Walking with the Wound

I wish each and every one of you a wonderful and fulfilling 2011 and I very much look for forward to our continued work together. I decided to write a longer newsletter than usual as I wanted to share some valuable insights about our wounds and our relationship to them.

From the depths of our deepest wounds emerge our greatest gifts. Similarly, contained within the fate we were given, emerges a destiny when we choose to work with the fate. However, destiny cannot emerge until our fate is submitted to. That means standing back and looking at everything that was given and has happened and asking ourselves where the opportunities for self development and self healing lie. If we come from lack, then discovering the fullness of our being lies as an opportunity before us, if we come from conflict, then peace and reconciliation lies before us, if we come from abandonment and despair, then connection to all life lies before us. Whatever the lack, its opposite awaits us. Therefore the difficult and challenging aspects of our fate give us the opportunity to springboard towards a destiny of our own choosing instead of bemoaning that which is less than desirable.

In submitting to fate, we receive this life and all of its circumstances as a gift and we get on with the task of digging for the gold that awaits us.

So many of my clients come to me saying 'I have this issue, this wound, this problem, and I want it to go away'. Experience tells me that when we most want something to 'go away' or we want to 'get rid' of it, it tends to stick to us like proverbial mud.  I tell my clients that the objective is not rid ourselves of the wound, but to change our relationship to it.  When a parent loses a child, that wound never goes away, it remains for life, however, over time, the nature of the wound can change and how it operates in the parent's life also transforms. This is also true four our own deeper wounds. Our wounds exist in three states: Burden, Teacher, Companion.

Burden

We can know when our wound is a burden as we are often still stuck in blame, self pity and invariably allow ourselves to be triggered by others and we invariably view the world through the veil that the wound had placed on our vision of other people and the world at large. When our wound is a burden we take less responsibility for ourselves, our reactions and frequently go either into conflict or withdrawal. We interpret the actions of others through the lens of our wound and we frequently re-create the same circumstances over and over again, often with different people. However, when we step back and look through the eyes of our greater self, the occurrences often have more to do with our reactions that actually what happened. Neutral bystanders will invariably see things differently to our own wounded self.

We become stuck in burden when we need others to change, to give us what we didn't get.  We remain stuck in burden until the moment we decide to simply give up the need to get what we didn't get from others and start to focus on self-care and fulfilling our own needs. We remain stuck in burden when we stubbornly refuse to accept that we simply didn't get what we need - when the fear of facing that painful truth seems far too much for us to bear or to integrate.  We remain stuck in burden when we allow our suffering to continue as a way of demonstrating to others 'Look what you did to me!'.

Teacher

This is the next stage of living and working with our wounds. At this stage we are still reacting, projecting, blaming and falling into self-pity, but we have simply become more aware of what we are doing. At this stage we are able to retrospectively view what happened, our reaction, our masks, our defences and reactions with a little more neutrality and honesty. We have become much more self aware and with this awareness we are able to make much more self responsibility and begin to truly address the wound and its workings in our lives.  One of the challenges at this stage is to be gentle with ourselves. If we have come from a family in which children were guided and disciplined through a lot of criticism, then we are likely to beat ourselves up a lot at this stage - which simply piles even more negative energy onto our wound, making it more difficult to reach a solution. Gentle self awareness is what is required here and a reminder that if you have a question concerning your self-healing, the answer is always love.

Companion

At this stage our wounds become our friends. In every situation in which we can find ourselves triggered into defence, we become gently aware of our own wounding in the background and we gently make the choice not to go into defence. If we do go into defence or have a reaction, we start to take immediate responsibility for it and gently take ourselves off into more gentle self-healing work that feeds and nourishes our soul.  Whilst it is true that others can hurt us in the present and that our reaction is not always from a place of being triggered by an event in the present that stimulates an old wound, when our wounds are our companions, we react with less voracity. When our wound is our friend, our compassion increases and we are much more easily able to see other beyond the veils of their own wounds and defences. We recognise them for who they truly are and how they are feeling in the moment. When our wound is our friend we no longer blame or push back, but stand with both feet firmly on the ground with an open heart - feeling no need to be forgiven or to forgive, but simply to be in the present moment with what is presenting itself.  When our wound is our friend, we don't make the other wrong and we can choose to withdraw peacefully until a better opportunity presents itself to deal with the matter at hand in a more constructive manner.

