When you are at peace with your parents, there are two powerful openings that occur in your life.  First, you’re able to look at your mother and father and accept them just as they are, without judgment, and without wishing they were or had acted any differently.  This allows for you to be receptive to the full power of the life force that they passed on to you, with all the conditions to which your soul agreed in order for you to have your life.  You can experience all the strength that comes through your ancestral lineage without any dilution.

Secondly, when you’re free from any entanglements with your parents’ fates, the choices they made in their marriage and their parenting approaches, you no longer have to use any of your energy in secretly trying to change anything about them or any of the ways that they have acted in life- either toward each other or toward you.  You respect the fates that their souls have agreed to work with in this lifetime, and see that you have something in common with them- that you also have challenges you came to life to use as growth and learning opportunities.  You can begin to uncover and let go of any hidden sense you might carry that you know better than they do. This ultimately liberates you to be more completely present to the actual partner that you choose to be with, and not see your beloved with any of the lenses through which you viewed your parents.  If there are unresolved concerns with your mother or father, you will be tempted to unconsciously work out these inner dramas with the person you draw closest to, and become most vulnerable to, as an adult.

Is this process ever completed?  Not a chance! As long as we’re in a body, we’ll be influenced by the energetic patterns that were formed with the first people we knew in life- our parents.  Those same patterns from childhood and youth are reactivated any time our energy fields come close to and interact with our parents’ fields. A quote attributed in many places to the spiritual leader Ram Dass  wisely cautions, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” When you do, you’ll have many opportunities to discover just how much work remains for you to reach a peaceful acceptance of your parents, siblings and other family members.

A constellation is a powerful exploration of the living energy field of your family’s soul.  Because it’s done with representatives, rather than your actual family members, it becomes a safer place to consciously experience the hidden dynamics and unresolved issues you agreed to take on through your first birth into life.  The second, and what may be considered the more difficult, birth is out of the limiting energetics of the family story, and into the gifts and strengths you came to life to share with the world as your purpose for being here. If it was easy, everyone would have already reached this level.  The healing can only begin once the deep wounds are opened and cleaned.  As Barbara Brennan has taught, it's within your deepest wound that your greatest gift resides.  If you take one quick look at the news, you can see the overwhelming need for all of us to help each other to wade into the deeper waters of the unconscious, and begin reweaving the threads of healthy and healing communities that will be necessary to restore the overheated atmospheres of nature and society.