Issue 18, June 2011
£ 15.00
Contents
Barbara Morgan: Editorial
Bert Hellinger: ‘Laws of Healing’ – Introduction
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Kent Layden in conversation with Jane Peterson
Ty Francis in conversation with Tomás Kohn
THE HISTORY OF NATIONS, CULTURES & RELIGIONS
Chetna Kobayashi: A Journey to Okinawa, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Meera Finnigan: Australian Constellation Training Intensive
Verónica Menduiña: Constellations and a new Narrative
Joy Manné: Conceptual Constellations
Liz Martins: The Bristol Project
ORGANISATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
Jan Jacob Stam: Trauma in Organisations
Raquel Schlosser: Unconscious Memory in Organisations
Claude Rosselet: Connecting to the Source of Organisational Intelligence
PERSONAL RELFECTIONS
Michael Reddy: Constellations & the Evolution of World-Views: Part One
Jane Peterson: Prove It! The Riddle of Research
Brenda Vos & Jan Hein Mooren: The Moral Field
Victor Velasco: Trans-generational and Systemic Philosophy: Sexual Diversity and HIV
REPORTS ON CONFERENCES & INTENSIVES
Katrina Kirchbaumer: The International Infosyon Conference, Vienna, Austria
Various Contributors: Constellations Intensive, Bernried, Germany
BOOK REVIEW
Aurel Mocanu: Notes from the Indigenous Field by Francesca Mason Boring
POEMS
Joy Manné: Words have Families too
Lisa Wells: I was taken
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Various Contributors
Bert Hellinger: Extract ‘Fulfilled’ – Tata Cachora alias Don Juan Matus
Extracts
Bert Hellinger: Laws of Healing: Getting well; staying well
Our Soul:
So what do we know about healing beyond the physical treatment? Beyond our body, our soul and our feelings play an important role in healing. They also need to be treated well.Often we feel the pain of the soul even more intensely than the pain in the body.
What, above all, is the most profound pain in our soul? Nearly all pain in the soul is about separation – whether in present time or memories of separation – often from back in our childhood. This kind of pain is experienced as trauma, especially if we were exposed to it without protection, without being able to escape it.
This separation pain is stored in our body and it can be reactivated at any time, for instance through inner images that evoke feelings from way back that suddenly overcome us.
In this moment, our behaviour towards other people changes. Without being immediately aware of it, we anticipate another dreaded separation.
At the same time, our body responds to this by contracting.
We tighten up. We might lose our appetite or can’t breathe properly. Or our heart aches and contracts. Instead of moving, we stay still, even staying in bed for long periods. Our mood becomes gloomy and we also get physically ill.
In the Spotlight: Kent Layden in conversation with Jane Peterson
Kent: What then is special about Hellinger’s work?
Jane: One of Bert’s extraordinary contributions is that he used the body directly, without shaping or sculpting it. He let the body become a channel for information, to share what soma, the living intentional being, knew about relationships and was unable to articulate in words.This was brilliant, because it enabled certain information to emerge in a way that we hadn’t fully experienced so directly before. It’s different from psychodrama or sculpting in that we are not putting any information into or on to the body. Instead, systemic knowledge can emerge directly through both the client’s soma and the representatives.
Another thing Bert did that was absolutely brilliant was his long and diligent enquiry into how conscience actually functions in human systems. Its just an incredible phenomenological study of conscience, beautifully described in No Waves without the Ocean (Hellinger, 2006). He re-framed conscience as an inner urge that enables us to maintain our belonging to our group, rather than a moral compass – it’s moral only for our group!
The orders of love are so simple, what he says about conscience, how it governs belonging, its so simple. And yet this simplicity is true of complex systems. The complex behaviour we see on the surface is often governed by a set of very simple rules.
Bert did a brilliant job of unearthing those patterns in ways that are useful and also very beautiful.
Constellation work brings the grace of love to light in our relationships.
Michael Reddy: Constellations and the Evolution of World-Views
How do we model systemic constellations in our minds? How do we picture them working? In the West, most of us have absorbed cultural conceptions of physical reality based on objective, scientific materialism. Biological reality is framed largely in terms of separation, Darwinian fitness and competition. How do these interact with our own and our clients’ understandings of constellations? To say there is conflict is not news…..Prevailing concepts of individuality, even time and space are challenged by what we do. For some facilitators, mental models are not an issue. They can do the work very well and not stress about explanations. If Hellinger had not been able to distance himself from theories, our work might well not exist. For others of us though, the divide runs deeper. What we regularly experience in constellations is very difficult to reconcile with how science says the world operates. What are we to answer when some potential clients ask: How can this possibly work? We help many, but see others turn away. Their minds will not let them experiment.
Constellations amount to a profound challenge to competitive, objectivisit, materialistic, reductionist perspectives on reality.