A Week of Ancestral Healing
I’ve just come back from an incredible 5 days at St.Ottilien Abbey, near Munich, doing a workshop attended mainly by the descendants of Nazis and Jews, and also by others with the huge splits in their greater systems that lead us to carry deep trauma in our bodies. For some weird/ dumb reason I didn’t realise I was stepping into this particular field of Nazis and Jews, but in a workshop facilitated by Dan Cohen and Emily Blefeld amongst others, (plus the fact that it was in Germany) I’m surprised I was so naive!
Read more about my experience on Substack in this article.
When I was 11 or 12 years old, we studied the Holocaust in school. The school didn’t acknowledge the inherited trauma that pubescent girls might be carrying for their families, as they showed us films of the liberation of Auzchwitz, with no support for what it brought up for us.
Of course I knew about the holocaust, my father was a Hungarian Jew born in 1932 who spent 1944-45 in Budapest, (also aged 12) being unknowingly sheltered in a school (which he later attended as a pupil) by the SS via a Hungarian Officer in the fascist army, Captain Osckay. Osckay had WW1 comrades in Berlin who helped him protect over 2000 Jews (one of the Hungarians who saved the most persecuted people during the holocaust) from the deadly Arrow Cross fascist government. My father never shied away from telling us about his experiences during the war and the subsequent soviet invasion.
The plaque commenorating the addition of Captain Osckay to the Yad Vashem monument at the Jewish high school in Zugló , where my father was in hiding in Budapest.
I grew up with this trauma in my body and my field.
At the workshop, I fell into the arms of the descendants of Nazi perpetrators, I represented Jewish perpetrators and Jewish victims, and German perpetrators and German victims, I represented German Blood, I represented “I Don’t Want to March”, I represented hearts, souls, Glyphosate, I did a huge amount of profound representation in every constellation.
When we arrived, Dan’s first sentence was “When I think of my father, I draw a line from Gaza to here”. I feel the same. When we left, we planted daffodils on the graves of monks and of Jewish holocaust survivors in the cemeteries at the Abbey, and we did my first ever Jewish ritual in that cemetery.
We also shared some very funny Jewish humour, I feel so grateful for that, as well as Irish humour and love courtesy of my lovely friend and colleague Roisin Fallon, without whom I (literally) wouldn’t have been there, and the laughter makes so much more sense now.
The work we do is profoundly felt in my body and the 40 or so bodies of those of us who were there, doing the work. My wish for the work is that it impacts the horrific situation in Gaza, and I know those are grand wishes.
Read more about my experience on Substack in this article.
To learn more about Family Constellations, join me and Barbara Morgan in her facilitator training starting at the end of April in the west of England. Or you can join me at my retreat coming up in May, Family Constellations and 5Rhythms Retreat- The Alchemy of Shiva