Otto:
Claus Otto Schamer
Susan: Susan Lanier
Otto: Were
you trained by Bert Hellinger?
Susan: I’ve
witnessed hundreds of hours of Bert Hellinger facilitating family constellations
and Movements of the Soul. And been in supervision with him, and I’m
very grateful for that. But I trained at The New York Hellinger Institute
with Harold Honen. I have a particular orientation because of my connection
with the indigenous people and my deep respect for the ancestors and
for the process of invoking them.
The way Hellinger now works
feels shamanic to me. His way has evolved so much that he says very
little. And sometimes what he does say is so astute and to the point
it’s almost like the psychological equivalent of psychic surgery.
Looked at from a distance, it’s very disturbing. I saw John of
God in Brazil. He’s an indigenous faith healer who uses no anesthesia
but physically operates on tumors. His patients don’t experience
pain at all. So on an emotional level, people will look at what Bert
says and they don’t understand it. It looks terrible, but when
I’ve asked the people that he worked with afterward, most of them
are fine with it.
What’s going on here?
When someone with these gifts goes to work, their auric field expands.
The patient, in John’s case, physically enters this field. Within
the safety of that field, John’s field of faith, if you will,
the patient experiences a physical anesthesia that allows John to remove
the life-destroying force from the body. My experience of Bert is that
he does this kind of thing but through the emotional body instead of
the physical body. What he says is like a seed in the emotional body.
It ripens with the healing movement in time, when the client is ready
for it.
Otto: Does
Hellinger train to do that or did he have some kind of spontaneous awakening?
Susan: I don’t
know. You’d have to ask him. John, I know, was chosen by the 33
saints and ancient physicians that heal through him. He awoke as a healer
very young and had a hard time with the authorities. My impression with
this work is that you work in a respectful way with the energies that
come in. It’s true in the constellations, too. When you become
a representative, you learn something about life. When you become a
representative and spirits come into you, they inform you. They come
into your body and inform you on a cellular level. Their experience
comes into you, and your experience informs them as well. So it’s
teaching that goes both ways, and you’re forever transformed by
the experience of being a representative.
Otto: Being
a representative of . . . ?
Susan: If
I’m facilitating a constellation for someone and feel that the
issue is lodged in the relationship between the client, her mother and
grandmother, then we would set up a constellation with representatives
for her, her mother and grandmother. The client then places the representatives
in the space. They stand silently until they begin to have physical
or emotional sensations.
Otto: How
did this line of work first show up in your own life?
Susan: I was
raised in the country, outside of Columbus, Ohio, so I was always a
country person and oriented to the outdoors. I think that is very important.
My earliest memory was being
in a crib right by the window. I was lying there, looking at the light
coming through the trees. The tree spirits and I were playing. It’s
one of my very earliest memories.
Otto: At what
age was that?
Susan: Well,
I wasn’t even old enough to crawl.
Otto: Very
few people have memories from that early.
Susan: Yes.
It was a very early memory. But it was of the natural world and my relationship
to it. On the outside, my life was pretty conventional. I was middle
class, white, and went to a private girls’ school. My parents
tried to sequester and protect us. So my adventures were in the woods
and wild areas. But in the summers, we went to Canada. I was intrigued
by the native people there, although I didn’t have any way to
meet them, which isolated interaction. But I was always drawn to the
indigenous people. When I took piano lessons as a young girl, I composed
a song that was a native chant. I don’t know where it came from.
It just happened.
Then, in my twenties, I took
Silva mind control. I had married a man who would do these different
things. He’d become embedded in a new system of thought, and I
realized that if I was going to be able to talk to him, I’d have
to follow along and get the language.
Otto: What
is Silva mind control?
Susan: They
taught about the power of thought and also about how intuitive we are
without realizing it. I discovered that I had certain psychic gifts.
It frightened me. I had no context for it. But David and I were interested
in all this, so we explored it. He would guide me in meditation and
that began the whole thing. We moved to Vermont and lived on a farm.
Otto: When
was that?
Susan: The
early seventies. I was communicating with the spirits of the land. They
would tell us what fertilizer to use and where to put this and that.
It was very specific.
Otto: You
communicated with whom?
Susan: The
plant devas, the major spirits.
Otto: So you
could have a direct dialogue with them?
