Samsara and Clear Sight
In Buddism, The concept of Samsara is the continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth along with the repeating patterns of life which we are born into, shaped by actions from previous lives.
Beyond a literal cycle, it is also a metaphor for the way people can remain stuck in recurring patterns of suffering, habits, and attachments.
Liberation comes from breaking the cycle through insight, intentional living, and spiritual practice, allowing a person to move beyond the repetitive loop of samsara into freedom.
We can release these patterns by seeing how suffering is created through attachment and aversion, and by loosening our grip of that grasping and control. Interdependence is one of the key lenses that makes this possible.
Samsara continues because the mind believes things are solid, permanent, and separate. When an experience arises, the mind grasps it as “me,” “mine,” or “for me.” That grasping creates tension, craving, aversion, and the feeling of being trapped in a cycle.
Renunciation begins the moment you recognize that this cycle is optional. You don’t have to push life away. You renounce the mistaken belief that grasping will bring security or fulfillment.
Interdependence shows you that everything you cling to—your identity, emotions, relationships, successes, failures—is a flow of causes and conditions. Nothing stands alone. When you see that a feeling is simply the result of countless influences, it becomes less personal. When an emotion or desire is no longer “mine,” the grasping weakens naturally. You aren’t forcing yourself to let go; you are seeing clearly enough that letting go happens by itself.
Using interdependence as a practice means watching an experience arise and quietly tracing its conditions: the mood you woke up with, the memory it triggered, the tone of someone’s voice, the unmet need underneath it. This reflection dissolves the illusion of a solid “thing” you must hold or resist. What looked like a fixed problem becomes a process. What felt like “my anger” becomes “conditions creating anger.”
The technique of release begins when you see grasping in real time. The hallmark of grasping is tightness in the mind or the body, the sense that something must be different right now or controlled. When that tightness is noticed without judgment, you can turn your attention toward the space around it with love. Just like a mother can console her child, we can become a witness to the parts of ourselves that are having something arise.
Instead of trying to push the experience away, you let it be exactly as it is. The recognition “this is arising due to conditions” softens the ownership. The grip loosens. Release is not an action but a relaxation of effort.
Renunciation, then, is lived moment by moment. It is choosing clarity over compulsion, seeing process instead of solidity, and returning again and again to the simple knowing that nothing stands alone. When this understanding becomes familiar, samsara is no longer something to escape but something that loses its power to bind.
Part of our cycles of Samsara can be passed down through generations through a process often called epigenetic inheritance. When a person experiences severe stress or trauma, their body can chemically modify the way certain genes are expressed, turning some “on” or “off” in ways that heighten sensitivity to stress, alter inflammatory responses, or prime the nervous system for vigilance. These changes do not alter the DNA sequence itself but affect how the DNA functions. Research in humans and animals shows that children and grandchildren of individuals who experienced war, famine, enslavement, or chronic fear may inherit these altered stress-response patterns, even without experiencing the original trauma themselves. This is one explanation for why some families carry patterns of anxiety, hypervigilance, or emotional reactivity that seem older than any one generation.
Healing this inherited imprint begins with awareness. When we learn to recognize that some of our reactions of fear, shutdown, perfectionism, self-protection may not be personal failings but adaptive patterns from our lineage, we remove some of the shame and open space for change.
Practices that regulate the nervous system, through somatic therapy, trauma-informed yoga, breathwork, or body-based psychotherapy, help the body relearn safety so it no longer operates from that inherited stress imprint. Meaningful relationships, secure attachment, and environments that provide consistent safety also help rewire these patterns over time.
As you heal, you are not erasing your lineage but transforming the way it lives in you. Each moment of regulation, compassion, and conscious choice signals to the nervous system that the old threat is no longer present. This creates epigenetic shifts in the opposite direction—toward resilience, openness, and freedom. In this way, personal healing becomes ancestral healing: your body learns to live with more freedom than your ancestors ever could, and that healing becomes something you pass forward rather than the trauma that was passed to you.
