Principles of Mindful Representations Training

Mission

MRtraining is designed as a high-quality professional training based which nurtures personal growth, theoretical understanding, and relevant skills. These skills will serve the students both in facilitating constellation work and also will enrich their own personal lives.

Values

We believe in cultivating a compassionate awareness directed towards finding a respectful place for everyone in their families and in the wider world. This includes everyone taking appropriate responsibility for their own actions.

We look to empower our clients rather than making them dependent, whilst acknowledging that some dependence can be temporarily necessary to support the growth that makes self-empowerment possible.

MBSC Course Aims

  • To generate a productive and enjoyable educational experience
  • To develop a good theoretical and practical basis for introducing systemic constellation work into student’s own work practices.
  • To be primarily skills focussed, supported by theoretical understanding and the development of personal insight.
    • If the student explicitly says they prefer to use the training for self-development purposes, the primary focus for that student will be changed accordingly
  • To have clear evaluation processes so students can realistically evaluate their own progress and direct their own learning accordingly.

MBSC Training Philosophy

Learning is based on dialogue. It is achieved through doing (experience) and reflecting through discussions.

Methods

Mindfulness Training

The underlying approach for facilitating constellations is phenomenology. Phenomenology means being present to and acknowledging what actually is happening, both in objective space and in our own minds. That doesn’t sound too hard … or does it.? How do we ensure that what we observe and perceive is not coming from our own projections- the habitual filters of familiar thinking patterns, learned tendencies and ‘what we already think we know’? We need a quality of attention that attunes us without choosing and without preference. Mindfulness is a practice that enables us to pay attention in this way- to discover and transform our habitual organization of experience and attend to the present moment, non-judgmentally. This approach serves us extremely well when we are tuning into the field of a constellation. It is also a great asset in our personal lives.

Mindfulness is a skill which improves significantly with practice, especially when we receive adroit coaching from an experienced practitioner. We help you to learn mindfulness using an approach called the mindfulness learning spiral. This involves didactic teaching then experiential practice followed by discussion and feedback from an experienced practitioner based on the practice. This, in turn, leads to more teaching and practice. As we progress through the mindfulness learning spiral our practice deepens and becomes stronger.

A good mindfulness practice helps everyone including Mindful Rep practitioners to stay grounded by bringing us back to our senses – literally! It is a very valuable asset for constellation practitioners because regular mindfulness practice improves our capacity to be more genuinely phenomenological.  Moreover, mindfulness meditation has successfully subjected itself to extensive scientific evaluation. It now has mainstream credibility. See www.mindfulness.org.au

The practice of mindfulness is the backbone of this course because it is a powerful method for the facilitator to stay in tune with the energy of the field by attending to the reactions of the client, the representatives and the holding circle in a detached and non-intrusive way. Moreover, it also enables the facilitator to stay in tune with their own responses which include thoughts, physical sensations, emotions and impulses. Mindfulness is a practical skill which improves with practice. Accordingly, this course includes a structure that strongly supports this practice.

Systemic Representations Training

Systemic Representations reveals how we interact with those around us. They show how our behaviours are influenced by our family and by significant events involving our ancestors. It allows us to set ourselves free from entanglements in our family system that are influencing our behaviour in maladaptive ways. This training will make this work more understandable. In it, we will use constellations both to teach and to help address participant’s personal issues

This training also helps the students to think systemically. In this way, the students learn to transcend the limited point of view of the isolated individual. Instead, the students get a real experiential sense of people as part of an organic whole, which includes families going back through the generations, organizations, businesses, nations, the entire human race and finally all of nature. This is called systemic understanding. This helps students to get a felt sense that we are all part of something much bigger. They can sense how we are all caught up in the huge currents of larger society and history. This generates a spontaneously arising compassion, which is balanced by a realistic understanding of individual responsibility.

In order to develop systemic understanding,  the students learn the natural structures in families that support peace and harmony in individuals who belong to the family system. They also learn to think visuospatially about systems, as this allows for much more sophisticated comprehension of complex systems than mere verbal explanation.  Imagine pulling on one part of a spider web and looking at what happens throughout the web. Immediately you have a strong felt sense of what is happening. To explain the same process verbally you may need to read an academic thesis, after which you may still be none the wiser. When we set up a representation we are beginning to observe the web of interconnections.

Navigating a representation skilfully requires the facilitator to first set up a safe holding field and to conduct an interview which clarifies the facts and the issue. Once this has been done using the same mindful attitude described above, the facilitator needs to continue the constellation with the same open and courageous awareness while keeping in mind systemic principles, the facts and other clues that emerge along the way.

This is clearly an enormous amount to keep in mind. Fortunately, the practice of mindfulness can be developed to the point that we can skillfully practice choiceless awareness. When this happens we have an openness in our mind that allows the right perception or thought to come to our mind at the right time.

Summary

With the attitude of compassionate awareness directed towards empowering our clients this training focuses on the following:

  1. Strengthening the phenomenological stance through mindfulness
  2. Developing and deepening systemic awareness and understanding
  3. Good grounding in theoretical understanding
  4. Development of the practical skills of systemic constellation work
  5. Self-growth and development through tuning into the larger interconnected field mindfully.
  6. Students having a realistic appraisal of their own abilities, strengths and vulnerabilities as Facilitators of Mindful Representations