Tanja Meyburgh, a psychologist and renowned family and systems constellations expert, teaches all over the world on the power of working with ancestral lineage healing. Through her work over the decades, Ms Meyburgh noticed a deep problem in modern humanity: Those raised in western systems have forgotten how to include ancestors, they have lost their connection to elders, community and to the land itself. Entire societies find themselves disconnected from a sense of belonging to each other and to their communities and it shows up as spiritual disconnection, meaninglessness and grief on a large scale. In her new book, Reclaiming Ancestors, she shows you what has been lost and suggests how to reclaim this.
My path of reclaiming my own ancestors started 15 years earlier at a party in Cape Town over a glass of bubbly in the year 2000.
I was chatting to a fascinating woman about our lives and the paths that we had each taken, when I said that I had to manage my stress since I had repeated bouts of ‘chronic fatigue’ since the age of 15. I’d never been sure about that diagnosis.
Under the glitzy disco lights and surrounded by glamorous people, she asked me a strange question:
“Is it possible that you have an ancestral calling?”
“What?” I had never heard of such a thing and found the suggestion a bit strange. “Why would you say that?”
She told me that she couldn’t really say much more except that she had a feeling that I should go and see a sangoma, who would be able to assist me in my process of healing.
Well, where do you start as a white South African? Not only did I have no knowledge of what a sangoma was (a traditional African healer that divines and communicates with ancestors), I most certainly didn’t know where to find one. In my culture there is no such thing as an ancestral calling. In fact, I think my Catholic grandmother must have shivered and turned in her grave at the thought of me consulting with what the Christian missionaries to South Africa would have called a ‘witch doctor’. Besides, I was pretty allergic to anything airy-fairy. I was a traditional psychology student trying to embrace the concept of the soul without any esoteric or spiritual fanfare.
A few serendipitous weeks after that discussion, I was guided by a friend to the home of a sangoma that had been recommended to her. I booked an appointment and was told to walk through the front garden and enter a little wooden hut hidden amongst the trees in the back garden. My palms were sweaty as I stepped through the door of the hut into another world. It was like being in a cave, a cottage in the woods, reminiscent of the medicine people I remember from myths and fairy tales. The hut smelled of herbs; bones and skins were organised around the traditional healer. He was an ordinary-looking man wearing black jeans and a T-shirt, with a cloth around his shoulders and white beads around his neck and wrists. He asked me why I had come and then threw the bones – a collection of objects, bones, coins and trinkets that fell onto the mat between us. He checked the placement of each object and the relationship between them. He then slowly began to unpack what he saw.
“You have an ancestral calling,” he said. “At some point you will need to respond to the call. It is not a choice; it is something that you will have to do in order to become healthy.”
What that meant, in the traditional sense, was that I needed to learn to commune with my ancestors in order to heal and become well again. The next step was for another sangoma to confirm my calling and for me to then start the training.
It felt strange to try and fathom how my ancestors could call me into another tradition. My German and white South African lineage would have had no knowledge of these ancestral calling practices.
I decided to wait and see how it might be possible for me to pursue a path not so radically in opposition to my own cultural upbringing. I hoped I would be able to choose something that my German and South African ancestors could stand behind. I knew that if I did not act, I might succumb to the eternal sleep that my body craved. It’s onto this fertile ground that my first family constellations experience landed.
I vividly remember the day I did my first family constellation. A family constellation is a group process that gives one an experience of the invisible dynamics that are present in your family system. It involves representatives of various family members standing in and allowing participants to look at the entire family system. In looking with this trans-generational lens, one is able to reveal hidden dynamics and underlying loyalties. It can bring about greater personal and family understanding and healing.
It was in 2002 and I was part of a small group, where I unexpectedly volunteered to set up my own family. My chronic fatigue indicated that I was in some way disconnected from life and unable to receive sufficient life force from my parents. I used the family constellation model to set up my mother and father and both of their lineages. What followed was a glimpse into the lives of my German grandparents who lived during World War I.
The positioning of the people in the centre of the circle indicated that my mother was not able to look at me. She was looking past me, her eyes downcast. The facilitator then brought in representatives for her parents and a heavy and depressive quality entered the room. My grandmother cried and looked down at the floor and my grandfather could not look at her. The image made such sense to me as my granny lived with many depressive episodes over the years and my grandfather died of a heart attack shortly after World War II.
