have I inherited?”

You may have inherited things that are tangible—land, wealth, a family name. But you have also inherited ways of loving, fighting, grieving, surviving, parenting, and responding to authority. We inherit beliefs about money, intimacy, masculinity, femininity, success, shame, vulnerability, and belonging. Every family passes down saṁskāras—some that nourish us, and some that constrain us.

Pitṛ Pakṣa and Intergenerational Trauma

Contemporarily, psychological literature has been increasingly echoing how trauma moves through everyday family patterns: attachment styles, the versions of stories we are repeatedly told or refuse to tell, coping mechanisms, shame, secrecy, survival behaviours, money wounds, and potentially even biological and epigenetic pathways.

Consider a parent who grew up watching their family struggle to make ends meet. They learn to treat spending on themselves as irresponsible: “Why buy this when we already have something at home?” Their child may grow up equating self-indulgence with guilt—saving for everyone else, but feeling uncomfortable spending even on things they genuinely need or enjoy. Years later, they may have financial security and still hear that old voice whenever they buy something for themselves.

Consider a family where money was always discussed in terms of sacrifice: “We did everything for you. Do you know how much this cost us?” A child may grow up learning that receiving comes with a debt. Even as an adult, they may struggle to accept help, spend freely, or let someone do something for them—because somewhere along the way, money became tied to guilt and obligation.

It is also important to be mindful that this does not mean every difficulty we experience was simply “inherited from our ancestors”. Human experience is far more complex than trauma being merely encoded in our DNA. Yet, it is unquestionable that families transmit emotional worlds of their own.

Honouring without romanticising

Honouring our ancestors and romanticising them does not mean the same thing. The lens of śrāddha invites us:

• To honour what came before us.
• To acknowledge what they endured.
• To recognise what we inherited from them.
• To preserve what nourishes us.
• And to willingly release what no longer needs to be carried forward.

“Perhaps one of the deepest offerings we can make to those who came before us is to heal what we can, so that the pain they could not resolve does not have to become the inheritance of those who come after us.”

The Conscious Descendant

We are neither completely independent of our ancestors nor condemned to repeat them. We are the meeting point between inheritance and possibility. Pitṛ Pakṣa need not only be a remembrance of the dead. It can also become a period of inquiry for the living:

• What entered the world through those before me?
• What continues through me?
• And what shall end with me?

May we remember our ancestors with śraddhā rather than fear. May we inherit their wisdom without unconsciously inheriting all their wounds. And may the work we do upon ourselves become an offering—not only to those who came before us, but also to those who will come after us.