One of the most important models of healing that Lydi and I work with and reference frequently in terms of the sacred medicines is Constellations therapy. Constellations are so fundamental to how she and I think about families and the ancestry that we have to include a discussion of this material here in order to provide a well-rounded model for how we work with the sacred medicines. Though Constellations therapy can be hard to understand and appreciate without the sacred medicines, the language and concepts presented in the Constellations model can provide guideposts and landmarks when you’re in the middle of a trip using the sacred medicines, especially psilocybin.
Bert Hellinger was a Catholic priest who was sent to different countries where he had to help people solve complex problems within families and communities. He often didn’t know the culture or the language of the places he was sent to, so he developed a system for resolving conflicts within families that went beyond just talk therapy. In this system known as Constellations therapy, Hellinger invoked the power of something he referred to as The Knowing Field.
The Knowing Field
The Knowing Field in Constellations therapy is just a large space, indoors or outdoors, that’s used by a group of people to hold the energy of unspoken emotional or historical dynamics from within a family or a group of people. The Knowing Field is a bit like a stage where the unspoken drama and untold traumas of a family system or group of people can unfold.
Through the use of the Knowing Field as a stage where clients can watch their own family drama unfold, Constellations therapy gains access to hidden information and emotions that need to be released in order to resolve and overcome certain toxic patterns that are causing pain within a system. The ideal is for a Constellations therapy practitioner to organize a group of people who are strangers to the client. These strangers can then act as representatives for various members of the family. Representatives intuit the feelings and intentions of the family member they represent in the Knowing Field. The client themselves sits to the side in the audience to watch the Constellation unfold as the therapist interprets what’s going on and directs the family dynamic toward resolution.
Watch a video of Bert Hellinger doing Constellations therapy here.
Constellations are sometimes controversial in terms of how resolution is directed by a therapist, but when working with the sacred medicines, you are not under the guidance of a human therapist. You’re under the guidance and tutelage of the sacred medicines themselves to manage resolution for a family trauma. So there’s no need to have to seek out a human, flesh-and-blood therapist and there’s no need to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a live session with actual, in-person representatives (unless you really want to because the live sessions are sometimes really powerful too). Rather, the goal of this article is to give readers the basic ideas around Constellations therapy so that when you’re doing work with the sacred medicines, the medicines themselves can speak using the concepts and vocabulary that we offer here.
Essentially, a concept that seems to make no sense to a person or that is mostly just troubling and not that easy to understand can “fill up with air” during a sacred medicines trip and change from a two-dimensional, wrinkled-up, frumpled-up, nonsensical idea into something more like a used car inflatable man that has not only 3 dimensions, but also an animated personality. Ideas that are nonsensical in normal conscious mentality can become points of revelation on a sacred medicines trip.
We always recommend curiosity as a good mood to cultivate toward anything that you encounter in the world of sacred medicines. In the developed world, conquest is usually favored over curiosity as an approach to life. But curiosity, as a general approach, yields a very different outcome than conquest. If we think about the major conquistadors and leaders of the world who have sought to subdue and overcome other cultures and other nations of the world and imagine how different the outcome of their explorations would have been had they approached other cultures with curiosity rather than with the desire to produce submission, it’s easy to see the difference between curiosity and conquest. Much of the anxiety that people feel about taking the sacred medicines comes from this orientation that we have in the developed world to be conquistadors rather than explorers who are curious and interested. In the world of the sacred medicines, we aren’t in charge of the experience and we don’t have the same level of control over outcomes as what we have in our normal waking lives. We have to trust in something that’s bigger than us. But while we can’t go into a sacred medicine trip as conquistadors and expect to have good outcomes, we can go in with curiosity and trust. While conquest, as a general rule, produces conflict and war, curiosity rarely disappoints in the realm of the sacred medicines.
People who feel drawn to Constellations therapy tend to be sensing family or ancestral trauma and these people are hoping to discover an expanded and enlightened version of their own personal narrative. Unfortunately, though Bert Hellinger was incredibly gifted at fleshing out the details of familial narrative using The Knowing Field, most Constellations therapists lack the same level of giftedness. Those who wish to work with Constellations therapy, but avoid the problem of finding a gifted therapist should consider working with Constellations using psilocybin mushrooms as an inspired alternative.
Constellations Therapy: The Three Orders of Love
Bert Hellinger had some basic tenets that he set forth in regard to love within families. These tenets include:
- Inclusion: Everyone in the family unit has a right to belong, no matter who they are or what they’ve done. A healthy family acknowledges members who have passed including babies who died during pregnancy or shortly after birth. People who have been cut out of the family and who are categorically exiled will eventually find inclusion through future generations who act out the exile’s story.
