“The past is not past” – Bert Hellinger
There are moments in this work when time feels less like a straight line and more like a circle. A client will say something, or a representative will turn their head in a certain way, and suddenly the room fills with a story that didn’t begin with them at all. Part of my training is learning to notice these echoes across generations, to sense what’s connected and who might be missing.
A story that started long before you were born can still live in you body, your breath, your symptoms and choices.
I see this all the time. These ancestral threads show up quietly, almost shyly, as if asking permission to be seen. Demanding to be noticed.
I’m thinking of a client who came with severe neck and shoulder stiffness. As an Alexander practitioner, I could work with their mind–muscle patterns, but something felt different. By the end of a working day the pain was so intense they couldn’t take their jacket off or run their fingers through their hair.
I asked a few gentle questions, trying to understand the emotional landscape of their childhood and their parents’ early lives. What was the tension in the system? What had never been spoken?
They told me about being abused by their grandfather, and how their mother hadn’t protected or believed them.
What struck me was how much of this pain their body had held, and how much the mind had tucked away. As we looked at the child they once were in the constellation, their mother, and their grandfather, the pattern became clearer. I wondered if the mother had also been abused as a child, unable to speak up to her father. The constellation showed her fear, and the sheer force of the grandfather’s rage. He too had been raised harshly, carrying his own unhealed emotional wounds.
This doesn’t excuse the behaviour. But it reveals the pattern – passed down, unspoken, now lodged in my client’s body as pain and a blockage to their enjoyment of work and life.
We worked with healing sentences, acknowledging what had happened and returning the weight to where it belonged. As the words landed, my client began to move their hand, arm and shoulder with more ease and a wider range of motion.
Later they were able to speak with their mother about their childhood, and heard more about hers. So much pain. So much grief. And yet, in the telling, their was truth, seeing and something in their connection was mending. They were finally seeing each other – their truths, their limits, their strengths.
It still amazes me how the past lives on in our bodies. Not as metaphor, but as a real, felt presence. A gesture. A fear. A pattern we can’t explain. A tenderness we don’t know the origin of. Hellinger was right: the past is not past. It waits. It lingers. It asks to be put in order so the living can be free.
When someone sits in front of me with a struggle that feels too big or a pain that makes no sense, I no longer assume it belongs only to them. I honour the symptom, and I also follow the frozen threads of trauma to see who else might be entangled, and where the burden truly lies. When we look back and put the past in order, the dead can rest more peacefully, and the living become lighter, with more energy for their own lives.