Family Constellation

Anger has many faces: for example, someone attacks you and you react with anger. This anger is necessary to defend yourself from the attack. This is a good and meaningful emotion and will be released immediately after the attack is over through shaking, crying, or heavy breathing.

And then there is anger against yourself when you make a ‘wrong’ decision, this anger is self-destructive and a substitute of letting go of the past and acknowledging what is. This emotion is sticky and will attach itself to you for a long time, maybe all your life, until you’ll be able to let it go by understanding your way and destiny, sometimes also called ‘the spiritual journey to yourself’.

Anger is ‘love-hold-back’ in disguise.

And then there is anger against someone else whom you have hurt, because you cannot admit that your action has caused their suffering, so you’re camouflaging the feeling of guild with anger. This emotion will also stick around for a long time until you see the emotion of guild and what is truely needed: taking over responsibility of your own actions and the result of it.

When you’re going to a Family Constellation Workshop chances are that you’ll meet one or more of your ancestors. That is, not in person, but their energy fields, represented by other workshop participants. The ancestor is there to either support you to clear an old family pattern that causes suffering in the family system or he/she is still stuck in a trauma and asks you to help to clear the path in order to return home where his/her soul belongs, free of the burden of the past event.

The family dynamic is hidden and only revealed when both family members are ready to look at what has caused it with love.

But who is it that you’re looking at in this situation? And why have you been chosen for this task? The answer to these questions can be found in the ‘Orders of Love’ or ‘Loves hidden symmetries’ as developed by Bert Hellinger: there is a special bond between you and your ancestor, also called a family dynamic, which ties you two together with an unseen thread made out of the emotion of compassion.

When we talk about ancestors in family constellations we’re looking at the 4th to 7th generation, which includes the great grandfathers and 3 more generations of parents before them.

If you have followed the work and life of Bert Hellinger (16.12.25 – 19.9.2019) you would have noticed that he titled his later family constellation workshops as ‘going with the spirit’ instead of the previous  ‘movements of the soul’. What does that mean? What is the spirit and the soul he refers to? And who is going? And where to?

‘Spirit’ comes from latin: spirare which is translated as ‘to breathe’, and was first defined in the 13th century as the ‘animating or vital principle in man and animals’. Or in other words: the breath that brings dead matter to life: the breath of life. Otherwise also called ‘higher consciousness’, ‘God’, ‘Higher self’, ‘ the source’ or simply the ‘life force’.

In order to understand spirit and it’s function, we need to look at how life is created.

Ancient teachings talk about the physical, emotional and spiritual body which form sentient life. We can see and touch the physical body and are very well aware of our thoughts and emotions, but we can neither see nor touch those: thoughts and emotions are not visible, only their effects show if they are put into actions.

Children all over the world are bothered by the evil man hidden in the dark (mainly under the bed) waiting for them to fall asleep to… well, to do what exactly?

Myth has it that this paranormal creature preys on the fear of children to become stronger, but it doesn’t quite say what happens to the children when they get caught. Is he captivating the kids, eating them, torturing them? There is no evidence for any of these deeds, but to this day the Boogeyman is used to induce a child with fear, often to keep it safe (so the parents think), i.e. not to go out of the house at night or into the woods alone.

It is fear that attracts the Boogeyman.

So why does he induce fear? Because he can. He doesn’t even need to exist. The fear of his existence alone does the job and hold the kids captive of their imaginations. Fear is used to control children around the world up to this day and leaves an imprint in the subconscious mind that there is such a thing as the Boogeyman who can do unspeakable things… although he never has done any of this anywhere!