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Family Constellation

C and M podcast

Caitriona and Michele: Constellation Medicine

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By stepping into the energetic and intuitive field that Family Constellation work provides, you directly invoke the Sacred Feminine.

Family Systems Constellation work is more than a personal healing modality because it looks beyond personal healing towards our ancestral line and the generations of the future.

This work is a form of sacred medicine, immediately accessible and immediately able to illuminate our place in the family of living beings. It honors the Holy in the world, in our life, and in our body.

We have been blessed to be working with Constellation work in these times. It brings together and integrates a lifetime of work in the Dharma, with Hypnosis-Trance and Neurolinguistics, and yet remains accessible, simple, and easy.

https://www.fivechanges.com/family-constallations/ 

 

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Manipulated image of Matisse's painting of five dancing figures

Heuristics. Tools for Intuitive Competence.

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Manipulated image of Matisse's painting of five dancing figuresHeuristics. Tools for Intuitive Competence

Heuristics is discovering the solution to a problem by looking for it in places you never imagined you could find it.

Open a book, put your finger randomly on a word, then use that word to guide you as you write your speech, or start the awkward conversation you’ve been avoiding,  or begin that difficult project.

‘Trusting your gut’
‘First thought, best thought’
‘Forget everything you think you know about this situation’
– are also forms of heuristics.

If you have a problem which is abstract, or if your understanding is unclear, look for another problem that is more specific and use it as a clue on how to proceed.

Draw a picture, or a map, to represent a situation you don’t fully understand yet.

If you have a problem that can be represented by two individuals, choose two people in a crowd, at a shopping center perhaps, or in a bar. Watch how they move and stand, how they interact with each other.

Heuristics can be a Constellation. Constellations are heuristic.

We imagine that the world is more linear, more coherent, more bounded by fixed rules, less interconnected than it is.

We assume that our problems are unique and specific to us. Imagine that we spend our lives representing different elements within countless constellations, for countless others. Imagine that the parts we play, while unknown to us, may be as essential to those in whose systems we serve as the air they breathe. While we, unbeknownst to ourselves, help them navigate their way through the mystery of their lives?

Abstract human portrait with illuminated head.

How We Make Meanings

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Semiotics. How we make meanings.

Late one night a bat flew into the large hall where a group of us were meeting before a night-long ceremony with our South American curandero friends. It flew once around the room in a wide circle then flew back into the night. The shaman asked me, “What does it mean?”

Perhaps, for the shaman, the bat was a portent, perhaps he was testing me, to discover what meaning the bat might have for me. I suggested that the bat was a beautiful creature of the night – the spirit of the night – paying respects to the people who had travelled so far to join us for this ceremony.

Semiotics recognizes that all the images, symbols, and forms that make up our every-day experience are as specific and meaningful as words and language. Our world is infused with the meanings and nuance of a myriad images. Some of them have been with us for millennia, while others enter our collective consciousness through art, through the forms of nature, through commercial branding, or simply through repetition in the media.

A bat of course, is just a bat, but through continuous human contact with them, bats, like countless other animals, plants, landscapes, objects, and events, have taken on a wealth of meanings and associations.

The scientific fundamentalism that has pervaded our thinking for the past several centuries and which has come to be accepted in the dominant culture as the de facto ‘truth’ would declare that a bat is simply a winged rodent, driven by basic instincts.

But a tension exists between our mechanistic explanation of the world and the reality of our associative consciousness that has absorbed the richness of mythological and semiotic meaning.

An indigenous shaman divining whether it is auspicious to conduct a ceremony might have very specific associations for a bat, or a snake, or a tree growing in a certain way, or a pattern in the clouds. That’s how divination works. It’s also how semiotics works. We make meanings, and from those meanings we derive a context-specific reality, a truth.

“We are meaning-making machines,” says Richard Bandler, the co-creator of NLP. We are continually extrapolating meanings from our experience. We have to, in order to make sense of it all. If we didn’t, the world would be an incomprehensible soup of random pieces of unrelated information.

Neurologically speaking, we’re wired to make patterns. It’s how our brains make intelligible images from the fragmented bits of information it receives from our eyes and our visual cortex. It’s how we organize memories, thoughts, sounds, tastes, smells, and the wealth of somatic occurrences, all within the dynamic neural network that we construct and experience as our senses, our bodies, our life.

We experience the world as a vast neural network that is continually prompting us to make patterns, stories, and meanings.

No wonder then, that we sometimes get our wires crossed, or compromise ourselves with outdated or inadequate information. No wonder, given our propensity for seeking what is familiar and safe, that most of us resist change of any sort, and avoid disturbing the patterns by which we have comfortably interpreted the world, and our experience of it, for a lifetime.

This tension between the mechanistic-rationalist worldview, and our ability to transform what appears before us into archetypal representations, is exactly why constellations are effective. It opens a door to a part of our psyche which has laid dormant for generations.  It’s as if we hunger for a pretext to open to the realm where we can make fresh meanings about our life, where we can see with fresh eyes, where we can understand something about what ‘we know but don’t yet know that we know’, where we can trust our intuition.

The new meanings may be as fragile and unverifiable as a cloud in the sky foretelling the future, or as the diviner’s cards thrown down on the table, but that doesn’t make them any less true or useful. Perhaps their fleeting evanescence makes them all the more real, by reflecting the chimera-like nature of the world.

