The Orders of Love: Reflections from Our Final Family Constellations Retreat at The Mercy Center

There are moments in our work that mark both an ending and a beginning. Our most recent Family Constellations retreat at the Mercy Center was one such moment. It was the final time we would gather at the Mercy Center—yet the retreats themselves continue, deepening and expanding into new locations and new experiences.

This retreat was guided by the theme “The Orders of Love” and centered around a question that speaks to every human heart:

What gets in the way of allowing, experiencing, and receiving love?

What unfolded over our time together was profound. People arrived carrying their own stories, questions, and emotional inheritances. What emerged was a shared opening—a gentle pathway toward receiving, allowing, and inviting love back into places where it had been blocked, forgotten, or interrupted.

The Right to Belong: A Core Principle of Family Constellations

At the heart of Family Constellations lies a simple and universal truth: Everything and everyone in the family system has the right to belong.

When a person, event, or memory is excluded—through trauma, loss, silence, death, adoption, stillbirth, affairs, war, migration, or shame—an empty space is created. That space carries energy. It calls for recognition and reconciliation.

Those who have been “left out” long to be seen, remembered, and welcomed back into the story. Until this happens, later generations may unconsciously carry their burdens. This is one of the guiding principles we worked with throughout the retreat—making room for everything to belong.

A Unique Integration: Enneagram, Color Therapy, and Somatic Awareness

We worked with coloured round and square felts to represent family members and dynamics. Although chosen unconsciously, the colours consistently reveal hidden layers of a story:

• why a colour is chosen

• what the shape represents

• the direction a representative faces

• who turns away

• who stands close or far

Each detail widens our understanding of inclusion, exclusion, longing, and connection within the system.

The body then becomes an instrument of wisdom. Somatic sensations—tightness, warmth, heaviness, or movement—begin to guide us toward what is unresolved and wanting expression. This is where the story begins to shift.

The Field of Consciousness: Where Hidden Stories Reveal Themselves

Family Constellations is often described as a phenomenon because of what happens when the circle gathers.

Retreat participants, many of whom are strangers, may know very little about their ancestral history beyond their parents or grandparents. Some may know almost nothing at all.

Yet as they step onto the representations, a complete story begins to emerge.

Representatives feel emotions that are not theirs. Words rise that carry truth. Movements reveal relationship patterns. The “field” brings forward what has been held in silence or secrecy.

We call this the Field of Consciousness—the unseen, yet deeply intelligent space where the memories, emotions, and dynamics of a lineage live and can finally be acknowledged.

Entanglements: When We Carry What Isn’t Ours

Many participants come with an issue they cannot quite explain: anxiety, fear, emotional heaviness, relational patterns, illness tendencies, or a sense of being stuck.

Often, these patterns stretch back to earlier generations.

A grandparent who survived war. A baby who wasn’t spoken of. A mother who carried grief alone. A father who left. An ancestor who lost their home, country, or place.

These unprocessed stories create entanglements, meaning we carry emotions or patterns for others in the system—often out of love or loyalty.

Family Constellations helps separate what belongs to us from what we have carried for others. When this separation happens, a deep sense of relief, clarity, and healing becomes possible.

Healing Through Presence, Recognition, and Belonging

Healing in the constellation circle does not happen through force—it happens through presence.

Sometimes healing is a shift in posture. Sometimes it is a truth spoken for the first time. Sometimes it is the simple act of inviting an excluded family member back into the story with dignity.

Throughout this retreat, we witnessed profound moments of reconnection—not only for those whose constellations opened, but also for those who stood as representatives. Every person became part of something larger: a living system seeking balance, order, and love.

A Closing, a Continuation, and a Deepening

Although this was our final retreat at the Mercy Center, the work continues—strongly, beautifully, and with great purpose. Our next retreats are in Missouri and South Africa. To learn more, look at our retreats and workshop page.

Our future Family Constellations retreats will carry forward everything we learned, everything we felt, and everything we honored here:

• the orders of love

• the right to belong

• the healing held in the field

• the wisdom of the ancestors

• the truth that emerges when people gather with courage

This retreat reminded us, once again, of the profound way Family Constellations calls us home:

To ourselves.

To our lineage.

To the love that has always been seeking us.