As we embrace our wounds, firstly as teachers, then as companions through life, it is at this stage we begin to submit to our destiny - our childhood and other circumstances are what they are and are unchangeable - with the exception of our feelings and reactions.  In submitting to our fate be begin to see the opportunities for growth inherent within the wound and we start seeing the many opportunities that have been presented to us.  For many of us, it is the very seeking for solutions to our pain that leads us onto a path of encountering our own soul and the much greater part of ourselves - even to the Divine.

www,johnlpayne.com

Frustration is Your Friend

Yes, you read that correctly, it did say frustration is your friend!

Often when we are in the depths of our personal process, frustration comes to visit us for a while or for a few moments.  For the most part our response to frustration is to try doing the thing we were trying to do before or when the frustration set in.  This is part of the problem, when we get frustrated it generally leaves us on the proverbial hamster wheel and round and round and round we go until we give up and walk away from the issue at hand.

I have learnt over the years that frustration is a great friend and ally in my own personal process. So how does that work? 

The emotional body is one unit of human energy and it contains all of the emotions we full, the full spectrum from bliss to blame, happiness to horror, love and lamentation, joy to jealousy, bitterness and sweetness. When we suppress one emotion, we simply numb all of them. It’s like placing a partial damn on a river, it may still be flowing, but the flow will have changed significantly. 

Sometimes our frustration is born out of wanting to opt for a spiritual bypass, meaning, we don’t want to ‘go there’, but would rather jump straight into all the nice feelings and grab the resolution with both hands. In reality, that never works, perhaps temporarily as we ride the ‘feelgood’ wave, but in the long term, we are still struggling with unresolved feelings and self image.

Frustration is your friend for as you ride the wave of frustration it can take you to exactly where you need to go. Frustration leading to anger, leading to our deeper wound and then leading to the resolution. 

When we get frustrated, we are in a good place. Let me repeat that: When we are frustrated, we are in a good place, a very good place.  All that is necessary is to take advantage of the charge of energy behind the frustration and ride the wave; it will lead us to exactly where we need to go. 

If you feel ready to get really frustrated during a Skype or Phone session with me, get in touch and you’ll be riding the wave soon and I promise not to play Hawaii Five-O music in the background, unless of course you ask me to. 

With love,

John 

www.johnlpayne.com 

Freedom from Bondage

Very often when we approach Family Constellation we work, we do so from a wounded place.  Perhaps we did not receive the love and nurturance we needed, or perhaps there was even abuse that was verbal, physical or sexual.  These can be very deep wounds that have a deep impact on how we live our lives and our current relationship, be that with partners, our children or friends. 

Very often we can get stuck with two differing attempts to heal a family wound. We can get motivated to heal ourselves and simply to ‘try’ harder, hoping that somehow they may one day become the family that we needed, or, with distaste and disdain, we can remove ourselves, sever all contact and get on with our lives – neither approach works. With the former we can create a pattern in which in order to have our needs met we develop a high tolerance for abuse and with the latter, in severing the physical link, we are still left with the unseen energetic and psychological ties.  These ties are our family’s image of us and the family image of the world – to which we are for the most part loyal. 

So how do we extricate ourselves from destructive family patterns whilst at the same time honouring the life that has been given? It is at this point that Family Constellation work steps into the spiritual domain, beyond the framework of what may be termed psychotherapeutic process. 

With this process, the healing sentence ‘Thank you for what you could do for me, the rest I shall do for myself’ presents itself as a solution. So what are we saying with this healing sentence? No matter the circumstances, something was given - be that shelter, sustenance, education and life itself. In addition, we are acknowledging in a respectful way that there are and were limitations with ‘could’. As we round off our sentence with ‘the rest I shall give to myself’ we start the process of freeing ourselves from the bondage that someday what we needed will be given and empower ourselves to start drinking in life’s riches without being dependent on another to change or transform. 

