What are Mindful Re-Presentations?
A Mindful Re-Presentation is a method that helps us
To find a way
To flourish as an individual and
Belong to the group in a healthy way (family, organization or nature)
We are all connected though these organic systems but not always in a good way that allows us all to thrive.
Family members don’t always connect in helpful and mutually supportive ways. The same often happens in organisations. Modern humans have not been doing a great job of relating well with the planet earth either.
When we live at odds with each other and the planet, these larger organic systems become hostile to us. People become polarised and our governance systems deteriorate. Conflict escalates and cooperation drops away. Meanwhile the planet starts to attack us. We have wild bush fires, floods and hurricanes such as we have never seen before. These are the awesome challenges that confront us early in the 21st century. We experience these difficulties within ourselves, within our intimate social groups such as family and freinds as well as in larger social groups.
Mindful Representations give us a way of quickly and deeply understand these organic systems. (family organisation and planet) They open up elegant and effective ways of moving forward to address these terrible difficulties.
MRs can be used to help deal with interpersonal problems in both families and organizations. It can help families deal with other issues such as alcoholism and other addictions, psychiatric disorders, serious medical illnesses, adoption, grief and separation. MRs can help organizations function more effectively dealing with such issues as restructuring and communication problems. Individuals who somehow feel held back from living life to their full potential may also benefit.
| What differentiates Mindful Reps from Other Constellations |
|---|
| A strong commitment by practitioners to maintain their own personal daily mindfulness practice that supports a deep mindful presence in representations. |
| The mindful presence means these insights are experienced not just as ideas but as deep embodied realisations. That means these insights are more easily integrated into our everyday lives. |
| A strong respect for reality and known facts. That helps to ground the insights so that they remain relevant and useful. |
Mindful Representations of families and organisations are a distinct form of family constellation work due to the inclusion of mindfulness and the priority they gives to respecting facts and science. Any intuitive understanding that arises out of a Mindful Representation will be checked against the facts. This approach means that workshop participants can much more easily integrate the experiential insights that emerge during representations. That means they can these experiences have an unfolding positive effect on participants’ lives.
MRs can help organizations function more effectively dealing with such issues as restructuring and communication problems.
Mindful Representations are usually done in a group of about 10 to 20 people sitting in a circle with a skilled facilitator curating the process. In a one day workshop devoted to these representations alone, about 6 separate representations can be completed.
These representations reveal previously hidden forces that are seriously interfering with our ability to get on with each other and with the planet. They can then usher in a natural remedial process.
Mindful Representations (MRs) look at the family or organisation as a whole without scapegoating or blaming. A mindful re-presentation is a brief intervention that can reveal creative and unexpected solutions that emerge out of taking a broader perspective than is possible in other approaches. This work emerged out of psychotherapy, family therapy, group therapy, systems theory and phenomenology in Family Constellations in the 1990s. Mindful Representations have evolved from family constellations.
Distinguishing features of Mindful Representations are:
Facilitators of Mindful Representations need to nurture a creative open space where creative solutions can emerge. This requires the capacity to navigate through conflicting needs and perspectives, whilst maintaining a profound respect and compassion for everyone involved. The empathy and respect need to be all encompassing, even to the point of including the worst of perpetrators.
This is intensely challenging for practitioners. To deal with this, practitioners are strongly committed to maintaining their own personal daily mindfulness practice. Their training in mindfulness is equivalent to the three levels of training outlines on www.mindfulnesstraining.info/courses Due to the mindful presence in MR workshops, these insights emerge not just as ideas but as deep embodied realisations.
Mindful Representation practitioners maintain strong respect for known facts. That protects the repesentations from deteriorating into dramatic fantasies and helps to firmly ground the insights in reality so that they remain relevant and useful.
Practitioners cultivate a deep understanding of the processes that support organic systems. They learn to have a deep respect for the organic self-regulation and natural hierarchy within systems. This assists them to make elegantly attuned interventions that enable those systems to move towards optimal function for the benefit of all.
These insights are experienced as:
- embodied realisations arising out of mindful presence
- being firmly grounded in reality and
- being supported by the larger organic system
These embodied realisations then tend to gradually express themselves seemlessly in our daily lives after they emerge in a workshop.
Mindful Representations have evolved from family and systemic constellations which have been around for almost 40 years. This constellation process has benefited and even transformed many individuals. Nonetheless, the impact in the broader community has been minuscule. At Mindful Representations we are trying to address this dissappointing outcome by:
- Grounding our representations in a solid practice and understanding of mindfulness.
- Remaining open to surpising information that comes to light during a representation while still staying grounded in reality.
- Respecting facts and repudiating superstitious and ungrounded approaches to this work
- Clearly distinguishing between facts and hypotheses. It is dangerous to present a hypothesis that emerges from a representation as a fact. Nonetheless, these hypotheses can be extremely helpful as they open up new vistas for exploration.
- Keeping our work as understandable and as transparent as possible
- Integrating our work with evidence-based practices
- Supporting research into our work
Hopefully this approach wiil help make this work more relevant to the general community.