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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
By Yael Reiss
Imagine a life in which you
Take your time:
To cook
To love
To sleep
To fall in love again
To breath
To eat
To look at the sunlight breaking on the waves
To go for a walk
To catch up with a good friend
To listen to your body
To listen to your soul
To really listen
To listen to what really someone is saying
To really be with those you really love
To hug
To embrace
To embrace the beauty
To embrace what you have
To enjoy
To have fun
To be
Take your time to heal yourself
By Yael Reiss
All human beings and all their problems somehow can sum down into one simple thing:
We all try to avoid pain.
The problem with avoiding pain is that life has pain in it. Life has pain and life has joy in it. By trying to avoid the pain in life we try to avoid a part of life, thus we always minimize our lives, in the fruitless attempts to avoid something that cannot be avoided.
Think about any problem that you are stuck with. What is the pain that you are trying to avoid?
When you are courageous enough to stop avoiding this pain and letting yourself go through it, that’s when the problem will no longer be a problem.
When people allow themselves to go through the pain, they come out of it on the other side. Often people come out on the other side of pain stronger and perhaps even more joyful than before.
An extremely important example is avoiding the pain in grief of separation. I see people who are in relationships that are damaging themselves, their partner and the children – and they feel unable to leave the relationship.
The same with not letting go of a workplace that is no longer healthy for the person, a friendship that is consuming energy in unhealthy ways, etc.
It is not an inability to leave the relationship. It is unwillingness to experience the pain of grief in separation.
Only people who go through the grief, with all the pain in it, can come out on the other side of grief with energy to live life fully again.
In my view, Mother Nature has given us grief, like any emotion, so when it goes through us, it has a certain energy that does what is needed to be done.
As we go through the pain of no-longer-having-what-or-who-we-had, when we come out on the other side of grief, we feel a renewed energy to participate in life in a new way.
This is only one example of the importance of being brave enough to stop trying to avoid pain. Because each time we try to avoid pain, in an ironic way, it tends to prolong the pain and put us into some kind of suffering anyway.
In each family there is always an emotional pain that was attempted to be avoided throughout the generations. This is often when people find themselves overwhelmed with trying to figure out what is wrong.
Family Constellations workshops are a very special and effective way to let yourself look into and safely experience the pain that was avoided through generations in your family.
Doing so, you will be the first brave person in your family in generations to have gone through that familiar pain, and out to the other side of it. Enabling yourself, as well as the generations to come, to live life fully in a new way.
FamilyConstellations
By Yael Reiss
You might be familiar with the Star Wars motto: May the force be with you.
I have a motto in life, that I say just slightly differently to the Star Wars one:
May YOU be with the force.
What do I mean?
Have you ever felt you were stuck in a situation or in life in general? That something just doesn’t flow, it’s just HARD, difficult, it doesn’t work, you’re not sure about it and can’t make up your mind, it doesn’t feel right, it feels wrong, you’re doing it because you HAVE TO, because YOU SHOULD, because you HAVE NO CHOICE, it’s boring, time is just soooo slowwwww, your energy is not into it, etc.
Basically, whatever it is that you’re stuck on, just seems to suck more and more of your energy.
That is what happens when you go against your life force.
Your life force is your life energy, your soul or spirit, it’s YOU.
In that place where you are just purely your life force there are no fears or worries or concerns, there are no agendas and no attachment to outcomes. It’s just purely you, your life force, your life energy.
Your soul and life force tends to flow to wherever it is that is your soulful: places, activities, people, hobbies, occupation, etc. When you let your life force flow, you get more and more energy from whatever it it you are doing, so although you put energy into doing it, you only seem to end up with much more energy:
When you are in these places that for you are soulful, you feel alive; when you are engaging in these activities you feel energized; when you are being with these people you feel calm and experience love and kindness; while engaging with these hobbies you lose track of time; and while “working” in an occupation that feels that you were born to do, that feels like a hobby, it feels effortless, you feel that you are just playing and having fun and even get paid well to do that! That is YOU – your soul and life force.
When you keep out of the way of your life force, it flows effortlessly and what you feel is joy and ease. You always get more and more energy.
Unfortunately in our society, culture, day and age, too many of us have learnt to believe that making a living while spending time with loved ones or in any way living effortlessly – isn’t possible in reality. And so we’ve learnt mostly to resist and stand in the way of our life force, preventing it from just naturally and effortlessly flowing.
To relearn the simple and magical fact of your life force and how to let yourself live life effortlessly and joyfully is, in a way, to become today’s Jedi. It is quite simple and possible actually, believe it or not. In one sentence it can be summed up: Keeping out of the way of your life force, and letting it flow. Or: May YOU be with the force.
The Family Constellations workshops, especially being a representative/resonating, is a wonderful way to experience and learn this simple ability we all possess: to be with the force. So, come join us to the upcoming workshop!
By Yael Reiss
What has Mother Nature given us emotions for?
The way I see it, Mother Nature had to have a really good and very simple reason to have given us emotions.
She’s given us a whole array of different emotions.
Have you noticed that each emotion comes and fills us with different energy?
I feel that Mother Nature has given us this variety of emotions, each of them giving us a certain kind of energy to do what is needed to be done at a certain moment.
For instance:
She’s given us ANGER in order to keep our boundaries intact.
When someone is trespassing our boundary, we become angry.
Mother Nature intended us to use this energy in a way that is efficient and effective – not too little not too much, achieving safety in a healthy boundary.
BUT, in modern society, people are scared to let this energy that we call anger go through them. Instead, they bottle it up. A bottled up emotion, is an emotion that we didn’t let go through us and do what it came here to do. This unspent emotion then rots. Rotten anger is what we know as resentment, as rage, or as depression. It’s an emotional abscess: it rots you from within as resentment and depression do, or it bursts out unpleasantly at the external world as rage.
Only when we have the courage to let each emotion go through us and fulfil it’s energy, can we enjoy the original purpose it came here for, as well as not having to suffer the consequences of bottling it up for the long term.
Anger is just one example, enough for this short post. Mother Nature of course had a great reason to give us each of the other emotions, such as love, shame, guilt, calm, etc. I might write about them some time.
All families have emotional abscesses that have been ascending down generations. Emotions that were bottled and trapped and unspent in our parents, grandparents and even further down the generations. This undealt-with emotion, which no one in the family so far has had the courage to face and learn how to let through them in a way that is effective – this emotion comes down to us so naturally. We are born into it and believe that that is how life is and should be. Or if we already know that that is NOT how life should be, we still find it extremely unsafe to experience it, and we don’t even know know how, as we’ve never seen it done properly.
Systemic Family Constellations workshop is a great opportunity to experience that emotion that is trapped on your lineage, in a safe way, that enables it to fulfil itself in you (and in your children) in the future.