When I see children, I usually ask the parent/s to participate in the session. I can’t help the child without seeing the parents. Most of the work is actually with the parents when I see a child. Or more accurately, a lot of the work is with the child that this parent once was him or herself.

When I see adults, I never really see just the adult. I always see the child that this adult once was.

I see this big man in front of me as the boy he was growing up.

I feel how it feels to be in the body and height and weight of that child, in the clothes that this little boy was wearing. I feel how it feels to look at the adults in this child’s life from this child’s height and eyes, and how it feels to hear them from his ears and child’s brain, and I imagine clearly from this child’s brain what thoughts and conclusions can be made when the important adults in your life are treating you one way or another. Or not treating you at all.

I feel how it feels to be respected as a child or to be spanked with a wooden spoon. Did you ever think of the fact that when an adult hits a child with a spoon, not only does it hurt more as it hits the child’s body. The adult doesn’t feel at all the pain that they inflict.

This is not at all limited to therapy.

If you’ll have a look, you can see the little kid in any person you’re interacting with. Even with children by the way, you can see the younger child they were. You can see the little child in the person you’re interviewing, in the prime minister, in the real estate agent, in your child’s teacher, in your friend, etc.

When I see my husband, even when I’m upset with him, I see the boy that he was. When I interview a builder, I see the boy that he was, and the man this boy had become, and I immediately know this specific person is going to build the best house for me.

Go to the little child you were, and look at them, and really see that little child. And tell that child that you once were: I see you. I see you feel _________. What will this child feel if you could accurately tell them that you feel that they feel?

Most people report that their young self is teary, relieved, comforted, and so on. Even, and especially, if it is a tough emotion that you see them feeling.

It brings peace into your nervous system and to your sense of self to just be seen. As simple as that. Before we go fixing anything, first we need to be seen.

Seeing the tree in a seed and the seed in the tree.

If you’re fascinated about seeing the people around you deeply and you’ve considered joining The Art of Seeing training – this is the time!

You are warmly welcomed into the group.

To Register please fill in the form: Registration form for Art Of Seeing 2 Day Workshop / Registration form for Art Of Seeing Full Training

Please feel comfortable to contact me with any questions.

Warmly,

Yael

Over the years I’ve found that there are questions that are like bullets. They shoot straight into the core. 

Questions that help people to see themselves or others to their core in a new and profound way.

One of these questions is: 

Please fill in:

Mum / Dad, I wish you could _________…

This question is helpful at any age, young or old. As a matter of fact, I find that people I see in their seventies tend to change the quickest.

It’s as if I’m asking: if you could ask the “Parents-Fairy” for a wish what would it be?
My real question is: what are you lacking right now? But I find it shoots straight into the core when I ask people to please fill in:

Mum / Dad, I wish you could _________…

I feel that the outcome of any successful therapeutic process (or any successful growth process) is maturing into parenting yourself in the way you needed your parents to parent you. Your parents were lacking something themselves, in a way that made them unable to give you something basic and important that you needed.

Whatever the answer to this question is, I take the answer and bring it back to you as a gift to give yourself.

For example, often people say: “Mum, I wish you’d stop criticizing me about my parenting”.

I then ask them: what would you wish she do instead?

“Mum, I wish you’d tell me that I’m doing a good job parenting my children.”

I then tell them: 

Tell yourself: “[Your name], please stop criticizing me for the way I parent.

[Your name], please tell me I’m doing a good job parenting my children.” 

“Mum, please stop caring about what others think. Please pay attention to me and to what I truly need.”

“[Your name], please stop caring about what others think. Please pay attention to yourself and to what you truly need, Yael.”

“Dad, please work less and spend more time with me.”

“[Your name] please work less and spend more time with yourself.”

“Mum, please tell me the truth.”

“[Your name], please tell yourself the truth / please know your truth/ please trust your truth.”

I’ve given here only a few examples. The list is endless.

How do you know you’re in the right spot?

When you feel touched. 

When you feel touched by saying back to yourself what you needed from your parents, you know you’re there.
This can be your homework now: to parent yourself in that healthiest way that you needed which your parents couldn’t give you back then. 

If you’ve found your own questions that help you SEE, you know how exciting and helpful this is. Please share them with me too.

I look forward to The Art of Seeing training, to share and to inspire you to taste the effects of words and other communications in a way that helps you SEE.

I am creating this training because I am a trainer and LOVE teaching. I call it being an edutainer. I love it when people come and have profound experiences, have fun, and learn so much. This kind of learning and teaching isn’t just fun and effortless, it also sinks deep inside, into different levels of our being. With this kind of learning, you don’t have to memorise a thing, or think and plan. Instead, you will find yourself in a state of flow in life and when you work with people. In this state of flow everything that you’ve learned by experience and having fun just comes and does the job through you.
Of course, a nice ‘side effect’ of such training is the healing we often get by looking into our own issues and being SEEN during the exercises and the questions we ask in the training.

