The Unseen Gathering Before the Gathering: Systemic Family Constellations, Ancestral Healing & Retreats in Europe
As we prepare for our upcoming constellation retreats in Europe, we feel the quiet, and sometimes intense, ways the unseen begins to gather. When we say “yes” to co-creating around a particular theme, something from beyond answers and a new field of consciousness awakens. Ancestors lean in. The “pre-field” begins to hum, preparing us for what is to come, sometimes gently, and sometimes like the roller coaster ride of the century.
What Is the “Pre-Field” and How Does It Arise In Systemic Family Constellations?
We’ve noticed this again and again, but long before the first person steps through the door, the ancestors arrive. Not only the council of ancestors that support us as facilitators, calling us to the next level of our own evolution and agreeing to co-facilitate, but also the ancestors of those who are attending the retreat. Sometimes we wonder, do the participants enroll first, or do their ancestors? Our hunch is it’s their ancestors, whispering, nudging, clearing a path for them to step into the work.
Participants have acknowledged this phenomenon too. Often, right after they register, the tapestry of their life becomes electric, alive with hints of what is being woven from beyond the beyond.
This is what we mean by the “pre-field.” It is the unseen gathering before the gathering, the multidimensional intelligence that arrives early with potent messages and an agenda for alchemical transformation. It’s an energetic scaffolding that tunes facilitators, participants, and the wider field to the medicine we will work with. For some it comes as images, dreams, or obscure memories. For others, fresh questions, unexpected insights, synchronistic happenings, and the symptoms that want to heal rise to the surface. The land itself, the theme, the facilitators, the ancestors, and the participants all are shaped by it.
Yom Kippur and the Pre-Field of Transformation
On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, we hear echoes of reckoning, release, and renewal. We confront old patterns rising to be seen, confessed, and cleared. The veils thin, not only between us and the Divine but also between past and present. We step into a field where accountability and transformation invite us to pause before stepping forward. We welcome this opportunity to align with the deeper currents that are calling us into our next expression.
When we’re willing to listen, to heed the call of the wider field of consciousness, and attune our awareness to the healing movement calling us forward, the pre-field transforms raw potency into a sacred container strong enough to hold profound change.
Setting Intentions for Our Ancestral Healing Retreats
On this day of At-One-Ment we set intentions for our upcoming retreats, “Into The Dark” in Germany and “Reclaiming Aliveness” in Romania. We prepare to enter the deep work that breaks through victim-perpetrator patterns, the very patterns that cycle atrocities of the past into atrocities of our present. Our yearning is to move with the ancestors and the land toward a unified, healing pulse of peace. The teachings, movements, and messages are already arriving with striking clarity, so we chose to record a conversation about what is unfolding for us, both personally and professionally.
If, after reading this or watching the two behind-the-scenes videos, where we meet with our collaborative facilitators Oana Tanase and Rotger Heilmeier, you feel something stir in your body – perhaps that’s the pre-field tugging at you – we’d love to hear what’s arising.
Here’s a quick teaser video before watching the longer ones below…
What’s Alive in the Pre-Field for Our “Into the Dark” Ancestral Healing Retreat in Germany
For our Into The Dark retreat in St Ottilien, Germany, both the dates and the location carry powerful meaning. Held over Samhain, known by many as the witch’s new year, it is a time when the veils thin between the seen and unseen. This timing opens a doorway, a threshold time, one that carries the lost medicines of the witches and healers who were hunted, silenced, and burned across Europe. To gather in Germany at this turning of the year is to stand in the heart of that history, to feel the grief and terror, and to reclaim what was never destroyed: the deep wisdom that survived in our bodies and bloodlines.
Another powerful layer is the location itself… St. Ottilien in Germany, where our retreat will be held. This cloister and its surrounding landscape carry a history of survival and careful nurture. After World War II, Jewish survivors were brought here to heal, to be cared for, and to find their way back to life. The grounds have held stories of resilience, hope, and renewal. To gather in circle and ceremony here is to step into that lineage and remember our potent lifeforce.
And within the facilitatorship itself, a truth comes alive: this retreat is held by two Jewish constellators and one German constellator, a descendant of Nazi lineage, all three alchemists and mystics in modernity. The victim–perpetrator bond lives in our bodies and lineages, and to hold it together in ceremony is to refuse erasure. We choose to sit in the fire of complexity, to face the fractures we inherited, and to transmute what is ready to be freed so bodies and lineages may finally breathe differently. Here, entering the dark is fertile soil, where grief, memory, and shadow can be tended into seeds for a future no longer bound by silence.
To tend the pre-field, we met on zoom to discuss and process what’s asking to be met. Here’s a behind the scenes conversation between Emily Blefeld, Dan Cohen and Rotger Heilmeier in preparation for our Into The Dark retreat…
Here are some moments you won’t want to miss:
1:27 – Dan shares:
- “How I’m able to do work in Germany that is taboo for Germans to do in relationship to the crimes of the Nazi era…”
- “How you never know who’s going to attend and how there’s an anticipation and anxiety when the circle forms: who’s there, what do they bring, what are they coming for, what are we going to do for them?”
