I’m aware of inhabiting two kinds of consciousness. During the pandemic, being on screen a lot more than in person, I’m calling one of these “screen consciousness”. You know that buzz in your brain from too much information? That’s screen consciousness to the max. With screen consciousness, I’m barely aware of sensation (unless my eyes start to burn from staring at data). Reductive conclusions flavor my responses to information. But with what I’ll call “alive consciousness”, I feel my body inside and out. I respond with spontaneity and wonder. Every time I engage, my experience of alive consciousness is fresh, emergent, and unique.
Nature is a great way to come into alive consciousness. Walking amongst the trees, being attentive to the particular smells, sounds, colors, and shapes of the forest—tree bark, roots, woodpecker, moss, robin, or huckleberry. Climbing a mountain, following a stream, or strolling along a shore. Each brings delights, where we are once again deeply connected to the thrum of nature’s rhythms, organically, integrally whole with nature, as if seeing through her eyes.
The deep listening of alive consciousness reveals inter-relationships in new ways. The more we attend to nature, the more we learn. Any aspect of nature can teach us — fungi, ferns, frogs, or falcons.
Nature constellations
And here’s where constellations come in. In a nature constellation, as in any constellation, we work in a group, with a living system or the interface between living systems. (That’s why the whole field of constellations is formally called “systemic constellation work”.) Families, marshlands, cities, corporations, communities, and cultures are examples of living systems. We could set a constellation with any of those, but I’m going to focus on nature constellations in this piece.
Nature constellations are based in traditional wisdom and sprang from the family constellations of Bert Hellinger and his students. (I wrote here on Medium about family constellations, sharing a part of my own life story for illustration.) Francesca Mason Boring, one of the originators and a bicultural woman enrolled with the Western Shoshone Tribe, introduced me to nature constellations and taught me how to facilitate them. Her colleagues in developing nature constellations come from a range of cultures and spiritual traditions around the world.
“I am still and steady. Slow and grounded. From my perspective, humans look like a beehive, with so much happening. I feel infinitely older and wiser than humans—beyond comparison. I’m aware of wisdom’s source.” —words of an ancient tree voiced by a nature constellation participant
Outdoors in nature is ideally where we gather to set nature constellations. (During the pandemic, I’ve begun to offer nature constellations online. And as ironic as that sounds, we’re finding we can use the screen to support alive consciousness.) Together, with the help of a facilitator, we do our best to leave screen consciousness and come into a state of being that is more immediate.
Knowledge gained from alive consciousness is nothing like that gleaned with screen consciousness. There’s a feeling of control with Google, but often the answers come up short. When my consciousness is alive, I’ll forget about Google and Facebook. Instead, I engage the direct knowing of intuition and connect to “what is”.
Simple, open awareness allows individuals to represent an aspect of nature in an alive, fresh way. We can each have a felt experience of life in a particular system, from the point of view of the particular member we’re representing—and create a living map of the system at the same time. We do this by inviting participants to represent different people or aspects of a living system, to stand in relation to each other, and to interact with the facilitator’s guidance.
Nature constellations offer us the chance to temporarily inhabit any aspect of nature. For example, you could decide to represent Fish or Volcano, while others represent Mother Earth, Geopolitical Earth, Wildness, Indigenous Person, or Settler. When you represent in a nature constellation, you open to the alive consciousness of that particular aspect or person you’re representing. And you get to relate to the others in the constellation in their chosen representations.
Representing one part in a natural system may reveal a holistic pattern that’s important for you now. With a nature constellation, you learn from what or who you’re representing, from the other representatives’ experiences, and the whole field of the constellation. Let’s say you choose to represent Volcano. As Volcano erupting and creating new land, you might learn about your creative force. You might even realize that your fire is part of a larger fire at the core of Mother Earth. Or you might represent Fish—a little fish that blends into the background, that moves and flows in the ocean with its school, hides among Mother Earth’s sea corals when Volcano erupts, and when it’s safe reemerges. From Fish, you might learn about humility and responsiveness.
Constellations support alive consciousness by giving us a dynamic way to move out of our usual frames of reference. Exploring different parts, like Fish or Volcano, help us break out of worn patterns of thinking. Living systems adapt, mature, breakdown, and regenerate through the inter-relationships between their members and their responses to outside forces. When we come together in a nature constellation circle, we can play with living systems in creative, meaningful ways.
Recovering our connection to nature
We are facing ecological, humanitarian, and economic crises on a global scale entirely new for humanity. Working with the self-organizing dimension of living systems, as we do in constellations, gives us powerful leverage in changing our consciousness and perhaps also our behaviors to meet these challenges.
But the full alive consciousness has been lost to most of us. And most of us have forgotten that our bodies and our spirits are part of nature. Nature constellations are a way back to alive consciousness and direct knowing bodies in nature. Learning from all parts of nature, there’s a sense of community and spontaneity, a valuing of direct experience, and a chance to share insights with each other. Nature constellations foster healing, understanding, creativity, and fresh vision.
We are fortunate today that so many teachers from all over the world are offering their traditional wisdom and teachings. Nature constellations, along with the practices of these old ways—like those of indigenous cultures’ of the Americas, the Dagara’s of western Africa, Celt’s, original Judaism, and many others—when we approach them with respect and honoring help us recover our alive consciousness and our sense of direct knowing.
Rather than blame ourselves for being disconnected, the positive thing we can do is see what’s happening and act from within whatever sphere we find ourselves in. For example, we may be called to take visible leadership or work behind the scenes, to pray, to march, to tend to our gardens, or care for our children. We truly are part of a collective and can be most powerful when functioning in awareness from exactly where we are.
Mother Earth’s perspective
One summer, I led a nature constellation circle in the large backyard of one of my colleagues. I started by welcoming everyone to share their feelings about nature, climate change, and environmental destruction. Some expressed fear and sadness, while others felt held by Mother Earth and had confidence in nature’s ability to heal.
Participants’ sharing led to co-creating a constellation where one woman represented Mother Earth, and everyone else represented different humans—an activist and a human family—and other aspects of nature. I facilitated dialogues between Mother Earth and each of the other representatives in turn.
The woman who represented Mother Earth discovered deep peace and confidence that surprised her. And to us as well, she transformed—appearing immovably solid, her words carried depth and wisdom. “Everything will work out,” Mother Earth said to a man who was representing Human Activist, “You don’t need to worry about Mother Earth.”
That was difficult for Human Activist to hear as he felt we are headed for environmental catastrophe. From a human perspective, we are in peril, as are many of Earth’s species. Yet, regardless of what happens to us, Mother Earth will continue. Constellations challenge us to look at situations in new ways and to embrace seemingly paradoxical views. That excites me, because if we don’t embrace contradictions that encompass the whole system, we may not be able to survive.
Nature constellations widen the possibilities for community flourishing. Nature constellations offer a way to strengthen our original sensing capacities in nature, harmonize our relationships with nature, and get clearer about our roles within the living systems of our lives. Take a moment, if you like, to reflect on your own life, your skills, and talents. Where and how do you seem to have influence around you? And how are you influenced by the living systems you inhabit or have been a part of?
Schedule of Constellation Offerings