Shamanism can offer Family Constellations work a deeper map of the ancestors and the dead: the difference between our own ancestors and the AncestorsAncestors. The human Oversoul: the whole of humanity held as one Lower-World being. Distinct from individual dead ancestors (small a), who are not worked with in this approach. Read the full answer, and a clear understanding of where the dead belong. It also offers a tribal rather than a nuclear template for a healthy family, and ways of working with entanglementEntanglement. An unhealthy energetic tie hooking us into another person, a role, an object or a family story; released by disentanglement. More about this beyond the circle.
Who are the ancestors, and who are the Ancestors? #
Constellation work gives the ancestors a real place, and shamanism can add a distinction. “The ancestors (with a small ‘a’) are our individual biological ancestors who are no longer living, our great-grandparents and so on. The Ancestors on the other hand are something bigger. They are not a single twig but a whole branch.” Followed back far enough, every people’s Ancestral branch joins the one branch of Human, “itself being just a part of a great tree” with the Oversouls of all the other Peoples.1
So when the Ancestors appear as GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this, “the Ancestral Guides are the Human OversoulOversoul. A branch of Mother Earth representing the whole of a species: the single being all the individuals arise from. Lower-World work is always with the Oversoul, never an individual; environments are composite Oversouls, wheels within wheels. More about this in a form or forms that we can have a relationship with. They may look like an individual, in order for us to be able to relate to them, but they are much more than that.”2 Our own family dead are not the same as these Guides, and shamanism treats them very differently. See What is the difference between an ancestor and an Ancestor?
What does shamanism understand about the dead? #
That they belong in the Land of the Dead, not amongst the living. Francesca Mason Boring, a constellation facilitator rooted in Western Shoshone tradition, notes that when grief has been cut short, by flight or by many deaths close together, a family can be left “in shock and the dead wandering, unsure of their place.”3 Shamanism has a long tradition of helping such souls on: the shaman’s task of “escorting the unquiet deadUnquiet dead. The middle-world self become ghost: the ego that, having no body left to anchor it, lingers among the living instead of moving on to the Land of the Dead. Unhealthy for the living, and moved on by psychopomping. More about this to the afterlife where they could no longer be of harm to the living”. “Shamans do not see the dead as helpful spirits to work with. They are not taken on as guides and teachers. Nor are they kept around.” This is in marked contrast to mediumship, “where the desire is to converse with the souls of the dead”.4
This escorting, psychopomping, “is a specialist area of shamanic work”, and someone without long experience should leave it to their Guides or to someone more experienced.5 See How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand death and what happens when we die?
What shape is a healthy family? #
A tribe more than a nuclear family. Hellinger’s Orders of Love place “A mother and father standing together, grandparents behind them in supportive roles, and the children arranged in front of the parents in order of age”. To Paul Francis this never felt quite right, “because, at the heart of Hellinger’s Orders is essentially a nuclear family.” What made the healthy Patterns clear was thinking how the patterns would have worked not in modern-day families, but in hunter-gatherer tribes.6 Shamanism can offer constellation work this template for healthy human life, far older than the modern family. See What do tribe and belonging mean, and what is the shaman’s role in a community?
What can shamanism add to healing family entanglements? #
Ways of working that go beyond the circle. Constellation work uses the word entanglement for the way later generations become caught up in the fates of earlier ones.7 Shamanism uses the same word in a wider sense: “Shamans have always understood entanglement and working with it is central to shamanic practice.” All sorts of things can become entangled, “including objects, places, and even people. In fact, especially people.”8 Shamanic disentanglement, done with the Guides in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, frees us from ties that are no longer healthy, and soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer can bring back parts of us that a family’s pain sent away. See What is soul retrieval?