I warmly welcome you to the training and look forward to going through these special experiences together.

People from different walks of life have asked me if The Art of Seeing training is suitable for them, or if they are suitable for the training.

My husband and I were on our weekly walk together. My husband is an engineer and manages big projects. 

My husband told me he is interviewing. He is looking for someone that can think a bit outside the box and have enough initiative to get big projects going. 

He said to me, “I don’t know why I’m interviewing. You never know how the person you employ is going to do eventually. Only after they work for you for a while you can know”.

I replied “Well… why don’t you come to my training, ‘The Art of Seeing’ in November and learn how to know a lot about who the person is from a little chat with them?’

My husband did sit in all the NLP trainings I conducted back in Israel 20 years ago. He was assisting me with the technical aspects. While he sat there quietly, he did also learn a lot.

Since he needs to know it now, he asked me if I could give him a clue. A clue about how could he know a lot about who the person is from just a little interview.

I spontaneously gave him a few questions. He was so happy that he wrote them down quickly and uses them now in his interviewing process.

Here are a couple of the questions I gave him:

# Tell me about your work experience, but not about how many years or what role. Tell me about your internal experience: how did you feel, how did you think, what did you see? (This one is my husband’s favourite question.)

# Tell me about a holiday in which something went completely wrong / not as you planned. (This one is my favourite question.)

# How do you know that you did a good job? It can be doing a good job in a project, or even better, in making dinner or anything interesting that you did.  

I helped my husband understand how you can know so much about the person from their answers as well as from the way they relate to the questions. About how someone with enough initiative will find it interesting to answer these kinds of questions. While, someone with low initiative will struggle with the questions in and of themselves and will find it difficult to relate to the questions.

My daughter heard our discussion about it later at home. She  liked it too. She’s on a student job hunt now. She said she wished her interviewers asked her these kinds of questions too. Underlying this wish is the wish to truly be seen for how capable she is. To be seen for what she truly is, rather than what her interviewer needs to tick off their list.

If you are curious about The Art of Seeing, if you are passionate about being able to see people truly and deeply, you’ve ticked the main prerequisite for the training! We welcome you to join us as a wonderful part of the training group, whatever walk of life you come from.

On a personal note: I am a trainer and LOVE teaching. I call it being an edutainer. I love it when people come and have profound experiences, have fun, and learn so much. This kind of learning and teaching isn’t just fun and effortless, it also sinks deep inside, into different levels of our being. With this kind of learning, you don’t have to memorise a thing, or think and plan. Instead, you will find yourself in a state of flow in life and when you work with people. In this state of flow everything that you’ve learned by experience and having fun just comes and does the job through you.

I warmly welcome you to the training and look forward to going through these special experiences together.

Have you ever had an experience of being seen, in a way that touched you to your core? Imagine what that feels like to be seen in this way. Without saying much at all. Without making an effort. Without explaining what you yourself don’t even know. A young adult came to see me. It was her first session. She was depressed and anxious and had been taking antidepressants for too many years for someone so young. She reported that she suffered severe side effects but still continued to take them, although they didn’t relieve her anxiety and depression. I asked her: ‘why do you continue taking them if you suffer all these severe side effects and don’t get any benefit?’ Her answer was: ‘Because the doctor wants me to take them’. ‘Does he know about your side effects?’ ‘Yes, but he still wants me to take them.’ ‘So you take these pills that give you all this pain, because he wants you to take them?’ ‘Yes.’ Then I felt something strongly and asked her: Had you been molested as a child? She was very surprised about the question and answered that she had been molested as a child. We had a long chat about her childhood trauma and about doing what people want you to do. She came back and in her second session she shared with me how much better she felt and that she felt it was a turning point in her wellbeing. When I asked her for permission to share this story here, not only did she give me her permission and blessing. She also wrote back that she thinks it is a very important message to be spread, and that being seen can sometimes be life changing. Would you like to know how to see people to their core within minutes? Would you like to do that without them having to explain, without having to think, but from a place of flow? Join us at:

The Art of Seeing training

I’ve been asked for book recommendations about Family Constellations.

There’s so many beautiful books that I’ve read. Here is a chosen selection of my top recommendation of where to start.

Happy reading!
Yael

Surrender

Going Beyond the Story
By Yael Reiss

Human beings live inside stories.
We are born into a story and live in it from the day we are born.

We are most often unaware that it is a story, and mistake it for reality. We are convinced it is reality, that things are this way, and that things should be one way or another. This causes us great pain and occupies our thoughts and actions in unnecessarily painful ways.