Susan: Right.
Otto: You’d
ask questions about what fertilizers to use, and you would get responses?
Susan: Usually.
Then people began to come to me for psychic readings. I also discovered
that I had healing touch. All of this was really overwhelming me. I
was uncomfortable with the way people would project power on me, saying,
“Oh, Susan, I need you to tell me what to do with …whatever.”
Or asking me to touch them. Sometimes it helped miraculously. Sometimes
nothing happened. Why? I was so confused. I felt too young.
Otto: When
did you first notice that you had capabilities in that direction?
Susan: That
first memory. But it was not unusual; it was not a capability. It was
just there. My parents had no context for it, so it went underground.
I’m sure that happens for many, many people.
Otto: Maybe
at that age, everybody can do it. We just don’t remember.
Susan: Yeah.
I explored those gifts, but then got freaked out and felt I couldn’t
handle it. I had children. So I decided that I was going to be a normal
person.
Otto: [laughter]
When did that decision come?
Susan: In
the early eighties. I decided that I was going to be conventional, write
poetry, and channel it into my poetry, and play tennis.
Listening to Your Call in
the Food Co-op
It was just too much for me.
I didn’t have the maturity for it, but at least I had the wisdom
to know that. I didn’t have a teacher, and I had no idea how to
find one. I didn’t know anything about indigenous people and what
they remember. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me to find a
native teacher.
So I decided to be normal,
and of course, it ate at me. I was divorced and remarried and divorced.
It was a hard, hard time. Then a friend I hadn’t seen in years,
who lived in the same community, came up to me at the food co-op and
said, “Susan, you have to go to this school. I’m going to
this school. This is your school. You have to go there because this
is all about your gift.” It was the Barbara Brennan School of
Healing. She gave me Barbara’s books and I just devoured them.
I was so excited. So I went.
Otto: Where
was the school?
Susan: It
was in New Jersey then. It’s a four-year program. It gave me community
and helped me get past my fear. During that time, I heard about the
Maya Spiritual Elders from Guatemala who were going to do a sacred fire
ceremony and some teaching about their calendars. I thought, “Well,
here I am going to this school and learning all about energy--the energy
field and energy healing and all these techniques. It’s all wonderful,
but it’s really like reinventing the wheel.” I thought,
“Those people know all this, and they’ve always known it.”
You see, I was on my path.
A couple of years before, I’d gone to a psychic, which I do only
about once every 15 years. She said, “There’s a Lakota elder
who has something for you.” I didn’t even know what Lakota
meant, but then later, I was looking through The Rowe Conference Center
catalog and there was Grandfather Wallace Black Elk, a Lakota elder,
who was going to be there. I thought, “I know that word. Maybe
I should go to this.” So I went. I’ll never forget driving
there and thinking, “Why am I doing this? I have no idea who this
person is. I have no idea why I’m doing this. I just don’t
know. Well heck, I don’t know anything.” I was laughing
and crying then. That was my state.
So I went in a state of not
knowing. Grandfather Wallace did a stone people’s lodge. Have
you ever done a sweat lodge?
Otto: No.
Susan: We
were jammed into this domed hut covered tight with blankets and canvas
sitting around a pit. Stone people, glowing hot rocks are brought in.
It’s completely dark, you can’t see a thing, and it’s
very crowded and very hot. The Medicine Person prays. There’s
drumming and singing. My knees were up at my chest, with my arms around.
I heard over on the other side a great flap, flap, flap, like a huge
bird. I thought, “How did that bird get in here? There’s
no room for a bird. How did he get in here?” I heard this flapping
coming right at me. I put my hands up like this because it sounded like
it was going to fly right into me. I felt this wing brush across my
hands. I thought, “This didn’t just happen. Did this happen?
Oh dear.” Then I looked up and I could see the whole night sky.
At that point, I realized that there was another dimension very close
and that I could walk there awake and in my body with the proper guidance.
Later, I went to learn from
the Maya. They taught me a lot about approaching these other dimensions
and how to do it in a respectful way. It’s not something that
you just do, like you don’t just pray when you pray; you live
a life of prayer. Or you don’t walk with the spirit world only
when you’re doing a constellation; you walk with it as a part
of your awareness. So you’re always conscious of coincidence or
signs, or you’re always aware and altering that awareness.
