Issue 38, JUNE 2021

£ 15.00

Contents

  • Barbara Morgan: Editorial

  • Bert Hellinger: The Greater

WORKING WITH THE COLLECTIVE

  • Jan Jacob Stam: Societal Constellations: What the heck?!

  • Diana Claire Douglas: Dream Big

  • Nikki Mackay: Persecution of the Feminine: Remembering Jenny Horne

  • Olivia Fermi: Collective Inquiry Constellations

  • Shivaun Woolfson: Constellations in the Field

HISTORY OF NATIONS, CULTURES & RELIGIONS

  • Anngwyn St. Just: Zwi Migdal

  • Nariman Asad: A Brief Dip into the Arabic Culture

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

  • Olof Ribbing: Are we working on the Placebo Effect?

  • Stephanie Hartung: Our Double Nature in Online Constellations

TIPS FOR FACILITATORS

  • Francesca Mason Boring: The Schism of ‘Ism’

REPORTS ON CONFERENCES & INTENSIVES

  • Various Contributors: The Australasian Intensive

  • Various Contributors: ISCA Online Conference: Belonging – Thriving Together

  • Alexandra Tatiana Finkelstein: ISCA 2021 Online Gathering: A concert in eight movements of the Soul

  • Various Contributors: Memories of the International Intensives at ZIST, Kloster Bernried and Kochel, Germany

IN MEMORIAM

  • Amy Wilson Billingsley: Died Feb 2021

POETS’ CORNER

  • Radhika Mansata: ATHITI DEVO BHAVA (Sanskrit for THE GUEST IS GOD)

  • Angus Landman: One Sorrow at a Time; Why Roses Are; Flow

  • Bill Mannle: Echoes of Love

Extracts

Bert Hellinger: The Greater
Whatever we experience as great, be it inside us, be it in nature, behind it we sense something greater that transcends our imagination by far. Even the billions of processes in the most minute of cells that take place in our body in every moment transcend our grasp.

The same goes for everything we plan, for everything we want to tackle in order to achieve something creative with it.

Where does this creativity begin and where does it end? Is the result in our hands? Can it survive us? What remains of it when we leave this life behind?

What remains is this greater something that transcends us and our work.

Looking at it this way, how do we relate to this ‘greater’ in a way that is appropriate given its size? And also in a way that does justice to our powerlessness?

We pause before its greatness and become still. We remain so still that we can immediately perceive its workings within, until we perceive inside us its love for everything and everyone, as it comes forth from it, and how it is held in its existence, all pervading, far beyond its earlier and its present existence.

What happens to our fears then, and to our worries? What happens to our assumed greatness and to everything that we deem to produce of our own accord? It all returns back to the dust from where it came.

Nikki Mackay: Persecution of the Feminine: Remembering Jenny Horne
The power of witnessing in a constellation is huge
It is ‘seeing’ an entanglement that begins the process of disentangling. There are times in the constellation setting where you step into the stories that are known and familiar. They may not have been seen by the individuals in question, but they have been seen; they are known on some level of consciousness. And then there are times when you set up the created Constellation Field and step into the known parts in order to discern the unknown and the missing, and it feels different. It feels different because it hasn’t been seen. There is the sense that whoever is looking is the first in their lineage or family Field to actively choose to see, to actively choose to bear witness to what happened. The constellation for Jenny Horne was one such constellation.

Jenny Horne
In preparing for the day we discovered that ‘Jenny Horne’ probably wasn’t even the real name of the woman in question. It had become common practice, particularly in the north of Scotland, to refer to any woman accused of witchcraft as ‘Jenny Horne’. Their names were taken from them too.