Example: Whatever we try to ignore or cast out of the family system, violates the idea that we are always connected to our family. In the United States right now, about 25% of all children are in exile from their parents. Often, in situations involving exile, one of the grandchildren or great-grandchildren will begin to embody the parent or grandparent who is in exile. In other words, exile can delay dealing with the problems that led at some point to disconnection and exile, but if the issues are not addressed within a family now, they have to be addressed later on in the life-cycle of the family.
In some families, there are people who commit murder or who have been dubbed “unsafe”. These people might not be invited over to the house to hang out with the kids (serial killers, for example), but it’s important for these people to still be a part of the family narrative to keep the family healthy and to avoid having kids act out the energy of the forgotten exile. Serial killers, in fact, were often victims themselves of a certain set of traumas. But the point here is that when we exile a person and exclude that person from the family narrative, we’re setting up a situation in which that person’s story will play out in future generations.
- Big and Small: There is a natural order in family systems that’s based on who arrived to planet earth first. Parents came before their children so they are “big”. And each child holds a specific place in the family in order of their birth (from “bigger” to “smaller”).
Example: In our family, Lydian is the second child. Her step-sister, Kylie came first. Kylie is older than Lydian by 5 years so, in Constellations therapy, Kylie is “big” to Lydian and Lydian is “small” to Kylie.
If our family tries to exclude Kylie by not talking about her or by pretending that she doesn’t exist (because she is a step-sister, for example, who experiences herself as belonging to a different family other than ours), Lydian ends up being forced to be like the “big one” (the oldest daughter) when in fact, she is smaller than the energetic imprint for “oldest daughter” in the Knowing Field of our family. There is a place for Kylie in our family because we acknowledge that she exists and we talk about her as a member of our family even though she isn’t present with us right now.
The problem of “big” and “small” can create a lot of problems for people including especially different forms of mental illness. In the United States, it’s common for families to have exiles, sometimes several of them who are still living, but who are excluded from the family. Other members of the family who are not in exile will try to occupy the vacuous spaces left behind by exiles who are not acknowledged members of the family.
Using Lydian as an example again…John and I had a stillborn baby about a year after she was born. So Lydian is “big” to this baby. For a long time, we tried to not talk about this baby. Indeed, we didn’t name the baby per the counsel of our parents when he was born. His gravestone says only “Baby Shipp”. Though Baby Shipp died, he left an energetic imprint in our family that exists whether he is presently occupying that space in the flesh or not. Talking about Baby Shipp as a person who was a part of our family helps this baby occupy his given space within our family. This, in turn, impacts Lydian psychologically and also all future generations.
Finally, it is vital for parents to acknowledge that they are “big” to their children and allow their own parents (their child’s grandparents) to be “big” to them. Currently, in the modern world, it is exceptionally common for a young couple to get married and then to suddenly be cast into the role of “big” for their own parents. This is akin to turning away from life toward death or turning away from the future to the past. As a child, if I look backward at my parents and try to be parental toward them, I’ll inevitably experience anxiety, depression, and other negative mood states (possibly even psychosis if the situation is bad enough) because I’ll be “too small” to fill the energetic space that should have been occupied by my grandparents (my parent’s parents). I shouldn’t parent my parents even if my parents seem to be requiring that to me. There’s really no way to end up with a positive outcome if I parent my parents, after all. To solve the problem, I have to let my parents be “big” and look to my own future, to my own children, or to my own projects. I don’t have to take my parent’s advice or do what they tell me to do. I do, however, have to respect their choices though for their own lives, even if their choices are unhealthy. I can only provide guidance and support for the people in our family who are younger and “smaller” than me.
Giving advice to people who are “bigger” than us puts us in a situation where our advice is not be correct or beneficial. If we advise our parents, we create a situation where it’s likely that we’ll be wrong and our parents will prove us wrong or where our parents don’t take our advice after it’s given (because we are small to them). We are acting out of our place when we advise our parents.
- Balance: Family systems are exquisitely sensitive to the balance of giving and receiving. The balance between giving and receiving looks different though depending on the “bigness” or “smallness” of the two people in the relationship.
Example: In marriage relationships, spouses are often in competition with each other to give the least in the relationship. This causes a negative spiral in the relationship that can be remedied, at least in part, by re-orienting the balance toward competing to see who can give the other person the most rather than the least.
In parent-child relationships, resources should ideally be shared in a way that children are supported. But parents are “big” and children are “small”. One of the “big” aspects of being a parent has to do with having better, richer resources than children. Children may have more money than their parents depending on the economy during the productive lifestage of an adult child, but parents should generally be better connected socially than their children and they should also have a solid sense of how to survive by the time a child reaches adulthood. In the modern world, money is all that matters in terms of resources. Other types of resources aren’t generally recognized. But parents shouldn’t take from their children except under certain extenuating circumstances even if their children have more money than them. And adult children shouldn’t give resources / money to parents that were meant for their own children in an effort to be “big”. Sending money backward toward death and the past can create a serious lack of resources for future generations.
