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Issue 18, June 2011

£ 15.00

Contents

Barbara Morgan: Editorial

Bert Hellinger: ‘Laws of Healing’ – Introduction

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

  • Kent Layden in conversation with Jane Peterson

  • Ty Francis in conversation with Tomás Kohn

THE HISTORY OF NATIONS, CULTURES & RELIGIONS

  • Chetna Kobayashi: A Journey to Okinawa, Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  • Meera Finnigan: Australian Constellation Training Intensive

  • Verónica Menduiña: Constellations and a new Narrative

  • Joy Manné: Conceptual Constellations

  • Liz Martins: The Bristol Project

ORGANISATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS

  • Jan Jacob Stam: Trauma in Organisations

  • Raquel Schlosser: Unconscious Memory in Organisations

  • Claude Rosselet: Connecting to the Source of Organisational Intelligence

PERSONAL RELFECTIONS

  • Michael Reddy: Constellations & the Evolution of World-Views: Part One

  • Jane Peterson: Prove It! The Riddle of Research

  • Brenda Vos & Jan Hein Mooren: The Moral Field

  • Victor Velasco: Trans-generational and Systemic Philosophy: Sexual Diversity and HIV

REPORTS ON CONFERENCES & INTENSIVES

  • Katrina Kirchbaumer: The International Infosyon Conference, Vienna, Austria

  • Various Contributors: Constellations Intensive, Bernried, Germany

BOOK REVIEW

  • Aurel Mocanu: Notes from the Indigenous Field by Francesca Mason Boring

POEMS

  • Joy Manné: Words have Families too

  • Lisa Wells: I was taken

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

  • Various Contributors

Bert Hellinger: Extract ‘Fulfilled’ – Tata Cachora alias Don Juan Matus

Extracts

Bert Hellinger: Laws of Healing: Getting well; staying well

Our Soul:
So what do we know about healing beyond the physical treatment? Beyond our body, our soul and our feelings play an important role in healing. They also need to be treated well.Often we feel the pain of the soul even more intensely than the pain in the body.
What, above all, is the most profound pain in our soul? Nearly all pain in the soul is about separation – whether in present time or memories of separation – often from back in our childhood. This kind of pain is experienced as trauma, especially if we were exposed to it without protection, without being able to escape it.
This separation pain is stored in our body and it can be reactivated at any time, for instance through inner images that evoke feelings from way back that suddenly overcome us.
In this moment, our behaviour towards other people changes. Without being immediately aware of it, we anticipate another dreaded separation.
At the same time, our body responds to this by contracting.
We tighten up. We might lose our appetite or can’t breathe properly. Or our heart aches and contracts. Instead of moving, we stay still, even staying in bed for long periods. Our mood becomes gloomy and we also get physically ill.

In the Spotlight: Kent Layden in conversation with Jane Peterson

Kent: What then is special about Hellinger’s work?
Jane: One of Bert’s extraordinary contributions is that he used the body directly, without shaping or sculpting it. He let the body become a channel for information, to share what soma, the living intentional being, knew about relationships and was unable to articulate in words.This was brilliant, because it enabled certain information to emerge in a way that we hadn’t fully experienced so directly before. It’s different from psychodrama or sculpting in that we are not putting any information into or on to the body. Instead, systemic knowledge can emerge directly through both the client’s soma and the representatives.
Another thing Bert did that was absolutely brilliant was his long and diligent enquiry into how conscience actually functions in human systems. Its just an incredible phenomenological study of conscience, beautifully described in No Waves without the Ocean (Hellinger, 2006). He re-framed conscience as an inner urge that enables us to maintain our belonging to our group, rather than a moral compass – it’s moral only for our group!
The orders of love are so simple, what he says about conscience, how it governs belonging, its so simple. And yet this simplicity is true of complex systems. The complex behaviour we see on the surface is often governed by a set of very simple rules.
Bert did a brilliant job of unearthing those patterns in ways that are useful and also very beautiful.
Constellation work brings the grace of love to light in our relationships.

Michael Reddy: Constellations and the Evolution of World-Views

How do we model systemic constellations in our minds? How do we picture them working? In the West, most of us have absorbed cultural conceptions of physical reality based on objective, scientific materialism. Biological reality is framed largely in terms of separation, Darwinian fitness and competition. How do these interact with our own and our clients’ understandings of constellations? To say there is conflict is not news…..Prevailing concepts of individuality, even time and space are challenged by what we do. For some facilitators, mental models are not an issue. They can do the work very well and not stress about explanations. If Hellinger had not been able to distance himself from theories, our work might well not exist. For others of us though, the divide runs deeper. What we regularly experience in constellations is very difficult to reconcile with how science says the world operates. What are we to answer when some potential clients ask: How can this possibly work? We help many, but see others turn away. Their minds will not let them experiment.
Constellations amount to a profound challenge to competitive, objectivisit, materialistic, reductionist perspectives on reality.