Working with money issues

Working with Money Issues A BLOG Post by Nic Johnson – Family Constellations Facilitator.

I have found an interesting article in my research on working with money issues with Family Constellations! It is written by Chetna Kobayashi and its called Money Supports Life (TKF Issue 9 p.50, article Money Supports Life)

She writes that in her observations of facilitating Family Constellations she has learned that people are often unable to look at money. If this is the case and for whatever reason this is so, no wonder many of us have problems of one sort or another with money!

From her work at Family Constellation Workshops Chetna has noticed that the ability to receive or to make money is often connected to male energy. She makes the point that there may be other factors at play but that the male line is often a good starting point to begin work with money issues.

Chetna talks about being at low point in her life with a debt to pay and caring responsibilities that were curtailing her income flow. She found that a couple of friends offered her some financial support with no strings attached and she was able to receive their offerings as an expression of their deep love for her.

She says that it required true modesty and that she had not been able to be humble in this real sense before. Chetna came out of this dark time realising that out of pity for her parents she had been trying to sacrifice herself for them, giving only and not allowing herself to receive anything they offered her. She had learned only to give and not to receive and had tried to be bigger than her parents.

Of course this had not been possible, it is disrespectful to think we know better than out parents but as a child we have a blind love and think we can help – rather we fail to learn the need for a balance of give and take in our relationships and to assimilate the right order of things with our parents – which is that they give and we take, they are bigger than us and we are small. This way love can flow in the right direction freely, a supportive and energising love filled with life force. This is the gift our parents want for us, it is what they wanted from their parents and what they want to pass into us.

It is out of this blind love and loyalty to the family belief system, an entanglement with forgotten ancestors or unacknowledged acts of perpetration or suffering that keep this love from flowing down through the generations. Once we begin to see these blocks we can feel the love and support free up.

We learn to connect to life and love through our first nurturing experience with our primary carer, most often our mother. As we reach teenage years and start to reach out into the wider world our fathers become more of an influence, with encouragement to take some risks, to try things out to find out about how we are in relationship to the world outside our smaller communities. I see this as one way that our male lines can affect how we are with money. If this father/child relationship is healthy, accepting, supportive and encouraging, the flow of love, energy, abundance and money is clean. If there are entanglements, unconscious loyalties and things are out of order with our ancestors this flow will be blocked and the energy flow will be blocked.

Chetna says she has the simple idea that dates back to primitive times when men went out to hunt game and women stayed home to care for the children and to gather fruits and nuts. She says that in those days game supported life, she thinks this same instinct still works today but instead of game it is money that the men hunt, game is represented by money. Money supports life and once that life energy is passed from old to young through the paternal line connected to that ancient hunting energy, there is no obstacles to having it.

My own personal journey of looking at money issues started a few years ago when I gave up working for the NHS and a regular and reasonable income. I felt I had always had enough money, I had never had any debts aside from a, now small, mortgage but underlying this was a sense of fear of potential disaster, money had not come easily, I had worked hard and budgeted hard, I had very little savings and was unsure how I would survive into old age on a state pension! Yet I also always felt that I would be ok.

I think it is fair to say that my underlying feeling about money was confusion and insecurity, I felt a need to hold on tightly at times but had enough to let go on occassions too. Perhaps I am tight and definitely careful. I am not very well educated on economics or handling money. I have no idea about investments or how to grow money without working. So there we have it. I didn’t really want to look at money, as Chetna says.

I did some personal work recently as I settled back into life at home after a couple of years travelling in my camper van. I wanted to make sure that I had cleared the way to making myself a prosperous Family Constellations Business, motivated by a passion for this work and wanting to share the huge benefits that I have found for myself as I have unravelled stories and gained new perspectives.

I started a one to one session with a great facilitator Ty Francis! Together we looked at my relationship with money. Ty showed me how we usually have one of three ways of dealing with money, we reject it, we love it, or we do both! Turns out I do both – I reject and love it at different times.

