I recently took my whole family to see the new Pixar movie Coco, which is based around the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead. We all loved it, kids ranging from ages 5-10 and adults alike.

It’s about a little boy, who dreams of being a musician, but his family won’t allow it because the only musician in the family tree broke his great great great grandmother’s heart by abandoning her to pursue his dream of being a famous musician. The boy refuses to give up on his dream, in spite of his family’s resistance to it.

In the film, the young boy is magically transported to the “other side,” where he goes on an adventure to receive the blessing from his great great great grandfather to become a musician after all. His journey unfolds by dramatically uncovering old family secrets including lies and murder to eventually get to the truth about what happened in his ancestry, receive blessing of his family and also learn to value family above all – there is much healing for his entire family tree, living and dead.

As fantastical as the movie is, it reminded me of something real and powerful, which I’ve experienced firsthand: Inter-generational Healing Prayer.

Years ago, when my son was miraculously healed of kidney disease after a priest with the gift of healing prayed over him, the priest (Fr. Mottet) gave me a book of Inter-generational Healing prayers by Robert Degrandis. The prayers were so powerful. Reading them, I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit like never before. God worked powerfully through that book to change my life and increase my faith.

Now I think everyone should know the concept of inter-generational healing prayer because we all have family patterns we’d like to heal. Do we really want to be tethered to a genetic disposition to mental illness or cancer for example? What about addiction or heart disease? Wouldn’t you rather see future generations healed of these conditions if possible?  Prayer isn’t a magic wand, but I can attest to the fact that it is incredibly powerful.

At that phase of my life, after receiving the diagnosis that my son would battle chronic kidney disease for his entire life, I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back it’s clear I needed to face a lifelong pattern of helplessly and endlessly taking on the suffering of family members, who never seemed to get better. A lifelong worrier and empath, my spirit was weary from taking on other people’s pain. I wouldn’t emotionally abandon them if they were going through something, but I just really needed God to throw me a bone and rekindle my hope, especially for my precious new baby.

Through the inter-generational healing prayers, I was able to invite Jesus the Divine Physician into into past generational traumas and wounds to heal that fundamental belief system in past and future generations. The results were an amazing, life-changing miracle, which I witnessed firsthand and am still praising God about eight years later. Not only was my son healed physically, I was healed spiritually from that heartbreaking pattern of hopelessness. My faith was renewed and has only grown with time.

Maybe my miracle story sounds as fantastical to you as the movie Coco! That’s okay-I know not everyone is a believer. But as someone, who is passionate about the power of prayer in general and inter-generational healing prayer specifically, I am overjoyed to see how science is catching up to this ancient prayer tradition with the study of epigenetics, which proves how trauma of our ancestors becomes encoded into our very cells and dna structure.

I believe Jesus came to heal us and adopt us mind, body and spirit into His Divine family tree, so we can be totally transformed and healed by him most importantly spiritually, but also more often than we dare dream, physically. To me, the science of epigentics is just further proof that Jesus is ultimately a Genius, who we are all still trying to catch up to over 2,000 years later – in prayer and modern medicine.

What do you think? What are your experiences with inter-generational prayer? Have you heard about it? Are you curious? I pray that the Divine Physician blesses you to heal all family patterns back and forward through every generation.