Guys, we are going to lesson three, but for this lesson I want you to grab some things—I will explain better during the lesson, but start looking for them now. I want you to grab 10 materials that are more or less similar to each other. It could be 10 pen caps, 10 stones, 10 crystals, uh, 10 pieces of fruit, okay?
10 cushions, but preferably 10 objects that fit on your table, that can fit on a table, okay? I will explain better during the lesson. We are going to do a small exercise so you can start feeling what it's like to look at your family through a geometric formation and symbology, okay?
This will be important later for you to understand the horses, right? Thanks, let's get to class. In the presence of the warrior.
Let's go to our third lesson. Now I want to comment a little with you on how family constellations work in general and why we look at them through the perspective of horses. Generally, we will deal with family constellations based on the approach of Bert Hellinger, who was the great name that unified these many therapies, as we mentioned: primal therapy, hug therapy, family therapy, the systemic view, and, well, the other therapies that formed psychodrama, which formed family constellations, which works as follows: we will have a circle of people; of course, it can also be done with dolls, with crystals in water, with horses; there are already people constellating with whales, right?
But we will take this more traditional approach, so to speak. So, a circle of people, the circle itself already has a whole medicine, because it is not for nothing that we look at all indigenous cultures and they sit in a circle, right? Usually around the fire.
When we sat in a circle for the first time around the Tataporá, around the sacred fire, it was the first time in human history that we could turn our backs to the woods and look at our brothers during the night with faces somewhat flickering from the crackle of the flames. So, sitting in a circle by itself is already therapeutic. In the circle, everyone is equal.
There are no masters or students. There are not those who teach and those who only learn. Everyone can share knowledge because everyone sees each other.
It's very different from how we usually see content being delivered, right? Where one person is up on a stage or a podium and everyone else is lower down, just getting hit with a flood of arguments. In a circle, we are on equal footing.
This is very similar to horses. Generally, people will sit in a circle, so one person will be constellated, while the others participate in the constellation—meaning they can represent the family field of the person being constellated. I'll explain how this representation happens, but above all, one person constellates and the others participate if they are called by their own body, by their own physical sensation.
This is something very emotional, and very interesting, because we're a bit disconnected from this feeling, right? So, the constellation becomes therapeutic because, in the first moment, it invites people to bring their attention to what they are feeling. People who are sitting in the circle can be called by the person who is being constellated .
So, "I'd like you to represent this person for me. " Or they can simply sustain this therapeutic field by feeling, I don't know, a desire to stand up, a desire to cry, a desire to lie down, feeling a pain in their leg, a headache, pain in an elbow—anyway, it can happen in many different ways. So, some people will enter the circle and realize where they feel called to stand, who they feel close to or feel more attraction toward, who they feel more connection with, and who they feel repulsion or aversion toward.
This is already great information for the facilitator, because these people are representing family dynamics. It's very interesting, because even if people don't know what happens in the families , these feedbacks—like "I don't want to look at this person" or "I feel very close to this one,""I feel connected to this one"—are feedbacks that are very coherent with what actually happens in the client's real life. How does this happen?
Well, we'll talk about the action of morphic fields, which were proven by Rupert Sheldrake, a scientist who studied how they act in animals, among other things. But above all, we can imagine a flock of birds; no bird hits another, they all leave in migration, taking turns, without any type of communication system. In schools of fish, the fish perform these dances fleeing from predators; a herd of horses or wildebeests in a stampede, they take off at full speed and no one collides.
Sometimes, they even gallop in the same rhythm. Who commands all of this? Who coordinates, right, this collective, simultaneous, and harmonic thought?
Well, this same force, according to Rupert Sheldrake, acts within family systems. So, we descend from those who came before. Is that what Guerreiro is telling me here, right?
Those who are greater than us. And we carry, as you wrote there in the class two exercise, we carry some dynamics that can be, uh, both with physical formations, meaning, I have, for example, uh, the arms of my ancestor X, Y, Z, feet just like the feet of so-and-so, right? And at the same time, I can, uh, talk in the same way as that ancestor or I can have the same dream of traveling that my ancestors had.
Or I can have the same fear of horses that such and such a person had. We carry this because there are dynamics that remain immersed not in genetics, because a phenotype hardly ever generates a genotype, but they remain, uh, impregnated in epigenetics, meaning that which is beyond the genetic field we can code. So, in this traditional way, with the groups, what happens is that, when people are called to represent family systems, they end up feeling, as a rule, what it is, what happens, the dynamic that is present, even if it is unconscious or hidden to the person being constellated.
Meaning, they might not know about an aversion of one brother towards another or even about a distance, a place that is missing, someone who needs to be included. They might not know about it, but it will manifest. And then, from the systemic view, from the three forces of love or the three systemic laws, we seek a solution for when this dilemma has weakened the person being constellated.