Constellations Therapy and the Sacred Medicines
There are very few rules in Constellations therapy, which makes it seem like a deceptively simple type of treatment for family dysfunction. It is NOT simple though. Bert Hellinger looked for unspoken or sometimes legal contracts between family members (marriage, adoption, divorce, etc. are all legal contracts) that create blocks in the Knowing Field. He looked for ancestral patterns involving exiles, issues related to “big” and “small”, and problems arising from a lack of balance in terms of the family’s resources. He would often suggest highly controversial solutions to problems. His work was sometimes shocking, but he got good results so he had a lot of followers who tried to emulate what he was doing.
When Lydi and I studied Constellations therapy originally many years ago, we also tried to emulate Bert Hellinger and memorize his methods. It didn’t work. We never felt sure-footed in regard to this type of therapy using memorization and a copy-cat mentality because every family story is unique. You can’t memorize the tenets of Constellations therapy and apply those tenets using a cookie-cutter approach. The key to using Constellations therapy effectively has to do with intuiting and feeling each family member and also the family as a whole.
Shortly after we got our Constellations therapy certification, Lydi and I both sought out several Constellations therapists to help us sort out some toxic patterns in our own family. The yield on that endeavor was disappointing. The Constellation therapist who did in-person work backed-out at the last minute and the Constellations therapists who worked with us online used computer programs and little wooden figurines, which was fine…but they expected for Lydi and I to intuit the material for each of our family members. Essentially, we were supposed to sit in the audience, and also stand in for each family member and/or ancestor, in turn. This is an incredibly tall order and most people who work with Constellations therapy are in some kind of crisis. So intuiting the feelings of the various family members involved in a conflict isn’t generally easy to do, especially if you’re a part of the conflict. The sessions each had a time limit, of course, so the second the session started, we were racing with the clock to try to basically tell ourselves our own story.
I suppose this was a good way for those therapists to get paid, but it didn’t really do Lydi and I any good. Some of the therapists got upset with Lydi or I when we stalled during our sessions, unable to produce an intuitive response to what Aunt Eloise was feeling in response to Grandma when their mother (my great grandmother, Lydi’s great great grandmother) died. All of the Constellations therapists that we worked with were very time-oriented people who seemed to be disenchanted with their work and excited to get off the call with us. At that time, I put Constellations therapy to the side and resolved that perhaps it just didn’t make sense to me.
But all of those toxic family dynamics got even more toxic when Lydian’s husband returned to Myanmar from Mexico during Lydi’s 8th month of pregnancy. The trauma-load of our family system hit critical mass at that point. It was at this time, when the newborn baby was 3 months old, that Lydi and I decided to work intensively with psilocybin mushrooms to try to get back to a baseline of okay-ness.
Even in the early part of our work with the mushrooms, Hellinger’s tenets of Constellations therapy came up. These tenets that had been 2-dimensional turned into 3-dimensional, animated concepts using psilocybin. The tenets were actually useful! The mushrooms elaborated on these tenets and explained them to us. But they didn’t explain the tenets in words, per se. They explained them through the felt sense. In other words, when we took the mushrooms and walked out into our forest, we were in The Knowing Field. I could be my Aunt Eloise and feel Aunt Eloise deeply and then switch to Grandma and feel her deeply too. And I could understand Aunt Eloise’s motives in terms of her behavior toward Grandma and toward my own mother. And yet, I could also then switch to feel how I was impacted by the dynamic among all of these women. And because I’d studied Constellations therapy, I had this vocabulary in my left-brain that the mushrooms could use to help the creative, right hemisphere of my brain understand the feelings that I felt and that all of these other women felt.
Passing It Through
Much of the work that Lydi and I do with psilocybin involves something that we refer to as “passing it through”. When we talk about “passing it through”, we’re talking about “it” as an emotion, a dynamic, or sometimes even a memory, or the name and identity of an ancestor. We pass this data through our bodies and the right hemisphere of the brain to the left, logical hemisphere of the brain where such things can be put into words.
To “pass something through” us is to receive some bit of data from the body (the data might belong to our body and be a part of our own story / trauma, or it might be data that comes in from other sources) and essentially put this data into words using the left hemisphere of the brain. Once a piece of data has been given words, it has been “passed through us” such that we no longer carry it as a burden in our bodies.