I like to imagine looking at human life from the point of view of an alien from outer space:

Seeing so many humans struggle with weight, entrenched in a story that only a certain weight “looks good” and will “make them happy”.
Seeing so many humans entrenched in a story that they “should be happy”/have a lot of friends/ have an amazing wedding party or birthday party/ get to the top, etc.
We forget or are unaware that these are only stories. We try and try to make our lives fit into these stories perfectly – otherwise we cannot be happy.

I went for a paddle this morning, expecting it to be “paddle perfect”, that the water will be mirror-like calm. By the time I got the kayak into the water and started paddling, the wind picked up slightly. The water became choppy and I had to work harder to paddle. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see as much marine life as I would if it was “paddle perfect”, mirror-like, calm water. I began to let myself be disappointed and thought about turning back. It didn’t meet my story that paddles should be “paddle perfect”. Then, I caught myself with my story. I let myself see if I could enjoy the imperfect paddle, as is. I noticed that my body is enjoying the motion of paddling and being outdoors. I had a wonderful experience of enjoying what is, rather than suffering from my unmet expectations – my story.

I see couples who love each other very much, but let themselves be disappointed when their partner doesn’t meet their story of how things should be.  

Some couples, even after being together for decades haven’t yet formed their “us” story.  A couple comes from two families. That means that there are two different stories that can’t both be met. This is a new, third story that the couple needs to write together.

To practice surrendering and going beyond the stories, be curious, identify and observe the story behind anything that you are unhappy or worried about.

Once you’ve become aware of the story, it is possible to start practicing surrendering to what is.

Start with little things, such as my surrender during my paddle. It’s like when you’re making a recipe and miss an ingredient. You find some other way to make that recipe from what is available. Often it turns out great, at times even better than the original recipe.

Look at the partner that you have, instead of at the partner that you ‘should’ have according to your story.

When you’re ready, surrender to bigger things such fear of dying, disease, and things not going the way you planned.

Practice surrendering to all possibilities, including those that go against our stories. Surrendering to the possibilities that we don’t like is what enables us to be at peace. Ironically, being at peace with what we don’t like decreases our chances of having to meet these unwanted possibilities. Even unwanted events such as dying or illness can be met with calmness when we surrender to what is beyond the story we tell ourselves. The story that we should live to a certain age, or be in a certain state, or achieve a certain achievement. 
As my mentor Louise says: “The purpose of life is life”.

Family Constellations workshops are a deep and profound way to identify your unconscious stories and start practicing surrender. It gives us an ability to identify unconscious stories that run in families for generations. These insights are only possible to gain in a group setting.

U-turn

When you find yourself trying to explain, justify, convince, over apologize, blame, try to make the other person understand you – it’s time to make a U-turn.

Whenever you find yourself aiming your attention in any way to the other person trying to get them to do something so you will feel better – it’s time to U-turn.

By U-turn I mean:
Turn 180 degrees: take your attention away from that person, and turn into YOU.

Example: if you are trying to convince someone or make them see how right you are, stop. Turn and look inside. If you are happy with what you find inside and feel right about it, just let yourself be with your own feeling and opinion about it. And that’s it.
Simple. Not complex.
Very simple.
And, if, on the other hand, you are not happy with what you find inside when you  turn inward – it is your job with yourself to do something about it. It is not the other person’s job to make you feel better, in most cases.

This takes some courage. Courage to be honest with yourself. Courage to rely on your own feelings, intuitions and opinions. Courage to be content with your own love to yourself. Courage to read your own body and your own life energy. Courage to parent yourself instead of asking the other person to parent you, in the way that your childhood parent wasn’t capable of parenting you. The courage to parent yourself in the healthy way that you needed then in your childhood, as well as now.

Do you know what empathy is?
Empathy is our natural ability to know and feel what other people are feeling.
It is one of the most important skills for healthy relationships.

When I talk about empathy, I DON’T mean sympathy and I DON’T mean being an empath. In sympathy you feel some kind of care for the other person. “Empath” is usually used to describe someone who not only knows what other people are feeling, but also tries to “fix” it for them.

When I talk about empathy, I refer to our natural ability to know what someone else is feeling, without doing anything about it. Just knowing deeply how they feel, in a way that we feel it for a moment. That is how we most deeply understand the other person. Deeply understanding the other person enables deep connection, good communication and a flow in the relationship. Any kind of relationship will come to a flow naturally with empathy. there is not much that needs to be done other than that, because once you have empathy to know what the other person truly feels, you cannot not understand them and then you cannot not unblock anything that was in the way of the relationship being healthy.

I tell men: “Tell her ‘I UNDERSTAND’”, and take a moment before you say that, and truly understand what she feels. Don’t be stuck in being right.

Being right, even when we are totally right, always blocks empathy and leaves us lonely and isolated. Empathy, understanding how she FEELS, has nothing to do with thoughts or with being right or wrong. It is JUST understanding / knowing how she FEELS. When you do that – all will unfold in the best ways.

