Issue 40, JUne 2022

£ 15.00

Contents

  • Barbara Morgan: Editorial

  • Bert Hellinger: Thoughts of Peace

WORKING WITH THE COLLECTIVE

  • Annelieke Verkerk: Beyond Right and Wrong: A Societal Constellation on Polarisation

  • Nikki Mackay: Those who left and the Left Behind: A Liminal Space

HISTORY OF NATIONS, CULTURES & RELIGIONS

  • Veronica Bañuelos Miramontes: In Solidarity

  • Nikki Mackay: Voiceless Women – An Unspoken Legacy

NEW APPROACHES

  • Irmgard Rosa Maria Rauscher: Yoni Constellations

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

  • Simone Perazzoli & José Pedro de Santana Neto: A Systemic and unified understanding of Constellations

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

  • Josh Alexander: A call for the proper inclusion of Transgender People

  • Karen Carnabucci: LGBTQI

BOOK REVIEW

  • Francesca Mason Boring: Learning Transgender from the Outside Looking In by Bertold Ulsamer

BOOK EXTRACT

  • Marine Sélénée: An Excerpt From: Connected Fates, Separate Destinies

POETS’ CORNER

  • Rafael Ruiz Mandal: Impotency & Hope

  • Angus Landman: The Face of God; Because I love I Fly; One Knee on the Ground

  • Michal Golan: In the Service of Life: About Being a Representative

Extracts

Bert Hellinger: Thoughts of Peace

I have an image of life. Life is an interlude between what was before and what will be afterwards. Therefore the unborn and the accomplished are equally taken care of. If someone wants to get in touch with them, for instance because he or she wants to put something in order with them because he or she feels guilty towards them, the dead do not understand it.

But we also experience that some of the dead still have their effect on the present. They are not at peace yet. Sometimes they attach themselves to the living and draw them into death. These dead need help. It seems these dead do not realise that they are dead. They are still seeking nourishment from the living and suck them dry. To engage with them and give in to them is dangerous.

How can we escape them? We escape them in our pure existence. In their present, we dissolve as it were, into pure relating, so that nothing is left of us that they could attach themselves to. In this pure relating one is fully permeable, one looks away from them towards a mysterious dark, and then remains collected in its presence. This has the effect that the dead are also turning there, away from the living. We allow them to dissolve there, into something that Richard Wagner calls: Blissful primordial forgetting.

Nikki Mackay: Those who left and the Left Behind: A Liminal Space

Those who left are also left behind, and those left behind have also left. The pain of this entanglement, and the wounds inflicted by it, pass from generation to generation; morphing, growing, and mutating with each iteration. It encompasses migration trauma, war trauma, and the fracturing of families. It is bound up with the fragility of safety, love, hopes, and dreams – the fragility of life itself.

Those who left are also left behind, as part of their heart stays with who and what they have left behind – those they love, their home, the life and dreams that they have lived and tended. And those left behind have also left because part of them goes with those who have left and part of them goes to the memory of ‘what was’ in this place that they now find themselves.

It is an immense pain, a ragged wound that splits souls and hearts open. It can define families, communities, countries – it can define a generation. The lost youth of WWI, those boys and men who left and are also left behind. Bodies in the ground in the battlefields and hearts left at home with the world that once was. The mothers, fathers, siblings, lovers, grandparents left behind and who also left their present, to have their hearts travel with those they have lost and into that past that existed before the ripping apart.

It is the moment for many when peace dies, when safety dies – and for some, when their beliefs and their relationship with God dies. Belonging and sense of place is also lost when grief cannot be formed and given a place. So often the grief cannot be given a place because of the very vastness of what is lost between the separate but inextricably linked those who left and the left behind.

Irmgard Rosa Maria Rauscher: Yoni Constellations

The word ‘Yoni’ comes from Sanskrit and means ‘divine source’ or ‘holy place’. I use it in this context for all female sexual organs: vulva, vagina, uterus and ovaries.

For a long time I have been dealing with the different cross-national cultures of female deities with female history and female sexuality. I have become increasingly aware of how much we women are separated from our original and divine inheritance – a legacy that dates back some 30,000 years when women were respected and honoured as living representatives of the goddess. Sexuality was celebrated as the sacred union of woman and man. The Yoni was revered as a place of tremendous magical powers, as the greatest of all miracles arose from it: New Life…

…The traumatised Yoni

Unfortunately, we women have been intimidated and separated from our divine treasures through centuries of trauma, oppression and abuse. Trauma can trigger emotional and physical splits. Energetic blockages can arise that make individual body regions numb, rigid and tense. Neurological and biological studies confirm that the Yoni has a direct connection to the brain through a complex neural network. We can assume that it has its own consciousness. Everything that happens to the Yoni has a direct influence on the woman and her self-image. On the body level, the traumatised and abused Yoni cannot supply the female brain with the chemical substances that evoke creativity, courage, bondage and joy. In women, a well-functioning pelvic nerve plexus is crucial for the release of dopamine, oxytocin and other hormones, which sharpen perception, strengthen self confidence and increase liveliness. A traumatised Yoni affects the brain’s supply of these euphoric substances, leaves deep traces, conditions and shapes the body, soul and spirit of the woman.

Josh Alexander: A call for the proper inclusion of Transgender People

In many conversations about transgender people, both within the constellations community and outside of it, cisgender commentators seem driven to cast trans people and their allies standing up to oppression, as simply engaged in drama triangle dynamics. There is an inappropriate amount of focus on the alleged ‘perpetration’ of transgender people when they stand up against anti-trans oppression, or if they’re not cast as perpetrators, they are cast as ‘playing the victim’ for pointing out and challenging injustice. I believe this move on to the drama triangle is both an avoidance of discomfort with the system of oppression, and a defence of that oppression, however unwittingly.

If you do not see how the current level of conversation in our community falls short on these topics then that is your first piece of homework: to learn enough about the issues and to listen to LGBTQ+ voices and take our concerns to heart to the point that you too can perceive what I am pointing at. There are things about which we can reasonably disagree (and things we cannot, such as the basic dignity and personhood of all LGBTQ+ people) but we cannot even begin to have a productive conversation if our perspectives are so far apart that we can’t even agree that there is vast room for necessary improvement on how safe, welcoming, and accessible our profession is for LGBTQ+ people.