Last weekend I was blessed to take part in a Family Constellation (created by Burt Hellinger) workshop with Kim Goode. I have attended many of these workshops in the past and will try to explain the weird yet incredibly powerful way in which they work.
Kim started with a short meditation, set the ground rules and we all introduced ourselves briefly. There were 5 “Issue Holders” who have chosen in advance to address a problem they have. Each one gets a turn to do a constellation which lasts from 40 to 60 minutes. Kim asked us to invite workshop participants to represent family members or various aspects of the problem (called representatives). The Issue Holder intuitively placed the representatives where they felt they needed to stand. Kim then asked each of them in turn what they were feeling and, if it felt appropriate, she asked them to move to other positions or to say various healing sentences to other representatives. Towards the end of each constellation, she asked the issue holder to take the place of the person representing them and more healing sentences were said. The strange thing is that by the end of the process, the issue holder felt better in some way – it might have been a feeling of resolution of the problem, insights into the bigger picture, a shift in perspective or a deeper understanding for other family members being represented.
What I like about Family Constellations is that often when a problem does not seem to be shifting by other means, it is because of a bigger picture taking into account the whole family. The way I like to think about it is like this:
If you have a headache and go to the doctor, the doctor will (more often than not) take into account just your head. If you go to a holistic therapist eg homeopath, acupuncturist etc, they will take into account your whole body. If you go to someone who had family constellations or similar in their tool kit, they will take the whole family and ancestry into account.
One of my favourite processes in Family Constellations is the power of the ancestral line. The issue holder stands at the front of the line with someone representing her mother behind her. The mother puts her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. Behind her mother, stands someone representing her grandmother who puts her hands on the shoulders of the woman in front of her. Behind her is someone representing her great-grandmother and so forth until you have a long line of female ancestry. Each daughter leans into her mother receiving support from her. The same can be done with a line of fathers and sons.
I have introduced the mother line into my workshops and one-to-one sessions and combined it with EFT to tap on feelings arising within any of the mothers in the line for example resistances to giving love to the next generation or receiving love from the previous generation.