 

Four curanderos

Sacred Medicine. La Medicina Sagrada

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Four curanderos
Putumayo, Colombian Amazon

It began with a walking constellation. We saw them coming through the gate of our center – the curanderos and shamans from Colombia. Then there was a phone call. Then they arrived. They were here! And our lives changed forever. The world I had constructed from the fragments of our collective fundamentalist-mechanical worldview unraveled, and something else took shape from things I had missed, ignored or rejected as too fantastic. All the meditation, constellation work, hypnosis, psychology, NLP, and Psychomagic came to fruition in those dark nights of ceremony. Much of what I thought I understood well, I realized I had known only in the most superficial way.

  • The mind-body is not our own, nor is it bounded in any of the ways we assume.
  • It is possible to create a reality from any thought.
  • Anything is accessible through thought and imagination.
  • Tend to your thoughts wisely.
  • Everyone you meet has something to teach you about the system you are part of.
  • Treat them all with tenderness and love.

Sometimes, in ceremony, so many intangible beings appear that I have to keep my eyes closed. I prefer to feel them rather than to see them. I recognize that many of them have nothing to do with me. They are part of the constellated elements of others’ lives, assembled there: spirits, demons, ancestors, guardian angels.

Once in the forests of the Amazon, within minutes of drinking the medicine, they streamed in. They leaned over our hammocks, ancient spirit-healers, from the trees, from the river, deeply curious, attending to us carefully, tenderly, studying the strangers from the north.

Once, sitting in a room in the city, oblivious to the noise of the police sirens and revelers on the street outside, SHE came. She came, In a dress made of intricate beadwork like the jewelry of indigenous people in the northern Amazon. Seven feet tall, she sat in front of me all night long. She said, “I will never leave you.” Waves of joy, regret, delight, gratitude, sadness and love washed over me, all the emotions it is possible to feel. For the first time I felt myself to be part of this strange universe where I lived. I felt included, for the first time. I realized that until that moment I had never felt such a profound sense of inclusion.

“Remember, I’ll never leave you,” she said as she stood up at the end of the night to go. She smiled, “I’ll never leave you,” and ever since, wherever I am, I can call on her and she will be there, and I will know that I am included, in this world, in this universe, in any universe, in whatever situation or system I am part of at that moment.

Matisse. Dancing figures

Family Constellation

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Suddenly, we experience that it is possible that we are united in a way which goes far beyond our usual experience. This greater soul encompasses not only the living, but also the dead. And this is something quite extraordinary to experience: that we are part of a greater realm which unites the living and the dead, and that we have to meet the dead as we meet the living. 
Bert Hellinger. Originator of Family Systems Constellation work.

Family Constellation Workshop October 26, at Manzanita Village 

How Family Constellation works

So, here’s how it works: First, let’s assume that almost all the issues we face have their roots in our family of origin.

Even for problems that emerged more recently, the seeds were already sown.

A group of people come together under the supervision of a facilitator to help a client to transform an unresolved issue; emotional, inter-personal, professional, spiritual, even a health issue.

Often it’s something that conventional modalities have not helped resolve.

The other participants do not need to know any details. In fact, the less they know the better.

Members of the group are then asked to represent specific members of the client’s family and are directed to stand in the agreed workspace, which is usually a designated area in the center of the room.

Sometimes only two or three participants are involved, sometimes ten or more.

The facilitator and client observe how the ‘representatives’ interact with each other — choreography, gesture, expression, reaction.

The facilitator will question the ‘representatives’ and ask for their response to the situation as it unfolds.

The ‘representatives’ will interact with each other, observe their own feelings and reactions, respond when inspired to do so, and if called on by the facilitator will speak, either to relate their experience, or to address other participants directly.

Something extraordinary begins to happen. The simulated family system takes on a life of its own.

It’s always mind-blowing how easily representatives can let go of second-guessing, role-playing, acting, or imposing their own ideas on this family simulation.

We’ve seen this time and again, even with people entirely new to the work.

It’s as if permission had been given for each person to step into a collective field of energy and unconscious information, to trust the vast resources that, as it turns out, we all have access to.

Call it intuition, or the collective unconscious. In Family Constellation Work we call it ‘the field’.

It doesn’t need to be explained. The act of the client witnessing the movements, interactions, and the words of the people who represent their family system invariably creates new perspectives, new appreciation, new possibilities and choices, and not infrequently will shift the habits of a lifetime.

However many times we witness, participate in, or facilitate this work it’s still a mystery and a miracle, beautiful and sublime, a testament to the unfathomable nature of ‘mind’ itself.

Family Constellation Workshop October 26, at Manzanita Village 

Through Family Constellations, we are able to watch family entanglements unravel, by observing representatives who stand for members of the family system, with the support of an experienced facilitator….In Family Constellations those who are present in the circle, despite often having no former connection with other participants, are willing to stand as representatives of a family system, which may have suffered loss or conflicted relationships. Facilitator, client, representatives, and all who are present, gain access to a wider field, a larger, deeper way of ‘knowing’ and healing. The generosity of this work and what strangers are willing to do for each other IS phenomenal. — Francesca Mason Boring