In my travels I’ve met people with varying opinions about bamboo. Some love it. It grows fast. It’s tough and strong, durable; doesn’t break down for a long, long time. For this reason, it is a good choice as a renewable resource. A woman I met in Mexico told me she was dedicated to removing bamboo that had been planted and become a nuisance. She teaches people what can be done with bamboo, and she finds new homes for the plants when she can. So inspiring, the things people find as their calling in life.
I was thinking about this woman when I was working in a new garden patch in my back yard. Last fall, I decided to reclaim a patch of earth from a particularly stubborn, tenacious grass that grows back there, which has been serving to cover the ground quite well for decades, requiring nothing but sun and rain and an occasional trim. But I decided to put in a garden, with watermelon, basil, parsley, mint, greens and tomatoes. And now I am face to face with this plant – grass, bamboo’s second cousin – that has root systems deep and well established, intertwined and strong and formidable. It meets the blade of my shovel like iron. It snickers at my attempts to remove it. So I get down in there with my hands. I can find the roots when I get under them, when the soil is damp, and when I’m not in a hurry. Exerting myself in this way, connecting with dirt and plants really does something for my soul.
In the office, I’ve been fielding more requests for support groups and other types of groupwork. That is where a lot of my creative energy has been going as of late. The pattern that is showing up in my one-on-one work has been the particularly tough, entrenched impact of intergenerational trauma that is blocking real progress and growth in the lives of my clients. It shows up as stubborn and tenacious and sometimes appears impermeable to change.
The feeling is of being really mired in something that keeps sucking one in. It’s requiring me to take a different look at the way I can offer myself in service to them. Just so you know, it’s always mutually beneficial because my clients always mirror me and help me move through the processes I desire to work through as they do their work, and they always inspire me, whether they realize it or not.
I’m noticing that this new shift in the work I’m called to do demands a new level of humility. It demands that I continuously search out new resources. I am pushed to continually search for the right tools, and to make care for myself a sacred priority.
The really good thing about this is that the kind of trauma my clients are bringing to me these days responds to Systemic and Family Constellations Therapy.
And that is what I want to tell you about now. Here is a brief description, in case I haven’t already shared this with you. Over the next weeks, I plan to share on some various themes that I’ve come across in my studies as I’ve been working toward certification. I’m proud to say that yesterday I completed and submitted my application for Advanced Certification as a Systemic and Family Constellations Facilitator. I also bought and planted those herbs and greens in my little garden patch, and now it’s raining. I look forward to seeing what comes of this new vision – of working with others in groups to make real shifts in our experience, to removing obstacles to our being truly generative, vibrant, and expressive of who we came here to be. I hope they have a short acronym for Systemic and Family Constellations Therapist Facilitator, Advanced! I’ll share the certificate here once I get it!
My most recent vision is this:
To more powerfully perform from a place of embodiment so that I can stimulate and support the change that is desired; to collaborate with others to bring about not just a quick fix but transformation in the felt sense of people that I work with – that we finally know what it feels like to be held, to be supported in community, and believe that there is Something Bigger that we can lean into. And that joy and peace are our natural state, and that it is available to us in these bodies on this earth. To know what it feels like to be supported to move toward what we want, what we desire, what we need to make this life truly matter. And to celebrate all the movement (large and small) toward this goal.