The Family Body; constellations intro
Take a breath. Feel your actual body right here, right now. I want you to really land with me because everything we're about to explore starts and ends in the body.
Let me tell you what I've been seeing in this work - family systems are literally living, breathing bodies. They hold energy that needs to move, emotions that need expression, and patterns waiting for space to finally shift. And just like when emotions get stuck in our physical bodies creating density and pain, the same thing happens in family systems. When something can't be expressed, when emotions are forbidden, when truths go unspoken - that energy doesn't just disappear. It gets stored in the family body until there's space for it to finally move.
I'd fucking guess that until we start doing our own work, like 99% of our identity, our patterns, our behaviors come from family. Our parents come with baggage. Their parents came with baggage. Their parents' parents... you get it. There's no such thing as a perfect family. We've all got places where we needed something and weren't met.
The more I do this work, the more I'm convinced that contact is everything. If I could only teach one thing for 6 months straight, it would be this. Contact is where boundaries meet, where healing happens, where patterns dissolve. But here's the thing - contact isn't just being physically present. It's not just sitting in the same room nodding along. Real contact requires being in your actual body, feeling your actual feelings, staying present with what's happening.
Let's get real about how we break contact. These are protective mechanisms, and they're smart - they kept us safe. But they also keep us stuck. We've got projection - throwing our stuff onto others, that judgment, that blame we can't look at in ourselves. We've got deflection - like a satellite dish bouncing everything away before it can touch us. There's confluence - where we merge completely with others, no boundaries, just losing ourselves in their experience. Retroflection - turning emotions back on ourselves instead of expressing them outward. And introjection - taking on others' beliefs as our own.
Your family system has a structure. It has power dynamics, communication patterns, ways of handling conflict and emotion. Think about it - how does your family do contact? What's the structure? How did they handle conflict? Were people treated age-appropriately? What about choice, truth, sovereignty? All of this shapes who we think we are.
But here's what I really want you to get - this work isn't linear. You don't just learn something and move on. You spiral back, again and again, but each time you come with more awareness, better tools, deeper capacity, stronger sovereignty. So when you find yourself thinking "fuck, this again?" - that's actually perfect. That's exactly how it's supposed to work.
Here's what I know for sure: transformation happens through feeling, not thinking. How many times have you intellectually understood something but still found yourself in the same patterns? That's because real change happens at the level of the nervous system, in the actual tissues of your body.
When you start working with this, start small. Notice when you leave your body around family stuff. Practice tiny moments of staying present - even 30 seconds counts. Work with those feelings that arise. Give yourself so much fucking approval for wherever you are in this process.
Remember what Carolyn Lovewell says? "I am much more vast and strange than I think I am." These patterns? They're not the truth of who you are. They're just what got passed down. You're so much bigger, wilder, more sovereign than any inherited story.
Keep breathing, keep feeling, keep coming back to your body. That's where the real magic lives. That's where transformation actually happens. Your body knows exactly what needs to come next - trust that wild wisdom that lives in your bones.
This work isn't easy. It asks us to feel things we've spent lifetimes avoiding. It asks us to stay present when every pattern says "run." But when we start healing these patterns in ourselves, we create ripples that affect our entire lineage - past and future. You're not just doing this for yourself. You're doing it for all the generations that came before you, and all the ones that will come after.
In wild devotion, Carl
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#embodiment #familypatterns #practicalmagic #sovereignaf