ARTICLES
Quite by Surprise…
Learning how to flow with not-knowing
The following article has its roots in a speech that I was invited to give as the keynote speaker at the 6th Constellation Conference in San Diego entitled: Embracing Our Roots, Standing in Our Strength.
For many reasons, one of which was an ordinary fear of failure, I, for the first time in my life, prepared my speech ahead of time, writing it down word-for-word.
To put it another way: the papers with the written speech on, never made it out of my bag, because I gladly ‘came to my senses’ before delivering this written speech which contained the subtitle: Learning to flow with not knowing!
When I took my place as the keynote speaker of the conference, I shared with the audience my attempt to circumvent the ‘not-knowing’ part of myself, and told them I was now ready to do the speech without a safety net. And I also told them that because the written speech was certainly a beautiful one, I might one day publish it.
So here it is…
The gist of the speech is what makes us – as constellation facilitators – authentic. A good portion of the written material eventually found its way into the speech in San Diego anyway, but much of it never made it, because during the flow of the talk, other material seemed more appropriate. In order to make it easier to read, I have made changes – transforming it into something more like an article. I hope you enjoy it!
Dear audience, dear organizers: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this beautiful invitation! It is a great honor to be standing here in front of you.
With what I want to share with you, I will use key examples from my work that have shaped my approach, to include everything that, at first glance may seem disturbing or ill-fitting and talk about those moments in which chance happenings turned into opportunities for change.
In order to lay the foundations, I will offer some background:
When I went to the USA to hold my first workshops, it was not the first time that I had travelled there. Some fourteen years earlier, I had spent seven months of my spiritual quest in Oregon – in the presence of an enlightened master I had known from India. We called him Osho.
For many years, I had been deeply nourished, and greatly challenged, by his teachings – spending many months in his community in India, and learning about meditation and being trained in what were then cutting-edge therapy methods like primal therapy and breath awareness – and, years later, NLP and Ericksonian Hypnosis.
When the experiment, in which we, his people, had built a small town out of nothing in the desert of Oregon, gloriously crashed, we were all thrown into yet another unknown and unseen adventure. Later, I met up with my master again, with his beloved commune of seekers around him, back again in India.
Being in the presence of an enlightened master was certainly one of the biggest and most challenging learning events ever for me. It allowed me to live my life to the fullest. This led to me to understand that happiness and misery, joy and sadness, forgiveness and hatred are all part of the human experience and that it is up to me to choose to drown in misery, or watch it all unfold with deep and understanding compassion for myself and the world around me. It was through my master’s creative, loving and merciless ‘coaxing’ that I started a journey of letting go of many of my ideas of how to be and allowing myself to flow with simply not knowing.
It became the ultimate preparation for me in my work with people.
One of the many gifts that I received during that time, nearly thirty years ago, was meeting my husband. He is American, born and raised Jewish in Brooklyn, New York.
Constellation-wise, this union of ours – a German woman and a Jewish man – is, of course, a very interesting one. We both like to think of it as our way of building bridges. And bridge-building is hard work; it needs skill, passion, patience, understanding and love.
My husband lives and works with me in Germany. He takes care of the administration/organizational side of my work; he has been my travel companion for many years; he is (sometimes) my manager; he is my proofreader/editor and is always my honest-to-the-core critic.
And he has never learned the German language. As constellation facilitators, we might say that he has not betrayed his tribe. (Meanwhile I have learned to talk and walk and sleep and dream in English!)
All of the above comes with me to this 2015 Conference.
First of all, let me tell you: this is a very beautiful gathering of like-minded people, but the ‘embracing our roots’ part has never been an easy one for me.
As a German woman – first-generation after World War Two – I had absorbed my parents’ feelings, and for many years I was always relieved when – on my many travels –I was not recognized as the German that I am.
It took getting to know constellation work and the intense process of coming-to-grips with our German war crimes: the Holocaust; victims and perpetrators, to loosen the grip that shame and guilt had on me.