Welcome Home
The Maya Spiritual Elders were
doing work for the Journey of the Feathered Serpent. I can talk about
it only because they have permitted the story about the serpent energy
of the planet to come out. The feathered serpent, a great earth energy,
exists in many indigenous cultures. When it moves and comes up, there’s
a rising of consciousness. Some of the Maya Spiritual Elders still live
in caverns where they have kept the sacred fires burning for more than
a thousand years. They can describe where the serpent comes out, the
landscape, the people. So it can be tracked. Anyway, when the Panama
Canal was dug, it severed the spine of the Americas. This earth energy
moves through the Americas. It is to the earth what the Kundalini is
to the human body. In the Mayan calendar, the year 2012 is very, very
significant. It’s critically important that this energy be allowed
to follow its course through Central America to its destination in 2012.
Because the canal was cut across
the spine, these Maya Spiritual Elders were told by their Elders to
do ceremony on both sides of the canal to generate an energetic bridge.
The ceremonies served to stimulate certain points not unlike acupuncture
but on a planetary scale.
They wanted to do a ceremony
in Canada. They first thought to go to Vancouver, but that didn’t
happen. So I said to my Mayan teacher, “You know, there’s
this place I go in the summers near a sacred site.” She said,
“Well, that’s the one. You have to set it up.” So
I ended up going . . .
Otto: They’re
using that as an acupuncture point of the earth?
Susan: Yes.
For each of these ceremonies, there would be representatives from North,
South, and Central America. So I had to go to the particular nation
that keeps that sacred site. They were the Ojibwa I had wanted to meet
and that was how I met them. We then worked together, putting up teepees
and building cooking shacks, all for these people to come and do these
ceremonies. That’s how I came in close contact with them. We did
some hard physical labor together. At the end of the ceremonies, we
all were doing a hugging circle, where you’re in a circle and
one end doubles back and you hug everybody along the line. I came to
Lillian, an Elder Ojibwa Medicine Woman. She’s a big, big hearted
woman. She embraced me and I burst into tears. She said, “Welcome
home.”
Hellinger Work
Then I was introduced to the
Hellinger work. It was the only work that changed my relationship with
my father. I had had Jungian therapy and this kind of therapy and that
kind of therapy. Nothing shifted, until I did that work.
Otto: Who
was the connection to the Hellinger work?
Susan: I had
a friend who knew Gabrielle Borkin, a Hellinger facilitator who lived
out in California. She brought Gabrielle to Vermont. That was in 1995.
Otto: So you
went to a workshop. What happened?
Susan: I did
a constellation and I learned things.
Otto: So that
means there was a facilitator, you explained your situation, and the
facilitator chose other people from the group who then represented your
father, your mother, and all the key players, right?
So I Was Able to Have Compassion
for my Father
Susan: Yes.
The energy of my father came in, and the energy of his father and his
father’s first wife and his father’s second wife. Things
were revealed that allowed me to see my father in a different way. I
was able to have compassion for my father, even for things that he himself
may not know, but that were revealed to me through the constellation.
Hellinger facilitators will say they don’t use constellations
diagnostically, but it is uncanny what it is revealed. I did another
constellation months later in another city with an entirely different
group of people and exactly the same thing happened, even though none
of them had any knowledge of the first constellation. So it’s
there in the field. Hellinger talked about the family soul and the family
conscience. It’s in there, and that’s what you’re
tapping into when you do the constellation.
Meanwhile, back in Canada,
I was working with the Ojibwa Medicine Women. They do a traditional
cleansing ceremony called a cedar bath. They work with the energy in
the body and, if they find a blockages, they may intuit the history
connected to it. It may come through as a visual image or a physical
sensation; they’re very kinesthetic. They work to move the block
and free the system. Because I had done energy work, they asked me to
assist. The more work I did with them, the more I realized they were
accessing different dimensions of reality. So I said, “You know,
I could introduce you to the Hellinger work. I want you to see it because
I want to do this work with you. Because you’re giving me your
work, I want to give you my work too.” So I took three of them
to Florida, where he had come from Germany to do a workshop.
Otto: Who
was there?
Susan: It
was a workshop with long-time facilitators and first-timers and everything
in between. The Ojibwa could see that he works across generations like
they do. And Lillian asked to meet with him. None of this was planned.
