Do Family Constellations Myself at Home?
Before I learned to facilitate the Family Constellations originated by Bert Hellinger, I had long been a shaman. Started my journey from the dead mechanical world into that living conscious animistic one in 1986.
It's so much more fun and interesting when your drums are alive and bonded to you, and a rattle is--not a tool or an "object"--but a powerful little friend who is very good at dispersing stuck energies.
So a personal altar, on which lived little symbolic "object persons," was already in my home. Stones, a shell, an acorn from the oak I meditated under--these and more little friends and helpers moved around, came and went, and fed me deeper insights into my own and my students' lives. Stay open, and childlike--and they talk to you. More in feelings and flashes of intuition that words... But the info is valid.
Wait--Aren't These Also Constellations?
So it wasn't long before I and my early Family Constellation clients started setting up ancestral or family or life problems in this way and--my goodness--it worked! In fact, there was a whole additional layer of symbolism talking to us that isn't there in figurines or round markers.
If you intuitively (or blindly) choose a pack of cigarettes for Dad and Mom is a lighter--well, just look at the possible relationships. Everything from Mom turns Dad on, to Mom enables Dad's addictions. Are they both standing up? Or lying down? Is the package face up or face down?
So yes, these were real and powerful, do-it-yourself (or for another) constellations.
And We've Kept on Learning About This
More insights about how best to carry out these constellations and why they are valuable keep emerging.. Not only does the richer symbolism of ordinary household "object-persons" make up for the fact that the representatives are not people (as in a group workshop)--but several more major advantages showed up.
One, for example is--hey, suddenly there is no rush. You could visit your home altar constellation off and on over days or even a few weeks and watch it develop. No time pressure (as in a workshop, or client session).
Here are two more profoundly important reasons why slowing the whole thing down is immensely valuable.
Two Secrets of Slowness
First, if you visit your home altar family constellation, go away and live some of your life, come back again, and so on--your subconscious is primed to connect the psychic reality and goes to work doing this "in the background," so to speak. You come back at some point, or have a dream, or a thought pops into your mind--and suddenly something is clear to you.
There's a pattern where there was none before. And you start feeling like, "well, that's totally obvious now." But it wasn't before. I attended a parapsychology research webinar recently that said that it's really your subconscious that is the "psychic" part. So a SLOW CONSTELLATION done via repeated visits actually trains what Hellinger calls your "phenomenological awareness."
Second, what's the biggest problem facilitating family constellations? It's jumping to mental conclusions, failing to stay in an open, wide focus state of "not knowing" long enough. I call that premature closure. But of course, a Family Constellation in a workshop can only last so long. So there's pressure. And it's hard to "not know" in front of a bunch of other people who expect you to "know."
A SLOW Home Altar Family Constellation has absolutely no pressure to "know," or "finish on time." You get used to the fact that the right patterns will emerge on their own from the work your subconscious does between visits connecting to the field. This trust carries over into actual facilitations with clients. Practicing slow constellations makes you much better at the ones that happen in one sitting.