What the facilitator then did blew the picture I had of my family wide open. She brought in people to represent Jews who were killed by Germans in the war. I was shocked. I had no idea that this played any particular role in my life. As the representatives came in, several people lay on the ground in a row. I watched as the representative for my grandmother knelt beside them and wept as if at the grave of a loved one. The grief and heaviness I felt in that room mirrored the heaviness I experienced during my bouts of chronic fatigue. My mother was also looking at the victims and I stood there with no access to the female line. The facilitator offered them a few sentences to say out loud that acknowledged the difficult fate of the many people who died over that time. I knew that my family who lived in Germany got to keep their livelihood by turning the family business to making steel parts used for weapons, fighter planes and U-boats. Had they resisted they would have died.
But I saw in that moment the deep wounding and damage that it had caused in my family. It is a concept we call ‘perpetrator history’ and this was the first time I had come into contact with the perpetrator history of my very own German family. After the war so much was done to recover, repair and move forward that many things had never been acknowledged. My mother belongs to a lost generation of children who grew up in the rubble and on a land that was full of bloodshed.
I felt seen on a deep, deep level for the first time that day. The gravity from the chronic fatigue and depression suddenly made sense to me when I saw the bodies of so many lives lost in the war. Their experiences mirrored something I had experienced deep inside my soul but could never make sense of. The tears that had welled inside me for years were in fact the tears of my ancestors. What I felt in that moment was a clear answer to my ancestral calling. That day inspired me to dedicate my life to learning about and healing all the energy I carried as a victim and a perpetrator.
It was the start of a career that was a healing journey as well. Doing constellation work since 2003 has allowed me to meet and work with hundreds of clients and trainees and help them heal and transform in unimaginable ways. I have seen modern-day miracles of reunited families, deadly diseases cured, lost family members found, financial circumstances turned and relationships blossom. I describe it as seeing people coming into the right relationship with their surroundings in a way that serves life and love. Coming into their unique and rightful position in relation to family, elders, ancestors, land and nature. When we enter a rightful relationship, where we fill the place that is only ours to fill in the system, then we come into order. This rightful place means that we take a posture of humility and, at the same time, we receive strength. It allows all people and beings around us to come into their rightful place too.
When I first encountered family constellations there were very few opportunities to do the work in South Africa and most people hadn’t even heard of it. I approached Dr Ursula Franke, psychotherapist and author, to assist me in setting up training in South Africa and, together with business coach and trainer, Svenja Wachter, we founded the first South African International Training and brought in first-generation trainers from Germany. In 2010 I founded African Constellations, a family and systems constellation training programme to continue the work that we had started. As the work grew, other trainers joined the ranks and we then founded the Systemic Constellations Association of Southern Africa.
Today, African Constellations is an internationally renowned training institute and has been invited into partnership and collaborations with the top training institutes in the world. We are seen as the go-to institute for training and research for people wanting to work multiculturally and in a way that honours the African lineage root of constellation work that lies in the work of its originator, Bert Hellinger and his 16 years of experience in South Africa.
What I have to share about reclaiming ancestors is not new. It comes from an interweaving of what I have learnt from my many teachers, conversations with colleagues and my experience working with people and their ancestors. My primary background is trans-generational systemic family therapy and the tradition of traditional healing. The intention is to guide you in ways to connect with your ancestors that encourages inclusion of your spiritual path, ways that others have walked, your ancestor’s old wisdom and what makes sense and is meaningful to you.
To create your own relationship is a modern path that encourages you to listen, observe and come into communication and the right relationship with your ancestors. What works for one person may not work for another. Some of what I am offering is not intended for you to teach or perform on behalf of others. To do that, the rightful and respectful way would be to train in a tradition and go through the necessary initiations to hold space for other people’s ancestral processes. Initiation through a teacher or school of some kind is an essential part of doing ancestral work for others.
As the threads of entanglement unravel and you shift and heal your own field, so the ripples expand into the places where it is most needed around you. The best gift you can give your ancestors, your family, your children and your clients, is your own authenticity, presence and integration. It allows you to be in resonance with what is most needed for them without compromising yourself or your integrity.