We met and they drummed. They sang their songs, offered him tobacco,
and invited him to come to Ontario to work with their front-line workers.
He was very respectful. He said, “I will sleep on this, dream
on this.” The next day he came back and said he would come. There
is a lot of work to do for this because it must be a weaving of their
way and Hellinger’s way. He likes to work with people who are
doing the work. So it fell on me to teach them and learn on a deeper
level. Some of my friends offered to help. The Women wanted those who
came to work with them to have a cedar bath. They wanted the helpers
to have a sense of who they are and what they know, so there is an initiation
for each person who comes to do the Hellinger work and assist us.
Constellation Work and Shamanism
Otto: You
said that, in the constellation work, you worked with the family soul,
not just with the souls of the individual people, right? Is that how
Hellinger would describe his own work? How does that relate to the more
shamanistic line?
Susan: In
a constellation, there are different energies within the family soul
that emerge, and different people will perceive different things. One
thing that the facilitator understands is that there’s no one
person in the field of the constellation who has the ticket to truth.
Each person has his or her vision of it, and the energy will shift from
individual to individual as the constellation begins to make the healing
movement. It will come over one person at a certain time, and he or
she must follow the movement with his or her body or with certain words
or sounds. These may arise spontaneously or may be prompted by the facilitator
who moves with acute sensitivity and no expectation or judgment through
the physical space of the constellation. Then the whole becomes engaged
in the story within that person’s field, which is like the holograph
of the family soul.
Three Conditions
Otto: What
conditions allow such a knowing field to emerge? I have come across
three different conditions. The first one is unconditional witnessing,
right? A group of people who really pay attention to the story or the
person or whatever is at the center in order to support that. The second
one is that there is a person putting herself into the opening, to the
vulnerability, showing your wound, you could say. It’s putting
yourself into this vulnerability. I think an example is the weekend
workshop you offer in your story. And the third is that you evoke the
field by representing it in some manner, for example, by doing a constellation.
Somehow you create the representation of the larger situation, which
is, say, a landing strip.
Susan: Yes.
That’s good.
Otto:
Those are three elements. If one
is missing, it would not work. If somebody were sharing his vulnerability,
but there was no good holding space, it would go nowhere. Just the holding
space without somebody coming into the open is also going nowhere. So
it seems to be very important, particularly in all the Hellinger work,
that there is a landing strip factor somewhere. I don’t know how
to describe it. These are three critical conditions that must be in
place and if any one is missing, the coming-into-presence of the family’s
soul or whatever we call that would not happen.
Another illustration is a sacred
passage workshop done by John P. Milton. His work is based on the shamanistic,
Daoistic, and the Buddhist tradition. In very small groups, he gives
some practices with some principles up front. Then you are at a sacred
site on your own for a week.
Susan: Are
you fasting?
Otto: Not
necessarily, but it is suggested. So I did. You find your own way there,
and then you reconvene and share your experience. What he is doing and
also what the group is doing is the holding space, right? Then your
own process is putting you into a vulnerable state, which happens very
naturally when you’re on your own for a week at the sacred site.
Then there’s the third element concerned with relating to mother
earth—to nature—as a teacher. It seems to me that it may
function as a landing strip. When you’re in a sweat lodge, there
is a very precise structure on which your opening takes place.
Susan: Yes.
And this is true at the sacred sites, where there have been ceremonies
down through generations. They are gateways that are maintained.
Boundaries
Otto: Is the
field or group phenomenon, in your experience, limited to families?
What’s the boundary around that? Is it a family situation or could
it include any kind of, say, social settings? Is that a property that
every community or group could have?
Susan: Well,
the Hellinger work is also done with corporations. There is a danger
of abstracting too much. We steer away from people with too big a problem
who want to do a constellation.
Otto: With
too big a problem?
Susan: For
instance, a woman who comes to the group from a country that’s
torn apart by political strife. She says, “My country is my problem,”
and Hellinger says, “It’s too big for me.”
Otto: So the
relationship is with your family of origin?
Susan: It
varies. You can see that in the organizational work. Hellinger facilitators
do a lot of work with family-owned organizations and non-profits.
