34-cover-500px.jpg
 

Issue 34, June 2019

£ 15.00

Contents

  • Barbara Morgan: Editorial

  • Bert Hellinger: Knocking

  • Bert Hellinger: Despair & Discord

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

  • Diana Claire Douglas: Interview with Karl-Heinz Rauscher

HISTORY OF NATIONS, CULTURES & RELIGIONS

  • Anngwyn St. Just: Chernobyl Rave: Dancing in the Field of Wormwood

  • Anngwyn St. Just: Exodus

  • Anngwyn St. Just: Rashomon: Hall of Mirrors in DC

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

  • Jonathan Hooton: Shame: An Existential Wound

  • Catherine Geils, Thirusha Naidu & Stephen Edwards: Psychologists’ Experience of the Phenomenon of Representation

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

  • David Cagney: The Present – A Ramble towards Self Love

  • Ricí Ní Chléirigh: Beyond Ideas

  • Poppy Altmann: Attunement & Embodiment in Family Constellations

  • Karin Dremel: Sometimes the Side Effect is the Main Effect: the Contemplative Relational Practice of Representing

  • Alemka Dauskardt: Representative Perception and the Nature of Reality

  • Franziska Pretsch: The Power of Body Image and Constellation Work

REPORTS ON CONFERENCES & INTENSIVES

  • Josh Alexander: West Coast Systemic Constellations Intensive 2019

BOOK REVIEW

  • Karin Dremel: Trauma: Time, Space, and Fractals II by Anngwyn St. Just, PhD

INVITATION

  • Francesca Mason Boring

POETS' CORNER

  • Angus Landman: The End of Sadness

  • Angus Landman: It's No Wonder

  • Angus Landman: This

  • Angus Landman: Big Bang Echo

  • Samo Koprivec: To My Father

Extracts

Bert Hellinger: Knocking

Someone knocks who wishes to enter. This is how we hold the image of Death knocking when our time is up. However, it is not we who open the door to death. Death already has its hand on the doorknob and pushes it open when the time is right.

By contrast, Love does knock and we rush to open the door, full of expectation, our heart racing.

With Love, Life is knocking at our door. Soon after love, comes life in all its fullness. A new child takes its first breath and opens itself to the light of the world and we open the door to this child.

Everything that enriches our life knocks, even that which threatens it. The question is, are we prepared to open the door no matter what or do we decide that something else, which is basically opposing it, is of more importance?

In this way, we often miss the Essential. Instead of being allowed to enter, this essence gradually moves away from us, unseen…

Poppy Altmann: Attunement and Embodiment in Family Constellations

… Our senses are crucial in the representative role, whether they are for the purposes of attunement, or for transferring important information to the facilitator and client. For example, if a representative feels cold, it may signify the presence of death, or heat may reveal suppressed anger. How we ‘hear’ a sound such as a creaky floor, will be influenced by the Field and provide more information. A creak might sound like a footstep on a stair, a door opening or even someone hanging, according to the Field. I have heard of representatives smelling things like bread baking when there is no oven around, and this information has helped the Constellation. More obviously, the way we see things may be different from representative to representative, and this might provide material that is significant. Equally, the interpretation of touch within the Constellation may be received as gentle, or gripping and frightening to the recipient:

“As a representative, we physically perceive how it feels to be in a specific place in the system. We feel heat, cold, pain, laughter, indifference, etc.” (Lingg, H. K., 2006, p. 27)

Who we are chosen to represent is also significant. Often, the role will reflect issues in our own lives. For example I might regularly be chosen to represent someone whose child has died if I have lost a child myself. Or an adopted person might repeatedly be chosen to represent an excluded person in the same or different workshops. This gives us the opportunity to face and heal our unresolved trauma…

 

Karin Dremel: Sometimes the Side Effect is the Main Effect: The Contemplative Relational Practice of Representing in Systemic Constellation Work

… Regardless of a facilitator’s ‘brand’ or style, every constellation includes some version of representational perception. Even an ad hoc tabletop constellation in a coffee shop relies on perception – of both the facilitator and the one exploring the issue – when a spoon or a cup represents great-grandmother, country of origin, or ‘that-which-is-missing’. The Königsweg (royal road) to the full potential of representational perception is a bodily stand-in-for-X experience. No sooner is someone chosen, than the inner process of perception begins in response to being positioned (aufgestellt). Seasoned representatives immediately feel a shift, often increasing during shifts in relational proximity and interconnectedness (or lack thereof), which ensue and develop. The complexity and specificity in the system’s structure is reflected through gradual and shifting emergence of sensations, impressions, and impulses. People experience physically, emotionally, and mentally that they are temporarily part of a: “breathing three-dimensional portrait of [this] ancestral lineage, which elicits a system’s ‘workings’ and emerging solutions.” (Booth Cohen, 2009)

Alas, so far, SCW research focuses on the improvement of the client and the client’s family system; data reflects outcomes after treatment. Here and there, aspects of representing are touched on, for example the mention of representatives in two studies by a group of researchers in Heidelberg, Germany. Sadly, this group of researchers chose to call clients ‘active participants (AP)’ and those who represent ‘observing participants (OP) [who] solely serve as stand-ins for the APs’ family members’ (Heidelberg Study, 2013). Group participants and their experiences are far less visible, nor are they even deemed active in this study. Such wholesale omission of representational experience is somewhat surprising. Is it not the perception, the collaboration, and the willing action of representatives that yield healing templates and balancing shifts? …

 

Alemka Dauskardt: Representative Perception and the Nature of Reality

… Many of us, I bet, can still remember that moment when we first experienced representative perception, leaving us perplexed and in awe. Each one of us was having to come to terms with the implications of this undeniable fact witnessed in every constellation – that strangers representing a person they don’t know, accurately and authentically channel the energy of that person, situation or related dynamic.

By now we have become so used to this phenomenon that we do not question it, or even wonder about its nature. The problem is that these phenomena the Constellation method relies upon and uses as a matter of fact, are incompatible with the widely accepted belief of scientific materialism that the material world we can observe with our senses is the only reality.

How we, the practitioners of the approach, deal with such a situation is an important question to consider, especially in the light of frequent cries for wider acceptance of our work.

Some continue to ignore these issues by focusing pragmatically on the practice of the work. Others endeavour to carry out research and provide ‘scientific evidence’ for the Knowing Field and effectiveness of the method…