- “We have to go into the darkness in order to find the light… if we move straight into radiance, to me, it feels like a bypass…”
3:26 – Rotger shares:
- How the Third Reich comes up often in ancestral layers…
5:34 – Emily shares the questions she’s questing:
- “What does it mean to be a human in relationship to success as defined by the overculture… I’m going to dare to not belong to the overculture and dare to belong more fully to the systems of natural law. ”
- “As I’m preparing for this event I’m asking how to transmit any part of me that believes I’m separate from this infinite field..”
- “Personally I’m on this quest to dismantle any remnants of internalized oppression that keep my boots on the ground where I’m working to prove to something..”
Into the Dark will be an intimate retreat container as we are keeping the numbers lower to meet what has been hidden, to honor what has been carried for too long, and to seed a future rooted in truth, peace, and possibility. We would love for you to be part of this intimate circle:
Read more about the Into the Dark Retreat in St Ottilien, Germany
What’s Alive in the Pre-Field for Our “Reclaiming Aliveness” Ancestral Healing Retreat in Romania
To tend the pre-field for Reclaiming Aliveness Retreat in Bucharest, Romania, Emily, Dan and Oana Tanase met on Zoom. Here’s the juicy conversation we had about what’s alive and active in our lives as we prep for this retreat – including the incident that had me accidentally put a knife through my hand!
Here are some key moments:
2:12 – Dan shares:
- “In my origins, Romania was a place that was “behind the iron curtain”.. People came from the east to the west but hardly anybody went from the west to the east … and so it was a part of the world that felt cut off…”
- “Where growth was restricted for a long time… when the soil is fertilized, what blooms are the most magnificent plants and flowers… and I feel like within the work that we are doing.. This is the most fertile soil that we could grow this work in…”
4:31- Oana shares:
- “My challenge that I said yes to when I opened this portal into this retreat… Emily you said… I won’t join you in your entrapment.. “
- “And I felt, finally…someone is calling out this pattern and it’s actually making a genuine statement of love and respect towards me as a soul and my journey..“
- “There’s a deep tragedy of a loss of soul… a way in which it has been trapped in systems of oppression for centuries… “
- “It’s a lonely place.. Like a prison with no bars…but a prison nonetheless..”
8:58 – Emily shares:
- “For me.. I was cleaning a candle.. It was a sacred candle holder.. It was the first decorative item I bought for my apartment with my former husband… and so I kept that candle and I loved it and as I was chipping away at the wax that had hardened, somehow the candle cracked and I put the knife right through my hand.. Right at the spot near my middle and ring finger.. And as stitches were woven.. Literally into my skin.. Right around my ring finger.. I recognize that I was thinking about this retreat..”
- “I’ve been exploring vows.. And when we enter into marriage with one another… When is our voice silenced… when is our voice upheld…what brings us together…what tears us apart… and what do we do with the vows when the marriage is complete…”
- “I was recently grieving the loss of my former father-in-law and my deep love and connection with him and it was a reminder that even in heartbreak, love remains…”
In Romania, the land holds the memory of centuries of domination and displacement. The descendants of those who lived under Communist rule carry wounds that echo through their bodies and lineages. Dictatorship stripped people from their rootedness and forced them into survival patterns that left little space for beauty, sovereignty, or joy.
These wounds create a bind for descendants:
- The fear of being uprooted if they stand in their truth.
- The push to assimilate while longing for freedom.
- The grief of not knowing where home is.
- The body remembering hunger, silence, and punishment when it moves toward expression or power.
And yet, here in Romania, the figure of Ileana Cosânzeana rises – a Romanian goddess with immense beauty stemming from natural elements such as ‘eyes like the sun’ and a ‘body like the ocean’, with her garments made of flowers white pearls and gold flowing out of her mouth when she sings. She is a magnificently poetic representation of feminine brilliance. She sings of courage, of the wild belonging of the feminine, of a home in the natural world that no oppressor can erase. She meets the wounds of displacement with the rhythm of beauty and devotion.
In some tales, Ileana is the radiant beauty stolen away by a dragon, her abduction calling forth the courage of a heroic quest. In others, she shines with lunar power, said to have become the moon itself after refusing a forbidden union with the sun… choosing sovereignty over surrender. She is also celebrated as the Fairy Queen, the Lady of Flowers, protector of forests and wild creatures, embodying the wild, luminous rhythms of nature. Ileana is a force that calls descendants beyond the bind: to root in the earth, to honor the survival of their ancestors, and to step into the living pulse of sovereignty and aliveness that was never fully destroyed.
We are feeling her invitation towards depth right alongside her invitation towards the beauty that comes with healing.
If Ileana Cosânzeana’s message stirs something within you, or if the land in Romania is calling your name, we’d love to have you join this circle.
You can read more about the Reclaiming Aliveness Retreat in Bucharest, Romania here