At times it is necessary to extricate ourselves from our family, but how do we do this and yet retain some sense of who we are and the ability to turn our fate into a destiny of choice instead of a fate that repeats itself over and over?  Closing our heart, turning away with anger, taking a superior stance or walking off with disdain are approaches that are always doomed to fail, for we simply take all of that with us and that in turn re-creates the same thing over and over.  Having tried all of those things over and over and over again, we then enter the spiritual. We begin to look at our fate as something that was handed to us by forces and movements much greater than ourselves. In turn we ask ourselves the question ‘this is my fate, what am I going to do with it?’ Within this is the acknowledgment that buried under our deepest wound lie our greatest gifts. Once we acknowledge and accept what is and what was, and know that it is not within our power to change anyone, we can then start the process of bowing with deep respect and saying ‘Thank you for what you could do for me, the rest I shall give to myself’.  At this point we liberate ourselves from the belief systems, images and wounds of the family system whilst retaining the family in our heart, opening ourselves to the blessings of the ancestors and the goodness that life can offer – we embrace our soul and all that it has delivered.

www.johnlpayne.com

Family Constellations - The Orders of Love

The Orders of Love describe a natural hierarchy that has been observed through the practice of Family Constellations. What we have observed, is that there is a distinct order that states who belongs, and who doesn’t belong not only to a family system, but also to groups and nations. On working with individuals, we observe that each of us has three levels of conscience: the conscience we have as individuals which dictates to us what is right and wrong, our responsibilities, and our reactions to certain conditions; additionally, we belong to the collective conscience of our biological family, the connections and influence of which can span many generations; and lastly, we participate in the conscience of our ethnic and national groups—be that Jewish, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, White, Black, Coloured, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, English, German or Scottish, etc.

In observing work with clients during the process of Family Constellations, we see an undeniable and almost measurable effect when the Orders of Love have been disrupted in some families. The Orders of Love prescribe who comes first, who belongs after that, and describes a natural flow of love from grandparents, to parents and to children. These orders span countless generations but tend to be experienced as having the greatest influence within three to seven generations. So how do the Orders of Love become disrupted? As these ancient orders dictate who belongs and how, disruptions take place when individuals or groups have been excluded, either deliberately, or as a result of family members not being able to embrace the difficult fate of another family member. The overriding principle of the Orders of Love is that parents give life, and that children receive life. Therefore, when a child—no matter the age—is motivated to place himself above a parent, or equal to a parent, there are consequences in terms of the natural flow of the Orders of Love towards him. The cost to the child with such posturing is usually evident in disruptive life patterns.

For example, the most common disruptions are caused by the early death of a parent or grandparent, the death of a child, miscarriages, abortions, an individual being ousted from a family in the role of ‘black sheep’ or if a murder or other injustice has taken place. All of these events can be felt and observed to have a deep residual impact on our lives today, even when they have taken place three, four or five generations back. On encountering these ancient Orders of Love, seasoned therapists are not only amazed by the efficiency of working within this new concept, but are also humbled by the power of working in this innovative and fresh way, inspiring them to find new solutions for clients that have hitherto eluded them. When we look closer at the Orders of Love, we enter a realm that is beyond traditional psychotherapy, and initiates a movement to cross the threshold into the dominion of the Soul. The Soul, by its very nature is equal to, and inclusive of, all things. At the heart of the Soul is the acknowledgement and acceptance of what is. This is the basis and power of love. Through this nature of love, we become liberated to belong without entanglement in the fate of others, as well as from a collective conscience that may be detrimental to us in terms of creating disruptive life patterns. Resolutions for interruptions in the natural Orders of Love lie in seeing each member of our family (or nation) as belonging equally, irrespective of personality traits: whether they are strong or
weak, amicable or argumentative, mentally or physically handicapped, committed suicide or died at a very young age. In restoring the Orders of Love, we need to allow and respect the fate of each member of our family (or nation), no matter how burdensome that fate may be, for each individual must be able to be strengthened not only by their fate, but also by any responsibility that they may have for it. What has been observed time and time again, is that disruptive life patterns—be they manifest as physical illness or difficulties in relationships—can be attributed to an interruption in the Orders of Love, as well as the difficulty that some individuals have in allowing the fate of another to remain where it is, instead of taking it on as their own.
Often, in working to restore the Orders of Love through Family Constellations, the client has little or no conscious awareness of his entanglements with the fate of others, but when revealed through a constellation, he becomes acutely aware of his hidden loyalties and begins to consciously defend them.

