The truth about
what gets carried.
"This is not a story about blame. It is a story about what gets carried from one generation to the next — pain, silence, survival, love — and what reaches all who come after us."
A deeply personal memoir about breaking the cycles we inherit, healing the wounds we never chose, and becoming the one who changes what gets passed down.
"Old habits stay in the body, even at sixty."
Some things don't need words
to be inherited.
Some things get handed down through families without a word ever being spoken — patterns, pain, ways of moving through the world that never quite felt like yours.
In All Who Come After, Reiki practitioner Cathy Leigh tells the story of recognizing the inherited patterns that shaped her, tracing their energetic roots, and choosing to be the one who ends them. Drawing on more than twenty years of holding space for others — through illness, grief, and hard transitions — she turns that same clear attention on her own life, and on the pain she spent years learning to suppress.
This is a book for anyone who has wondered why certain feelings keep returning. Why forgiveness feels impossible. Why, even after years of work, something still feels stuck — and what happens when you finally let it move.
A memoir about trauma, grief, forgiveness, and generational healing, All Who Come After is an invitation to recognize that the patterns we inherit don’t have to be the ones we pass on.
When Cathy Leigh sat beside her dying mother and finally said the words she had guarded for over fifty years, something cracked open. Not the relationship — it was too late for that. But something older and deeper: the silence itself.
Her mother looked at her and said, "I wasn't very nice to you." Then, four more words: "You didn't deserve that."
All Who Come After is the memoir that follows. It traces Cathy's journey from a childhood shaped by trauma, silence, and a mother who gave what she herself had been given — to the decades of healing, Reiki practice, and hard spiritual work it took to finally stop carrying what was never hers to carry.
Along the way, Cathy writes about the ovarian cancer diagnosis at 27 that forced her into the present. About the near-death experience on the operating table. About learning — slowly, imperfectly — how energy blocks form, where disease comes from, and what it really means to heal rather than simply survive.
And ultimately, about the choice that became the heart of this book: to be the one who ends the cycle.
- IThe House by the BrookA childhood that looked ordinary from the outside — and the night at age six that changed everything inside it.
- IIKen Who?How the man who would become her anchor arrived at exactly the right moment — and what that tells us about timing and trust.
- IIILove in the Shadow of CancerA tumor the size of a grapefruit, a near-death experience, and a glimpse of something she can't stop thinking about.
- IV–The Long Road to ReikiHow energy work found her — not the other way around — and what she discovered about the body's memory of everything it was never allowed to feel.
- —All Who Come AfterThe conversation with her mother. Four words. And what becomes possible when the truth is finally spoken — even at the very end.
My mother lay in her bed, unable to move, appearing smaller than I had ever seen her. I sat beside her with my hands folded in my lap, like a child waiting to be corrected. Old habits stay in the body, even at sixty.
We started with the safe things — the weather, her new caretaker, the food she didn't want to eat — and stayed close to the surface. That was where our conversations were safest.
I don't remember deciding to say it. One moment, we were talking about nothing, and the next, I heard my own voice crossing a line I had guarded for decades.
"Mom, I need to tell you something."
"Something happened to me when I was six."
After I finished speaking, she said nothing for a moment. Then she nodded and said, "I knew something was different about you after that day."
"I wasn't very nice to you."
Then: "You didn't deserve that."
"You were the mother you knew how to be. You gave me what you were given." Even though she didn't ask for it, I told her, "I forgave you a long time ago."
She stared out the window. We sat in that truth for a while — two women at the edge of the same inheritance. We didn't fix the past that night. But we finally told the truth about it. And that changed what came after.
You'll recognize yourself
somewhere in these pages.
You are still carrying someone else's weight.
The anger that wasn't yours. The silence you were taught. The patterns planted before you were old enough to question them.
You've done the work — and something is still stuck.
Therapy helped. Books helped. But there's a layer underneath that logic and language haven't reached. Cathy writes from exactly that place.
You have complicated feelings about a parent.
Love and harm lived in the same history. You know what it is to hold both — to grieve someone who was still alive, to love someone who hurt you.
You've faced illness and wanted to understand why.
Not in a blaming way. In a what is my body trying to tell me way. Cathy's journey with cancer is one of the most honest explorations of that question.
You are spiritually curious but not religiously bound.
You believe in something — energy, God, the universe — but you've outgrown the containers you were given for it.
You want to be the one who ends it.
The cycle. The silence. The inheritance of pain. You've decided it stops with you, and you're looking for company in that decision.
"Love and harm lived in the same history."
— All Who Come After"Silence became my constant companion. I carried shame I couldn't name, fear I couldn't voice."
— All Who Come After"She gave me what she was given. I chose to give something different."
— All Who Come After
Cathy Leigh
Cathy Leigh spent decades learning how to hold space for other people's pain before she was ready to face her own. As a Reiki practitioner for over twenty years, she has worked with cancer patients, caregivers, grieving families, and people in the middle of life's most disorienting transitions.
But the work she describes in All Who Come After began long before she ever put her hands on a client — in a childhood marked by trauma and silence, in a hospital at twenty-seven facing ovarian cancer, and in the on-the-table experience that left her unable to dismiss the reality of something beyond the physical world.
She writes the way she works: honestly, without blame, and with a deep respect for what the body knows before the mind catches up.
Cathy lives in Connecticut with her husband Ken, who has his own practice in Akashic Records readings. Between them, they have watched what happens when people are finally given permission to speak the truth about what they've been carrying — and what becomes possible after.
What they're saying.
“Cathy’s question was profound — it suggested I had more to say about my experience than I was aware of, and that I could include my whole self: mind, body, and soul. The experience with her helped restore my strength and gave me the energy I needed as I went forward with treatment.”
Pat McGrath — cancer patient, second-round chemo
“I had no idea that one session with a woman I hardly knew would change my life forever. The origins and core of the PTSD I didn’t realize I was experiencing came out during our work together. I felt safe, supported, and most importantly empowered to begin to trust my body through processing deep trauma work.”
Lisa Laughlin, ND
“We work on the physical, the mental, the emotional — but so often we leave out the whole spiritual, energetic piece. And that’s the part that changes everything.”
Cathy Leigh — from All Who Come After
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Cathy Leigh
Author & Reiki Practitioner · Connecticut · Visit Cathy's Site
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