A legacy of peace

Epigenetics is a fascinating area of research which investigates whether or not the experiences of a parent or grandparent can literally affect the genetic inheritance of offspring. Experiments with mice have shown that the grandchildren of mice who were trained to fear a certain chemical by exposure to shocks and the smell of the chemical exhibited fear of the chemical smell without having had any similar conditioning. Descendants of the original mice also had physical brain changes in the areas that recognized the smell. Studies have shown that the descendants of populations subjected to difficult conditions during wartime are at increased risk for a number of diseases including heart disease and diabetes.

Studies have also shown that anxious parents can create anxious children, both by passing on genes for anxiety and by exhibiting behaviors that affect the way a child perceives the world. Other research points to the changes wrought in a child's genetic makeup by chronic stress experienced by the child's mother while pregnant. 

So, essentially, if you have bad things happen to you - a bad car accident, an assault, the death of a loved one, serious illness, natural catastrophe, whatever - or if you are in the military, or a firefighter, or a police officer who regularly encounters life-threatening situations - you and your descendants may very well become sicker and more fearful. And that sickness and fearfulness can be passed on to future descendants. But what can be done about this? We can't control our lives and the world so that bad things won't happen to us, although we like to think we can. What can we do to try and ward off some of the cascade of debilitation that is engendered by our suffering?

The only thing we can control is our reaction to the events around us.  We can seek peace in our outlook on life, in our interpretation of these events, and we can do this by cultivating a habit of mindfulness and meditation. Mindfulness has been shown to reduce anxiety and post-traumatic stress syndrome. It allows us to detach from our thinking; it can make us more resilient. We can interrupt our rumination about the past, which we cannot change, and our worrying about the future, which is unwritten, and spend more time in the present moment, enjoying whatever life is currently bringing us.

If we can become more resilient, so that we can better tolerate "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" then we can perhaps avoid the kind of epigenetic changes that could not only make us sicker, but could also haunt our children and their children. We woul be in a sense passing our resilience down to them.  And that is a legacy that anyone would wish for.