Dear Tom,
I believe that one of the underlying tenets of our work is knowing what is
our business and what isn't, and I feel that some of your questions about
Bert are not really our business. I certainly do not agree with everything
Bert says or does, however, I hold in in the very highest regard for having
brought this work to the world. Additionally, I also greatly believe in the
saying "we teach best what we ourselves have come to learn" so I assume that
applies not only to myself, but to Bert and all of us out there doing this
work. For the most part, those of us who become healers and therapists are
motivated in the first place by wanting to fix something that went wrong in
our own family, then as we mature, we are no longer on a crusade, but simply
sit with what is and allow others to benefit from our experience.
For me, my views of Bert are as irrelevant to the work as they may be for my
grandfather in a constellation. My grandfather may not have been a nice
person, I may not like him, he may have done some harm, however, as he begat
my parent, and my parent begat me, I bow to my grandfather anyway, as a
source of life. And so it for me with Bert, I bow to him as the grandfather
of this wonderful work. In essence, it makes no difference if I agree
entirely with him, like him as a personality or otherwise, he simply is the
bringer of this work and for that I honour him and I'm not interested in his
personal affairs.
I've had the priviledge of meeting him in person once. He was warm and he
touched me deeply with his words. I've also found that at times when I've
gasped at some of his infamous pronouncements, that when I sit with it and
mull it over, I more often than not find a deep truth in what he says. You
know, we all have our foibles and not everyone is going to like our work,
our stlye and the way that we say things, we'll all have clients that will
demonise us and those on the opposite extreme will make saints of us - and
neither perspective is true, and so it is for Bert or anyone in the public
eye. There is a saying that goes "the bigger the tree, the more wind it will
catch", this is true for anyone that has something to say in public.
Life has taight me that the one thing that irritates people more than being
lied to, is the truth being told. FC work lends itself to exposing truths in
undeniable ways. Bert is much older than all of us, I'm sure he doesn't have
to worry at this stage in his life about being polite or being political in
order to to win him favours through smothering the truth in warm and fuzzy
platitudes, he calls a spade a spade, and sometimes a shovel.
I for one see his gentle heart, plus also his dogmatic side. Each of us has
light and shadow that we bring to this work. It makes not one iota of
difference if Bert is 'working on himself' or not, it's not our business,
our only business is ourselves within the work and how we carry it. As a
facilitator, I see my clients as my teachers, for we are perpetual students.
Welcome to the group and thank you for brining up a topic that may have been
considered a Holy Cow
Warm regards,
John
***************************************************************************
South African Institute for Family Constellations
Office: 011 614 0821 Cell: 072 138 3048
Website: www.familyconstellations.net
----- Original Message -----
From: "tmasthenes13" <TomBuoyed@xxxxxxx>
To: <ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005 1:30 AM
Subject: [ConstellationTalk] Re: Constellations with Soul AND Spirit
Barbara,
Thanks for your reply. I actually have seen part of a video of Bert
in Santa Barbara from a few years ago. It would be great to do a
workshop with him but that means going over to France or Germany
since I hear he no longer travels to the USA.
But if you want more thought-provoking statements, I'll ask this one
as a proverb in Latin: "Quis custodet ipsos custodes?" ("Who will
guard the guards themselves?") Explanation below.
I appreciate what you say about taking any scuttlebut with many
grains of salt; but there is a nagging question I have that concerns
the attitude of separating out the personality of Bert from his work.
What about Bert's own family system? Has he himself put himself
through the same gauntlet of constellations that everyone else who
becomes a facilitator must go though? And if so, does anyone know
about the results?
I can understand that such information would be used against him by
his enemies, but on the other hand, facilitators not knowing about it
puts Bert in the superior position of a father, and in his case a
Holy Father because of the ritualistic, shamanic, and Catholic
aspects of his work and being. That's why I joke about him as Pope
Bert, knowing that I can tell more truth in jest than in serious
talk. Are we to hold his family system as sacrosanct because it is
one of the secrets that children must not ask their parents about?
I really feel that he has, for whatever reason, placed himself above
the rest of us who are drawn so deeply to pursue and extend his work.
I've recently read through both _Love's Hidden Symmetry_ and
_Acknowledging What Is_. With every page, my soul does cartwheels and
raises a fist in the air and shouts YES! to the truth that I feel
flows through every page in every answer to every question posed in
those books.
But then I wonder about the absolutism of his attitude, the
infallible aura of his pronouncements, any my deep desire to believe
such pronouncements. I have nothing against infallibility because the
universe itself is infallible (at least the right-brain universe is,
not the left). But we are all fallible in our perceptions and
observations of that world and universe, and the fallibility is
precisley in the realm of the mind soul where our ordinary left-brain
intellectual consciousness must allow for its transcendence by the
emotions or what I like to term "heart-thinking" that goes beyond the
ordinary logic of our intellects.
My fear is that however sincere and well-intentioned he is,
nonetheless Bert Hellinger has set himself up as a Father-God figure
to all those who are drawn to pursue his work. As a Catholic and now
a Hellingrite, I feel like there's two German Popes now.
As I read so many of his pronouncements about God and spirituality,
etc., I keep wondering how much of this is his own personal
projecting which might be revealed as such if we knew about the
dynamics of his own personal family systemic order.
Quis custodet ipsos custodes?
Doubting Thomas
(who doubts so much, he even doubts his own doubting.)
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