The left hemisphere of the brain exists in many ways to serve the needs of the body and all of the things that the body can do. Our bodies, after all, sense all kinds of things and can receive all kinds of data from the world and the people in it. When I try to avoid or deny what the body feels, whether it’s a feeling that belongs to me or a feeling that belongs to someone else, I have to dissociate from the landscape of my corporeal form in order to survive this condition. Incoming data builds up in the landscape of the body if I don’t acknowledge it and allow it to “pass through” to my left, logical brain. When I’m not traumatized myself and simply trying to pass my own trauma through that’s built up in the body over the course of time, I might dissociate into the future rather than being pulled into a past-tense, PTSD “flashback”. Futuristic dissociations for me are usually about planning projects or building things. Whenever I find myself planning a big project when I’m in a relaxed alpha brainwave state at the end of the day, I know that something is popping into my unconsciousness, wanting my attention. I can do futuristic planning during the day when I’m in a beta brainwave state, but when I’m relaxed and trying to get ready for bed, futuristic planning is anxiety provoking.
On a mushroom trip or on an Ayahuasca trip, it can be very uncomfortable to pass information through the body into the left hemisphere of the brain for verbal labeling and description, but the discomfort doesn’t last and once the data is “passed through”, you feel lighter and better in a permanent way. Once trauma from the body (read: from the unconscious mind) has passed into the left hemisphere of the brain…and once that trauma has received a label, it tends to pass permanently. Like a young child that has a limited vocabulary, the body feels all kinds of emotions that it serves up to the left hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere of the brain can either ignore the emotions and deny them or dissociate from them or it can acknowledge them and, like a good parent, give words of validation and acknowledgement to the experience.
Ancestral Trauma: Passing It Through
Often, but not always, our traumas are also ancestral traumas. We embody the traumatic stories of the ancestors that were never “passed through” but that rather got stuck in the body of the family. Let me explain.
Throughout time, as the left-hemisphere of the brain became a dominant human feature, stories took shape as the basic unit of human understanding. Before that time, humans were a lot like animals. We could posture and grunt to communicate with each other, but with the development of the frontal lobe and the so-called left-brain, we began to be able to organize our experiences into stories. Some people have argued that the human species that survived, homo sapiens, ate psilocybin mushrooms and subsequently developed logic and a frontal lobe, giving them an advantage. Nonetheless, humans today organize experiences of ourselves, the world, our family, the past, the present, and the future, according to the beginning, middle, and end of stories. Facts do not compel us with the same force as a well-told story because, in order to store data, we have to care about the data emotionally. In other words, in order for us to store data in a retrievable form, we store it as something attached to an emotion that we feel in the body.
In some tribal societies in Central America, the nuclear family is represented as a corn seed…not a GMO corn seed, but as one of the original corn seeds which can be of any number of colors and design patterns. Each year, a piece of string is wound around the corn seed as a designated storyteller in the community recounts the story of the family for that year. Each year, more string is added and wound around the seed as the family’s story is retold. Once the string is wound around the seed, the seed looks a bit like an egg. The eggs of the families in a community are stored in a small bag that the storyteller carries with him at all times as something precious that exists to guide that community.
In Mexico and Central America, there is a long tradition in indigenous cultures of preserving the story of the family as a way to “pass trauma through” the community. When a story is too horrific or strange to be put into words, it is “traumatic” according to our definition of “trauma”. In Mexico and Central America, a storyteller might charged with putting a traumatic story into words, but in the modern, developed world, people often have no idea what their family story even is. The story gets trapped in the body or bodies of the family, in the collective unconscious of the living people who are alive as members of a forgotten lineage. If a person dies with a trauma that is never properly inserted into the overall narrative of the family with a beginning, middle, and an end, that trauma exists as a loop with no beginning and no end. This looping content is what future generations of the family tend to act out unconsciously as the story tries to be told through the lineage. Soul parts of a person can get caught in an eddy of this nature, repeating a trauma over and over again until living members of the family pick up on the story so that the story (and the soul part) can be released.
If, for example, you are raped as a young woman before you’re married, other women in your ancestry who are already dead may identify with you because you embody a looping story, something traumatic, that they also experienced as young unmarried women, but that they were never allowed to tell and integrate through community and family support. Once you are marked with a trauma like this, if you can’t pass it through, you may end up embodying ancestors whose stories are very different from yours. This can feel weird and if you don’t have words for the experience of embodying your ancestors, you may end up thinking that you have a mental illness of some kind. Though women tend to embody female ancestors, there are exceptions to this rule. Lydian has carried an ancestor who was a gay man who was exiled from his family and then executed publicly. This produced actual physical pain in her hips in addition to causing weird emotions. Through embodiment of the ancestors, we are afflicted with the stories of the past, but using the sacred medicines, we’re empowered to release these stories.