The Orders of Love rarely exist intact within the average family. When members of a family cause a disruption to the Orders of Love—albeit this is more often than not realised or responded to in an unconscious way and not acknowledged—the awareness does not simply fade away from the family conscience or Soul; it remains intact. If an individual has been ousted unfairly from a family, another family member—even several generations later—will be compelled to restore balance and order by suffering a similar fate out of unspoken loyalty. It is in the same way, that nations or national and ethnic groups that have been victims of other groups, go on to imitate the original perpetrators. Victims and perpetrators share a fate with one another and when the victim is denied or excluded in some way, the perpetrator is also excluded—given a status that is less than human—compelling future generations to either take on the fate of the perpetrator or the victim as their own. When we look at perpetrators, it must be remembered that there is much more to the individual than that moment in time when he becomes the murderer or persecutor. His being is much larger than a single event, and rather than a single event defining who he is, it is the totality of his being. Let
me share some examples:

Although raised in a Christian household, a client was compelled to convert to Judaism. On exploring family history, we see that his great-grandfather left his
wife for a Jewish woman and had a child with her. This child, Jewish owing to its mother, was excluded, not acknowledged as a brother to the client’s grandfather,
not acknowledged as an uncle or great-uncle, by the client or his family. This constitutes an exclusion which creates disruption in the Orders of Love; therefore, as the nature of the Soul is inclusion and to be equal to all things, the client feels compelled to share in the fate of his great-uncle and live with the consequences of conversion to Judaism within the context of belonging to a Christian family.

In this way, we as children, and our own children, take on the energies and feelings of ancestors, living life as if they themselves were a particular ancestor who had been forgotten or ousted in some way. By far the most common entanglement and disruption to the Orders of Love are observed when there has been the early death of an individual within a family, be it a parent or a child. When an individual dies early, it is very difficult for surviving family members to accept the fate of that person; this is particularly so for parents who lose an infant, or for a young child when a parent dies. When we are unable to look at and fully acknowledge the dead, they, too, become excluded, for their fate has been rejected. Fate is a matter for the Soul.

A client reports that she has often struggled with suicidal feelings and has been on a life-long quest to search for spiritual truth. On working with her family, we learned that her mother’s sister died just a few hours after birth. The child was neither named nor given a funeral and was never spoken of, a clearly taboo subject within the family. On setting up her constellation, the client immediately wept when looking at the representative for the dead child and reported, “It feels as if I’ve been looking for her all of my life.” The client also reported feeling guilty simply for being alive, and now had a clear understanding why.

My client was compelled to represent the dead child in some way, and to share in its fate through not being fully present in life, with one foot in the grave so to speak. When a child dies, the parents often cannot look at the child, and are unable to take the child as their own, thus the child becomes ousted from the family. In such cases, even four or five generations later, its effect can be felt and the children and grandchildren of later generations can feel compelled to share the fate of such a child in some way, either through action, or by carrying the feelings. More often than not, clients who report being on a life-long quest for spiritual truth or ‘something’, are usually looking for someone who has died and been forgotten.

So how do we work with the Orders of Love and access the information that is revealed? We do so by employing what is described as the Knowing Field.

The Knowing Field
In Family Constellation work we use representatives to stand in for members of our family and ancestors; this is when we engage the unseen presence that we have come to know as the Knowing Field. It is then that we meet the phenomenon that representatives have access to information and feelings of the individuals they are representing. This, for the representatives, can be a powerful and life-changing experience in its own right as they step into another’s shoes and ‘become’ someone else, with little to no knowledge of the personality and circumstances of the individual they are representing.

During a constellation process, a representative is asked to stand in for the client’s grandfather. On being placed in position, the representative lifts up one foot and rests it behind the knee of his other leg, therefore standing on one leg. The client gasps and utters, “My grandfather lost his leg in WWI!”

