Role of the Representatives

In an Ancestral Family Constellations workshop, you create a living ‘map’ of your family system, past and present. With the help of other group members, who act as ‘representatives’ for family members, you can see how people, stand, sit and move in relation to each other. The person who is exploring their family chooses the representatives, based on their intuition or ‘strong feelings’..

You can sense other people’s feelings!

Representatives for your family members appear to know how the person feels and are able to express this, so that the ‘living map’ can be explored and any difficult issues brought to the surface. The representatives are able to tune into the feelings of others, even though they may not know them. Their verbal feedback and body posture, can help to surface some of the core issues which is then relayed to the person exploring their constellation through the facilitator. This method helps to clarify personal experience and supports them in becoming more conscious about what is happening within their family system

Intuitive Knowing

This may seem unusual, but we often have connections with unknown people.  We may walk into a room and suddenly feel sad or angry and realise that we are connecting to the feelings of others.  Or we may meet someone who reminds us exactly of a family member or friend.  Often it is about the way that the person looks, at other times it is a gesture, or way of walking or talking.

This a powerful method to aid transformation, reconciliation and healing. As you witness the process unfolding, you gain insight and greater clarity on difficult and complex issues by literally being able to ‘see’ family and community patterns emerge.

The Movements

The space that people step into when they start to ‘map-out’ their constellation is hard to define or explain.  The person who is exploring an issue will place a ‘representative for a family member’ in the constellation space  and that person will start to sense the feelings and movement of the family member through…..

•  an intuitive felt sense of the person being represented
• going with the flow of inner knowing
• allowing the constellation to unfold organically

This cannot easily be explained to a rational Western mind, yet it is something that many indigenous communities around the world accept and know instinctively.

Remembering what you once knew!

This sense of knowing has been lost in many Western communities, but when I have done workshops in the Caribbean or with people of African heritage in the UK, there is an understanding of this knowing.  It is deep in our bones and psyche, yet we do not speak of it. gradually people are awakening to older wisdom traditions and reclaiming their roots, Ancestral Constellations can assist in this process.