The Victim-Perpetrator Bond
One of the Deepest Bonds in Human Experience
“Life don’t clickety clack down a straight line track
It comes together and it comes apart.” ~ Ferron
The beginning of 2019 was the fullest month ever for Seeing with Your Heart. In the early part of January, we had back-to-back 3-day weekends with our Immersion and Advanced program participants. Then, Emily and Dan flew to Oslo, Norway for 5 consecutive days of Constellation circles including a Master Class for facilitators. From there, we traveled to Budapest, Hungary where we led a 3-day Deep Dive into the Heart of Hungary with a dedicated group of social activists who represented a cross-section of Hungary’s Christian, Roma, Jewish, LGBT and cross-border communities.
Meanwhile, past graduates of the Immersion and Advanced programs are making a splash in their own practices. We counted at least 8 events in January on our Seeing with Your Heart alumni calendar. It is especially gratifying to recognize how far and wide the work is expanding.
“Out beyond ideas of wrong and right there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
~ Rumi
Many of you may be familiar with Rumi’s centuries-old invitation to the Field. It is easy enough to read and appreciate; how much harder it is to reach that field? The ideas of right and wrong may lay down in the grass for a brief rest before they are back up and shouting again inside our heads. We so want to lay with our love where the world is too full to talk about. Instead, we are consumed with our own pain and a long list of reasons that seesaw between it is someone else’s fault and it is our own damn fault.
The work of Seeing with Your Heart is to complete the metamorphosis that releases the corrosive mind chatter that keeps us away from Rumi’s field. It is deep heart work that dives into the darkness and rises into the light.
“There is an immense healing potential arising from the power of consciousness witnessing. Dark and light are woven together in a rhythmic dance that seems to sustain the eternal spinning of the universe.”
~ Susan Eckhart, Seeing with Your Heart participant”
One of the important teachings that is coming to up from the field beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing is that it is easier to sympathize and identify with the victims, but we are genetically descended and embody the consciousness of the perpetrators. We make the perpetrators, the rapists, slave owners, Conquistadors, coal mine owners, Nazi murderers wrong – and they are wrong. But our rage against them blinds us to the distasteful reality that the blood of rapists, slave owners, Conquistadors, mine owners and murderers runs in our own veins. Denying our own perpetration against our parents, siblings, lovers, children and co-workers, projecting our anger and indignation against those who have wounded us, is the fence that prevents us from entering Rumi’s field. In all our Constellations, we put in a representative for the perpetrating force. It’s not someone else. It’s us. When we are honest about our crimes and privileges, when we release the righteousness of being tyrannical victims, we can say “yes” to Rumi’s invitation and meet our true selves in the field.
The container we are holding, the Field we are calling in, is going beyond the context of the immediate family or even the greater family system to access the healing movements. When we place representatives for parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents, the Field is pulling them backwards to ancient battlegrounds, medieval torture chambers, the burning times, the sacred temples, the days when humans and tree spirits occupied the same sacred ground.
In our Seeing with Your Heart Immersion program, participants have recognized how the long, sometimes ancient chains of oppression keep them trapped in jobs, relationships and patterns of physical stress and pain that trap them away from life’s full possibilities. The chains are snapping like threads. For some, this is liberating; for others it has been frightening and painful. Everyone is supporting each other through these movements across the peaks and troughs of change.
This year’s Act with Your Heart Advanced program has our most diverse mix of trainees. Our weekend together reflected the seriousness of humanity on the brink. We dove into the conflicts of rightdoing and wrongdoing, victims and perpetrators. It wasn’t nice; not a place for nice. We traded nice for real. Deep fissures across race, sex, gender, orientation, religion, ethnicity and class distinctions surfaced and we confronted ancient myths of destruction. A dragon was in our midst. Hanuman’s Tail, a myth neither Emily nor Dan had ever heard of, ignited and showed us the potential for total destruction. We completed shaken, humbled and inspired. This year’s ACT is going to change us all for life.
In the words of Bert Hellinger, “Resistance is loyalty to the old and prevents development. Every expectation is thus linked to something already known. Only what shakes me to the core leads me onward. The rigidity breaks, growth follows. In the end, we can only marvel at where we find ourselves.”
In Norway, we returned to the more familiar territory of the heart’s desire for love and belonging. In the cold days and long dark nights, Norwegians want to find warmth in the embrace of partnership and community. Many of the Constellations were for those who wanted a greater sense of connection and belonging. We shared our tools and teaching about how to tune-in, walk the field, and expand the power of representative perception. Our hosts and the participants are eager to create a Scandinavian Seeing with Your Heart Immersion in 2020. Å være på pletten.
After the rush of three consecutive weeks in our programs and Oslo, Budapest was a dramatic change of pace. We met for 3 days with activists interested in opening the field to understand the ways Hungary’s violent past and problematic present augers for the future of the nation. The question of coming to terms with the past and finding words of forgiveness framed our event. To our surprise, social activists in Budapest were not quite so ready for Seeing with Your Heart Constellations. Our opening heart exercise, always a great beginning, bombed. We followed up with an exercise to teach representative perception that was met with perplexed cold stares. Somehow, we persisted in spite of resistance that bordered on outright rejection. By Saturday afternoon, the group was warmed up, on-board and we did some powerful pieces that brought on amazement from the previously highly skeptical group. One participant, left work on Monday to meet us near our Airbnb flat to give Emily a sacred object and tell us it was one of the most impactful 3 days of her life.
Regardless of where you find yourself reading this, these are not easy days for heart-centered individuals. We welcome you to join us on March 1-3 or May 3-5, 2019 for a Seeing with Your Heart 3-Day Deep Dive into the Fields of Consciousness. Bring your intentions for life and the deep-seated challenges you are facing and together we will co-create a transformational experience you won’t forget.
