New In-form-ation, New Form
What Family Constellations taught me.
I believe it is essential for educators to understand the relationship between form and in-form-ation. The current form of your life is just a temporary expression of a shifting landscape of in-form-ation.
How did I come to such an idea? The seed of that insight came to me exactly 13 years ago, when I attended my first Family Constellations workshop. Here’s part 1 of that story.
January, 2012
I showed up at the Family Constellations workshop with butterflies in my stomach and a heaviness in my chest.
The butterflies were excitement, but the heaviness was less clear.
I had done some research in advance, so I had a general idea of what to expect: we would be chosen to stand in for members of a person’s family system. However, this simple description revealed nothing of the multidimensional landscape I was about to experience.
A man took the chair next to the facilitator. He described his issue: He had a confusing relationship with his mentor, a man he had great admiration for. Their time always began well, but invariably, as the visit would come to an end, he and his mentor would find themselves in conflict. “Can you help me understand why this is happening? We’re supposed to be working on a project together, but this is getting in the way,” the client asked the facilitator.
The facilitator asked him to choose two people from the group to represent him and his mentor. The man looked carefully around the circle of workshop participants and selected two people. He walked each of them to the center of the circle and placed them facing each other about six feet apart. The two representatives stood silently in the center of the room, looking down. They both described themselves feeling shaky, unsteady.
The facilitator silently observed the representatives, then turned to the client and asked him to pick two more people, second representatives for himself and his mentor. He placed the “second mentor” to the right of the first. At this point, all of the representatives he chose were men. So I was a bit surprised when he chose me, a short woman, as the second representative for himself. I stood across from the “second mentor”.
Having never done this before, I was nervous and uncertain. What was I supposed to do? What if I did it wrong? I couldn’t remember the facilitator’s specific instructions. Maybe he didn’t give me any instructions at all?
After a few moments, the facilitator asked me, “What do you notice?”
What I noticed was that my limbs felt weak. I felt that if I didn’t lie down, I would fall down. I told this to the facilitator and he instructed me to follow my movement. As I lay face down on the ground, my whole body felt cold, and I started shivering. I experienced an unusual pressure where my body touched the floor - one that I had never felt before and never felt since - as if a magnet were pulling me into the ground.
“Who is that?” the facilitator asked as he extended his hand towards me. The client looked at me on the floor and took a deep breath, “I think that’s my sister.”
“My sister died as a child. I was 6 and she was 9. My parents, in their grief, just packed up the house and we moved to another city. We never spoke of her again.”
As he said these things, I felt myself lighten. The warmth returned to my body, and I looked up at him with a sense of playfulness and happiness that “I” was being spoken of.
As the process continued, the facilitator asked me to stand. When I stood, I made eye contact with the man chosen as “the second mentor.” As I looked at him, I was overcome with emotion – so much love! Clear, radiant love. The facilitator said, “This is your father.”
The facilitator invited us to follow our movements, and “my father” and I embraced. It was our longed-for reunion.
I returned to my seat in silence and awe. The heaviness I arrived with was replaced with a sense of warmth and lightness in my heart.