Issue 37, January 2021
£ 15.00
Contents
Barbara Morgan: Editorial
Bert Hellinger: Important/Deeply Moved
WORKING WITH THE COLLECTIVE
Diana Claire Douglas: Constellating in Jerusalem: Diana in Conversation with Yuval Carmi
Stuart Taylor/De-Col. Hub, London: From Symbols to Substance – 2020 A Year of Tumultuous Change
Paul Stoney/ISCA Board: ISCA Gathering 2021: Belonging – Thriving Together
HISTORY OF NATIONS, CULTURES & RELIGIONS
Anngwyn St. Just: Something that can Stand in the Wind
Anngwyn St. Just & Timothy John Thornton: Man’s Inhumanity to Man: Ancient and Ongoing
Anngwyn St. Just: Magdalene Chronicles: Secrecy, Silence and Shame
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Yildiz Sethi: The Missing Piece for Family Constellation Practitioners
Nikki Mackay: Disentangling the Roots of Racism
PERSONAL REFLECTIONS
Cecilio Fernández Regojo: Reflections
Marcela Velfl: Connection: Insights from the Dance Floor
Franziska Pretsch: Music and Ancestral Connections
Jane Buyers: Constellations as a Way of Life
Michelle Bias: A Cross-Atlantic Conversation – Intimacy
Francesca Mason Boring: The Treasure of Invisibility: The Invitation to be Seen
POETS’ CORNER
Petra Juhászová: Rebirth
Ayaz Angus Landman: The Immeasurable Sky/For No Reason
John Waite: The Next Boy
IN MEMORIAM
Jen Altman 1942 – 2020
Extracts
Bert Hellinger: Deeply Moved
We feel deeply moved when something touches us deeply, for example, when we listen to sublime music, when we are in the midst of awe-inspiring nature, when we receive unexpected loving attention or when we witness people reuniting after a long separation.
Where does this feeling come from and what in us is moved? We are moved deeply in our souls and our hearts, but also in our spirits, when we stand before a miracle.
These movements begin outside. We only react to them. We feel drawn by them, moving beyond ourselves, becoming one with them out there in rapture.
In this way, we are elevated to something far beyond our ordinary lives.
Everything that takes hold of us in this way, we experience as a gift, as something precious. At the same time in this rapture we experience ourselves stronger and more at one with ourselves.
Just as we experience ourselves drawn to something way beyond us on the outside, we experience this movement also the other way round on our journeys to our core. Something draws into our own depths and even beyond.
Anngwyn St. Just: Magdalene Chronicles: Secrecy, Silence and Shame
In Ireland, in the city of Dublin, during the early 1990s, land that had been owned by the former Catholic, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity Mother and Baby Home, attached to a laundry, was found to contain hundreds of bodies in unmarked graves. As the truth and horror of abuse was literally unearthed, adult corpses showed signs of malnutrition and broken limbs, some with multiple fractures. This led to media revelations about sadistic practices that had transpired within this and other clandestine religious institutions (Ryan, 2011)…
…Ostensibly established to house ‘fallen women’, it has been estimated that throughout Ireland, nearly 30,000 women were enslaved into a grim archipelago of Magdalene facilities, locked in tight, behind high convent walls, topped with iron spikes and broken glass, together with iron bars and caging wires on the windows. While these now infamous laundries were initially founded to remove prostitutes from the streets, by the 1940s the majority of inmates were unmarried mothers. At that time in Ireland, sex outside of Holy Matrimony was considered a mortal sin, equivalent to murder, and such women were condemned by family, community and the church. There was no such punishment for fathers of these babies, whose identities often remained secret. In many cases fathers were unaware and never informed of pregnancies, as women were quickly sent away, with their fate and that of their babies, unknown (Culliton, 2019).
Nikki Mackay: Disentangling the Roots of Racism
Those who occupy positions within a relational system, such as a constellation, are able to represent the bodily sensations, feelings and impulses of someone whom they do not know. In our experiment these were associated with categories of memory that are larger than the individual; thus they will express the collective experience of suffering in the past that is being re-experienced in the present.
In exploring the notion that trauma represents an entanglement with the past, the project sought to explore the quantum notion that to ‘see’ an entanglement is to break it…
…In each of the preceding constellations the trauma within the roots of slavery was compartmentalised and unseen. Within the created Constellation Field, the dominance was given to the ‘white’ trauma instead. Because of this emergent theme, we decided to set the intention to look through the lens of the unacknowledged trauma within African American families who had been enslaved in our next focus group. We intentionally kept the focus there, to avoid the obfuscating presence of the narrative of white guilt.
Four historical true-life accounts of individuals who had been enslaved were explored. It was highly emotive. There was deep wounding between the generations of the ancestors themselves with mothers and children being torn apart. The parents’ relationship promises and the place of the children were deeply entangled with the trauma of grief, persecution, loss and fear.
Marcela Velfl: Connection: Insights from the Dance Floor
I have been dancing my whole life, always moving in tune with the music. During this year when social distancing and the avoidance of touch have become a new standard; when the fear of contact has become a driving force of human behaviour and when couple and group dances have been brought down to a bare minimum, I have noticed in myself that maintaining a physical connection has become more important than ever, to keep my body and psyche healthy. Being part of a small group of dancers who maintained social and physical contact throughout the year, dancing together in very close contact, despite all the social distancing measures, was a risk worth taking. Instead of disconnecting from each other and ourselves, we have connected on a deeper and more profound level, which goes beyond dancing itself. That’s why the notion of connection, a connection with our spirit through maintaining the connection with our body, a heart-to-heart connection among human beings, and a connection to the wider community and life, is the focus of this article…
…Movement happens through our bodies, and reflects our whole being. Our bodies are amazing; they are stores of information – of our lives as well as the lives of our ancestors. Through dance we have a unique opportunity to see how we are connecting with the life of our bodies. We have the opportunity to observe the messages it is sending to us, and to notice what wants to be seen and acknowledged. Our bodies show if and to what extent we are centred, grounded and present in our lives. We can observe if we live only in our minds, theories and concepts or if we live in all parts of our bodies equally. We can observe how we deal with intimacy, how much sadness and pain we are carrying in our chest and pelvis. We can observe if we are able to surrender to each other with full trust and expose our front body, the most vulnerable part, to another human being. We can observe how much we long for connection, while fear and anxiety are simultaneously awakened by the intimacy.