What does it mean to live life fully? One evening this week I experienced a lightning storm like nothing I had ever experienced before. The rain poured down and the sky completely lit up with flashes of sheet lightning every few seconds and this went on for at least an hour. There was no doubt that the universe was alive with energy and I recognized the full power of the natural world and life itself. During the storm, the energy that flows around, through, and between you and I, the energy we talk about in systemic constellations or any other energy healing work, was visible to the naked eye. This is the energy that allows us to live life fully.
Let me digress. I recently had a subscriber ask me to share my thoughts on a phrase frequently used by Bert Hellinger, generally considered the founder of Family Constellations. She wanted to fully understand the phrase “living the full life.” The systemic constellation family is spread all over the world and sometimes things get lost in translation. Frequently, the use of language is complex and the meaning relies on context and culture. This subscriber has attended numerous international systemic constellation training camps with Hellinger at various places around the world over the past decade. She wondered if living the full life means no longer living in agency with others and living with respect for the hierarchy of precedence? I know I often encourage others to live life fully, which I feel is another way of expressing the same phrase. What does it mean to live life fully, filled with passion and compassion, and to feel the energy of the universe flow through your body?
I sense that this concept has a different meaning for everyone; however, I will attempt to piece together the systemic healing use of the phrase. It doesn’t matter what phase of life you are in or whether you came to life with immense physical or mental challenges, I know that you can live life fully. Since I use the phrase frequently in my blog posts, I went back to each usage and created this list of components that serve as an action guide for you to live life fully.
Physical Needs Are Met
At the basic level of life, we need to have our physical needs met. To live life more fully we begin to focus on higher levels of health and wellbeing. We live in harmony and grounded to Mother Earth. We connect to Source. We ensure our bodies receive adequate levels of clean water and healthy food. We ensure that we receive enough restful sleep and a moderate level of healthy exercise. We surround the cells of our body with a life-giving energetic and emotional environment. Just like the creatures of the natural world around us, the body of a baby, child, or adult human being thrives when the body is touched or in contact with others.
Your body is the temple of your soul or spirit. It is your antennae to the environment around you and your emotional wellbeing. It is your unconscious mind. To understand how emotions connect with your body, sit or lie down, then take some time to feel into your body. Can you feel the energy flowing through your body? Can you track your breath in your body? Do you have energy blocks that keep you from experiencing the flow of energy to some parts of your body? Can you touch the place of your body that experiences your mother or your father? If you cannot feel the energy flowing freely through your body when you contemplate your mother and father; then you likely shut down your body to protect yourself in early childhood. If you are at that place in life where you shut down every time you hear or read that your wellbeing is related to your relationship with your mother and father, then I gently encourage you to give an inch, or a centimetre, and continue to read about how to live life more fully.
Live With Gratitude
You are able to live life fully when you have gratitude for being given life and you let go of the rest. Living life fully means you are connected to your vital life force, which comes to you through your mother and father. Are you able to say “Yes” to life as it was given to you? Are you able to acknowledge and accept the past as it was? If you are stuck with feelings of anger, resentment, hate, guilt, sadness, shame, anxiety, or depression when you think about your mother or father, or you’re still waiting for them to change in some way, then you are likely stuck in your childhood emotional response patterns. These patterns occur when you can’t fully take in vital life force energy from one or both of your parents. If you left childhood behind feeling like you didn’t get enough from one or both of your parents, or feeling like you got too much from your parents, you may struggle to feel anything emotionally in your body, or contrarily, be continually overwhelmed with emotion. Doing your healing work allows you to live life fully with vital life force energy flowing through your body.
Taking Responsibility for Wellness
You are able to live life fully when you decide to acknowledge, accept, and respond to the dynamics of your family system. Take responsibility for your own wellness and change old unconscious emotional reactive patterns that don’t serve you well anymore. If you struggle to find inner peace, self-love, emotional wellness, or fulfilling success in relationships and life, it might be because you consciously or unconsciously can’t fully take in or feel the love of your parents.
Live Authentic: Discover Your Inner Self
To live life fully, you are encouraged to live authentic to self. That comes with acceptance of birth as it was and life as it was given. You are energetically and physically 50% mother and 50% father. It is important to accept yourself fully inside. You can take in life fully when they can fully take in the love of your biological mother and father.
