Beautifully said and very helpful. Thanks William
Liz Jelinek, PhD
Sent from my iPhone 6
On Feb 18, 2017, at 10:46 AM, wmedw21@xxxxxxxxx [ConstellationTalk]
<ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear Anne,
I am appreciating your post. Gender is such a significant definer in our
embodied world; and in my experience, the phenomenological field of
constellation work can be of great service towards issues of gender – and not
just “trans” issues. I have worked within “the field” with gender fully and
often.
My experience is that we know our engendered selves internally. It is an
implicit knowing. And then there’s the body. The field and constellation can
offer the client CONGRUITY – a matching between inner and outer experience. The
felt discrepancy, especially given our general cultures and family systems, can
be tremendous. For the client to be able to “see” their engendered self through
the grace of the field and its representatives externally as the client feels
into the engendered self internally – to have the realities open and revealing
and matching (or not matching) – can be of great assistance. As with all things
in our human development, to be seen from without that which we are knowing
within is of great help.
And, of course, what could arise in the field is the incongruity of it all
allowing the client and the field that experience. In the overall, I have the
suggestion as a facilitator to have a special awareness here that body and
gender are not necessarily one and the same. One’s physical-ness and one’s
felt-sense of gender could be represented individually. Nowhere in our human
lives does the insufficiency of a binary explanation for things arise more as
it can with gender. Duality as we usually think of it, is challenged. A client
could be male-embodied and have a clear knowing of being female – and not
necessarily feel that the embodiment needs to be changed.
I have found that the most important thing with gender is that we are able to
know our internal experience – and to know this with others and as part of our
tribe and world. I think that in our current cultures, for the most part, we
are just beginning to really understand and allow gender, and I am happy for
the dialog here.
Thank you.
William E. Thompson
Tucson, Arizona, USA
