A few nights ago, I had the experience of having my family “constellated,” and it was an extremely powerful experience.

Here’s how it works:

A number of people show up to participate in the constellation—in the group I was part of, there were 14 of us. A facilitator chooses someone in the group as a subject, and the subject then chooses people from the group to represent his or her family members. In my case, I was asked to choose representatives for my father, mother, brother, sister, and myself. Later in the constellation, a representative was chosen by the facilitator, to play my oldest sister who died two years before I was born.

The death of a child is a personal horror of unthinkable proportions. And families handle such things in a variety of ways. In my family, the fact of my deceased sister and the details of her passing (lived three days; died of pneumonia) were not secrets.

What was kept secret, almost always, was the ongoing low-level (and sometimes high-level) grief it caused in all of us—not just my mother, who has spent the last forty-nine Octobers in deep mourning. It wasn’t that any of us was lying to ourselves about it—it’s more that the grief was so deeply buried, so often truly forgotten, so completely subconscious, that it was just left to have its effect on all of us in a way that was inadvertently secret.

Once the subject of the constellation chooses the family representatives, he or she is then asked to position the family members, without thinking, within the circle. It’s considered significant when a member is placed outside of the circle or facing away from the group.

Once the constellation is set, the facilitator begins to question each family-member-representative. There’s no observable rhyme or reason to what the facilitator does as it’s largely (if not entirely) intuitive. Technically, facilitation can be taught, but that’s like saying that someone can be taught to draw:

The basics are teachable, but in my opinion, the facilitation of a family constellation is among the highest of art forms.

The subject does not initially participate in her own constellation, but I was a representative in a later constellation, so I can tell you from experience that it’s an extraordinary experience. As you stand where the subject has placed you, you tap into the consciousness of the person you’re representing. In my own family constellation, for example, the representative for my father was asked how he felt, and the first thing he said was that his feet hurt, which was right on the money. Later, the person representing me spoke of her hands hurting and of carrying really heavy things in front of herself. I’ve had very significant hand issues, which even resulted in surgery on my left hand, due to having carried excessive amounts of weight over my ten years as a personal shopper.

But those uncanny revelations of known family details help mostly to convince the subject that the other, less-known, perhaps even long-secret family details are right on target too.

Nobody really knows where the “magic” comes from that makes the constellation process so powerful. Some say that our intentions within the circle give us access to what’s known as the “Morphogenetic Field”—the field in which we are entirely without boundary, and so everything is revealed. Not even Bert Hellinger, the creator of Family Constellation Therapy, claims to know, but subjects are almost always startled by the revelation of unknowable bits of detail about their own lives and family stories.

I’m not going to share the specifics of my family constellation—not because they’re so top-secret, but because it feels more self-indulgent than helpful at this point. But I will share with you my most significant “Universal” take-away.

Time and again, in both of that evening’s constellations, guilt, shame, grief, and all of their wicked sisters were handed back to those who’d handed them down to us. Mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers were handed back the burdens we’d inadvertently taken from them over the years and carried faithfully ever since.

But the kicker is that every time the burden was handed back, both parties got lighter—both parties felt less burdened.

This is, on first blush, counter-intuitive. But on second blush, it makes PERFECT sense. No burden can be handed to another and actually released in the process. At best, burdens are shared, not given away. If I took on my mother’s grief, there is no way in which that made her burden lighter. In fact, the emotional diminishment of her beloved daughter—me—could only hurt her more. Psychically giving her back her burden of grief—promising her that I would no longer carry it—made her lighter, happier, the immediate recipient of the relief that passes all understanding.

The tiny act of handing back a burden is a brilliantly twisted act, having the power to un-break hearts in a single elegant movement.

There is, for lack of a better term, a lot of magic in the family constellation process, and it’s not just the subject who ends up getting shifted. The fact is, if you change, everything changes, and this process will change anyone who participates in it with an open heart, as well as everyone to whom that person is connected.

Significant illnesses and injuries are healed because individuals are no longer carrying burdens they are not entitled to carry. Decades-old grudges dissolve within weeks. People who never listen, suddenly start asking for details. People who seem hopeless, find hope.

