"Context" by Leslie Nipps
Family Constellations unentangle family pain and allow love to flow freely again.
But many participants wonder: What effect does it have on a client to have a constellation done?
This turns out to be a great question, because constellations effect healing in ways that are truly unique and, for most of us, pretty counter-intuitive.
The vehicle for constellation work is “the Field,” a web of energy and life that holds everything and everyone. As a result, constellations always work on whole systems. There isn’t anything about it that is surgical, focusing in on one small section of a client’s experience. It always brings new life both to areas of life we hoped for help in, and in areas that can be entirely unexpected.
Some examples:
- A client who asked for a constellation to address relationship issues reports that in the weeks after her constellation her conversations with her father have been loving and patient in an entirely new way.
- A woman who was hoping for more engagement with her life suddenly received a gift from an aunt with whom she had not communicated in years.
After years of facilitating constellations, I’ve noticed that constellations work on at least these three levels on behalf of clients:
1) Constellations always provide fantastic “ahas” and insights. They help us to see the family connections, blocks, sufferings, and expressions of love that we cannot normally see in our everyday life. Constellation work provides a kind of “MRI” for the soul of the family, so now we can really see, for instance, that the enmity between our father and his brother is an attempt to express love, and that, indeed, everything in our family is an expression of love. These insights are themselves life-changing.
2) Clients of constellations experience internal shifts and changes that are not limited to the effect of an insight. Healing is directed right at the client. A burden is put down, or the responsibility for a choice is taken up. Clients reach for their parents for the first time, or bow to their ancestors’ suffering. This changes us. Sometimes this is obvious by the end of a constellation, and other times it becomes clear over time. But clients know they are different in their worlds.
3) Finally, constellations affect the entire Family Soul. For healing to happen for the client, shifts in the family system need to take place so that the client can experience life differently, too. This is not “play acting.” When a war is part of a constellation, and the formerly unpeaceful dead find peace through the work of the constellation, this isn’t just a story—now these dead ones know peace. Living relatives—parents, siblings—are affected by this work, too. It isn’t a direct correlation; we cannot know how the changes will show in day to day life. But the whole system has been affected, and this will create new possibilities for the client which are fairly impossible to predict.
It’s this last level of change that is new to most people, and is often hardest to believe until you actually see and experience a constellation. When you do come to one, you feel the way the energy is moving, and most people have a deep sense that something much bigger than those of us in the room are being moved along with it.
In the end, it is not so different than the conviction of Catholics that praying for the dead helps them and us. Or, the beliefs of billions of people who conscientiously attend to their relationships with their relatives, living and dead, through their religious practices. Indeed, that is where Bert Hellinger, who created Family Constellation work, found his inspiration—with the Zulu peoples of South Africa, who know that the dead are not dead to us, that we have a responsibility for right relationship with them, and that transformation is available to all of us.
Click here for more information about constellation work.
Click here to see upcoming constellation dates.
Contact me at lnipps@gmail.com to ask questions or to talk about having your own constellation done.
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