Freeing the Future from the Collective Bloodshed of the Past:
Constellating Ancient Wounds and Eternal Resources
By Dan Cohen, PhD and Emily Blefeld, LICSW
“A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem” – Carl Jung
A century ago, Carl Jung proposed that humans were primed for an alchemical transformation, a mystical union of humankind in its wholeness. In this, he recognized that an individual’s sense of limitations was imposed by both societal conditioning and the transmission of inherited fates from ancestors and historic trends of their times.A century later, though his vision is far from fulfilled, there is a growing core of humanity questioning how to live free amidst oppression, remain vibrant within a decaying overculture, and develop our collective potential for all living organisms.
Human beings are born with extraordinary capacity to experience personal, family, ancestral, soul and spirit consciousness in the pulse of everyday moments. As we move through life, the deep, inherited wounds of war, displacement, slavery, poverty and violence constrict our spirit. The corrosive voice of shame, blame and fear imprisons our minds. We attempt to live, love, and do power differently; yet, what we resist, persists often hijacking our hope for healing.
Seeing with Your Heart founders, Dan Cohen and Emily Blefeld, will explore how contemporary social issues have their origins in collective patterns of perpetration and victimization. These entanglements are often far older than the immediate family lineage. An individual who commits a terrible crime is punished by society. However, when a nation or its people commit crimes against humanity on a vast scale, there is no mechanism to balance the scales of justice on behalf of those who were victimized. This is especially true for the colonial powers that perpetrated genocide, enslavement and conquest.
With the darkest aspects of colonialism written out of the historic narratives of a nation’s past, the need for punishment, atonement and restitution does not disappear from the hearts and bodies of the descendants of those violent times. Generations, centuries and even millennia later, the Victim-Perpetrator bond merges the fates of those who were enslavers with those who were enslaved, those who conquered and those whose communities were wiped out.
In this experiential workshop, Dan and Emily will facilitate a small group exercise and one-to-two personal constellations that incorporate family, ancestral, historic and archetypal fields in a single process.Their Constellations call in ancestral, mythic, and spirit resources that are accessed by representatives in a tangibly real way. They are teaching humanity’s healing movement. Diving deep into the trauma of human cruelty and suffering is not easy; it is the best tool we know for finding freedom, strength and clarity.