Remote Constellations--Some Whys and Hows

Many family constellation facilitators in North America, learning, or trained already in group workshop forms, need to consider learning to offer both private and remote 1 to 1 constellations.

Except in certain geographic areas, people here seem to want more privacy for the work, and steady attendance at workshops can be a difficult thing to organize and promote. Workshops are also limited to folks within an hour to two at most of driving time. Driving in some places and seasons can be a hassle.

Help Many Many More Needy People

Remote constellations via voice or voice plus video open a much larger world to your services. In addition to local, I have remote clients also--from India, Europe, Hawaii, Middle and South America, New Zealand, and Australia.

Face-to-Face Starts from a Shared Physical Configuration--the "Constellation"

Now, in private, face-to-face constellations, you set up a configuration of ancestors on the floor or tabletop, using colored footprints, figurines, or even simple household objects (which are rich in additional symbolism).

Both you and the client stand in the place of these, feel patiently into their energies, compare notes--and information about the family system emerges as in the group format.

So the work you do is grounded by a shared physical configuration--I call it "the setup." Transferring your group workshop skills to this format is not that difficult.

But What Happens When There is No Shared Setup in Remote Work?

First, let me say that there are clients and also facilitators for which ancestral healings can work very well without a shared setup. In my own experience and that of my students, this happens usually when both are skilled at mental imagery and/or psychically more gifted.

Also, as the number of shared setup constellations you do increases, your skills at this less grounded form increase. But some clients are still not going to be good visualizers. My approach is to serve the widest range of clients I can, with different techniques & technologies.

So how do we keep some kind of shared setup in remote constellations? The rest of this short blog post fills you in on some of the tricks of the trade.

Are You and the Client Both Tech Savvy?

If you are, then there are two ways to ground a remote constellation in a shared or "semi-shared" physical configuration. In one approach, which I use quite often, both my client and myself have laptop computers with attached webcams (almost all do these days). We connect via Zoom, etc. and see each other on live video.

With the intake information collected, I have the client setup ordinary household objects as representatives either on a table or in a room with some floorspace. Picking up her laptop and pointing the webcam, the client shows me her configuration. I then duplicate the arrangement, using household objects on my side.

This is semi-shared in that the configuration is the same, but my objects are different. We then proceed as we would face to face, taking turns representing the different elements of the constellation. I actually feel household objects are better than figurines in this case. Everyone has them. And, chosen intuitively, they carry their own rich symbolisms.