Until you return to your deep inner core self, addressing the layers of suppressed emotional wounds that keep your authenticity self hidden from you, the physical or mental symptoms and/or relationship patterns in your life will continue to occur. What we consciously or unconsciously feel we didn’t get in childhood from our mother or father is felt in every cell of our body, and remains there into adulthood, unless intentional healing takes place. This body felt sense may reveal itself as a great emptiness inside or a great unconscious longing. It may arise as feelings of abandonment, suffocation or inundation, lack of safety, or overwhelming vulnerability in relationships. There may be feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy in daily life or a general inability to feel fully alive or filled with joy. You may go around seeking life meaning or life purpose. Your biological mother and father want to be taken into your heart. They want to be acknowledged, respected, and honoured regardless of how well you feel they performed in their parenting role. You can’t fully take in your life force energy until you take the love of your biological mother and father into your heart as it was or is given. If you want it different you will continue to struggle.
Healthy Relationship With Mother
To live life fully, one needs to have a healthy relationship with mother. The child who can’t take in mother fully will likely have difficulties in future relationships with others. The relationship with mother is the blueprint for all future relationships. The child, whether it is a boy or girl, tends to reject the 50% feminine aspect of self that comes from mother. The individual will choose partners who will mirror/reflect this emotional rejection of mother back to them to raise awareness of this early childhood wound, or they may be fortunate and choose a partner who provides emotional space for this healing to occur. I have learned that for this reason family systems marry other family systems.
What you reject in your parents, you will also reject in yourself. What you emotionally try to carry for a parent will keep you from living your own life fully. You will expect your relationships to fill that emptiness, when the emptiness can only disappear or recede through emotional healing within Self.
When we reject a parent, we also tend to merge with the characteristics or qualities we have rejected in that parent. The child will struggle to develop healthy narcissistic self-love for self. Without self-love and strong healthy boundaries, relationships with others are emotionally difficult. Just as the child rejected mother, they will also reject others in relationships.
When a child is born to a mother that has great emotional need, the child struggles to fully connect to or make emotional contact with mother. The child feels her need and says, “You don’t have to be alone with this pain mother, I will share it with you.” The child energetically merges with mother. The child remains in mother’s energetic boundary until healing work is embraced. This may not occur in childhood or even in this lifetime. The child frequently doesn’t fully individuate from mother when it is developmentally expected around the age of 3 or 4. The child doesn’t develop a strong energetic boundary or sense of self as he or she grows older, and through this energetic merger with mother, the child energetically loses both mother and father. When the child merges with mother, a rejection of mother may also occur.
The child gives and gives and gives to others. The child fails to take enough for self. The body contracts and so does their experience of life. The child is afraid to take up enough space for self. The child struggles to breathe in life. The child will shallow breathe and struggle to breathe in a full supply of oxygen. They will ignore their own self-care. This individual will then seek external referencing rather than going inside to feel and ensure their own wellbeing at their inner core. Healing comes when a healthy boundary is developed and healthy separation occurs between the mother and child. The unhealthy relationship is replaced by a healthy relationship. Life challenges of any kind often reflect outstanding unresolved parental relationship issues from childhood or ancestral energetic entanglements. The child or adult needs to develop healthy life-giving boundaries with both parents and learn to take them both into their heart fully. We live life fully when we create a healthy relationship with mother, whether she is alive or transitioned to the other side.
Healthy Relationship With Father
The child who does not have a healthy relationship with mother will also tend to struggle in their relationship with father. They may reject father or be energetically too close to father. If the child remains in the energy boundary of mother, or too close to mother for life, they lose mother’s life-giving vitality and energetic essence. If mother is turned away from you emotionally because of her own unresolved emotional wounds and trauma, she likely isn’t there emotionally for your father either. Father feels disconnected from his partner and the children. The child is energetically guided to the father through the mother. If the child rejects father, or deems father unsatisfactory as mother’s partner, the child, whether it is a boy or girl, rejects the 50% of father or the masculine energy within self. A child who rejects father or can’t energetically connect to father may merge with father and unconsciously, out of love and loyalty, take on some aspect of father’s personality or suffering. The child may struggle as father struggles or behave as father behaves. That’s how the child maintains an unconscious relationship with father. We live life fully when we intentionally shift this unhealthy subversive relationship into a healthy relationship.
