Training for practitioners Summer 2024

Online and in-person training in the art of family constellation work.

The training will develop your ability to:

  • apply the principles of constellation work

  • be patient and successful working with difficult problems

  • relate to clients authentically and contactfully

  • trust yourself and your decisions as you facilitate

Training elements

  • A small group (7 to 10 participants)

  • Teaching sessions alternating with real work

  • At least two full personal constellations as a client, one online and one in person

  • A chance to practice and build community with colleagues throughout the training

  • Facilitating at least one full-length constellation in person

  • A certificate for 130 hours of training (teaching time, constellations, in-person field school, and practice sessions with students and TAs)

  • Possibility to co-facilitate in my regular online workshops after the training

There will also be in-person (Toronto) and online workshops almost every week to give you opportunities to participate and represent, which is key for facilitating.

If you’re interested

If you are interested, use the form on the booking page to email me and we’ll set up a virtual tea to talk about the training. The interviews for this year will close in mid-April.

Learn to work with the deepest questions people face

Constellation work is an extraordinary and rich discipline, and there is an urgent need for it. To be able to help clients and people you love with hard questions is an honour and a pleasure. This training will give you principles and tools to do that.

A lot of training is intellectual and not experiential—this training will not be like that. There is a structure set out below, within which we will flex to make the learning as alive and useful as possible.

The structure of the training

12 training modules and multiple constellations online, followed by a 6-day, in-person training

Saturday dates are 1.5 hours of teaching. Sundays are 2.5 to 3 hours for constellations. I’ll finalize start and end times after the interviews, based on everyone’s time zones. Depending on the group size, we may not need all the Sundays listed below.

Part 1: You as a facilitator May 4-5, 18-19, 25-26

Facilitators depend on a connection to themselves as they work, so it is an essential part of your equipment. Most of us have disruptions in our relationship with ourselves, which interfere with confidence and clarity. This hampers good people from doing good work, so we will look at those issues directly. This module uses constellation tools to explore who you are as a practitioner, with the goal that the learning and facilitating become your own.

One key to confidence is using your specific gifts, not imitating someone else’s. To do that, you must see your gifts, value them accurately, and work with them as fearlessly as possible (including blind spots and shadows). Last, because it’s so important in this work, we’ll build capacity to feel comfortable with uncertainty.

Part 2: Bert Hellinger’s principles of family systems June 1-2, 8-9, 15-16, 29-30 and July 6-7, 13-14

We’ll study and apply Bert Hellinger’s insights into systems:

  • Love in a system follows certain orders or rules

  • Inclusion and exclusion are profoundly important and systems respond to them in weighty ways

  • We are deeply influenced by events and history we do not know about

  • There is a deep love and longing for our parents that governs us unconsciously

  • We all have perpetrators and victims in our ancestry and both need to be honoured

We’ll study patterns that create disorder and patterns that resolve that disorder. We will also cover principles that are essential to good work but often aren’t articulated.

Part 3: How to be with clients July 27-28 and August 3-4 and 10-11

This will cover the practical experience of leading sessions individually and with groups:

  • Basic structure of doing the work individually and in groups, online and in person

  • Receptivity on the not-so-obvious level which is necessary to do a constellation

  • Using information from your own body and the client’s body (rather than navigating based on ideas)

  • Understanding pacing and how it affects the depth of the work

  • Integrating principles from Somatic Experiencing, Ray Castellino’s work, and other trauma practices

  • Building a vocabulary to talk about constellation work

  • What to expect of yourself as a facilitator

Six-day field school in Toronto, ON August 25th (noon) to August 30th (5 pm):

We’ll apply everything we covered in person together. Each person will facilitate at least one constellation and receive at least one. We’ll debrief and learn from each session. We’ll also share meals and social time, as much or as little as you prefer.

Fees

$2200 CAD plus costs for travel and accommodation for the field school in August.

You can apply for scholarships of $1000 that are available from a client who donated to support this training.