To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.  This instruction orients us to what we are all about in Zen practice, and comes to us from Dogen Zenji’s Genjo Koan, the Way of Everyday Life. To experience the present moment directly, and in the body, is how we study the self and come to know who we are. It’s also how we come to see clearly what gets in the way of being thoroughly present in our lives. And what gets in the way of being able to appreciate our life as it is; what gets in the way of being able to bring patience and flexibility to what most challenges us each day and to do our best.
We come to know in minute detail our previous conditioning, and how what happened to us earlier is still erecting barriers for us now.  We may have learned in the past how to protect ourselves from hurting by turning away from an experience, numbing out, running away, becoming immobile or maybe by being fiercely reactive. Rather than facing directly whatever is painful or confusing we have practiced habits of avoidance, which have accumulated and become not only automatic, but also unconscious.
As we go on in practice for awhile we begin to notice these and discover not only our own avoidance patterns, but see how we may have inherited them from our ancestors. It’s amazing to notice sometimes, when we ponder family history, how our patterns extend much further back than our individual lives and circumstances. They may well be conditioned by sustained and traumatic ancestral experiences. Trauma from persecution, hunger, war and dislocation, early loss and abandonment, and all the suffering that come with lives that are responding to collective crises.
You may know your family roots, but if you’re adopted you may not know your family roots, before the adoptive family. The new science of epigenetics is discovering ways in which trauma and sustained stress alters our DNA. This means that we inherit some of what our ancestors struggled with. We are biologically imprinted by the past, whether we are aware of the specifics or not.
This is what we know as karma.
Our karmic roots reach infinitely back. And our practice enables us to engage experience with openness while we also are guided by wholesome precepts for a healthy life. “Healthy” refers here not only to wholesome physical self-care, but also behavior that is connecting, understanding,  and self-aware. It is probably a rare person who doesn’t have some generational trauma that has never been brought into awareness and owned. How far back does this “self” that we inhabit reach?