https://www.peacefulpossibilities.ca/family-constellations-calgary-relationship-with-father/
Accept and Resolve Childhood Emotional Wounds
To live life fully, the adult addresses the wounds of the inner child. The adult cannot change what happened to the child. The adult learns to self-parent and self-soothe the inner child. The emotional impact of a separation or bonding wound from the biological mother and/or disconnection from father at birth or in early childhood is imprinted on the cells of the child. This is the energetic emotional healing work that needs to be addressed. The adult takes the inner child by the hand and shows them a different big picture way of being or gives them a different image of life. The tiny baby developed an emotional response strategy to survive and may have unconsciously offered to carry mother’s emotional pain or trauma. Babies and children do this out of love and loyalty to their parents and the greater family system. In addition, perhaps your birth was traumatic in some way or you were put in an incubator for the first few weeks of your life. Perhaps mom was too busy to pick you up sometimes when you were crying for attention. Perhaps mom was under her own stress or had emotional issues lingering from her own childhood; unable to fully be there emotionally for you when you were a baby or child. Perhaps you were separated from your mother and/or father as a young child even for a week. Sometimes these wounds developed through situations that were quite innocuous and yet greatly impacting. Sometimes there was abuse, violence, lack of safety, or other significant trauma in the home. These inner wounds will override your life if you don’t address them. Living life fully means accepting what was and resolving these childhood emotional wounds to minimize their impact on the present.
Accept and Resolve Your Epigenetic Ancestral Inheritance
To feel whole inside and love yourself fully, in other words, to live life fully, you need to accept your emotional ancestral inheritance, regardless of how problematic that might be. Do you have some unresolved systemic ancestral emotional wounds or family secrets that are seeking to be healed? Were your ancestors forced to emigrate for one traumatic reason or another? Did your ancestors stoically bury their emotions and feelings in their bodies and move on to build a new life? You may be carrying their emotional pain in your body and it may be time to heal these emotional wounds so that you can breathe in life fully or move on to enjoy life fully.
Remember that you can’t leave your family behind. For the descendants, and that means you and/or your children or grandchildren, to embrace life fully with joy entails honouring the journey of your ancestors. Any heavy emotion you are carrying for or about your ancestors needs to be released from the cells of your body. It was their fate to struggle, however, it is not your fate. It is your fate to create the best life for you and your family and to live it fully. Your ancestors may have lived in a time and space when many of the resources and information we have today to heal systematically were not available. We honour the ancestors when we acknowledge their emotional wounds and choose to heal, and to take in enough breath to live life fully.
Some families, due to unresolved emotional trauma of the past, have difficulty fully embracing life. Some families have generation after generation of symptoms, conditions, illness, or relationship difficulties. These conditions may have a genetic component to them, however, they likely carry an emotional epigenetic component that is frequently overlooked. Many symptoms, chronic conditions, or dis-eases serve to unconsciously help an individual fit into their family system, or they serve as support in some other emotional way. Some conditions create a boundary to keep others away when an individual doesn’t have a strong healthy self-regulating energy boundary. Some conditions force others to care for you when you consciously or unconsciously don’t feel like you get enough attention. Sometimes an illness is the only way to be seen in a family. This can be quite obvious in families that have experienced a major trauma and the attention of the parents is diverted elsewhere. The child is unconsciously seeking resolution to any family system imbalance or wound, and it is up to you, the adult, to guide the child to healthier ways to live life fully.
Change and Communion
To live life fully, we accept that change is inevitable. We cannot change the past. We cannot change a future that hasn’t yet occurred. We can only change the present and impact the future. We can only change ourselves. It is up to others to change themselves. We embrace communion with others, rather than communication. Communion is accepting the whole personality of the other without attempting to change them. It is our main challenge in any relationship. When we are in relationship, we naturally tend to do and say things to sway the other to change to our way of thinking and being and that’s why clashes occur. This is called communication, not communion. We feel safe when we are around others who think and act like us because communion flows easily. That’s why relationships are such a conundrum and also why they are central to spiritual development and growth.
Exploring the Full Spectrum of Duality
To live life fully, we are asked to experience the fully range of duality spectrums. Challenge yourself to recognize, acknowledge, value, and embrace the light and darkness that dwells within you. You may not live every dark aspect of life, but it is important to explore the shadow side of life, perhaps through study or introspection. Most of us tend to have a preference for the light end of the spectrum and we continually work to keep the dark that is within us under wrap. However, we cannot fully understand the full expansiveness of our light possibilities if we don’t explore the shadow side of who we are, or the darker potential that exists, at the core.
