By Yael Reiss

There is one effective question that you can ask yourself in a way that will help you guide yourself successfully in most, if not all things in life, small or big. The question is:

‘Does it make me stronger or weaker?’

Life is constant decision making. So many moments in our waking hours are moments in which we need to make a decision. Whether it is about deciding what to eat or what not to eat, whether to say something or not, and how to say it, whether to surrender to our fears or walk through them, whether to try something new or not, etc.

When we take this question with us in life, it can be our most effective guide.

Try it and see what you think.

By Yael Reiss

There are unwritten laws in life that can be observed, of how things work and don’t work. When we hear about these unwritten laws we tend to feel that, “Yes, actually that makes sense, that is how it is”. And one I want to bring to your attentions today is: In order to move forward in life, we first need to acknowledge what was.

One context that is helpful to apply, is a couple relationship, such as a second marriage. In order to be truly emotionally free to move on to a new relationship, the previous relationship must be acknowledged and honoured. When two people separate they can only truly separate when they are able to say to the other “Thank you for what you have given me, it’s a lot and I cherish it. What I gave you, I gave gladly, and it’s yours to keep.” The separating partners can only separate when they say “I take the responsibility on my part for what went wrong between us, and your part I leave with you.” They also need to be able to say: “With my whole heart, I wish you all the best.” When they can say these three things, then they can move on much more freely with their lives. 
Of course, at times it might be difficult to say. When people do not part on good terms there is an anger there, that acts as what I call “a binding material”, which does not allow a true separation to happen. When someone is angry at another, they are preoccupied with them, and thus not fully available emotionally to move on in life. In order to be able to say those sentences and mean them, they must somehow stop being angry. The best cure for overcoming anger is compassion and love. I know, in the case of a bad separation this sounds contradictory, still however it is one of the only true cures. 
Acknowledging what was enables us to look at this in the broader context, in a way that allows  us to gain more understanding. What I mean by this is, to consider “where did the other person come from, where did their parents come from, what happened in their life that brought them to be the way they are”. Also, to look at “where did I come from, my own childhood, as well as my ancestry”. Furthermore, reflecting on the good that brought the couple together initially can help bring insights and relieve some of the anger.
Something very interesting happens when we take a look at these things. Somehow when we look at the broader context of where we come from and where the other comes from, it enables compassion and love to flow in a way that dissipates the anger, in a way that enables a separating couple to acknowledge the goodness in the relationship as well as their own part in the breakdown of the relationship. 
Another example for a way to acknowledge what was, in a way that helps reduce anger, can be to acknowledge the partner for the children they have together. A person can say “thank you for the child we brought into this world, without you I wouldn’t have this beautiful child”. This helps a person feel grateful more than angry; without the partner the child they have would never have existed. 

These are just a few points to prompt the mind to think about how acknowledging what was helps us move on and move forward in life. Acknowledging the past can be effectively applied in almost any context in which we feel we cannot move forwards, in our personal life, and even in business and in organizations. “Acknowledging what was” can be even more effective when it goes together with “acknowledging what is”, but that is a topic for another blog post….

By Yael Reiss

This post is about my introduction to Family Constellations, and how it unexpectedly (at the time) helped me deal with a longstanding issue I had with my mother.

How did my involvement in Family Constellations start? I had heard from a good friend about Family Constellations, and she said to me that there’s no real way she can explain what it is; the only way to understand would be to experience it for myself.

I was curious and intrigued, and I had a problem that was on my mind forever. My problem was that I couldn’t feel “belonging”, even though I had friends and family that I love and who love me. I found it hard to trust that I belong and that was painful. It was exacerbated by immigrating to Australia quite a few years ago.

Anyway, I went to this Family Constellations workshop, and I was always very connected to my father’s side of the family, and so I started telling the history of my father’s side. The facilitator didn’t let me speak too much, and she asked me what I know about the history of my mother’s side. I replied that I actually don’t know too much. I told her the little that I knew, and then she started placing representatives for my mother, for my grandmother, and some others. The representative for my grandmother felt a very very deep pain, and emotional grief. This representative felt a sense of grief that she reported felt to her perhaps as a pain of losing a sibling at a young age. There was something there that felt like a very, very big loss, a trauma. I was not aware of any trauma on my grandmother’s side, and the facilitator had a sense that perhaps it had to do with the Holocaust. The constellation continued with a few more movements of the representatives, and a few sentences were said between the representatives, and in fact I don’t even remember a lot of what happened. I just remembered that, although these people did not know much about me or my life – I had shared just a few words about my problem, and a few facts about family history – I was in tears and the representatives were in tears. Something was happening, I didn’t really know what it was but it felt very real. After I finished the constellation, I started feeling a bit better but I didn’t know why and I didn’t really attribute it to the constellation. The next day, whether by chance or not, we had a spontaneous little get together with my mother, my mother’s sister, and a few other family members. I was amazed to hear from my family that my grandmother on my mother’s side had lost her sister when she was young and that had been devastating for her. My aunt is named after this sister. This was early in the 20th century, and they had lost her to appendicitis before they could get her to a hospital. What I didn’t know, and I am quite ashamed not to have known all this, is that my grandmother came to Israel before the Second World War. She got married in Israel and just after my mother and her twin sister were born in 1945, news of the Holocaust started arriving. One by one, gradually, my grandmother learnt her entire family had perished by the Nazis – her mother, father, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, even her grandparents. She was the only person left alive from her entire family.

This not only confirmed what had come up at the Family Constellations workshop, but it also made me understand for the first time: How can a person live with such a massive loss, with such grief, and still be available totally for her children? It’s not possible, and although my grandmother was a very good mother, and she did everything the best she could, it helped explain many things for which I was resentful towards my mother. I had carried resentment towards my mum most of my life, and seeing her upbringing in this light helped me realise how she had grown up. There was only so much she could have given me. After years of trying to forgive my mum I realised there was nothing to forgive. Everything was clear, and there was just a very natural flow of love. All the resentment just dropped away. That was a few years ago, and since then, surprisingly, I have felt more and more able to connect with people, to feel “belonging”, with family and friends.

Bert Hellinger, the founder of Family Constellations, observed that when a person can’t be at peace with his or her parents, usually that person suffers a block in some area of their life. Bert Hellinger has a great respect for parents. In a way he says that our parents give us life, and anything else is a bonus. And since life comes to us through our parents, when we cannot take in our parents into our heart, often we cannot take in some other aspects that life has to offer. There are many legitimate reasons to reject a parent, to feel resentment, or deprivation or anger for what a parent did to us or did not give us. Still, it is possible to heal and take in the gift of life that can be given to us by only two people in the entire world – our parents.
I definitely experience a lovely increase in the flow in different areas of my life since that constellation, I now naturally connect with great love with my mum. I am also learning how my grandmother would have had a similar pain to me, of not belonging when she had lost her entire family of origin. I guess in a way, it is the same struggle my grandmother and I had, and perhaps it’s a struggle common to many.