An interesting thing is, that we can do empathy even without being near the other person and without seeing them, and even without knowing them or having met them. Yes. We all can. It’s a natural ability, that we are not taught at school or nearly anywhere in modern society. We are not taught that we simply have this ability and how to hone our empathy skill.

And that is what we do in our Family Constellations workshops. In these workshops I offer a place for people to come and practice empathy for two hours, FREE of charge.  People who participate as resonators learn so much about how to use this natural ability for empathy and learn so much about relationships and about themselves.

I  recommend this to many people I see, and most of all to the men I see that come to see me in order to better their relationships in their life; couple, parent-child, work relationship, any relationship will benefit from that.
Upbringing of men in modern society discourages them from the age of about 3 years old to stop tuning in to emotions (ie: “don’t cry, don’t be a girl, toughen up”). The good news is that you can open up this channel again at any age.

If you haven’t yet found out what these workshops are about, and you can make a couple of hours on a Saturday morning,  it may be something worth doing spontaneously, without asking too many questions, just doing something new and surprising, with an open mind.

If on the other hand, you’ve been to these workshops before, you know what I’m talking about, come along and enjoy the Constellations magic again. It’s FREE to participate as a resonator.  So if you’re itching to have a couple hours to dive into the magic, let me know and come along!

Sharing with you here another draft page from my book-in-writing.
Let me know what it did in you to read it.
Warmly,
Yael

Chemically Modified Humans

By Yael Reiss

Perfume makes us smell “nice”.

Make-up makes us look “good”.

Hair dye makes sure we have a “great” hair color.

Hair growth pills “help” us not get bald.

Alcohol “helps” us “have fun” and “enjoy” each other’s company.

Artificial flavors make the food taste “better”.

Anti-depresants “relieve” our depression.

Anti-anxiety pills “relieve” our anxiety.

Imagine a world in which:

People smell like people,

Look like people,

Have the hair color they were born with and the hair color their age creates,

Have heads full of hair or bald, according to their genetics.

A world where people sit together or dance together “unaided” by alcohol, just simply enjoy being together, connecting with each other.

A world in which humans eat food that has “only” its true taste.

A world in which people address their emotional issues by talking to someone about it, and are kind to their nervous systems by having balance, sleep, and a daily walk.

When people suffer from anxiety or depression they go to the doctor and the doctor prescribes them anti-anxiety or antidepressant medications.

When someone breaks an arm, the doctor doesn’t just give them painkillers. They bind the arm in a cast and help the body to heal its own broken bone.

Imagine a world in which anxiety and depression are healed in the same way: not by “pain-killing” it, but by helping the soul to heal its own broken bones.

Dear Reader,

In this page from my book, I don’t intend to insult or criticize anyone taking antidepressants or dyeing their hair.

I sometimes imagine looking at planet Earth from an alien’s eyes, from outer space. I see all the different animals going about their lives. And then I see humans, making tremendous efforts to appear the same. As one of these humans, I feel the pain of trying to fit in, and I have a deep love for who we truly are.

Warmly.
Yael Tsvieli Reiss

I wanted to share with you a draft page from my book-in-writing.

My book’s name is The Time Mirror, and it is a collection of transformational metaphors and unwritten laws of life. 
These are metaphors and observations that I came up with while seeing people, conveying to them what I see.
Many of the people with whom I shared these metaphors in sessions had eye-opening moments. Some reported that these eye-openers affected them deeply and even changed their thinking and behaviour from then on.
They say it is hard now to stop seeing what they didn’t see that they were doing to themselves and to others.

Well, you’re invited to read and perhaps it will aid you too, to see clearly.

The Time Mirror

By Yael Reiss

Time  is a mirror.

Time is a mirror of what is actually important to you.

If you think something is important to you, but it does not show up in your time, it is only ideally important to you. It is not actually important to you.

And vice versa.
If you think something is not that important to you, but it takes a lot of your time, this is what is actually important to you. Even if ideally, you wouldn’t want it to be so important to you. 

Some common actually-but-not-ideally “importances” modern people find on their time mirror when they are honest with themselves include social media, screens, shopping, and work addiction.

My personal story about this metaphor

The Time Mirror is actually a metaphor I came up with to help myself see what I was doing to myself and others.
When my children where young and little, I used to “find myself” in front of the screen at night after they went to bed, “not being able to stop” for hours.
When I found myself fatigued the next day after so little sleep, bad quality after-screen sleep, I was cranky and becoming unwell with adrenal fatigue.

One night, as I was reaching out for my laptop, I said enough. And I told myself that time is a mirror, and that if my health and being a good mum isn’t to just be ideally important to me, I must give time to it here and now.
And that is just what I did. That was all it took for me then.

I hope in some way this inspires you.
I would love to hear and read feedback from you.

Warmly,
Yael Tsvieli Reiss
+61-431-837878