As I write this, my father’s birthday is a few days away, and I feel like my constellation is, in some significant way, a present for him. Never, in all of my years, had it ever occurred to me how he too had suffered in losing his daughter, his first born, the beautiful baby girl he waited for not only for nine months, but for all of his life. I’d never thought about how difficult it must have been for him to hear condolences and awkward silences upon returning to work instead of sharing his joy, especially for a man of so few words. I’m not proud to say this, but I don’t think I ever really saw my father as a fully human being until I saw him represented by a tiny dark-haired woman with big eyes and a beautiful smile who wept at the death of his daughter as though any possibility for full emotional connection had left his body forever.

There’s no telling how many hearts were un-broken the night of my constellation, nor for how many generations the healing will carry forward. But it’s clear to me that there is movement, not just in me, but in my entire family.

Last night I told my daughter about her aunt who died as a baby, and about the grief that my entire family had repressed (a new word I’d taught her recently) only to have it manifest in all of us in all kinds of injuries, illnesses, and addictions. And then with newfound courage, I even told her about the miscarriage I had a year or so before she was born.

She listened with interest, assured me that she was kind of glad she didn’t have an older brother, and seemed to take no burden from it.

When we take no pains to bury such things, they just become part of the natural order—the perfection of everything. Sad things happen. Our job is to welcome all of them, pain and all.

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Letting it Sink In

August 18, 2010

It’s often my inclination to blog (and talk) about my experiences rather than integrating them.

Today is different.

I had a profound experience last night and will not share it now–though I promise to share it soon. I’m only checking in with you now to suggest you do the same.

When something important happens, whether it’s a happy or unhappy happening, do yourself the honor of just being with the experience for a while without naming it or diminishing it with talking or writing.

I’m writing this note to myself, of course. Which, as we are all ONE, includes you.

love,
r

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It’s painfully obvious, isn’t it?

Courtship—that collection of “first moments” we spend with someone who excites us romantically—is a tease. We’re all on our best behavior at that point. We groom ourselves meticulously (or at lease shower regularly) and direct a level of attentiveness toward the object of our affection that is light years beyond the attentiveness we show anyone else.

But most importantly of all, for significant periods of time, we are truly, deeply Present with that person.

And then, at some point, no matter how well the relationship is going, that level of deep Presence almost always goes away. We begin to take that person for granted just a little, as the demands of our lives creep up on us. (How many yoga classes am I willing to miss in order to be with my lover?) We no longer clear everything off of our calendars in order to be with that person, and the far-less-sexy dance of negotiation and compromise gets a regular booking as our opening act.

It makes perfect sense that we do courtship that way because it’s an almost exact parallel of what we experience in the first days, weeks, and months of our lives.

On Day One of your life (in all but a few rare, tragic cases) you have the full attention of at least one of your parents. In best case scenarios, you may have that attention for several months, but typically the demands of your parents’ daily lives creep up on them. (How many baths am I willing to miss to spend every waking second with my baby, who is perfectly happy in her playpen, which, by the way, I can see out of the corner of my eye if I keep the bathroom door open and position the playpen just right…) Mama and baby no longer make long, dreamy eye-contact 24-hours-a-day, and the far-less-devotional dance of “let’s clean this place up” and “dear God, if I don’t have an adult conversation soon I’m going to kill myself” gets a regular booking as mama’s opening act.

It’s that first insidious tease—the tease of mama to baby—that sets up the pattern. We just play it out again and again throughout our lives, unconsciously hoping for a better outcome.

So what would happen if we applied some consciousness to that pattern? What would happen if we promised ourselves the deeply satisfying experience of our own true Presence within each moment and actually delivered on that promise? I don’t suppose we can demand Presence from others in any sort of overt way, but I do suppose we can summon Presence in others just by offering up our own. I suppose some people will be spooked by it and run away, but is that really such a bad thing?

Admittedly, I can only begin to fathom that sort of experience. Something in me knows that it would solve every problem I’ve ever had sooner or later, but the actual accomplishment of it seems somewhat out of reach.

