Sometimes we are blessed to encounter an extraordinary being….

Teta Kina, the great aunt of my first husband, was one such woman. She is an Ancestor now, but when I first met her she was in her late 80s, living a simple life in a remote village in Bulgaria with not much money and no teeth (they’d been extracted by a zealous dentist many years previously). Although I did speak a little Bulgarian, Teta Kina spoke a local dialect of which I could only understand the odd word here and there. Yet somehow we were communicating without words: In her presence I began to cry and the tears flowed silently and continuously without any obvious cause. It was very unexpected and to this day I have never experienced anything like it.

So what was so special about Teta Kina?

I only know a little about her life: She was a religious woman, an Orthodox Christian and a widow of many years. Her husband had been a bit of a drunkard by all accounts, though she described him as ‘great fun.’ They were unable to have children, so she adopted and brought up a girl, who was apparently extremely challenging; but she didn’t give up and when I met her, she was looking after her grand-daughter (as well as her chickens and vegetable plot).

She told us that she went to bed at 10pm and was often awake until 2am absorbed in happy memories. When asked what her secret was, she said, “You only need to identify one small thing in your life that brings you joy or produces a feeling of gratitude and then, you enlarge it and enlarge it until it fills your whole life.” Although the image was clear, I wasn’t able or ready to follow her advice at the time.

In the meantime, I began to study Family Constellations, in which we endeavour to reconnect with Ancestors who may have been excluded or forgotten. My teacher, Barbara Morgan, shares a healing visualisation where you see life as a river of love, flowing from your Ancestors, through your parents to you and then onwards through you to any offspring or creative projects you manifest in the world.

But in the river there are boulders…

The traumas which block the flow of love down the generations, can be quite large and difficult or even impossible to move.

The process of Family Constellations is looking at these boulders: Maybe Father was an alcoholic, or Mother was depressed; maybe there was a sibling in an earlier generation who committed suicide, or a child that was stillborn….

Sometimes the boulders are so large that only a trickle of water comes through in that place. As we look at the boulders we may feel helpless and hopeless, and we can look at the trickle as evidence that our parents didn’t really love us.

Reflecting on this image, I remembered Teta Kina’s words and suddenly realised that I had a choice: I could choose to focus on how small that trickle was; or…

I could look at the boulders and see how much was in the way (not my fault and not Mother’s fault if she, for example, lost her own Mother as she was growing up, or was sent away to boarding school age 8). And then perhaps I could see the little trickle differently: as evidence of the river of love that was still somehow managing to reach me despite all the obstacles in the way.

Internal shifts of perspective such as this can only happen when we are ready to receive them. Family Constellations is one way to ready ourselves for taking an enlarged perspective. Then and only then can we experience the river of love in its fullness and know true happiness, whatever the circumstances of our lives.

Julie Ulbricht