Honoring Our Ancestors: A Family Constellations Ceremony for Samhaín

Samhain is a traditional Gaelic holiday that marks the end of harvest and heralds the growing dark season. This is a time when the veil between worlds thins and connection with the ancestral realm is most tangibly felt.

 

Hence, an apropos opportunity to honor and make peace with our familial roots in simple ceremony through the healing power of Family Constellations!

Illness (physical, emotional, social, spiritual) is rooted in the illusion of isolation, and also in the confusion regarding our relationship with others, especially our family of origin. Each of us is shaped by painful experiences of difficulty, loss and disconnection in relationship with family, intimate partners, and the larger culture and collective history, experiences that shape what we can see as possible in our present and future.

 

Yet this ancestral root is the source wherefrom we receive the Gift of Life itself. When we turn towards our roots with respect, gratitude and honor for the gifts as well as challenges our ancestors faced, we can find more space from the pain we have inherited, and can allow more love to flow from our ancestors to support us in our going forward in Life.

As we remember and recover our proper place within the larger field of Life, we naturally feel more at ease, connected to resource, and encouraged to thrive. Family Constellations is a powerful therapeutic modality to respectfully engage ‘the knowing field’ for the purpose of understanding and meaningfully engaging the invisible systems within which we are embedded.

 

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This 4-hour workshop will utilize simple yet profound practices to develop participants’ intuitive (body-based) sensing and knowing in order to develop more coherence, both within oneself, within the group as a whole, and within the larger field of which we are a part.

Together we will use intuitive practices to respectfully address our unseen relations with compassionate boundaries. Our process will depend on what arises in the room among participants needs and desires, and will incorporate gentle movement and meditation in solo, paired and group process

This Samhain gathering is a collective prayer to seek to restore and clarify frayed connections, to see and accept what is with a courageous heart, and to remember the profound resources and support that always surround us.

 

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First developed by Bert Hellinger, a German former Jesuit priest who lived 16 years among the Zulu people of South Africa. Family Constellations is a therapeutic approach that has grown over 30 years into an international movement.

Family Constellations is a method to recognize and respectfully unravel patterns that people cary as a result of historical or trans-generational trauma.

Practically, a person seeking to receive a constellation (a ‘seeker’) brings a question, desire or intention to the circle of practice. The seeker chooses other participants in the circle to represent members of their family, or other aspects of the presenting challenge, including a representative for themselves. The representatives are placed in spatial relationships with one another. Once placed, the client observes the movements of the representatives. The facilitator asks the representatives to attend to the impact of their movements on their feelings, thoughts and sensory awareness. Representatives share back their experience in the moment. Tensions are often revealed and clarified through the reports of representatives. The facilitator seeks resolution of revealed tensions through an emergent process of respectful inquiry in dialogue with seeker and representatives.

 

* Everyone in a family system has the right to belong. The family is a part of a soul that does not abide being fractured.
* There is a hierarchy, a natural order, in family systems that can support the flow of love in the system.
* Individuals in a family can become ‘entangled’ with a trauma generations past in a family system or in an excluded member of a family system.
* Victims and perpetrators at times share, at a deep soul level, the experience of their shared horror, and subsequent generations may incorporate one or both aspects of that experience.
* In relationships, there is a need for a balance of give and take. In couples, there is a need for equity and balance in the giving and taking. between parents and children, parents give, and children take.
* A group conscience exists in family systems and in societies. This does not usually demonstrate any empirical right or wrong; instead it condones or condemns what the group identifies as right or wrong.
* A family system will try to redress any inequity or exclusion by retaining a pattern that honors the family victims, perpetrator, and those that have been excluded within the family system.

(*Sourced from Francesca Mason-Boring, ‘Connecting to Our Ancestral Past’ (2012))

Family Constellations is about welcoming what has been exiled and forgotten with a spirit of fierce loving compassion.

Family Constellations is the practice of Seeing and Remembering.

 

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Investment: $20-30

RSVP required. Please fill out this form to reserve your place: https://forms.gle/8ce3jpF83vLGzV5N7

Venmo: @christopher-collins-149

 

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Christopher Collins, (MSW, CMA) brings to this work years of training and experience as a mental health counselor, Laban movement analyst and systemic and family constellator. Christopher has trained in Family Constellations since 2021 with Ron Young (healingwisdom.com), and has also sat with Barbara Morgan (cominghome.org.uk).

Christopher serves as the Director of the Hidden Temple, a project in community resourcing he initiated in 2023. In addition to his group offerings, Christopher also works one-on-one with individuals seeking more agency and vitality in their life.