Accomplished practitioners of Presence like Leonard Jacobson and Eckhart Tolle, however, teach us that there is only this one moment, and that it’s rather pointless to plan on a whole run of moments to be spent in any one mindset or on any one issue. If I’m Present in this one moment—aware of the body breathing, aware of the movement of my eyes while reading, aware of the subtle sensation of words entering my consciousness—that’s really the whole enchilada anyway.

That whole courtship debacle probably isn’t going away any time soon. Mothers will always be busy, distracted, and burned out, and courtship will always be something of a sham.

Unless, of course, we bring our full Presence to this one moment.

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(cautionary)
Trev is to Rebecca
as
Sid is to Nancy




(practical)
Trev is to Rebecca
as
Bacon is to Breakfast (the perfect treat now and then, but if you had it every day, it would probably kill you)

(melodramatic)
Trev is to Rebecca
as
Oxygen is to Trapped Miner

(inevitable)
Trev is to Rebecca
as
Jerry is to Elaine

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A few days ago my daughter and I went to see 8 All-American superstars of beach volleyball. Among them was Olympic gold-medalist Todd Rogers.

The evening was arranged so that the four women played three sets and rotated partners after each set, so every woman got to play on the same team as every other. The men did it the same way, and the finale was a 4 against 4 match, with two women and two men on each side.

The only person whose team won every match that evening was Todd Rogers’ team. I think I know why.

Beach volleyball is a fast sport. But with Rogers on your team, something extraordinary happens. When the ball comes to him, everything slows down. I’m not sure if the physics would bear this out; perhaps I’ll research whether anyone ever did a credible study on the Michael Jordan “hang time” phenomena.

What Rogers does is very similar. When he gets the ball, time slows to about half its normal pace. He sets the ball for a teammate, and the teammate goes in for the kill. When it’s Rogers who’s set up for the kill, he’s just as likely to tap the ball over gently (to exactly the right spot) as he is to slam it down the collective throat of the opposing team. He’s known in beach volleyball circles as “The Professor” for just that reason.

He pauses first. And he pauses for as long as he damned well wants to. Then he takes action.

Once I noticed this phenomena, something I hadn’t been aware of while watching him on television, I studied the degree to which the other players were able to slow the ball down. No one did. Could it be that no one had noticed what Rogers was doing?

It was like watching Eckhart Tolle at quarterback for the Green Bay Packers.

I can just imagine the elfin Tolle out there among those huge padded brutes (and in my imagination he’s only wearing a light cotton shirt, a sage vest and kahki’s) using nothing but the force of his own presence to buy all the time he needed to toss the ball gently to whomever would then do whatever football players do…

I like seeing flashes of enlightenment in the sporting world, as well as in other unlikely places. It makes me realize that it’s not so impossible, and that it’s really just about finding a single enlightened response when the ball comes your way. On the court and off, it’s about answering love with love, and it’s about answering a cry for love with love too. That takes some slowing down, and I’ll take my slowing-down lessons wherever I can get them.

(Originally published on www.SpiritualResourcesReview.com, May 1, 2009, by Rebecca Smith)

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52 Tirades to Freedom

July 23, 2010

Spiritual teacher, Leonard Jacobson, talks in his Tuesday night lectures about the benefits of letting out your repressed anger. That repressed anger is what ambushes us, triggers us, makes events in our everyday lives bring us back to that rageful-little-kid place that we all inadvertently go to sometimes. We’ve learned along the way that it’s only okay for us to be rational and socially appropriate, so the (almost always) irrational stuff that comes up when we get triggered usually stays buried. Even if it shows up in bits and pieces, we often slam the door shut on it and keep it as tightly capped as possible.

This has an effect, of course.

That repressed anger doesn’t just go away; it has to pop out somewhere, so it will often manifest in pains and illnesses in the body or it can be projected outward so that we see that anger coming back at us through “someone else” in our more difficult moments in our most difficult relationships.

Jacobson encourages expressing that anger (responsibly, of course) in a way that helps us to see the irrational toddler in us who really believes on some level that those who hurt us deserve nothing short of retaliatory humiliations, extended torture, and death. He talks about “sounding the right note” of that anger, which is ultimately one of just that sort of outrageous infantile ridiculousness.