It can be a family issue or
the overlay of the family and the organizational hierarchies that cause
the problem. Sometimes, within an organization, there’s a disorder
in the hierarchy. Sometimes, within that, a person who is involved in
their own family system’s soul issues is projecting those issues
into the business system, and it can throw everything out of whack.
If there’s a disruption
in the systemic order of the business, it’s like a crack in the
field. When there’s a crack in the human field, it’s an
entry point for other energies. For example, maybe somebody has a big
desk by the window who is actually lower in the hierarchy than someone
with a smaller desk in a more obscure corner. This dis-order creates
a crack in the business’ field. And the big-desk-person will attract
projections. The whole system will lag as a result. But if that person
is moved from that desk and the right person is put there, then the
system becomes harmonious and these other issues don’t have such
an opportunity to come in. Sometimes the solution is very simple and
doesn’t involve dealing with any one person’s family system.
Constellation Work in Organizations
Otto: How
would you do practical constellation work in a company. An organizational
issue is not just one person’s story.
Susan: But
you set up a constellation and then the energies come in and they show
you. One person tells the story and then you set up the representatives.
So you’ll have the representatives for all the different parts,
and they themselves reveal the dynamic.
Otto: Okay.
So it doesn’t really matter what entry point you take; the field
will come in anyway.
Susan: If
you have permission.
In a family issue, any sibling
or parent could tell the story. But there are different identifications.
For instance, usually a girl will identify with her mother’s family
system, and a boy will identify with his father’s family system.
What the daughter would set up could be different from what the son
would set up. The initiating dynamic that’s involved in an issue
may be different for each. Still, the healing movement may be the same
and will affect them both.
Otto: How
do you handle that? Do you do both? I mean that would be similar to
a more complex organizational situation.
Susan: Yes,
and organizational is very challenging work. It’s still young
work: The facilitators of organizational constellations are discovering
how complex and challenging it is. In a family system, when a man and
woman approach each other in love, you see that woman’s family
system--her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents—and
his, standing behind them. Through them runs the current of regeneration,
that longing for sexual contact and progeny that is bigger than any
one or even any two of us. So under every family constellation is this
simple but powerful movement. Think about it, how old it is. In contrast,
with businesses, the facilitator has to locate the source of power,
the source of cohesion, the source of motivation. And yet the orders
themselves are simple.
Entering a Different Level
of Dialogue with the World
Otto: When
you’re doing your work, how would you relate to whatever that
collective entity or field is? What practices do you use in order to
establish a functioning relationship?
Susan: It’s
not really a practice. It’s an orientation. For instance, last
night in Vermont I was very tired and thought, “I’m going
to have to get up really early, and I don’t know where the place
is I’m meeting Otto, so I should get out the map and figure it
out tonight so that tomorrow I can just get up and know where I’m
going.” Instead I decided to watch the dusk settle over the hills,
and I went to sleep and slept like a baby. I got up and thought, “Well,
I kind of know where I’m going. I’m just going to go.”
It’s a peaceful feeling, trusting. I trust those helpers in other
dimensions who see and know so much more than I do. And that’s
exactly what happened. I got to where I usually get totally turned around
in Cambridge. I lived here in the seventies, but everything now is different.
I guessed that I should really turn left at a certain point, but I thought,
“Oh, but I don’t know that way,” so I went one more
street. Then the thought came to me, “Turn left. You really need
to turn.” So I turned left. I was not sure where this was going
to take me, but I came right here. I didn’t make a single wrong
turn.
So then I do things like burn
sage, offer tobacco. I carry some sacred objects. I have a drum. I have
ways, but I don’t think they work unless your orientation is to
that dimension. Does that answer your question?
Otto: Yeah,
sort of.
Susan: In
other words, I don’t burn sage and do other traditional practices
because I want to manipulate the spirit world to come in and give me
directions. Will is not at work here. I do these things because they
arise. It’s a question of being tuned in. I am in this state of
trusting that this is meant to happen and that something will come of
it that will provide a channel for my soul and your soul and my ancestors’
souls and your ancestors’ souls. Toward truth. Yes. And the fact
that I came right here against some pretty big odds means to me that
what is here to happen in this interview is in alignment with not just
your curiosity and my gabbiness but with something that is ripe to happen.
It’s a ripeness that’s informed by more than this three
dimensional reality, bigger than you, bigger than me, and they’re
going to help us find a way. In this case, the way for me to get here!
