The Ghosts You Carry — How Family Constellation Works
On a daily basis I have atleast five people asking me: Tell me, how does the method of family constellation actually work? Are there spirits involved? Are there other worldly beings? Is there ghost business here? And I tell them: yes, there are. And these ghosts exist in your genes. You have carried these spirits right from the time you were born in your tissues, cells, genes and DNA. It’s just that you are primed to look at things about yourself which you have inherited from your parents, grandparents and your lineage that seem tangible and acceptable to you: for example, your diabetes, your cardiovascular preponderance to ailments, your autoimmune disorder, your skin colour, the morphology of your bones. These are things you yourself can verify, or put under the heading of hereditary traits and ailments. The doctor will tell you that you have weak and wobbly knees at thirty-eight because osteoporosis and bone disorders run in your family. Rheumatic pain history is taken while enquiring about your parents or if it’s common in the family. Even dental caries are seen as a result of disproportionate inheritance of two sets of teeth from either parent. These are acceptable variables of inheritance because society, medical science, rational scientific understanding supports theories of genetic material being passed from one generation to the next. Then, what would you say if I told you that you not only inherit your mother’s rheumatic pain but also her burden of being the only living child of her family after two of her brothers passed away in their mother’s womb. You not only inherit bad mal-aligned teeth from your grandfather but also an entire ancestry of people behind him who were addicted to chewing betel-nuts. You not only inherited an autoimmune disorder from your mother, but also her deep sense of rejection at birth by her parents for being a girl child. And these happen through ways that we may not have concrete understanding of. But the fact is, we inherit way beyond what we think our bodies can feel and our eyes can see.
Until a decade back, we did not know of the field of epigenetics — how our inner and outer environment leads to activation of certain genes. For example, one of the twins after having faced separation from its parents at birth can have severe digestive issues (and later colon cancer), while the other has a perfectly functioning stomach. Until a decade back we thought of memory as an individual asset — for example, my memory is different from my father’s or my memory is limited to what I have experienced from birth to death. Nothing more than that. Our understanding of knowledge and the idea of ‘knowing’ was restricted to ‘what we acquire through learning in this lifetime.’ Not something that is downloaded and exists outside our bodies. How can knowledge exist outside our bodies? How can inanimate objects have knowledge, memory and experience? The truth is, memory and knowledge exist both inside and outside of us. We carry them in our genes as well as around us — like we carry experience, time, we carry daylight and we carry the darkness of the night.
It is this extremely expansive idea of memory, time and knowledge that the process of family constellation explores. When we place real people as representatives of the family members in ‘the field’ and allow them to move around, express and get in touch with the information that is ‘energetically’ available to them, they begin to bring in stories and experiences of our ancestors and our parents without we giving them any oral or written information about how our parents behave or what trauma our siblings went through or how our grandparents died. What exactly are they doing? How exactly is it happening? These validate the understanding that we are not only a byproduct of our own experiences or individual memories. Our experiences go beyond our personal participation. And similarly our inheritance goes beyond the physicality of our bodies and genes. It is present as an energy field that we carry with us. This field of collective consciousness is holographic in nature and can be brought into light by unified focus. It can be recreated again and again and again anywhere in this universe using whatever object — animate or inanimate to bring family experiences into the light and eventually resolve them.
In order to understand the process of resolution, you will ofcourse have to go through the experience of participating in a family constellation, but here I will allow myself to go back to the first point — how does it even work! It works not because of some other worldly creatures being called into a seance, but because of what you carry with yourself within and around you. This field that you carry with you takes shape and weaves stories that you see come alive in a constellation — whether a facilitator uses real people as representatives or objects like crystal, puppets or even pillows as alternatives. The story will be told and it is re-telling of a forgotten story (literally stored in our genes) that brings the necessary healing into the picture. Such stories become more important if they are stories of trauma, if they are stories of abuse, if they are stories of neglect and rejection, of mass massacre or of heavy wars. For we carry them wherever we go. Like we carry time, we carry daylight, we carry the darkness of the night. Family Constellation simply shows us the largeness of what we carry and brings the overwhelming magnitude of that to rest.
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