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Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children's genes New finding is first example in humans of the theory of epigenetic inheritance: the idea that environmental factors can affect the genes of your children

Hi there!
I'm going to facilitate a Systemic Constellation Workshop on Sunday 23rd of June, in St Kilda East, Melbourne.
There are still few places left - email me ASAP on [email protected] if you'd like to attend.

Love can stop your Fear…Fear can stop your Loving…
Posted on November 13, 2012

At our last Systemic Constellation workshop on 4th of November participants had an opportunity to have a direct experience of a Mind-Spirit Constellation. It was done in small groups of three; one person was a Client, another one was a representative of a Parent for the Client, and the third person was representing the Client’s World. Instruction was (to the Client and the Parent) to stay in an eye-contact, motionless, and in complete silence. The representative for the World was following free movements as directed by body sensations. It was set for 7 minutes.

Dali: Meditation for the Harp

Mind-Spirit Constellations were invented by Bert Hellinger in last decade as a result of his new developing in Family Constellations method. The healing power of Mind-Spirit Constellation is enormous however it doesn’t look so dramatic like some traditional constellations – in contrary, it might look like very little happens; there are less representatives and often the client represents him/herself. That is because transformational movements go mainly and directly to the client’s internal dimension of Mind-Spirit.

Going back to our constellation: facing the representative for Parent (Client was instructed to choose in mind who of the parents will be represented), Client could experience a flood of feelings. Stillness, silence and eye contact served as keys to the deepest layers of Client – Parent relationship. In that connection a lot happened ; some habitual masks were dropped off to unfold a level of truth in relationship as reachable for the client in this moment. And for those Clients who were able to open up fully to this uneasy experience – some new insights emerged.

Facilitating that constellation I observed many subtle transformational movements in Clients; all flows of feelings and internal images in the field between Client and Parent were waving from two major emotional rivers – river of Fear and river of Love. And it could be surprising how much fear could be experienced in that relationship, also from Parent side.

There are only two major feelings – Love and Fear – from which stem all other feelings. Whatever happens in any personal relationship – is affected by Fear or Love directions.

Like in the title of this post (taken from a beautiful song by Morcheeba) - Love can stop your Fear…Fear can stop your Loving… It brings to my mind a lot of reflections of a wider nature – if we could make more space to Love, Fear would be simply limited to basic instinctive regulations instead of spreading to politics, religions, social encounters…Am I a dreamer? Sounds too simple? Please think again.

Hate? Stems from fear; Anger? from fear; Grumpy? from fear; Curious? from love; Motivated? from love; Authentic? from love; Secure? from love. And so on.

Going through the details of this concept of Love-Fear would exceed the blog post size but for those interested I’d recommend – for example – Gerald Jampolsky’s books. Your comments are welcome!

If you’d like to experience how it’d be to go into a Mind-Spirit dimension, simply sit in a quiet place to be not distracted by any outside noises. Sit comfortable (with your spine gently erected but without a chair support) or stand with your feet grounded firmly and bare. Close your eyes and keep them closed all the time during your Mind-Spirit meditation. Start from feeling your body and your breathing. Notice your body sensations without judgement. Now, in your mind’s eye – see one of your parents. You might choose if the parent image would be from your childhood or from your adulthood. Simply look at your parent. Notice what feelings come and go, notice what you see in your parent, and what is coming from your parent.

Hania Gorski

And another Dali masterpiece - Galatea...

I love SAlvador Dali art of bridging intellect to imagination...(that picture is so full of meanings - it'd be worth to see it in a bigger size). Hania

How to translate personal experiences?
Posted on August 22, 2012

How to translate personal experiences? Many philosophers and poets were following that question in history… That question also comes to my mind when I try to describe the method of the Systemic/Family Constellation – to people who never experienced it.

Words are beautiful tools (could we even imagine our existence without verbal communication?) but if they dominate our thinking and our expressions to the world, we lose something important; something existing beyond words but still so meaningful.

Salvador Dali art is an example of attempt to cross a barrier between a linear (thinking, intellectual) and non-linear (imagination, figurative) mind ways of processing and communicating.

Dali: Passion; gilded and excessive

Love, passion, dream – we share a broad understanding of these complex internal states of our psyche – but still they might carry very different meanings for different people. What if I’d try to talk to someone about what happened in my picturesque, surrealistic dream? That’s the basic difficulty in talking about internal experiences. I can talk about my experience of love but my verbal description of that experience would never reflect a full content of what I actually experience.

Phenomenology as a way of exploring the structure of subjective experience and consciousness is a necessary method of exploration of internal experience. If science (or our personal reasoning) ignores internal experiences – science (nad reasoning) remains in denial of reality: a dream is a real fact as it happened to an individual in one’s internal experience.

Collusive, historical but still ruling science – the Positivistic formula (commonly presented as necessity of repetition of specific reactions to give them a go in the science) reduces a vast of humanology. We are unique as humans, each of us; we are able to share part of what we experience but not everything, as an internal experience gives always a unique outcome to an individual. The view of a mountain you look at – is unique; and difficult to translate to words, especially if you feel amusement of that view in your heart.

So called “evidence based” approaches in human sciences (like in psychology and sociology) are promoted not because they really work in solving problems!!! They are just extractable pieces of personal experience, “minced” to fit to statistical correctness. “Evidence based” means nothing but “statistically measured” – which is applicable to some isolated segments of human psyche (and it could be sometimes useful to search these segments; but it’s not enough to complete the description of human’s experience).

