“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”
Many of us have heard these words from Maya Angelou, wise and simple. Still, they are sometimes difficult to apply. Suffering usually -if not always- comes from opposing life, from saying “no” to our reality. From our stubbornness to think that reality should be different, from our inability to accept situations that we cannot change.
If we can change our reality though, suffering arises from our belief that others should change, that we cannot do anything about it. Hellinger often says that “suffering is easier than acting”.
In both cases, opposing reality brings useless suffering and the impossibility to move on. We feel stuck. In a constellation we can EXPERIENCE our reality and clearly SEE the possibility or the impossibility to change it. For example, when we set up our past or our parents’ past (war, separations, losses), it becomes more real to us that those events happened and cannot be changed. Then we are facing a choice: either we surrender to the past, or we decide to fight against it. The first choice will bring peace upon us, wholeness and the possibility to move on. With the second choice, reality will continue to hunt us, leaving in us an eternal bitterness, a wake of resentment that will keep us prisoners of our past. Life is bigger than us, she imposes herself and we need to integrate her. In constellations we often see the difficulty to accept what life wanted.
On the other hand, sometimes we suffer from situations where there is a possibility to change. In those cases, a constellation gives us the perfect stage to feel our position in relationship to others, to experience our stuckness in our body, to notice the tightness and the inflexibility in our muscles, the uneasiness in our breath. We can also feel what happens between us and the other, and how the other is impacted by the situation too. In the field we get the chance to do something different, not only cognitively, but with our body, with our soul. This can happen in the blink of an eye, a deep shift within.
A constellation does not do the work, yet it gives us a three-dimensional experience that facilitates the internal movement we need in order to let go of our fix attitude.
Ultimately, it is our choice. It is our responsibility, our ability to respond to a situation in a different way. The constellation facilitates (from French faciliter, “to make easier”) our movement away from suffering and towards happiness.
Photo: Pep Gasol
