We'll Meet in the Sun by Leslie Nipps
Your life is torn up in ways you are unable to understand. Therapy and meditation have not significantly changed the anguish you feel. Some of us in that situation come to realize that we are entangled with the suffering of our ancestors.
Bert Hellinger, the founder of Family Constellation work, worked with the Zulu peoples of Southern Africa for twenty years. During that time, he had a fundamental insight: for the Zulu, proper relationships with the ancestors is every bit as important as it is to have proper relationships with fellow living members of the community.
Pretty much everything in our western society insures that we will get out of proper relationship with our ancestors. In Mexico, families have picnics with the dead in cemeteries on the Day of the Dead. In Japan, Shinto family leave food for the dead to eat on their altars. In very devout, traditional Roman Catholic families, you might pray that dead relatives grow in holiness after death, and ask for them to intercede on your behalf.
How would we modern Americans even notice if we’d gotten out of order with our dead relatives? Unconsciously, we continue to be in relationship, for good or ill—it’s inevitable, part of our make-up—and we can’t help but be involved with and related to our dead ancestors. Unconsciously, we remain connected to their suffering, their sins, their tragedies, their heartbreaks. And if one of those lives seems especially relevant to us, we will reach out energetically to help, or include, or somehow save those who have gone before. All unconsciously.
These unconscious gestures are ultimately unworkable. They are an expression of an improper relationship with the dead, whose sufferings, after all (unlike ours) are now over. We are trying to help, and as the smallest ones in the ancestral system (Family Soul), we cannot help.
When we do try to help, we bring suffering into our lives. For instance, one common entanglement involves ancestors who suffered great deprivation, perhaps to the point of starvation. In our unconscious attempt to help, we might develop an uncontrollable hunger. It shows up as a simple but very painful case of compulsive eating. But until we unveil the source of our unconscious attempt to re-include the lost starving ones, we might find ourselves utterly unable to change the behavior that is causing us so much suffering.
In Family Constellation work, we don’t try and change the compulsive eating. Instead, we bring the client back into proper relationship to the ancestors, bowing to their past suffering, honoring them for their lives, and noticing that their suffering is now long over. Clients find their proper place again, and find their behaviors changing subtly as they acknowledge their ancestors properly.
Join us for a Family Constellation, and find out how proper relationship to your ancestors can heal deep devotional pain and suffering, and bring peace and new life.
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