Otto: So it’s
tuning in to your soul’s intentions and to what you feel is wanting
to emerge. That seems to be the entry point; you connect with the feeling
and follow that.
Susan: Yes.
Otto: It seems
as if you are describing a kind of trust of the environment with your
own intelligence.
Susan: Yes,
and it’s not only of the environment, but that the environment
is constantly informed from another dimension, which has intentions
that are interweaving with my intentions, if I allow that.
Otto: So it’s
almost a process of surrendering into that, right?
Susan: Yes,
but there is also dialogue. As Westerners, when we begin to go into
this state of mind and heart, we receive signs, get guidance, and all
this stuff, and it’s take, take, take. If it’s going to
really be true, there needs to be dialogue. You need to cultivate relationship
with the spirits who are in alignment with your soul’s intention
in being here. Discernment is appropriate. And vigilance.
I’m going to give you
an example. Here is a woman who dreamed of a bear. Within a week, she’s
driving down the road and a bear runs up to the side of the road in
front of her car, stands there and looks at her, comes right up, and
then runs back the way it came. She could say, “Oh, isn’t
that wonderful? It’s so exciting. This bear came up to the road
and looked at ME. I can’t wait to tell…” In this way
she takes it and makes it her story. Or she can pull over and offer
tobacco. She says, “I see you. I honor you. Thank you for appearing
to me here. I am listening.” So she’s going to a different
level of dialogue.
Offerings
Otto: What
is the importance of offering tobacco? In a good moment, I may have
appreciated the bear that crossed the road. But to offer the tobacco
would never have crossed my mind. What’s the relevance of it?
Susan: I think
that the appreciation may be all that’s required. But for me,
I feel that to stop myself physically from whatever I was doing to acknowledge
that something has come in from another dimension, a door opens just
a little bit more. A gift has been given to me by the native people.
They have taught me how to be with sacred plants. The native people
work with cedar, tobacco, cornmeal, and pollen. These plant spirits
are sacred to them. When invoked with respect, they can move like a
cathedral. They open sacred space. That’s how powerful they are.
Offering a sacred plant is what the Maya call payment. You make your
payment. Hellinger calls it the balance of giving and taking and it’s
one of the Orders of Love.
Practices
Otto: When
I asked the question concerning practices, I was thinking, for example,
of when you do a workshop in which you put your own intention fully
into the service of whatever—whether a group, family, or social
situation—is wanting to emerge. How do you as a facilitator or
moderator “tune in” to this deeper intention, which isn’t
just your personal intention but which is connected to the field you’re
working with?
Susan: First,
I clear the space. I will burn sage, partly to demonstrate that my intention
is to serve within sacred space.
Otto: You
go to the actual place where the event is going to take place?
Susan: Right.
Otto: The
day before?
Susan: Or
just minutes before people arrive.
Otto: But
you do go to the physical place?
Susan: Yes.
Then I also offer a prayer.
Otto: How
do you clear the space?
Susan: Well,
I burn sage and walk around. I pray to open sacred space and I say a
prayer to the ancestors of the people who are coming. You need to create
safety for more than just the individuals who are coming. It’s
really a field of safety; it has to be multidimensional safety because,
in many families, the wounds are indeed traumatic. There may be murder
or difficult fates, and it’s a struggle for the spirits of the
ancestors.
They have to have a sense of your whole being, your intention, your
truth. A new movement will bring a deeper peace. So where there has
been restlessness and a revisiting of fate upon subsequent generations,
you hold the potential for this fate to be taken back where it belongs
and the living generations then freed. That’s a big order for
us and for them and it doesn’t always work.
At a constellation I did up
north, one of the representatives was on the floor and the spirit would
not move. You just could feel where the movement within the family soul
wanted to go but she would not move. I tried many different things and
finally said, “I don’t have permission. This isn’t
going to work. We’ll end it here” People started to move
out of their places in the constellation, but she just stayed frozen
on the ground. All of a sudden, she started to scream. All of the agony
was to come out, and I had to go to that place where I said, “You
either do or you don’t.” Then she did and the whole system
shifted, but it was very, very hard work.
Otto: What
makes it so hard?