We played with a representation of money and I tested out my desire for it. Awkward! Well that was tricky. Could I let go and play with this new awareness that I was allowed to actually desire money. Not really, I revealed loads of hang ups about my ability to let go into desire at all! It was fun working with Ty, we played and laughed, I got embarrassed and learned masses about how I related to, not just money, but to men, sex, desire, my ability to receive, to trust, to give, to let go. My relationship with money did seem to relate to my male line, my own gender issues, my inability to relax into my femaleness, to give up my tendency to do both male and female roles in my own family. I felt less confused afterwards and hopeful that perhaps I could have fun with this deep exploration of the life force that is money.

A few months later I had the opportunity to do a personal constellation looking at my longing for a prosperous business and the freedom to practice with ease! The constellation showed much stuckness in my fathers line, many shut down men, much trauma and very little movement. I felt that same stuckness afterwards and carried it rather more hopelessly for a couple of months, concentrating on just being with the sense of being stuck.

Then I was shown a constellations exercise, based on work done by Emily Blefeld and Dan Cohen at their recent workshop in Ireland.

I had the chance to work with this short exercise and I got to represent my own father and grandfather. What I saw and experienced from these two mens perspective, was a deep and paralysing grief at the loss of my grandfathers older brother (aged 21) in the first world war and my own fathers loss of his son, my brother. I felt too, extraordinarily for the first time, the parallels with my own experience of loosing my brother (aged 27) in a canoeing accident.

When you loose a sibling you witness the grief that your parents suffer at the loss of their child, and you loose both a sibling and in effect both parents too, to their grief. Its a complex and difficult place to be! There can be little place for your own grief.

In my grandfathers case his parents decided to not talk about their loss. They had the funeral and wrote in a letter to the family that they just wanted to not talk of the loss again. They shut down their grief, it was unbearable in the face of so much grief for the loss of so many young men, and so much more in WW1.

So my grandfather and my father too, out of loyalty to their parents shut down. I too have struggled to stay present with the pain of my losses, I have run from grief, from the pain that my children have suffered through this pattern of disconnection or shutting down.

I have been working on this but was I still being loyal to my fathers family, avoiding feeling the seemingly unbearable grief?

I spent a few weeks in and out of deep grief, with such pain and inability to function normally in the world. I clearly understood why my ancestors had wanted to shut this away. It was only with the resource to dip in and out of the pain with some distance now from the original source of the death of my great uncle, that I could face the grief.

I had been watching ‘Another Self’ a Netflix series(Written by Nuran Evran Sit) about a community in Turkey that use Family Constellations work to heal their relationship issues and other things and had noticed that the Facilitator ‘Zaman’ often suggested research or a way of honouring what had been experienced in his constellations. I looked for photos of my father, grandfather and great grandfather in a box of old family photos and looked into their eyes. Every day I lit a candle for each of these men and another for my longing for a prosperous business and ease in my work. As I lit the candles I honoured the grief my ancestors had had to face in the loss of their sons, or brother. And my own loss of my brother too. I found photos of my great uncle and of my brother too and added them to the group.

I said the sentence:

‘Dear ancestors, I honour your loss and the way that you carried it. I would like to face the depth of pain of all my feelings, of my grief, my sorrow, my jealousy, my anger and rage. I would like to feel the width and breadth of my joy too and I thank you with all my heart for passing on life to me, with all that it cost you. I ask that you support me, my family and my business with kindness if I do this. I shall live my life in your honour and take my vision for a prosperous business and ease at work with me into the rest of my life.’

I then turned and took my longings candle and walked away from the photos.

I continued this ritual on a trip to France and went into many small churches – aware I was honouring my grandfathers deeply christian loyalty here too. I lit the candles on offer there and I spoke the ritual sentences.

As the weeks went by, following this I began to notice subtle changes. My son designed and set up a new website for me, it was a generous gift of his time. My daughter offered me a photoshoot to get some good photos to supplement the website. Another generous gift.

Within minutes of launching this website I was getting enquiries about workshops, and one to one sessions. I was offering free phone consultations and people were contacting me for these too.

The workshops I have run since starting this process have felt precious and the field has been very strong. It is almost as though I had nothing to do as facilitator! The field just handed us what we needed. I honour this process and am in awe of its power. I hope it has been helpful to the clients that have been working with me. They too have been awesome in their bravery in coming to workshops, facing their own pain and taking steps to open more deeply to this miraculous work.

May everyone prosper and take their share in the abundance as we each move into a deeper understanding of this need for balance with giving and taking together.