Issue 24, June 2014
£ 15.00
Contents
Barbara Morgan: Editoral
Bert Hellinger: Two Kinds of Happiness
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Barbara Morgan: In conversation with Sarah Peyton
Susan Pogue: In conversation with Bill Mannle
Barbara Morgan: In conversation with Louis Hillebrand & Fawzia Hanssens
Sofia Geordiadou: In conversation with Judy Wilkins-Smith
NEW DEVELOPMENTS
Charmaine Tener: Organisational Constellations in North America: Research Findings on Facilitators' Perspectives
Sofia Geordiadou & Judy Wilkins-Smith: A Comparative Study between Bert Hellinger's Family Constellation Work & Class Family Therapy Models
Jane Peterson: Orders of Love or Orders of Relationship: A Rubric for understanding how Family Constellations differ from Organisational Constellations
Jane Peterson: The Constellation is Right under your Nose: Using Somatic Imaging to Access the Constellations.
Susan Pogue: Magic & More: Fairy Stories in Constellations
PERSONAL REFLECTIONS
Francesca Mason Boring: Trusting the Knowing Field
Susan Schlosser: Communing with the Ancient Ones
CONSTELLATIONS
Gloria Davila: 'Don't worry; be happy': Bob Marley or is it Bobby McFerrin?
REPORTS ON CONFERENCES & INTENSIVES
Bill Mannle & other contributors: Men's Ritual at the 2nd Australasian Constellations Intensive
Various Contributors: Experiences of the 13th Intensive at Kloster Bernried, Germany
BOOK EXTRACT
Anngwyn St. Just: 'Angels in Peru' Waking to the Sound of Thunder: Trauma & the Human Condition Vol.II
POETS' CORNER
Jan Crawford: The Consenting Adult: Mourning
Jan Crawford: The Consenting Adult: Dying
Extracts
Janos Szabo in conversation with Dr Arnold Polivka
Janos: You and your wife have travelled all around the world. What are the most common constellation themes in the different countries?
Arnold: In Austria and Germany the war experience and the traumas from that are the most frequent issues in the families, plus the personal guilt of grandparents from the Nazi era.
In Italy it is hard for men generally to become independent from women’s emotions.
France was the first country where abortions were legalised and a couple of years ago we had a seminar where abortions were the issue of nearly every constellation, which was very exhausting for the group.
In Italy it is hard for men generally to become independent from women’s emotions.
In the Netherlands and in Norway sailor stories show up very often in the constellations: sons who had to take over father’s role in the family, because their fathers were away at sea.
In Brazil we have often witnessed the harsh fate of the indigenous people – the semi-nomadic indian tribes were mostly killed by the Europeans from 1500, when the Portugese explorers arrived. Slavery was abolished only in the 18th century.
During a constellation workshop in Prague (Czech Republic), we were unable to start the next planned session, because participants were sensing that a large number of invisible people had entered the room and it felt like an invasion of soldiers. So we asked the participants who were resonating with the images of war to stand up and follow their bodily reactions. People lay down on the floor, while others tried to help them. Suddenly someone jumped on a chair and cried: “Peace! We have peace now!” And the drama turned into a joyful dance. It turned out that the date was August 21, the anniversary of the 1968 Russian invasion.
Sarah Peyton: Getting to Know the Embodied Brain: The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Constellation Work
I promised you that we would take a tour of memory as well, since understanding memory helps us understand what we are doing with constellation work. Memory can be conscious (explicit) or non-conscious (implicit). Explicit memories are filed and co-ordinated by a different part of the brain than our implicit memories. Sometimes, as with traumatic memories that come back to us again and again, a memory can have both explicit (known) and implicit (unknown) parts. Emotional memories that are painful and disruptive tend not to
fade. The old adage: ‘Time heals all wounds’, is not true.
The implicit part of the memory is held in the amygdala, which has no sense of time. The time is always ‘now’ for the amygdala. So for my body, receiving the healing ritual, the implicit part of the memory of the abuse, the emotional pain which I continued to carry in my body as dis-ease and discomfort, was not fully known to me. So my amygdala, my emotional memory centre, held the remembering for me until the anger, betrayal, outrage and mourning could be fully held, named and known.
You might be asking: “The amygdala? I thought that was our emotional alarm system. What do you mean, it remembers?” Unconscious, or implicit emotional memory consists of amygdala-centred networks of perception and connections thatare written into our neurons without our conscious attention, with one exposure: hundreds of millions of emotionally significant seconds that create a glacier of implicit experience that inexorably moves us, sometimes quickly, as when the glacier calves pieces of ice that suddenly crash into the sea, (sudden rages, unexpected storms of tears, the quick experience of being unable to endure a relationship anymore) and sometimes so slowly that we don’t even notice our drift (dissociation, disconnection, apathy, depression, racism, de-humanisation, etc.). And like a glacier, always present, as I mentioned, the amygdala has no sense of anything being in the past.
Everything is present time. Flashbacks are the intrusion of past moments into the present with no clear sense that the memory is over. Loads of implicit pain can keep our entire bodies and immune systems continually activated, with our chronic conditions being a kind of extended, non-conscious flashback. So the face of this glacier is really the only part of it that we can know – the liminal space of the intersection between our emotional world and our conscious world, which has its own flavour, and which we will explore next.
In preparation for understanding our conscious world, let me introduce the second organ of memory in the brain, the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the rock star of neuroplastic change in constellation work. It holds a spatial representation of our world and our relationships; it time-stamps memory, (working closely with the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, which can tell present from past) and it is the central sorting organ for all our factual and autobiographical memory. In contrast to the amygdala-centred implicit memory, our conscious, or explicit,memory and knowing is centred here.
The hippocampus is not powered by emotion, which means it doesn’t have the weight of significance and survival helping it to write in its information. So we have to work harder to learn our conscious knowing, like our multiplication tables (no emotional significance). We can use repetition and practice to memorise, or we can hitch a ride on the amygdala’s ease of remembering by connecting the new knowing with something that has emotional content: a story, a passion, an intensity, a hunger – and then we have explicit memories, primarily stored in the hippocampus, but connected to the amygdala, that are given aliveness by their connection to our emotional world.
Emerson Bastos: Five Elements Constellations
Constellating the Five Elements
Four years ago I constellated for the first time the five elements as an experiment. It was a blind constellation with people who knew about the five elements theory but who weren’t at the time aware of the constellation approach at all. When I proposed the experiment, they were not aware we were going to do anything related to the five elements.
I gave five pieces of paper to five different participants in the group. On each piece of paper was written the name of one of the elements. I then placed each person as we normally do in a constellation workshop and purposely placed two of the elements in the ‘wrong’ order.
After a little while I asked for feedback from each of the five representatives. They all agreed they didn’t feel ‘right’. The three in the right place liked one another but couldn’t relate in a good way to the two elements placed in the ‘wrong’ position. The two representatives who were not in their places according to the Creative and Supportive cycle felt ‘not right’. As I mentioned earlier they didn’t know at the time that they were doing anything related to the five elements.
I then asked the five representatives if there was a spontaneous movement to follow it. They allowed themselves to move at this point. After a while they stopped at a place that felt good for them and all the other four representatives also liked.
At this moment I asked them to look towards the person standing on their left side as in the Creative Cycle. They all, in unison, said it felt great. Following that I asked them to look left towards the second person along on their left side – as in the Supportive cycle. They again said it felt even better.
The experiment went much deeper and confirmed in a very clear way the relationship between the five elements. I was flabbergasted, and so were all the participants of the group when I revealed the nature of the experiment. We were all completely speechless.