And getting to know constellation work actually happened, quite by surprise. It literally fell at my feet – in the shape of the first book about Bert Hellinger’s work – out of a bookshelf in my favorite book store. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The fact that I ended up holding workshops and trainings in the USA also happened quite by surprise – I could never have planned it, did not even think of it. So here’s the story of how that happened:
In one of Bert Hellinger’s early teaching seminars – in the old German city of Dresden – I met an old friend from the time that I had spent in the community of my spiritual master. He was originally from my hometown (Freiburg), and we had not heard from each other for the past fifteen years. All I knew was that he had emigrated to the USA.
He was there at Bert’s seminar, standing as a representative on the stage. His name is Dietrich Klinghardt. He is a physician who, in those days, was living and working in Seattle. After our surprise meeting in Dresden, he invited me to come and do workshops in the USA and he also passed me on to a colleague of his: Dr. Lon Hatfield, who was just about to open a holistic health centre in 1998 in the small and picturesque town of Colville, Washington. There, in my first group, I met Francesca Mason Boring, in addition to one of Dr. Hatfield’s patients – a Native American woman from the nearby reservation: Martina Whelshula.
He had invited her to come to my workshop, after she had shared with him her thesis about the holocaust of Native Americans. He thought my upcoming workshop might be of use for her research and the work of systemic constellations, a good tool for her people.
She attended and was very surprised and touched by the work. One year later, she hosted a two-day workshop – as a pilot-project – in her home on the ‘Rez’ (reservation). She had invited trusted friends and colleagues, and some family. My husband had come with me, as well as Dr. Hatfield, his wife Meredi, and a co-worker at the clinic, who had previously worked on reservations.
This pilot project turned out to be one of the most powerful and challenging workshops ever. My previous experience of working with holocaust issues, and victim and perpetrator themes, was certainly helpful, but it also needed adjusting to a much broader view that included perpetrators in the system in ways in which they could not harm anyone and where they had time to heal. Only a year later, Bert Hellinger came to similar conclusions.
And yes, the grief and pain in the constellations was often overwhelming, but so was the joy and laughter.
And I now believe that it was there that I learned to say: “I am German, my parents are German, and so are my grandparents and great-grandparents, and the ones before…” It was a very precious and long overdue step for me in the direction of becoming genuine and authentic.
Should this sound as if these qualities are needed in constellation work, well, let me make it clear: they are not. We are all totally capable of learning from any teacher: good, mediocre or poor.
It is not the other person who makes us take a much-needed step in our lives; it is not the facilitator, not the healer and also not the master. It is we who have chosen to finally do so, even if the facilitator is neither very skilled nor very authentic. For many of us, it is simply a question of honoring a tool of such powerful and exquisite quality that it would feel like a waste if we were not to give it our best; if we didn’t ask of each potential facilitator that they do so with utmost respect and as much grace as possible. To become authentic as a facilitator is actually nothing more than becoming yourself. And for this, help is always on the way. All we need to do is move!
There is a beautiful saying of Hassidic origin: If you take one step towards god, god will take a thousand steps towards you!
So how does this movement happen?
• When we are willing to question our most cherished beliefs and ideas about ourselves and our work
• When we are ready to acknowledge: we don’t know. In short: when we have the courage to fail.
In Germany, when constellation work started to experience a tremendous momentum, we early facilitators – being thoroughly in awe of the work and of Bert Hellinger himself –jumped on every explanation he offered and every ‘rule’ he stated, and reproduced it into our work – most of the time word-for-word. In no time at all, we had all accumulated an impressive set of rules. They helped when we were afraid and did not trust our own intuition.
There is, however, one event in my early career, which stands out as a complete rule-breaker:
A constellation was at a rather sticky point, where many dead people (uncles and aunts of the client who had died as children) were standing next to each other, so the client could bow before them, giving them a place in the family and in his heart.
However, the picture was frozen and no bowing down or coaxing from my side could do anything about it. This was a nightmare for a young facilitator like me: once the dead are honored, aren’t they supposed to feel compelled to then bless the client?