Salvador Dali – Galatea

I welcome foreruners of more holistic approaches in science like recent findings in psycho-neuroscience; there is evidence of physical development of the operational (decision center) part of the adult brain after regular mindfulness meditation – thanks of advanced technology of registering brain functioning. Recently I read about some statistics confirming that praying helps in healing. Well, all that was known for thousand years in humans’ experiences but was rejected by positivistically oriented science. Conclusion? Seems obvious: if science rejects something from human experience, probably that is because science doesn’t know yet how to measure it.

What picture comes to your mind when I say: Your Mother?…

Hania Gorski

Invisible loyalties in family system
Posted on July 12, 2012

What if some invisible, unconscious loyalties linked to ancestors would contribute to our problems in everyday life? What if we couldn’t resolve some problems without connecting them to transgenerational issues? What if our lack of pursuing these issues will cause next generations carrying it on and on?

Would it be worth to explore what is unconscious yet seriously affecting our life?

We, modern people, still prefer to follow XVIII century reductionism views which limit our ways of cognition to physical and repetitive experiments as an “objective” source of knowledge.

It is like we’d say that all humans are exactly the same, like clones. No one sane would say that – yet we try to “verify” observations of psyche by statistical measures, based on isolated factors and interpreted with distortion of reduced empirical lenses.

Physicists agreed long ago that everything exists as a specific form of energy (however linking the word energy to our psyche is still a kind of a social taboo in the modern world). So, if we acknowledge that everything is a form of energy, our thoughts and emotions would be a form of energy which brings further implications.

The newest neuroscience findings prove that our thoughts and beliefs can change not only chemistry of our brain but also can make permanent changes to our brain (google neuroplasticity).

What happens to the energy of our thoughts, emotions or – simply said – our inner experiences? Following energy laws – that energy goes somewhere to be transformed to other forms of energy.

Thoughts and feelings of your great-grandmother were influencing genes of your grandmother when she was a fetus in the great-grandmother womb. That’s no longer a fantasy but a scientific fact (to those interested there is a link: Ghostgenes).

Family Constellation as a phenomenological method searches these generational chains and their influence on our life by setting representation for family members and sometimes also for features important for finding solution; the person suffering cancer for example, could set an inquiry about the illness. Depending on presentation the facilitator could set representation of the client and some family members, and of the illness itself.

I was participating in a constellation set by Bert Hellinger; the client was a woman in her 30ties, ovaries cancer survivor however the remission was only a year long. Bert set up a representative for her and for the cancer. There were no words, no interview, just simple settings of two representatives. Representatives movements were very slow, almost invisible but they happened; these movements (in this particular situation)showed a dynamic of a positive connection of the client to her illness, and the illness was serving bringing her closer to her mother; when that primary connection (mother – daughter) was strengthened, the client’s representative moved slightly to the right and looked beyond. That was a perspective for health.Flame

That example shows many things: I’d like to emphasize two features. First – that was a particular constellation, the Spirit – Mind (Movements) Constellation; a method developed by Bert Hellinger after traditional form of a family constellation. That development in Systemic Family Constellation consists of a minimum of a facilitator intervention and a minimum of story/words with a simple inquiry; there is a minimum use of sentences, and a solution unfolds by very subtle movements. Movements are subtle, almost invisible yet they have powerful implications in a long term perspective. Experience, focus and patience of the facilitator is required. Personally, I prefer that kind of constellation if applicable.

The second feature from this example: there is a relationship between a person and an illness; it could be a part of more complex relationship dynamic in a family system. Family system dynamics and entanglements are going through invisible loyalties in family system, linked to Love, Guilt, Rejection, Denial, Secret, Abuse etc. Loyalty of love might cause such negative consequences like having unhappy life (in a child unconscious loyal statement to a parent: “I don’t deserve to have a better life than you”) or to have an ill health, or going to death. Bert Hellinger, and pioneers before him like S.Freud, C.G. Jung, V.Satir, J.Moreno and others, discovered these hidden dynamics under the surface of our consciousness.

Not always a positive solution is available and not always is seen during a constellation; if family system entanglements are complex, usually a first constellation would show a specific angle of issue, and that first constellation would initiate a process of unfolding other themes from family history; it is also possible that the person setting inquiry could not accept the solution or what is unfolded; these problems are big topics themselves. Off course, the fact that a constellation could not show a “naked” solution – creates avenues for skeptics who wouldn’t agree to keep open minds to find out what actually is going on. And the Systemic Constellation Method is not a clairvoyant method but a method of showing hidden dynamics in family system affecting our life (We don’t deny electromagnetic fields existence even if we don’t see them. They are “seen” by effects of their activity).

These hidden dynamics in a family system often look contradictory to our wishful thinking like “family is the safest place”, “home sweet home”, and contradictory to that wishful thoughts about love bonds between family members should be only positive. Well, that’s not the true about human nature and the nature of relationships entanglements. Ancient Greeks exposed some of these shadows of human nature and family system entanglements and hidden loyalties in myths and ancient tragedies.

Did you ever wonder why Oedipus or Antigone fates within family system were so heavy? Why Hamlet couldn’t find a positive way out of his fate entangled in the loyalty to his father, the fate which brought him to suicidal ideations? And from tradition of European storytellers – why Snow White was going to die in the forest? Why Red Hood couldn’t see a danger in her encounter to the Wolf?

These are not fairy tales for naughty children; there are deep insights about what is hidden to our consciousness. As many of my friends and clients know – I love archetypal wisdom of myths and ancient stories. But that’s another story…

Hania Gorski

Our personal life stories are not only stories; they are a lot more…to read my newest post, please go to http://constellationseries.wordpress.com/

constellationseries Family Constellations Workshop Series