After last Tuesday’s lecture, I developed a little practice for myself.

It just so happened that one of my relationships–a young man I’ll call Josh–was triggering some rejection issues for me. Now Josh and I had only been chatting for a few days and hadn’t even met. It was ridiculous for me to be triggered by him—there were any number of legitimate reasons for his sudden disappearance, and I had no rational reason to feel the least bit slighted by it.

But there it was: perfect fodder for my practice. I’d simply use Josh as a point of focus and direct all of my ridiculous toddler rage at him.

All day long I checked email (far more than I would normally, as my internet addiction seems to have passed) looking specifically for emails from him, knowing full well that the chances of seeing one were slim to none. Every time I checked and came up empty, I let loose a string of irrational, expletive laden, ultra-rageful venom at “him.” The gist of the tirade was usually some version of, “How %&$@! f***ing dare you ignore me!!!!”

Jacobson says that most (or does he say all?) of our current emotional disturbances are ghosts of our early experiences in which our parents and caregivers were simply not present with us. They may have been physically present, but distracted. They may have had their hands full with our siblings. And worst of all, practically all of them inadvertently “teased” us with their perfect, fawning presence early on, only to then turn their attention to our younger siblings, or the television, or their work, or their cigarettes instead of us.

How %&$@! f***ing dare they ignore us indeed!

It happened to all of us, no matter how attentive our parents tried to be. And it happened to them too, and it happened to everyone in every generation before them as well.

I admit that I had fun with it. I work in a rather relaxed office full of very conscious creative types, and I invited a number of my co-workers to be in on what I was up to. One suggested that I shoot for a total of 26 tirades—that it was a magic number of sorts for emotional release—so I challenged myself to have 26 tirades. When I finished the first 26, however, I had some rage left so I signed up for another round.

My favorite moment of the day came when my boss was giving a co-worker less feedback than she wanted on a project she was working on and he asked rather innocently (while I was in the room), “What exactly do you want from me?” I jumped in with my most cathartic tirade of the day and said, “I’ll tell you exactly what she wants from you! She wants what we all f***ing want! We all want everybody’s undivided attention. We want you and every-f***ing-body else to choose us over all others and all things at all times no matter what! And if anybody thinks that’s NOT what they want deep down, they’re 100% f***ing delusional!”

Oh, yes, that was exactly the right note of irrational-toddler ridiculousness. And it was also, in my not-so-humble opinion, just plain f***ing true.

So the question is: 52 tirades later, how do I feel? And the answer is: bullet-proof. Again tonight, something happened that might very well have triggered the heck out of me, and it didn’t trigger me at all. I wasn’t even tempted to cuss.

Try it, readers. Really.

You might want to spare the more sensitive folks around you from your actual verbal tirades. I just happen to work with a bunch of really spiritually enlightened (and cuss-friendly) people with whom I could share my one-day practice. They were amused and inspired and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if at least two of them give it a shot.

And as always, if you do try it, report back, wouldja?

PS…Thanks, Josh. I love you infinitely.

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Look for Me

July 13, 2010

‎”Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field; I’ll meet you there.”
~ Rumi

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Oos, Ahhs, Hahas, and Ahas

July 7, 2010

Ten things that never fail to knock me out:
• Toddlers at the beach
• A bunch of people all being happy about the same thing
at the same time—a cheering crowd at a sporting event,
[...]

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Guest Blogger Barbara Azzara on Expectations and Disappointment

July 2, 2010

In my head, I always hold this thought: All expectations, requirements, and demands lead to major disappointments.
I have experienced the disappointment of not being able to let go of my demands and of not being able to love unconditionally.
Why, after all the processing and therapy and meditating that I have done, do I still think [...]

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Divine Connection without Distraction is Now Available

July 2, 2010

But…I haven’t figured out how to get a link to it onto this blog! Until then, please cut and paste this address: http://www.createspace.com/3448212. When you get to that page, there’s a link to purchase.
The book is also available on Amazon. Just search by title!
With infinite love and gratitude,
r

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