Jenny and her daughter were arrested in Dornoch in Sutherland in 1727 and imprisoned on the accusations of her neighbours. Jenny Horne was showing signs of senility, and her daughter had a deformity of her hand. The neighbours accused Jenny of ‘having used her daughter as a pony to ride to the Devil, where she had her shod by him’. The trial was conducted very quickly; the sheriff had judged both guilty and sentenced them to be burned at the stake. Unusually for the time she was burned alive. There are records of her last words as she was led to her death as being: “What a bonny blaze!” It is likely that Jenny Horne was suffering from dementia and it was this that led to her accusation. She didn’t understand what was happening to her.

Shivaun Woolfson: Constellations in the Field
As herd members and prey animals, horses exist in an ongoing, ever-present state of now. Primed to ensure the survival of the whole, they assess others swiftly: do they pose a danger or threat? Are they trustworthy, faithful companions for the journey ahead? Highly attuned to the subtle variations in the energy, behaviour and intention of all those who enter their Field, their immediate responses – movements, sounds, actions, overall demeanour – can be regarded by facilitators as a precise gauge of an individual’s levels of presence, authenticity and congruence in any given moment.

This innate sensitivity has much to offer both facilitator and client: Horses are non-judgemental. They excel in non-verbal communication, which helps us humans bypass the machinations of the busy, doing mind. Interaction with the horse is experiential, received on the pulses and thus more readily embodied. Studies have shown that connection with animals and with horses in particular, given their enormous vibrational Field, improves trust, communication and confidence in individuals. On a physiological level, simply being in the presence of horses can reduce cortisol (stress hormone), blood pressure and heart rate, while increasing oxytocin (feel-good hormone). The adaptive behaviours that horses deploy, as they pendulate back and forth across their own windows of tolerance – extreme stress at one end and deep relaxation at the other – model, for us, how to widen our internal capacity and return more speedily to homeostasis. Not only can they meet us where we are, wherever that may be; they can lead us back.

Stephanie Hartung: Our Double Nature in Online Constellations
To understand why constellations work online (and face-to-face), there are two perspectives of observation. The first perspective of observation is scientific. In constellations, we are dealing with the laws of Quantum Physics that have an effect on our everyday relationships. The language here is of observer effects and (systemic) entanglement, about which you can find more in-depth information in my book (Hartung, 2016).

From this first perspective, we are also dealing with neurophysiological and biochemical aspects. Human experiences – no matter whether they are of face-to-face or online origin – lead to synapses of nerve cells (neurones) in the brain, whereby hormones appropriate to the respective situation are released. The hormones establish a (functional) reality in the body through biochemical processes that shape our experience in one direction or the other. You can find more in-depth reflections on this in our Textbook on Systemic Constellations (Hartung & Spitta, 2014).

The second perspective of observation has a holistic spiritual character. It comes up with the same conclusions as the scientific one – but with different words. In the holistic view, the quantum physical superposition – the superimposition of all possible states – becomes the universal Field of consciousness that contains all possibilities and all knowledge. This is only one example of the parallelism of insights and beliefs. For the holistic perspective, there is no scientific evidence, as we would expect in our Western culture. In Indian culture, for example, the Vedas, in which the Knowing Field is of central importance, are regarded as part of a timeless science that has its origins in the ancient Sanskrit texts of India. In their culture, no one doubts the truth of this belief.

Victor Hernandez Sandoval: ISCA Conference 14–21 April, 2021
I felt included; I felt part of something bigger; I even felt loved, maybe not in a personal, passionate way, but definitely loved in a way beyond our human emotional needs. I felt loved in a complete, integrative way, loved, like when you feel connected to the whole and realise we are all part of something bigger and as much as every individual present provided a valuable contribution to the group, so the group was providing a certain strength and protection to the individual.

Then it hit me: this is the strength of the system. It’s a strength from the arcane of our unconscious minds and it draws its power from the very core of our being and definitely beyond. It’s not only the strength and security provided by the group to the individual, but also the strength and security of those who have carried this movement up until this point in linear time. It is the strength of the ancestors, those who helped shape and give form to the systemic approach, those who have contributed to the healing of families, societies and maybe even humanity as a whole.