Special Family Constellations with Mathew Blom

What magical experience for a soul group of over 20 beautiful beings. Mathew was masterful in fascilitating and demostrating a deep and personal healing on my family, which touched and healed everyone in attendance. I am still personally integrating and have much to say about this new shamanic psycho-drama therapy, but for sake of this blog, I'll boil it down to the essentials.

Bert Hellinger (German, founder) describes Family Constellations as: "a phenomenological method of doing systemic psychotherapy. That means that in a group, a person collects himself and selects representatives for the members of his family –including one for himself- and places them in a space in relationship to one another, following only his own intuition. And as soon as those people have taken up their places they feel like the people they represent without knowing them. So by means of the Family Constellation, we get a real picture of what is going on in the family."

After a number of fun icebreakers and a centering meditation. Mathew conducted my intake interview infront of everyone. Here is the general line of questions and answers:
What hurts?
My first born son is almost three years old, and though I'm technically over my postpardum depression, I still find myself hating motherhood.

And what makes you think this issue might have to do with your family constellation?
My Abuelita (grandmother) who recently died, had sixteen children. She started when she was 15 and was pregant and nursing into her 40's. I can only imagine that she sometimes hated motherhood.

Yes, I can certainly see how that is relevant. Can you tell me about your mother?
She's an angry depressive, who loved us all very much, but yelled and blamed and made it unsafe to be a child.

Where are you in your family structure?
I have two older brothers and one younger brother. I'm the only girl, and for a long time I hated being a woman. The mexican culture is very machismo, and I became a feminist to rebell against that power structure.

And your first-born is a boy?
Yes.

And what about your abuela's first born?
He died at a young age. He was swept away in a flood. My grandfather once told me that they never got over it. They kept trying, they never had a son like the first one.

OK. Got it. So Let's start there...
Mathew asked for three volunteers to play my mother, my abuela and me. Without knowing who was to "represent" who, Mathew asked me to intuitively place them in "the field."
The players immediately assumed new body possitions and began to feel and voice into their characters.
The woman in my role dropped to her knees in what she described in heavy hopeless dispare.
The woman playing my mother stood strong and angry.
After about 10 minutes another character was "drafted" to play the role of my dead uncle who was angry at first: "I just want to punch the door!" When he calmed down we were able to welcome him back into the family and when he was told that he will always belong, he got down on his knees and bowed at my feet. And then he laid down in peace and said "I'm done." 
Kleenex were passed around and much cathartic healing was shared.

I look forward to hosting Mathew for a deeper weekend workshop in San Diego, sometime next year. Mathew can be reached at http://www.mathewblom.com/ Let me know if you're interested in his return.

The event was not only profound for me personally, but professional sparked many ideas for the developing modality called: Tantra Theater. I've been using the power of improvisation and the morphogenic agreement field to inspire many deep sacred sexual stories and personal narrative. I'm intersted to see how this form can help my players "channel" powerful tantra teachings onstage.

I don't belive Bert Hellinger ever intended to use his phenomenological method to practice tantra, but when he was asked: What areas can your systemic method be applied? Here's how he responded:
"There is a tendency at present that we extend the field away from psychotherapy and include many other areas, because it seems in them what I call orders of love -which lead to entanglements- can be applied in ways which lead to solutions. As an example I mention the work in prisons. We were in London last year and we worked in three prisons; it was very astonishing how the work was positively received by the prisoners. In Germany there is now research being done on how to apply this work in prisons. My suggestion was that we work first with murderers and their victims, because that seems to be the extreme case and it shows the laws best. I think if we can gather from them ways of solving these difficult issues then it can be extended more easily to other fields. Another field is schools for instance. Teachers can do that, apply that without being psychotherapists. Or in social work it can be easily applied. And to find solutions for relationship difficulties in organizations too, as we did in the workshop here in Santiago on September 3. So we try to get away from the restrictions of psychotherapy and apply in a wider field. And I think that's quite in harmony with what you actually want to achieve."
(By Humberto del Pozo in Santiago de Chile, 1999. Translated from Spanish by Humberto del Pozo in Santiago de Chile, September 1999. )

Stay tunned as the organic art of tantra theater continues to develop. By Kamala Devi, Author of Don't Drink the Punch, Sacred Sexual Healing, Tantra Teacher and Sacred Sex and Open Relationship Coach www.BlissCoach.com