The Knowing Fields Issue 11

As I write this Editorial, I am conscious of the clear divisions between the ISCA which is moving forward and recruiting helpers for the various tasks needed to take it to the next stage and Bert’s new Sciencia programme which offered its first summer camp in Austria in July and continues in 2008. It is therefore not by accident that I include pieces on Bert’s new approach to constellation work (entitled: Movements of the Spirit-Mind) and the ISCA progress report at the beginning and end of this issue, as if sandwiching everything else that is going on in this now substantial community of constellators with its vast array of approaches. Apart from Bert Hellinger’s personal contribution entitled: Dimensions of Love at the beginning, I include contributions from Suzi Tucker and Gary Stuart on the Movements of the Spirit-Mind. The main theme emerging in this issue seems to be around Community.

Ken Sloan and his team from the Sixth Sense in Service describe for us their use of the Birthplace representative and Birthplace Constellations, indicating the significance in our lives of our origins, our connection to our own soil and the communities we grew up in. Francesca Mason Boring writes of the importance of acknowledging and working with the differences in some cultures, where it is too exposing for individuals to do their own constellations and setting up the community as a whole seems to be a useful alternative. Unusually, I have made my own contribution in terms of the summer camp communities which I have been part of for many years and to which I have recently introduced constellation work. This particular community seems to bring together the connection to the land, expounded by the Sixth Sense in Service team and others involved with Nature or Environmental Constellations (see issue 9 of The Knowing Field) and the importance of living in community for us as individuals. In response to my discussion points raised in the previous issue, Judith Hemming and Diane Yankelevitz offer us their views on whether constellation work should be limited to the field of psychotherapy and the extension of that to the issue of accreditation for constellators which the ISCA claim is not possible and which Bert Hellinger’s Sciencia programme seems to be offering.

The use of personal work in organisational constellations has been addressed in two articles: Sebastian and Colette Green reflect on the inevitability of an overlap between family and organisational issues, particularly in family run businesses and demonstrate their way of working with it using constellations and psychodynamic interpretation. Jan Jacob approaches the subject more indirectly, reflecting more generally on the development of organisational constellations overall and stresses the need for everything to be seen in context. He raises an interesting point that debate can fix something in place and encourage people to take up positions, thus stifling further insight and discovery.

Tomás Kohn’s personal reflections on his journey through his work as a Management Consultant towards integration of his own internal differences is an interesting addition to the field of organisational constellations. Alison Rose Levy has taken further the process of self-reflection begun in issue 10 of The Knowing Field (pp.42-56) and collated the views of several attendees at the Plenary session entitled: Minding our own Business: A critical Review of what we do which proved to be a very popular event at the recent American Conference organised by Sheila Saunders in North Carolina. Beyond the issue of reflection and discussion, I am pleased to include two constellations from Dan Booth Cohen and Chiara Megighian-Zenati around the theme of peace and reconciliation and Dagmar Ingwersen’s description of her work with psychosomatic symptoms, another exciting development in constellation work. The number of books being written about constellation work is increasing all the time and we have four interesting reviews in this issue from Vivian Broughton, Meretta Hart, John Kapp and Jennifer Altman.

We extend our News from around the World section to include Belgium, Canada and two more Scandinavian countries: Finland and Norway which then leads into the reports from the two major events which took place this year – the second American Conference and the first Pichl Summer Camp. At the beginning of the American conference, greetings came from Bert Hellinger and from Hunter Beaumont as president of the ISCA and a metaphorical ‘baton’ was passed which had travelled from Germany to Moscow to Vladivostok linking the various communities across the world. the knowing field With a predominance of British and American contributors to the journal this time and reports on events from in effect three different communities – those at the American Conference, those at the Pichl Summer Camp and those connected to ISCA, I wonder about how these different communities or cultures co-exist and overlap with each other and how does one community gain dominance over another?

Is it possible for us as British and American Editors of an international journal to maintain that inclusivity which is necessary for an international journal? The introduction of international representatives (see below) is one attempt to bridge that gap. Will it be possible for the ISCA to maintain that inclusivity too? Is it inevitable that one or two cultures will dominate? It remains to be seen.

Barbara Morgan