One other ‘rule’ we had all learnt from Bert was: if nothing moves, stop the constellation! But I failed to use even this ‘bail out’ – feeling as stuck and frozen as the constellation itself.
Suddenly a participant got up from her chair in the circle and walked straight through the centre of the constellation to the other side of the room, in order to get her water bottle.
‘Rule Number One’ (held in my heart-of-hearts): the constellation space is sacred, and you as a participant sitting on a chair in the circle should never, ever walk through this holy space unasked!
While I stood speechless – trying to grab on to some of the sentences that tumbled through my mind – I saw from the corner of my eye that the frozen picture had started to move! That gave me the idea to ask the ‘trespasser’ to do the walk again, but this time very slowly. And as she was doing her walk again – this time consciously – one of the representatives for the dead said, “She was missing!” All others agreed, seemingly relieved. It turned out to be the mother of them all, the client’s grandmother, whose sorrow and agony over the loss of so many of her children had never been truly acknowledged. When she was finally seen in her pain and loss, and the client bowed to her deeply, the row of her dead children became joyous and were ready to give their blessings.
What I had learned was:
• ‘Rules’ can get in the way of the solution
• Surprise happenings help the solution to occur
• Better than stopping a constellation is to stop the rule, and
• Important roles – if forgotten – will show up anyway.
This taught me to keep my eyes not only on the constellation in the centre, but also on the whole group, seeing the people in the circle and their reactions as part of the process. In the months that followed, I started to include not only the people in the circle, but also what happened through the windows; around the building; in the roads outside; in the city itself; the country; the whole world…
One of my last groups, before leaving for the Conference in San Diego, took place in Southern Italy. It was a great example of how what happens around us impacts us greatly in many unseen ways.
At the start of the group, I was talking about the current flood of migrants pouring into Europe. Italy was literally awash with migrants, most of them wanting to reach Germany. So people were listening with interest. I mentioned how what happens on the outside will have an effect on us on the inside.
We then broke up into groups of three, so each participant could look at this most pressing issue for themselves. Their issue was represented by one person, their soul quality by another and the protagonist stood in his or her own place.
When we came back to the circle to share, one man, a physician and constellations facilitator, who was clearly shaken, said that his question had been how to be of help in this refugee crisis. His soul quality, he reported, just stood with arms spread wide, and he saw a picture of the streams of refugees representing the lost souls of the banished Jews coming back to claim the piece of their soul that had been lost in Germany, Italy and in many of the countries they were now attempting to reach.
After his sharing, the group sat in silence for a long time, which for a group from Southern Italy, is rather an unusual occurrence! In the discussion about it later on, we came to the conclusion that truth cannot always be decided by the logical mind; it sometimes resonates in other parts of the body, where we decide something to be true beyond logical explanation and then act accordingly.
I will, in the following, use some more examples from my earlier work, which illustrate how the work itself has influenced my ability to feel comfortable in the space of not-knowing, and to trust another kind of truth.
On our first trip to work with constellations in the USA my husband, who had not been back to his homeland for some fifteen years, had a little surprise constellation right at the immigration counter: The employee, a grey-haired older man, said to him with a warm smile, “Welcome home, we’re glad to have you back.”
During the next four years, I led several open workshops and four training groups: three of them for 21 days, and a shorter one held following an invitation from the reservation of the Colville Confederated Tribes. This training was limited to 3 lots of 3 days, while the one in neighboring Colville (organized by the new Healing Arts Center co-founded by Dr. Hatfield) lasted 21 days.
During the training group on the reservation, we stumbled over something shocking and enlightening:
The nine-day group was limited to 25 participants, but 30 had applied. Prior to the second meeting, a tragic death had happened to the younger sister of one participant, so many of them (all relatives and family) stayed away. The group had shrunk to 16, almost half, if you consider that 30 had wanted to come originally.
At the third, and last, meeting, we were down to again half of the half: 8. These 8 were almost exactly the same people who had been in the early pilot-project, so the circle was complete. And the only person who had not been to the pilot-project was a woman who at the last minute had felt too afraid to attend and sent her husband instead. In the meantime, he had died; so this time, it was she who came.