People vary in terms of their willingness to open up to ancestors when working with the sacred medicines, but if you understand that your trauma is the trauma of the ancestors and the idea that your story and your trauma is almost always going to have an ancestor attached to it, this can be a resource to you on your trips. The younger you are, the more ancestors who are invested in your story. There are, after all, a larger quantity of ancestors who survived through age 10 or age 20 than ancestors who survived through age 50. If you release your trauma, you release the ancestors who experienced the same or similar traumas. You heal the tree by healing yourself.
Indeed, in Constellations therapy with or without the sacred medicines, the telling of a story that has been looping in the family system releases the entire system from the grips of the traumatic loop. We tend to engage other members of the family in the traumatic ancestral loops that we embody from our lineage, so when we release traumatic loops for ourselves (and for the lineage at the same time), we also stop hooking other members of the family into our trauma-loops. This creates a fairly major change in the family system even if no one else in the family does work on themselves and their trauma.
One of the ideas that can be helpful in the work with the sacred medicines is the idea of beginnings, middles, and endings and stories. A lot of people are literally terrified by the idea that a trip may not provide any kind of toggling to beginnings, middles, and endings. This is usually phrased as a fear of losing one’s mind. Yet, in reality, the sacred medicines are always trying to help us rework a story to include all of the component parts (beginnings, middles, and endings) and put them in the proper order so as to retrieve and restore health to the mind. One trips, people sometimes feel (for a few minutes or maybe for an hour) like they don’t have a grip on the normal trajectory of a story that, in waking consciousness would start, crescendo, and then finish, but the energy of all of the sacred medicines is geared to re-assemble stories that have lost their sense and their component parts.
Understanding the Family Tree
The family tree is rooted by the babies and the children. The entire family tree must have good, strong roots (non-adult children) to hold the entire system / tree, which is why it doesn’t make sense to send resources like money up to the branches at the top of the tree when you could, instead, give your resources to the lower parts of the tree.
If you are a young, married adult with or without children, you are the trunk of your tree. Survival of the entire ancestry depends on the health of the roots and the trunk of the tree. If there’s a sickness in the ancestry of dead relatives or in the living relatives (or both), everyone involved in the healing of the lineage needs to orient toward sending resources toward the trunk and toward the roots of the tree. Grandparents should behave as parents to their adult-children so that adult-children can provide support effectively as parents to their own children.
Everyone on earth is here to heal something from the lineage. A lot of people try to aim their goals toward other pursuits, hoping to find happiness in the Money Realm or through “flanking” with friends and peers (as opposed to being a part of a multi-generational family), but we have all been marked to live out our story under the branches of our ancestors and the living relatives. An important corollary to this thought is the idea that your parents are responsible for their own story and the healing (or refusal to heal) that they’ve been charged to do in their lifetime. As the child of your parents, as the “smaller” one, you can honor and respect your parent’s path, but you cannot and should not squander your resources, emotional or otherwise, on your parents. You can acknowledge your parent’s choices and allow them to live out those choices with dignity, but if you have a sick family tree, aim your resources toward the trunk and the root of the tree.
This is harder than it looks. From infancy, children are hardwired to try to “repair” their parents. As young children, after all, our survival depends on our parent’s investment in us. We check in with parents often to make sure they’re “still with us” when we’re young and if our parents are facing backward toward death (toward their own parents) rather than focusing on us, we’ll do almost anything to get their attention and keep it. Later in our lives, as young adults, we begin to embody different ancestral stories that can be hard to navigate if we have no awareness of our family story. The modern, developed world doesn’t acknowledge that the ancestral influence exists so we try, as humans, to take responsibility and live out / act out ancestral material that doesn’t have to be a part of our current life. In other words, we start working to live out the dramas of the past that were never “passed through” by the ancestors. Our children, our babies, try desperately to ground their parents by requiring eye contact or by acting out, lacking focus, and requiring the parent’s attention. Even newborn infants can tell when their mommy “goes away” energetically and newborn babies will cry, choke, fuss, and do whatever is necessary to keep mommy’s attention. When parents “go away” energetically they are physically present, but preoccupied with something in the past. Frequently, the orientation is toward the grandparents and the sense that young adults feel that if they can get their own parents to on-board into life and orient toward the trunk and the root of the tree that everything in the family would be solved.
I’ve definitely walked the path where I oriented myself so that I faced my parents and looked away from Lydian, but I was lucky to always be working with things like my master’s in family psychology, Constellations therapy, and hypnotherapy. I didn’t get entirely lost to the loops in my lineage, but I also struggled tremendously to overcome the loops without the sacred medicines. Perhaps there will come a time in the future when humans will evolve to a point where they can use hypnosis and psychodrama to overcome trauma, but for now, the sacred medicines are the most important tool that we possess to be able to overcome trauma.
