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Issue 15, JANUARY 2010

£ 12.00

Contents

  • Barbara Morgan: Editorial

  • Bert Hellinger: Our Homeland

  • Bert Hellinger: Our Common Home: The Earth

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

  • Vivian Broughton In Conversation with Ursula Franke & Tom Bryson

  • Vivian Broughton In Conversation with Insa Sparrer

THE HISTORY OF NATIONS, CULTURES & RELIGIONS

  • Lisa Iversen: Breathing New Life into Old Pictures

  • Ayelet de-Picciotto: Being Jewish

  • Alison Rose Levy: The Trifecta

  • Dan Booth Cohen: Family Constellations and the Kabbalah

CONSTELLATIONS

  • Kari Drageset: The Role of Domestic Pets in Systemic

  • Yildiz Sethi: Sexual Abuse or not?

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

  • Barbara & Edward Lynch: Understanding the Complexity of Intimacy

  • Jane Peterson: Somatic Imaging

  • Jane Peterson: Reflecting Teams

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

  • David Mathes: The Order of Women Following Men: An Exploration

  • Sadhana Needham: The Male/Female Principle in Family Constellations

  • Amina Edlín Ortiz Graham: Trust: a freshness in the centre of the chest

  • Janice Crawford: (Poems) Until This Moment / Intensive Barcelona

BOOK REVIEWS

  • Mark Johnson: I carry your Heart in my Heart: Family Constellations in Prison by Dan Booth Cohen

  • Annette Aubrey & Francesca Mason Boring: Ancestral Blueprints: Revealing Invisible Truths in America’s Soul by Lisa Iversen

BOOK EXTRACT

  • Vivian Broughton: In the Presence of Many: Reflections on Constellations: Emphasising the Individual Context

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

  • Alannah Tandy-Pilbrow

Extracts

Bert Hellinger: Our Homeland

We have received everything essential from our homeland. Therefore, we have an obligation towards our homeland. As in other relationships, there must be a balance of giving and taking…..Sometimes our homeland gets into trouble. We have seen that for instance in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Albania. These countries got into trouble and then many of its people tried to escape these troubles by moving to another country. In this way, they refused to bear the sae fate along with their homeland. What is the result of this act? They lose strength. We can observe how many of them, just as they were not prepared to serve their homeland, very often also refuse to serve the country that receives them. In both countries they stay in an attitude of I take without giving something in return. I have observed that some of those who leave their homeland in order to escape their obligations there get ill. Then they have to return to their homeland in order to get well again.

Lisa Iversen: Breathing new Life into Old Patterns

The American emphasis on self-reliance reinforces an impulse to disconnect from one’s ancestry and therefore, from oneself – an image that needing others or help is somehow unpatriotic. Over the last hundred years, many Americans have moved away from multi-generational, extended family networks. Many people seek therapy while living in a context of this isoation from grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Connection with a therapist provides solace, comfort and a place to learn that one’s feelings and experience are normal. What’s also true is that all of us, including therapists, are all entangled in one way or another wth aspects of our family history that are waiting to be acknowledged. Each of us is a part of the larger human family and we need teach each other to wake up those aspects of our own ancestry that are ready to be seen, honoured and integrated.

Vivian Broughton: In Conversation with Ursula Franke and Tom Bryson

VB: So one of the things I know from observing you working on Friday is that this focus on the process of coming into presence is central to what you do. Can you say a bit more about this coming into presence?
UF: Presence is the only true moment, because the past is over and the future hasn’t arrived yet. So presence is about the present, but it’s more than that. Presence is the awareness of being in this very moment. And presence is eternal and without charcteristics, it’s without traits, it doesn’t have any qualities; presence is just pure being. And by that it is completely unattached and….
TB: Unconditioned.
UF: Yes, unconditioned. And there is so much power in it because it is completely free. Now we are present. I think that our actual state is presence, like what we learn in Zen and Aikido. Its just this very moment.
VB: So it is like in the meditation tradition, the notion of pure awareness with no thought, nothing else and most of us don’t do that most of the time.
UF: Yes, because the thoughts and everything else are all conditioned, they are all patterns from the past, all perception and resonance from the past. And I think that presence just incorporates, it embodies each of us. Presence is everywhere; that is why clients understand presence very well. It’s nothing new for them. Everyone understands that: we are presence and we are also body at the same time.
VB: This is interesting, because I was thinking, we all know what we mean by the word presence and yet it is difficult to formulate, in the same way as the term soul is difficult to put into words, even though we all have an understanding of what it is.