When we looked at the shrinking of the group, which felt painful for all, someone suddenly saw the parallel: the Indian population had died through contact with white people: either through new diseases with which their bodies could not cope, or, to a much greater extent, through ethnic cleansing. They had vanished in approximately the same proportions: in a first wave, half; in a second wave half of this. And nowadays? One participant, George Abrahmson, once stated dryly: “It was predicted long ago that by now we should have died out. Guess what? We are still here and growing!”
Knowing of the deep interest of four of the reservation group in continuing training, I asked in the Colville training group whether they would allow these people to join their group, in order to continue their training. I thought that this would be welcomed and easy to bring about. But to my surprise, the Colville group was not able to come to a clear decision, and, after a long and fruitless discussion, I suggested doing a constellation about it.
Without going into too much detail: at the end, what surfaced is best described with one participant’s explanation: “It is not about whether we let them come into our group; it is that we must beg them to come, because we need them. Otherwise, we are simply not complete.”
And so it happened, and we witnessed some of the most amazing constellations together. And I was, in many hidden ways, continuously taught by everything that happened; by the constellations; by the sharing in the circle and by the songs and ceremony that came with the first-nation participants.
Another precious gift which I got through contact with another culture’s way of being, came from Francesca Mason Boring – a participant in this first training group, and today a very honored and sought-after constellations facilitator, colleague and friend. I had learned through Bert Hellinger that the mother holds this special place in a system in which you eventually must honor, if not love, her. And each mother that I knew, who was not sure whether she had actually earned this place, felt guilty to the core.
Now I have learned that, in Shoshone culture, all women in the tribe are called ‘Mother’. When a baby is born, the mother is asked for several days whether she has heard the song of motherhood. If she says: “No, the song has not come to me,” then all the village women are asked: “Who has heard the song of motherhood?” And the woman who comes forward will be the one to raise the child.
When I first talked about this in a group in Germany, some of the women cried with relief. To this day, I regard this to be one of the most important things that I have ever learned.
Something else that I learned from this culture – so different from mine – and brought home with me, was that a workshop starts when everybody is present, and it ends when the first people need to leave. (Some of the participants had a six-hour round-trip each day). Since this experience, I give the start time and at the same time say that coming late is sometimes more important than hurrying. And in the evenings, we end when we run out of steam. The coffee breaks last half an hour by feeling, not by the clock and in no time at all, the group relaxes and everyone tunes into each other for timing.
And there was more that I learned and brought home with me:
Smudging with herbs, and opening and closing the group with prayer. I did this for many years, until one day I met a Hawaiian elder on Maui: Leslie Kuloloio (Uncle Les). He became a dear teacher and friend, and was holding several workshops about Hawaiian healing-art in my hometown of Freiburg. He is the kind of man who does not allow anything to stop him being authentic. The first time I met him at a herb class, he started the workshop by saying: “Let us pray.” and with that he told us a wild and funny story – a story he ended with “Amen.” The story was his prayer.
That was the time when my belief in how a prayer has to happen was forever ‘ruined’. Thank you, Uncle Les!
These days, I rarely use smudging or prayer – not because I do not like them, but rather, they have left me quite by themselves. I am still deeply grateful that they accompanied me for a long time, and now I hope their essence still comes along with me.
One thing I still hold on to is my drum – a small one, so it can travel with me. And I swear to god, from early on it started talking to me! Not with words, but rather with a gentle hum – a vibration that touches me on the inside and allows me to go somewhat into a trance. I can still function coherently, but I seem to be better able to grasp what is beyond a stated problem. I have also learned that it allows me and the group some time, if needed; it takes the mind away gently and quickly, and allows us to dive deeply into this constellation space and all its mysteries. I have brought it with me, of course, and will use it during my workshops here.