In my own childhood, my mother turned away from me and oriented herself toward her mother. I would arrive home from school every day to my mother yelling at her mother on the phone. I was stuck in a loop, irritated by my own mother’s behavior toward me. I talked constantly about her. Meanwhile, my mother was perpetually trying to get her mother (my grandmother) to pay attention to her in a very specific way. It never happened. She never got my grandmother’s attention and I never got my mother’s attention. My grandmother, after all, was perpetually looking at her own mother, my great-grandmother, who had died when my grandma was 18 years old.
When my grandma died after John and I got married, I thought for sure that my mother would then be able to finally pay attention to me. I thought that she’d finally be under less stress and we could all be a happy family. But no. Instead, I ended up getting placed in my grandmother’s energetic space in the Knowing Field. My mom tried over and over again to make me “big” and to put my grandmother’s responsibilities on me (I was charged with paying attention to my mother and giving her encouragement as though I were my mother’s mother), but whenever I would actually try to be parental toward my mom, she would crush me and make me “small” again. Not just smaller than her…but tiny. So I felt perpetually like I wasn’t good enough and like I would never be able to be good enough.
As an adult child, I shouldn’t be tiny to my parents but again and again, I’d been placed in my grandmother’s position in the Knowing Field of our family system where I would feel out of place and “not good enough” for reasons that I simply couldn’t define consciously. The feeling of “not good enough” was most obvious to me whenever I would try to start a business or do anything in the public sphere. Then, if I tried to give advice (my mother would set up conversations where I would be in an advice-giving position) my mother would crush me and make me tiny. This happened to me so often that my entire reality was based on this sense that I could, at any moment, be placed in a position of high-responsibility (where I’m the Big One) and then be deflated down to something the size of a small insect (the Small One). So I’d be too big and then I’d be too small, over and over again. I felt depressed. I felt anxious. I was sick. I had no idea why. In real life, I should experience myself as being about 6 inches to 1 foot shorter than my parents energetically in the Constellations sense of things (in real life, I’m physically taller than my mom but that doesn’t matter). I should, essentially, feel like I can lean on these people who have been on the planet for 20 years longer than me. I should feel energetically like I can lean into these people who are a bit bigger than me and they shouldn’t feel like they should be leaning on me because to them, I should feel smaller.
But what if your parents are not people that you can lean on?
Most of my life, I invested all kinds of time into trying to get my parents to be their proper size, to face toward life and the trunk and the root of the tree (me, John, Lydian, and Kylie), and in my family’s case, to stop stealing money and resources from John and me. Alas, there was nothing I could do about their behavior except create good boundaries and be aware and accept of the dynamics of my family. With awareness, I stopped being such good prey to these people who were naturally bigger than me. Once I accepted the family dynamic (using the sacred medicines – I couldn’t have accepted it otherwise), I could see the dynamic, be conscious of the beginning, the middle, and the end and what to expect once a particular script was initiated. That gave me a certain type of power to protect myself. I was no longer a reactive actor in the scripts contrived within the family system. I could make choices and play an active role in my own entrances and exits from said script.
The sacred medicines have been clear that for my family tree, at least…for John and me and Lydian and Naing Naing and my granddaughter, that we are a “reset” group. There are no guarantees in life, right? So we have to do our best to reset the family trajectory and the lineage and teach the younger generation of children these new ideals that have not been in practice in our family until now. My parents are not following my lead. But John and I can reset the trajectory of the family for the future. And we can accept the trajectory up to the current moment as a necessary arc in the story of our lineage. We’re lucky to be the ones with the sacred medicines who arrived at the tree, in the forest with the fence and the pleasant, quiet surroundings. Being the “reset” family is hard, but not as hard as being in a situation where bad things happen and there’s no way to process those things, make sense of them, and continue to feel a seed of hope. I feel lucky to be a part of the reset and not resentful toward the past about it. I got where I am now because of the sacrifices that have been made by the ones who came before me. Hopefully at least some of the ideals will carry over into the future for a few generations despite how the culture of the nations and the globe tries to contort ideals and methods within families. I can’t reset my parents. I can respect their life decisions though and allow them to make their own choices without interfering and without trying to get them to change their methods. In this sense “respect” and “honoring” are really about understanding how their story and their behaviors (however negative or toxic) led me to where I am now.
John and I no longer receive gifts of any kind from either set of parents because my parents always give gifts with strings attached. To get around this problem, John and I stopped receiving gifts from our parents more than a decade ago. That was one of the best decisions we ever made! Once the gift-giving was nixed, we were absolved of an array of unspoken contracts that obligated John and I to always be poor and to always be needy. At the time when we instituted the rule of “no gifts”, we didn’t know how this gesture worked within the family system. We just felt like it was the right thing to do because receiving gifts from our parents felt bad to us. In addition to nullifying spiritual contracts involving material along the lines of if I do this, you do that, we also stopped receiving negative psychic blasts at Christmas or on our birthdays when our parents had felt obligated to give us gifts. Our parents had used gifts throughout our lives to maintain power and connection with us versus trying to establish connection through love. But the gifts weren’t really gifts at all, but a cue for us to give them a piece of ourselves.