For example, when there is a child who was aborted, which the IJA is entering into that space now. Meaning, a child who has not been seen, right, who is not accounted for. Oh, my mother, uh, lost a baby at so many months of pregnancy.
When something like this happens and this child isn't counted, let's say, for the family's soul, for the hearts of the family members, it usually happens that someone comes to represent this person who didn't arrive. So, I will bring a very personal example for you to understand. In my family, we had the loss of a brother, a brother aborted at 3 months that my mother lost.
Three months into the pregnancy, my mother lost it. For a long time, I, who was the first male child who truly was born , who wasn't just conceived, but who left the womb and lived, stepped into the place of this first male child, who actually wasn't me, but this other baby . Everything is already happening.
We are already going to look at this from a deeper perspective. I will try to keep the class here with you, but the field is always sovereign, so it may be that I have to turn to the axis and make a movement with it here. But what it's showing, and what you will realize —that up to the 30th time we think this is a coincidence, and then finally we believe it's no longer a coincidence —is that this brother who didn't arrive wasn't being seen in the soul of my family.
And that was when I did my first constellation in that traditional way, without horses. And I called two people, actually I think they volunteered to represent my two sisters . And between them was a brother, a person who didn't come, who wasn't being seen.
When the facilitator asked me if there was anyone, I said I vaguely remembered something, because that's usually how it happens. Families vaguely speak of when a baby is lost, when there is an abortion. And then when we placed a person, who was actually a man, to represent this child who hadn't come, for me, in my bodily sensation, it was a relief, and for all the people who were representing my family system as well.
Want to know how this manifested in practice in my personal life? I had deep disagreements with my father at that time. And after this constellation, the next day, without me having said anything to him, our relationship became a different one .
And we had conversations that we had never had until then. This was around 2018, and that was the first time I came into contact with the medicine of family constellations. So I can say that I am a product of this, of these traditional constellations.
I am very grateful for and reverent toward this therapeutic practice, because it truly changed my life and made me start seeing life in a different way. This traditional way of doing constellations , that is, in a circle, can also unfold into, for example, constellations with figures. Because, as you can see, it's not so much about the family system itself or what happens there, but about how we, the ones being worked on, the ones being constellated, look at what happens.
We are even going to experience this practice now, okay? Since this is an experiential course, I want you to truly leave this online meeting of ours transformed. I’m going to invite you to grab, let’s say, 10 objects, okay?
10 objects of a more or less similar nature, that is, 10 stones, 10 pencils, 10 pen caps, 10 leaves, 10 flowers, whatever you feel. They don't specifically have to be the exact same objects, but they should be more or less similar in size or have similar characteristics and also not be identical to each other, right? They should be similar, but not the same.
so that we can tell them apart from one another. So you are going to set them up on a table; these objects actually have to fit on your table, right? You are going to set up your family system starting with yourself.
Choose one of these 10 objects to represent you and place it in a spot you feel right about on your workspace. Then you will choose an object to represent your mother, then an object to represent your father . If you have adoptive parents or if you don't know your parents, start by placing your biological parents, even if you have no contact with them, even if you don't know them, okay?
And then, if you have adoptive parents, place your two adoptive parents as well. Then add any siblings you have, and this time, if you have any aborted siblings, include them as well. Notice how this mandala, or what we can call this constellation, is taking shape.
This name actually comes from this formation that strongly resembles the stars, right? one object closer to another, one object more identified with another , further away from another, and start noticing how this configuration on your desk is turning out. And finally, you will take one more object to represent something that had not been seen until now.
You can try to remember an ancestor, an uncle, a grandfather, or even your parents 'first loves. The first great love, or your father's first great love, your mother's first great love, a first marriage, or someone who is not being seen—one or more people, if you feel like it, try to place and include them at your workstation, right? And then you contemplate this formation as it is, just by taking it in as it is for 5 minutes.
Give yourself this time, put on some music, music that lasts around 5 minutes, and breathing deeply, notice what it's like to look at these objects arranged on your desk, representing yourself. This is a way for us, first of all, to photograph our unconscious, to perceive how we see this family system of ours through symbols, right? And another way is for us to begin to open our hearts and minds a little to include what we are unconsciously or consciously excluding.
Right? I will wait for you to do this exercise so we can move on to the next lesson. Now that you have done this activity, I would like you to photograph this geometric formation that you and your family created, along with those you felt called to include for the first time.
Just photograph it, if possible labeling the names of each member represented by these symbols, right? Because in the next lesson we will talk about the three systemic laws, or the three forces of love. And I want you to feel this deeply within yourself so that you can then redo this activity.
But photograph it first and let's go to the next lesson. Okay.