Susan: It’s
the attachment to what happened. It doesn’t want to move. In that
case, and I’m going to patch and extrapolate here to protect privacy
but the principle is the same…in that case it was an Ojibwa woman
who was taken as a small child from her parents to a residential school.
She was denied her family, her language, her culture, everything that
was hers by right of birth. In that life, she had to repress her rage
and her grief to survive. But it stayed with her in death and reappeared
in her grandchild as physical symptoms and as an inability to speak
her native language. When this ancestor, through the body of the representative,
gave voice to her agony, the emotional torture of her fate was revealed
and she could be fully seen, heard and honored by the living. She could
find peace. But it meant surrendering into the agony and trusting the
living to hold that suffering with deep, deep respect.
The Field of the Future
Otto: A few
days ago, I talked to Arthur Zajonc, a physicist and educator at Amherst
College. He described sitting in numerous board meetings for founding
a new school. Whenever the meetings got stuck, he pictured little children,
unborn or not, watching this board meeting as if they were sitting at
the same table. Whenever he did that exercise, it allowed him to open
up and to perform his facilitation of that meeting much more effectively.
Susan: That’s
wonderful. There are times in a constellation when it may be reluctant
to move or you may have an individual who is stuck and you present them
with their children or grandchildren and that begins the movement. I
haven’t consciously involved the coming generations, but I do
hold them very dear.
Otto: Yes.
When you look onto this situation through the eyes of future children,
it is a different feeling. Your perception begins to operate from a
quite different place.
Susan: It
is a tremendous move into the multigenerational perspective, especially
for Westerners because we’re the “me” generation.
The native tradition holds that you don’t do anything without
thinking of seven future generations. But to actually stand in the place
of that seventh-generation child is different from intellectualizing,
“Oh, well, we have to take care of the trees because we want oxygen
for future generations.” To me, that’s the beauty of being
a representative. It’s a gift. We do blind constellations in which
the person with the issue presents it privately with the facilitator.
No one else in the group is aware of the issue, so when they step in
to be a representative, they have no idea who they’re representing.
It still comes through.
Otto: Really?
Susan: It
still comes through. You don’t hear the story. You just stand
where the client places you and you feel what you feel.
Otto: And
you articulate that to . . . ?
Susan: . .
. to the facilitator. It’s uncanny.
Otto: Uncanny?
Susan: I mean
it blows people away. First, that they have so many sensations, and
second, that in the end, when we talk about it, it’s revealed
who they were standing in for and what happened. And they know it’s
right. They can identify who they were.
Sustaining
Otto: So,
in terms of sustainability, you have experiences at workshops that worked
and you participated in some kind of shift. In most cases, do you just
do that once in a workshop and then a healing process or new development
takes its course? Or is there something else you need to do in order
to sustain that shift?
Susan: It
varies with each person. I think it depends first on what you bring
to the workshop: your own self-knowledge and your support system. Some
people have to go into therapy after. You get a lot of information very
quickly. Sometimes they can’t believe it and resist it. It takes
years for it to truly settle into the system. But a family member in
another state or country who is being represented may be affected by
the constellation even though they haven’t witnessed it and know
nothing about it.
Otto: The
more we put these things into the open, the more consciousness is required.
In the past, these practices went on, but they weren’t openly
accessible, were they? There was a shielding mechanism, which no longer
exists.
Susan: Do
you think that’s true?
Otto: Well,
I think spiritual practices are much more accessible today than earlier
when there was a cocoon to protect them. This may no longer be appropriate
in our age, but there are also new demands on ethical integrity, right?
Susan: Yes,
I think that’s true. My feeling is that what we’re moving
toward now—the year 2012—is a thinning of the veil to the
point where consciousness is perceiving and conversing both ways across
dimensions all the time. What’s happening is preparatory and would
happen no matter what. There’s no stopping it. So I’m very
appreciative of Hellinger’s integrity and The Way he teaches,
and the Indigenous Medicine People and Spiritual Elders and The Way
they teach.
Otto: What
is the threshold that you’ve connected with the 2012 development?
Is it a collective threshold?
Susan: Oh,
yes. It’s planetary. Any work that we can do to bring family systems
into harmony, coming into this, is important.
Otto: Coming
into?
Susan: Coming
into this meeting of the worlds...
Otto: ... and
fully coming into this world. Susan, thank you for this conversation.
