Embodied African Wisdom
The wisdom of indigenous communities relates to their knowledge of the past and their commitment to the family line that is rooted in the present and the natural order of things. Hierarchy in families is respected and acknowledged and everyone knows and takes their rightful place in the family so that there is a strong sense of identity and belonging.
As an ancestral process, constellations and healing ritual can honour and acknowledge the sacred, the healer, the visionary and the artistic in us. An Ancestral Constellation is an oracle and storying process that takes us back to lost ancestral traditions and unknown cosmologies.
In my experience of running workshops with people of African heritage, there is an immediate and deep understanding of the method. The heartbeat of these traditions still resides in communities of African heritage in the Western diaspora. And we can benefit from and harness some of those lost traditions through the Ancestral Constellations method.
Constellations as a Healing Ritual and ‘Rite-of-Passage’
When I began exploring the family constellations method, I immediately looked to that part of the process that most spoke to me. This was the embedded African ritual aspects of the process and I increasingly wanted to explore this aspect more. I knew that I recognised a familiarity within the method, but I wasn’t quite sure what or why.
I am interested in the idea of constellations as a ‘Rite of passage’, by that I mean, the transition that occurs during a healing session, whether resolved or not as a movement of energetic shift and change and is a form of ‘sacred space’.
For me ‘sacred space’ just means creating a context for ritual work to take place. The altar beside me with ‘elder’ dollies representing the ancestors, water and incense is just a way of recognising that there is something spiritual/transpersonal taking place. It is not elaborate, it does not have to be named, although people always ask and generally seem to like the altar, it there beside us as we do the work.
Resonating Deep in the Bones
When I work with people from African and Asian backgrounds, it is as though within a constellation they are seeing something that resonates deep in the bones, a sense of RE-Membering. So adapting Ancestral Constellation for African heritage people is a process of seeing through a multi-coloured lens. One that explores family and community dynamics in a way that is relevant to Caribbean diaspora/black/African heritage families and communities.
As I started working with the constellations method, I became much clearer about how the inclusion of ritual and family orders spoke to an African heritage experience. And I saw the relevance of the embedded African indigenous wisdom in working with black transgenerational lives.
The Ancestral Constellations Approach
The Ancestral Constellations approach is in my view particularly appropriate for people of African heritage because of three key features that I emphasise in my practice:
- Acknowledgement and inclusion of Ancestors within the creation of sacred space
- Storying the transgenerational line with reverence and humility
- Exploration of ritual as a form of family and community healing of trauma
- Foregrounding the indigenous African wisdom that is embedded in the method
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