Everyone taking part in Family Constellations for the first time is amazed, deeply touched and altered in some way by means of their exposure to what they see unfolding before them, as well as by their own often intense experiences when asked to represent a complete stranger. On hearing about this work, the reactions are often sceptical, even incredulous, wondering if it could possibly be true, some adding conjecture that representatives are merely acting out of a need to create healing or resolution for a client. However, sometimes what a representative feels and expresses is far from loving and none of the feelings of any of the representatives can be predicted in advance. What we do hear frequently are statements from clients like, “That’s just like my brother—that is what he would say.” There is a certain sense of mystery as to how this happens, for the representatives are not required to be psychically gifted, but are ordinary people attending a workshop. We hear time and again from participants verifying the truth of the feelings, attitudes and events that are being represented. In some way, the representatives are either absorbing the energy of the family soul, or simply becoming part of it—which is astounding in its own right—but the true power of the work comes from releasing the mystery of it, accepting what is, and simply using the Knowing Field as expressed through the representatives in order to bring order to chaos and resolution to disharmony.

Who do you think you are?

Who do you think you are? This is a vital question as we are all much more than we think – we have the blessings and the belief systems of a thousand or more generations behind us.

Whilst not conscious of it, each of us is deeply impacted by the events and belief systems of the generations that preceded us.  Far from being islands, we are connected to the family field as if to a matrix and much of that is subconscious and more powerful than we often give it credit.

During my recent three months in China I began to see that as a nation that has been closed to the outside world that it indeed was not just a different culture, but an entirely different world. In comparison, although in day to day life I do not consider myself a Christian in the traditional sense, I became increasingly aware of just how Christian I am with my belief systems and cultural values! If often takes comparison with something totally different to get a clearer picture of who we are and what makes us tick.

Through working with the Ancestral Field not only can we tap into all of the wisdom and goodness that streams from them, we can also heal that which has a limiting influence upon us. Belief systems and behaviour patterns are passed from one generation to the next and we as modern, educated human beings are just as affected by them. The good news about entering the Ancestral Field for healing purposes is that we do not need to know our family’s history; the field will do the revealing.

With this kind of approach we can work with:

Belief systems

Original Trauma

Family Guilt

All of which, when encountered and resolved can create big leaps forward in our lives and lasting change.

The Courage to Transform Fate into Destiny

When it comes to healing on any level, the most important quality or virtue is courage.  In order not to re-live our personal, family, national or ethnic history we must have the courage to face our past, or indeed to examine what we are creating in the present.

Without courage, all other qualities we consider virtues, such as love, forgiveness, acceptance, tolerance, kindness, charity and understanding are only temporary states of being for none of them can exist in our world unless they are supported by courage.  Likewise, courage does not exist unless fear is present. Fear of judgment, fear of exposure, the fear of being shamed and the fear of being undefended.

Without courage we can simply succumb to our fate an allow it to be the cornerstone of our lives, dictating the outcome of every relationship and life experience, in essence, more like a millstone than a solid cornerstone from which to build something that expresses who we truly are as opposed to the distorted self-view born from our wounding. However, all of the limiting life patterns that we experience really emerge from resisting that which was given, our fate. Yes, this sounds like a contradiction. In order for us to evolve our fate into a destiny of our choosing, we must first submit to whatever happened, to the fate that was given.

We live in a world of opposites, we have up and down, left and right, light and dark and so on an so forth and within life's lessons lies opposites as well - we live in a world of comparison and our free will allows us to create a life of our choosing. So no matter where we stand in life, all that is not wanted is an opportunity for us to launch ourselves forward towards what we do want. However, so many of us spend so much time simply resisting what is instead of reaching for that which is wanted.

The word submit is a difficult word for most to digest.  It conjures up images of submission, acquiescence and being resigned to a given situation with no further freedom to change or do anything about it. However, I use the term 'submit' in the meaning of accepting what is and what was. So why don't I just say 'accept' in its stead? Fate is a given and it comes to us from a power and a force that is much greater than us, I am not talking here about an individual God, the God of the Bible who has a personality, a will, wishes, laws and is all mighty, but I am talking here about the forces that govern human relationships and all life. Within this force is not only the greater soul of humanity and the soul of all life on our planet, both seen and unseen by the naked eye, but also our individual soul.

Family Constellations is a powerful way of looking at what fate had delivered, heal our wounds and turn towards our destiny.

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Courage

When it comes to healing on any level, the most important quality or virtue is courage.  In order not to re-live our personal, family, national or ethnic history we must have the courage to face our past.

Without courage, all other qualities we consider virtues, such as love, forgiveness, acceptance, tolerance, kindness, charity and understanding are only temporary states of being for none of them can exist in our world unless they are supported by courage.  Likewise, courage does not exist unless fear is present.

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