The Knowing Field Issue 10

This issue is published just after the inaugural meeting of the International Systemic Constellations Association (ISCA) in Köln has taken place. The ISCA is now formally established and a report from the Steering Committee is included at the end of this issue. I returned from Germany with a mixture of feelings, conscious of the different energies of Kloster Bernried and Köln. I wonder how the nourishing, peaceful Bavarian countryside and the limited size of the group impacted on the work we were able to do together at Bernried. This contrasted with the hustle and bustle of Köln and the busyness of a congress, where a few of the tensions in the field seemed to get played out through complaints about the translations. Despite this, there were many excellent lectures and workshops and a lot of enjoyable networking across cultures. I am pleased to include in this issue Daan van Kampenhout’s lecture given at the Congress on his integration of constellation work and shamanism in working with collective trauma.

With ISCA taking the first tangible steps to offer some kind of loose container for the work, it seems like a very good time for us to begin asking ourselves some really searching questions about who we are as Constellators and where the work is heading. As can be seen from the articles in this issue and from contact with people around the world, there is clearly a rich diversity of approaches which can trigger an equivalent variety of reactions and feelings. One way of beginning to address some of these is through dialogue. This also enables us to face some of our fears and challenge our assumptions. In line with this, I am pleased to include in this issue four opinion pieces which I hope will stimulate this dialogue. If we reflect on them for a moment, we see that each picks up a different perspective encouraging us to look in different directions.

Looking back at history, Lisa Iversen challenges us in her letter, originally addressed to the ISCA, to look more deeply into our own roots and personal history but also particularly at the impact on us of the roots and history of the Constellation work and the influence of Bert Hellinger and his relationships with others working in the field. She poses some insightful and pertinent questions to help us begin that process. Johannes Schmidt takes us inside ourselves and challenges us to look more closely at our role as facilitators and the impact on the work of our own internal processes and awareness, as well as at the wider dynamics in the room. Looking outward, Hans Gruenn invites us to examine the way we interface with the world. He sees some of the difficulties we have in this area as being to do with our own shadow and the the knowing field way this is mirrored by the sceptical public, and he offers a developmental model: spiral dynamics, as one way of providing ourselves with a map for navigating the complex territory of constellation work.

Daniel MacLean takes up the other polarity as he moves us beyond the edge of our awareness: he expresses his concern that the awe, the vastness and the mystery of ‘that which will not be contained’, may be lost in our attempts to find a fit for ourselves with the outside world. We have a further demonstration of the diversity of approaches in the field in other articles. Dimitris Stavropoulos and Alfred Austermann offer us two ways of providing support beyond the boundaries of our families by drawing on the ancient archetypes. In the constellations section, Alemka Atkins and Lisa Iversen show with moving examples some of the tentative steps Australia and the USA are beginning to make into the painful effect of their colonial histories, whilst Sneh Victoria Schnabel gives us a taste of what can happen when we allow the field to expand and move through chaos. This section is completed with two brief but moving examples of Constellation work from Edward Lynch. ‘Friends’ of the Journal These people have agreed to make a regular annual payment to support the journal.

If you wish to become a ‘Friend’ you can do so by visiting the website www.theknowingfield.com and clicking on Friends and Donations. Constellation Work Trainings Ltd. We are invited to allow our souls to be touched with three personal contributions from Colette Green, Richard Bundy and Amina Halwani. These are contrasted by the structured approach used by the three organisational articles. Henriette Katharina Lingg brings us the third and final part of her series demonstrating Management Constellations, while Marco Matera and Riccardo Benardon offer an innovative way of working very briefly with constellations using pieces of string. The final piece in this organisational section is a research article from Joseph Roevens and Peter van den Berg that begins to demonstrate the possible benefits of organisational constellations. The ‘News from around the World’ section brings yet more countries into the arena, offering the first Scandinavian contributions to the journal: Denmark and Sweden. Alongside these, the Middle East steps forward with two contributions from Israel and the European map fills in some of its missing pieces with submissions from Spain, Italy, Poland and Greece.

If your country has not yet been represented here, you are invited to send in your news for the next issue. Up till now, I have always waited for themes to emerge when compiling articles for each issue of The Knowing Field. On this occasion, I am proposing to experiment with a different approach and invite articles for the next issue on a theme I see already emerging in the field. It became clear to me when I was at Kloster Bernried that many factions of people are involved with this work and that assumptions exist in each of those factions. Some dialogue will hopefully be provoked from the opinion pieces contained in this issue. To take this dialogue a stage further, I would like to invite people to write about their particular faction, for example: June 2007 We then have a couple of snippets from Vivian Broughton and Richard Bundy before the final section, which I have headed ‘Recent Events in Germany’.

Following Daan van Kampenhout’s lecture, I have included a selection of comments from participants at each of the three events held in Germany in May – the International Intensive at Kloster Bernried, the International Congress at Köln and the inaugural meeting of the ISCA. Although these submissions can in no way claim to be representative, they may in some way offer the reader a flavour of the three events. It seems fitting at this time of transition to round off this issue with the report from the Steering Committee on the ISCA from the country where Constellation work was founded.

My grateful thanks once again to my core team for their unfailing support with editing, advising on practical, political, financial and selling issues and their positive encouragement. Thank you also to the Assistant Editors for stepping in to help out with editing when needed.

Barbara Morga