Developing Compassion For Self and Others
To live life fully, we develop compassion for self and others, including all past or present family members. Are you able to take all your family system members fully into your heart? Are you able to understand that they gave you all that they could give you emotionally given the emotional resources they had available to them? Are you able to accept that it was enough? Are you able to accept your gifts and talents as they were given to you through your parents? Are you able to broaden your perception to take in the experience of the other? Are you able to hold the other in your heart? Are you able to have compassion for those who came before you or those on the other side of any conflict or battle?
Healthy Give and Take in Relationships
To live life fully, we take the time to gain insight around a healthy level of give and take in relationships. It’s through give and take in relationships that we have our needs and wants met. Give and take go hand in hand and we learn how to do both through our early relationship with mother. Within the family system, giving passes energetically from those who came first to those who came later. This is a component of what my subscriber called the hierarchy of precedence. The grandparent can give to the parent and the parent can give to the child. The child is able to give back gratitude to the parent for what they receive; however, they can never fully balance the relationship with the parent through giving back in childhood. The parent takes precedence in the family system. Without the parent, the child does not exist. To live life fully, we practise giving and taking in relationships so that it is not too much or too little.
https://www.peacefulpossibilities.ca/family-constellations-calgary-relationship-give-take-1/
Step Out of Agency
It is your birthright to live life fully and experience energy flowing through your body. Living in agency is energy deadening. Within the family or the community, the words “I want,” “I need,” or “Can you…?” pull individuals into agency. Helping becomes agency when we devote our life to the needs, desires, and goals of others at the expense of our own needs, desires, and goals. When you are in agency with others you stop listening to your own inner voice. Living life fully involves understanding your character style developed in childhood and reducing its impact in your present life situations if it is not serving you well. The child who unconsciously sacrificed self in the womb or in early childhood to care for the needs of mother is living in agency. If we constantly live in agency, we will end up suffering in some way physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, or relationally. Chronic conditions and illnesses are a common body response to living in agency. When we hold anger, resentment, guilt, shame, blame, hurt, pain, rage, sorrow, or grief in our bodies, we take on symptoms of unwellness. The goal is to live life fully with love, joy, peace, abundance, and magnificent energy.
https://www.peacefulpossibilities.ca/family-constellations-calgary-living-in-agency/
Healthy Internal Referencing
To live life fully, you are encouraged to embrace the practice of internal referencing. If you are constantly concerned about how everything you do is affecting others, rather than having self-concern, you are in agency. This is called external referencing. This means you understand your own wellbeing through the feedback you receive from others, rather than going within to sense your wellbeing or feel it in your body. Living in agency drains you of your energy, vitality, and life force.
Energetic Separation From the Dead
To live life fully, you need to create healthy energetic separation from the dead. Being drawn to the dead means that you may be energetically entangled with someone in your family system who has died. It does not mean you are going to die in the near future. However, some individuals carry the feeling or sensation that they are supposed to die. You may feel like death is lurking in your energy field. For some, death continually shows up in their life. You may fear death or be intrigued by death. Frequently, being drawn to the dead manifests as an inability to fully embrace life, perhaps showing up as depression, anxiety, or another condition.
Being drawn to the dead can be the result of putting off mourning the dead. For one conscious or unconscious reason or another, individuals often put off the grieving process. In a family system, a child may become energetically entangled with the dead if they are not fully given a place in the family system, mourned, honoured, respected or loved fully. The child benefits when there is healthy family attitude about death, when a celebration of life follows a death, and when the one who dies is remembered. This seems to be especially relevant when there is an abortion, miscarriage, stillborn child, death giving birth, sudden tragic or accidental death, suicide, or when someone dies too soon in any other way. A child can be drawn to the dead in more than one generation of the family. Children benefit energetically and emotionally when they know their right birth order in the family system and this is especially noticeable when a sibling has not come to life. To live life fully, create a healthy separation boundary between your energy field and those who have died.
Let Go of Survivor Guilt
To live life fully, you need to let go of any survivor guilt. “Why did I live and you die?” The individual no longer feels worthy or able to take in life fully. Their world contracts and becomes small. “Me too, I will not take in life.” The individual with survivor guilt will generally hold back from committing fully to life events and relationships. They are unable to say “YES” to life as it is. Whether you are energetically entangled with someone who carried survivor guilt or you experienced this dynamic in your life, it’s time to untangle any energetic identification with those who did not survive.
New Book
I hope this post successfully brings together many aspects of how to live life fully. I have just finished writing a book on the topic of how to live life fully. Source of Life, Source of Healing: Tap into Your Ancestral Family Tree to Discover Systemic Body-Focused Wellness for Self, Family, and Society is pending publication at this time and will be available soon.