I would love now to take a bit more time to show how what we think of as a disadvantage, can become the very tool for a solution to reveal itself. I regularly work in Italy. I lived there for three years; I speak Italian well enough to hold the workshops in this language. And more importantly: I do love the Italian people; I feel at home there. Loving the people with whom you work has proved to be very important in my work. I cannot be authentic in helping a person, if I do not feel love for them. In the rare instances when I have not been able to find love in my heart for someone in a group, I have not done good work for them. In the end, what heals simply boils down to love.
I can feel close to Italians, which also means that I feel very comfortable around them. This helps in tuning into myself, away from thought-processes. And it is often in this space that I find unusual solutions.
In one group of trainees – towards the end of our last session – time was running out fast. There were far too many people still hoping to get some work done for their issue. Choosing whom to take didn’t feel like an option; so I sat in silence for a bit, and the idea about what to do came quite by surprise. It was actually very simple: many still wanted to work, so why not ask all of them to stand up and go about it at the same time?
I gave one, and only one, ‘rule’: do it in silence and move. When you find yourself feeling stuck: move. Do your work, use whomever you find that seems to fit the person with whom you need to solve something, and then do it, but without talking. And the few of you who have no issue, allow yourself to be surprised; perhaps an issue might appear. If not, then offer yourself as a representative for the others.
The next half-hour made many small and big stories visible:
• Two people slowly coming closer to each other
• Two people crying together, then laughing
• Someone bowing down to another person
• Someone lying on the floor with a person at their side
At some point, when all the movements had faded away, I asked everyone to come together in the circle and share. And everyone had found what they were looking for; nothing was left open or undone.
The big learning I got from that was: when we are ready to heal, we know how to move and what to do. Constellation-wise: we will find in each other exactly the person we need to see, and exactly the action we need to experience. It is we who make meaning from our experience; it is we who take the step.
The following is an example of how sometimes we can be inspired by chance happenings.
At a congress in Germany, I once overheard two people talking at breakfast about a workshop in which a sentence was constellated word-by-word with representatives. They left before I could ask more about it. But those words came back to me in my next group, and I started to experiment with it. It worked wonders when used to change a belief.
Years later, I learned it was actually a format created by a very creative couple: Matthias Varga von Kibéd and his wife Insa Sparrer. They had indeed used this format to change beliefs and convictions.
In an advanced training group in Boulder, someone with a negative belief wanted to do some work. I must confess, I am not very good with repetitions. When I do something a few times, I get bored, and then it somehow changes the Gestalt, almost by itself. I do not remember the exact words of the person’s belief. It was something like: “I am only good if I work hard!” So we placed representatives for each word, plus the exclamation point at the end. And something drove me to ask them, instead of standing still, to move around the whole room simultaneously with vigour, and to repeatedly say to each other the word they were standing for.
With this, chaos started: people were quite happily yelling their words at each other with wild gestures, while marching, running or stomping about. After a while, the client and I heard some strange other words: words that we could not quite understand. So I took her into the middle of the room, where the new words were coming from and we heard someone, and then more and more people, adding the word: ‘fun’.
In no time at all, the ‘song’ became stronger, and all I remember now is: at the end, the client in the middle of the mess was happily singing and dancing along with the group. And the new sentence I remember hearing was something like: “I am only good if I work with fun!”
This Boulder group later gave this way of working the name: chaos constellations. And this name has withstood many attempts to rename it as something more acceptable. Chaos constellations it is, and perhaps will always be.
What I learned from this is: follow your way and flow with what is happening. If chaos happens, watch for a new star to be born. And if you want a new star to be born, dance with chaos.
I am coming to the end of my talk now.
I hope my ideas and examples can be of use in this beautiful work of ours.
My gratitude to all the incredible people I have met here in the USA, and the learning that has become possible through them.
I would like to end with a quote from Pablo Picasso that I have translated as best I could:
I do not search; I find.
Searching means coming from a place of old possibilities, and wanting to find the already known in the new. To find is totally new – new also in its movement. All paths are open, and what is there to be found is unknown. It is an adventure – a sacred adventure. The uncertainty of such an adventure can be taken on only by those who feel sheltered in the unsheltered; those who are guided into the uncertainty; those who, in the dark, surrender to an invisible star…
Picasso quote: source unknown