As parents of adult children who have done a lot of work on ourselves, John and I understand now that grandchildren are the biggest gift that an adult child can give to us. Adult children should generally be exempted from giving gifts to their parents in the first place because of their place at the root of the tree, but when there are grandchildren involved, this is doubly true. It is through the youngest generation that our lineage maintains its roots on earth and our privilege of being able to return to earth in future lifetimes. So it’s important to feed the root and the trunk of the tree and to realize, as young adults, that if you are at the root or at the trunk that you are in a privileged and important position within the lineage that deserves a certain level of support from the Older Ones.
When I was in college, I lived in a small apartment and one day on my Sunday phone call home, I asked my dad how much I cost? He had been complaining about the cost of my education and the cost of me and I wanted to own myself. What he said next shocked me. He said, “You could never afford yourself.”
So I immediately set out into the world to try to afford myself because I wanted to be able to own myself. (spoiler alert: I eventually succeeded).
My parents had created a relationship with me that was exquisitely sensitive to their sense of what they thought I owed them because they had given me life. Instead of viewing me as a precious gift, they viewed me as a financial burden. That’s on them and I have to leave them with that issue and respect their choice to live out the results of that experiment. I got to review that same material later when my son-in-law joined our family through Lydian. His mother literally sold him to more than one buyer as he was growing up. He was expected to work under incomprehensibly horrific conditions for about $100 USD per month, no days off, and send all of his money back to his family to support them. He was never supposed to marry or have a home or any kind of life of his own. His mother viewed him as an investment who was supposed to have a good return for her. This was incredibly toxic for Naing Naing and it was hard work for him to overcome this orientation toward his mother and his family. While his Core Self wanted Lydian and his daughter Maya, another part of him had been woven so deeply into the fabric of the family system that this part of him literally didn’t view itself as human or separate from his mother’s self-serving, synthetic story.
In their defense, the problem of resources and money can be really complicated in families and Myanmar, as a nation, produces more than its fair share of complications for families. My son-in-law, Naing Naing, was sold by his family to more than one person over the course of his life with them because the family was poor and starving. One of his older brothers was sold in the same way before him. His family-of-origin was so poor that he often starved when he was growing up. His mother literally felt like she owned him and she experienced Naing Naing and his brothers as something that could be bought and sold like a cow. On sacred medicine trips, depictions of this issue have been presented like Naing Naing and his brothers were thread woven to make up the flag of Myanmar…and his mother wore the flag as a longyi (a traditional skirt), sewing Naing Naing’s threads into a pocket of absolute captivity using heavy-duty shoestrings. But she and the family also lived day-to-day in a state of barely surviving, so clinging in relationships makes sense. She wove him into the toxic and militant orientation of Myanmar as a country and then doubled up to tie him down by putting him in a makeshift pocket. Sometimes life is rather cruel and money and resource distribution requires a more creative approach that makes it hard to follow Hellinger’s rules. But even in the case of Naing Naing’s mom, despite the problem of survival, selling her son, weaving him in, and sewing him down (so-to-speak) had far-reaching consequences that have been hard to undo.
Using Constellations with Sacred Medicines
Psilocybin is the best sacred medicine to use with Constellations, in our opinion. There are a number of ways to work with the sacred medicines and Constellations therapy, but the simplest way is simply to learn a bit about Constellations therapy and then be open to exploring that information on a trip if you’re asked to do so. You don’t have to agree with Constellations therapy or with anything that Hellinger said in his books, but if you have even a basic knowledge of family trees and Constellations therapy tenets, this can be enough to expand your “edge” during a trip.
“The Edge” is the outer limit of your current understanding of some situation or some topic. Everyone has an inner model of the universe that they can explain to someone else up to a certain point. Some people believe in reincarnation, other people do not. Some people believe in a god or gods, other people do not. Some people believe that you can cure cancer, other people do not. What you believe and the model that ties your various beliefs together (or the model that hypocritically administers a set of beliefs that contradict each other blatantly), is your “edge”.
