Alchemical Constellations: Into the Dark, Reclaiming Aliveness, and the Bridge of Flowers
By Dan Cohen and Emily Blefeld
We just returned from two four-day Seeing with Your Heart retreats, Into the Dark at St. Ottilien Monastery near Munich, Germany with Rotger Heilmeier and Reclaiming Aliveness in Bucharest, Romania with Oana Tǎnase.
Through Alchemical Constellations, we descended deep into the grief, terror and shame that remain in our bodies as inheritances from past generations. By looking straight into the dark fates of our ancestors, we free them. They, in turn, free our bodies from their traumas, so we can reclaim the deep, enduring wisdom that lives on as human love and spirit.
Across both retreats, beneath the surface of stories, we touched the same longing. No matter the country or lineage, we saw a universal desire to speak truth without fear, to feel at home in one’s body, to love who we love, and to walk away from what no longer serves.
Our co-facilitator, Oana Tǎnase, wrote before we arrived, “The body keeps the score, and the soul rewrites the story.” In the Constellations, we felt this truth. Movements that were never completed, the apology never uttered, the goodbye never spoken, the choice never allowed, became available in the field.
Our global groups came with varied intentions, holding different burdens, but at their root, the yearning was the same: to embody the soul in a rich human experience and reclaim the aliveness that trauma had dimmed.
In Germany, Rotger Heilmeier guided us to a sacred site on the Danube where the river widens as it flows south and east towards Romania and the Sea. Rotger, in collaboration with Lisa Ishwari Murphy, had created a homeopathic remedy synthesized from the vibratory frequency of the blue whale – 52 Blue Whale. Together with his 2-year-old son, we walked to the riverbank, offered the medicine to the waters, and watched the current carry it from us. We did not know it, but 52 Blue Whale would eventually flow past the Prut River tributary that became a central motif to our retreat in Romania.
The current of the Danube became a unifying theme for both retreats. Like the ripples that form around an immersed boulder, our turbulent emotions, hidden desires, and restless obligations may have spawned far upstream. The Danube, like the heart, rises and shallows. Within its flow, everything eventually finds its way home to the sea.
A Story from the Border
On our first night at the Reclaiming Aliveness retreat, a Romanian woman shared this family story. In 1940, the Dniester River divided Romania and the Soviet Union. For generations, the river was a meeting place for families, traders, and farmers.
Together with the abundant flow of life, the riverbank had seen centuries of military invasions. Local warlords, Ottoman and Russian armies, mercenary Cossacks, and great powers of European empires fought countless battles. After the men slaughtered and destroyed, the women came out from hiding to rebuild, even to give birth to children born from rape. Such cycles of celebratory dances and weddings, blood stains and bitter tears, marked the seasons of life by the river.
In June of 1940, with World War II raging far to the north, this woman’s grandfather was a border guard at the Dniester River. On that day, a Soviet officer came across the river and told the young border guard, “Tomorrow Soviet troops will arrive. They will kill every soldier here. If you want to live, leave tonight.” So warned, he fled his post and ran into the darkness. By morning he crossed the Danube tributary, the Prut River. Within the next 48 hours, thousands more fled with what few possessions they could carry across the Prut. The following day, the Soviets sealed the border, separating Moldova from Romania.
Brothers, cousins, grandparents, and lovers were divided overnight. Two million Romanians on the eastern side were suddenly Soviet citizens. A river that once unified became a river of exile.
Dead Fathers, Grieving Mothers, Abandoned Children
In our Into the Dark retreat, several participants told stories about a young German father, their grandfather, sent to the Russian Front leaving his wife and small children. These men never returned at all or came back broken and silent.
Present day Moldova, nested between the Dniester and Prut rivers, is where German, Romanian, and Russian armies fought and killed from 1941-45. For their part, the Romanian military, allied with Germany, briefly retook their captured land from the Soviets. Almost immediately, inspired by murderous Nazism, they launched a brutal extermination campaign against Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) communities there. In a short time, they slaughtered over 300,000. The German troops, these same young men whose grandchildren we met in Germany, advanced deeper into Soviet Ukraine and Russia, where their units were ultimately wiped out.
After 1945, while Germany was rebuilt, Romania was drawn into a Soviet-style communist dictatorship, ruled by constriction, scarcity, secrecy, intimidation, and the slow bleeding out of imagination and spirit. Even under communist rule, the river border separating Moldova and Romania remained closed. This theme of abandonment, of cutoff, ran through many of our constellations.
In systemic work, there is a movement called “the interrupted reaching out to the mother.” It appears when a child reaches for connection that never comes. In communist Romania, the brutality of war trauma was inflicted against a generation of mothers and their children. In the tragedy of the infamous Romanian orphanages, tens of thousands of children were given up by their mothers and warehoused in severe neglect.
One or more of these accumulated traumas vibrate through the bodies of nearly everyone of German, Romanian, Moldovan, Jewish, Roma, or Russian descent. The movements of our Alchemical Constellations match the bookended tittles of the retreats. We go into the dark to feel whose traumas live in our disturbances and symptoms. By seeing them with our heart, we free them and thus can reclaim our own aliveness.
The Bridge of Flowers
In 1990, the Prut River again became a symbol of unity and yearning. As Soviet control of Eastern Europe eroded, independence movements surged across Eastern Europe. Romania rose up and overthrew its communist dictator.
On May 6, the Day of The Bridge of Flowers unfolded. Tens of thousands gathered on the banks of the Prut, Romanians on one side, Moldovans on the other, one people in their hearts and histories.
They first threw flowers across the water. Emboldened, some waded in and others from across the bank soon joined. Hundreds met in the center of the river where they took hands in the hora – the ancient Romanian circle dance.
As the Moldovan poet Grigore Vieru wrote of the day:
“If the dream of some was to reach the cosmos,
mine was to cross the Prut.”
What We Saw in the Field
There is a magnetic pull in all of us to repeat what came before, to reenact the same wounds in new disguises. But in these circles, we felt another current rising, one that invites us to reshape what is possible.
Justice needs no longer to demand punishment or repayment. It can be fulfilled with the restoration of coherence in sacred reciprocity. In this light, those who caused the worst destruction might see clearly a different path illuminated by the sacred feminine. Alchemy is not about erasing the past, but about laying what cannot be transformed into the deeper layers of the Earth and letting life force flow again in eternal renewal.
By the final constellation in Romania, everything we had touched, the dead fathers, the grieving mothers, the abandoned children, the rivers that once divided and then reunited, began to move together. We felt history loosening its grip. We felt the river flow through us.
