This past weekend I had the opportunity of attending a very profound workshop. It was a workshop on family constellation. During my early years in healing school I had heard about family constellation and how it can impact our lives profoundly. However, I had never done the work until this past weekend. Family “baggage” can affect us deeply and in such a way that we might not even be aware of it. We act, behave and take upon ourselves issues that were passed down from generations. Subconsciously and through generation epigenetics we carry this “baggage”. It is now known that these traumatic memories are transmitted through chemical changes in our DNA. We can also pass them on to future generations if we don’t do take the time and do the work to resolve these issues.
What is family constellation work?
As I mentioned above this is a special type of personal work that affects not only yourself but past and future generations, thus by doing family constellation work on yourself, you can begin to break inherited family patterns and heal the past. According to Mark Wolynn the author of the book It Didn’t Start With You and the conductor of the seminar, the traumas of our parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents can live in our unexplained depression, anxiety, fears, phobias, obsessive thoughts and physical symptoms—what scientists are now calling “secondary PTSD.” Simply put, many of us relive the tragedies from previous generations and rarely make the link.
Family constellation gives you the chance to heal yourself and your family gene pool in the process. I had the opportunity to not only see but experience this profound work. I had two long days of intense but beautifully deep transformation. At the end of the seminar, I went away thinking and experiencing myself differently. Since the age of four, I have been suffering from two chronic conditions, severe headaches and a cough that would go away and then come back at any time. These two issues had plagued me for so long, that I thought I will have to settle for living with them for the rest of my life. I didn’t know why I was suffering from these, there’s no one in my family that suffered the same ailments. I thought I had to settle with feeling the inconvenience and pain any time they would pop up in my life.
What a wonderful surprise it was to find out that the root of my issues did not originate with me. Through the constellation work I did this weekend, I discovered that these issues which started when I was four years old, went back to my grandmother and my mother. You see, both my grandmother and my mother had experienced the same exact experience in their lives around the same time frame of their lives. The issue was betrayal by the men they loved. Those feeling of sadness and despair had accumulated in my lungs which is the part of our system that holds these types of emotions, unknowingly to all of us. The headache was the pressure, frustration and stress they had felt during this time. I was around 3 or 4 when my father began to cheat on my mother. Shortly after I began to experience these symptoms which have been with me ever since!
Wow! That was a very deep and intense realization for me. What a relief to know that I did not have to carry these symptoms with me anymore! Once the root and causation is identified, the person can move forward in their lives and let those issues go. I felt a sigh of relief I felt at that point.
Interesting enough a day before when I had arrived at home after the first day of the seminar my four year old little girl told me that she had a headache. A headache at 4 yrs. old! What are the chances of that!?! At that moment I looked at her in the eyes and told her, listen to me, you do not need to carry this headache with you, it does not belong to you, just like it didn’t belong to me. What do you say we let this headache go once and for all? She looked at me and said, ok mommy, and we did.
My case was only one case of many that were resolved this past weekend. I can’t say enough about the profound effect this work has on everyone that attends this type of workshop and who is willing to work on themselves. If you have an issue, concern, disease, disorder, past trauma, etc., go to a family constellation workshop and experience the work for yourself. I was very glad that I was able to do so. I’m forever grateful to Mark Wolynn for bringing awareness and creating such a transformative work for everyone to experience.