As you read about Constellations therapy and other models of reality, ideas about sacred medicines, and concepts that become useful on your sacred medicines trips, you expand your “edge” or at the very least, you challenge your “edge”. The beliefs that you harbor about what’s possible and what’s impossible as humans are the outer limits of the container within which the mushrooms or the Ayahuasca or the other sacred medicines will work for you. Your “edge” is not going to be the same as any other person’s “edge”. But all of the sacred medicines push beyond the outer limit of that container, the edge, because what’s possible or impossible in the world is based on what we believe. For example, though most people don’t believe that you can cure cancer, I’ve watched people cure cancer many times. A person who doesn’t believe in a cure for cancer is unlikely to find a cure for cancer by accident. It’s only in situations involving desperation and a willingness to consider and to be open to new options and new beliefs that we open our minds to improbability. The sacred medicines help us be more open if we wish to be open to the possibilities. After all, improbable is not the same as impossible. If you were going to leave the reality of No Cancer Cures to explore and find cures for cancer, the best place to look would be in the known Realm of Improbable Things – a consensus “edge” space.
So Constellations therapy provides a model that other people can use when working directly with the sacred medicines on trips. Constellations are not always as useful in therapeutic settings unless you happen to be working with live, on-site, in person representatives and a very skilled and intuitive therapist. But the theories and ideas set forth by Hellinger push the edge of what most people believe. So if you’re trying to heal yourself or your family, these concepts can be useful.
As a general rule, Constellations therapy promotes acceptance and inclusion within family systems. Constellations therapy emphasizes the importance of “big” and “small” and being properly placed within the family tree. It respects the flow of love, respect, and honor for each person’s path without interfering with that path. Essentially, Constellations therapy generally espouses acceptance of what is versus a clinging to what we think should be.
Spiritual Contracts and Constellations Therapy
In Myanmar, one of the systems of healing that is used most often in small villages is the use of astrological contracts that alter the family system. This type of astrology is known as Mahebote and while the overall system of astrology is fairly simple in terms of calculations, it is used to alter the energy flow in order to cure physical disease, relationship issues, and mental illness.
Naing Naing’s brother, for example, changed his 4 year old son’s name because his son was not able to talk yet at age 4. The astrologer identified that there was a problem in the family system involving the ancestry and recommended that the child’s name be changed in order to throw up a sort of energetic smoke screen that would hopefully help the child recover from his affliction.
Essentially, this form of astrology and these spiritual contracts do sometimes work, but they also create additional problems down the road, sometimes in later generations. For example, because Naing Naing was sold to different businesses and families by his mother, he technically belongs to those other families as well as to his family-of-origin. When he was younger, in some ways, the creation of a buying-and-selling contract may have saved him from other dynamics in his family, but Naing Naing has also had to undo these contracts one-by-one.
Mahebote is just one type of system that involves the creation of spiritual contracts in order to produce some kind of desired effect. Constellations therapy is generally geared at undoing spiritual contracts that are causing problems in the family.
Summary
Constellations therapy is something worth studying on some level if you are working to try to overcome something that challenges you especially if this type of therapy pushes the outer limits of your “edge”. Lydi and I work with a lot of people who are trying to push their own thresholds to overcome something that seems impossible. If you’ve been presented with a problem that seems impossible to overcome, this is a calling to challenge your “edge”.
The sacred medicines generally push the limits of your “edge” which can be scary, but a little bit of fear is tolerable and a manifestation of interest. The sacred medicines won’t take you so far outside the limits of your edge that you can’t find your way back to consensus reality, but they will often push you out just a little bit beyond what the left, logical hemisphere of the brain can easily comprehend. The goal, at least with psilocybin, is always to put words to the experience while you’re on your trip or shortly after your trip. With that in mind, it’s good to remember that you’ll be pushed a little bit, but not so far that you’ll lose your mind.
Without some sort of container around concepts involving the ancestors and one’s lineage, the material that you might encounter using the sacred medicines can be confusing at times and even disillusioning. We are all connected to our ancestry. Without the ancestry, technology and all of the comforts, language, culture, and knowledge that we get to have as humans on this planet, would not exist. So, even people who feel completely disconnected and abandoned by their ancestry or their family still need to tune into their roots. If you’ve been abandoned and you’re trying to make sense of that, sometimes the reason for abandonment has to do with the need for a person to reconnect to an earlier point historically in the lineage in order to restore health to the current family.
Constellations provide an important model for us to work with the past in order to heal our future. The wisdom that you’ll receive through the sacred medicines will come primarily through the ancestry…your ancestry. So while Lydi and I might have a certain type of wisdom that we’ve managed to “pass through us” into conscious awareness, the wisdom that you get from a mushroom trip might be completely different. That’s okay. We all have a piece of the puzzle of our existence. We all work together, as a collective of humans, to push the edge of what’s known and what can be known and accomplished in the world, or to prevent progress toward a more inspired “edge”. Constellations and the sacred medicines help us remember that when we push our “edge” we push the “edge” for our family tree as well as for humanity.