Amazing Family Constellations
During the last years I have participated in quite a few workshops dealing with Bert Hellinger's impressive and amazing method of Family Constellations. Impressive because of the results, amazing because of the instant turning to your soul once you are invited to represent either someone or something in the constellation.

This book is not an introduction to the method. It is rather a specific way of looking at major conflicts in the world, both past and present.

Bert Hellinger's method of Family Constellations started some four years ago and has since then touched the lives of thousands of people. He used to be a priest and missionary in South Africa for 16 years. Then he devised the method focussing on people who felt themselves entangled in some overwhelming problem. His principle is that people are connected with their ancestors and that unsolved problems in the past can influence the lives of the descendants. The clue is to dig back into the rows of predecessors, to find the wound and heal it through constellations of the people who were involved.

In the workshops I have been invited to represent their father, friend, son or whoever and I felt myself turning into the one I was representing. It is then pivotal not to think, not to act like someone but just to empty yourself and open up to what is coming into you, without fear, without expectations, without intention, just into stillness. As Bert explains on page 159: You face the entirety and wait. Then, out of the darkness comes an insight, like a bolt of lightning, which shows the next step, but only the next step.

The book I'm reviewing here goes a step further. The book reports a host of meetings in many countries and discusses several population groups. In doing so it finds answers in examples from historical conflicts between peoples and cultures. Hellinger draws up constellations around the Greeks and the Germans, Spain and the New World, the Civil War in Columbia, and Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanon and Germany and the pains that came about during the interactions. But Hellinger also devotes time to peace among religions, for example between Christianity and the Islam, as well as to peace between masters and slaves in Brazil or the United States in the past. In the constellations participants are here representing a country, slavery, Islam and so forth.

Reconciliation will come about after representatives go through the depths of the souls of the perpetrators and their victims. They might blend into something greater, beyond humankind, into an eternal primal healing. And therefore the book is called Peace Begins in the Soul. A book very much recommended for those who are interested in the processes of family constellations, here rather constellations on politics. philosophy-religion