The Family Constellations series : The story of everyday goodness, with Judith Hemming

🌳In this episode, I speak with constellation facilitator Judith Hemming about how simple stories that are good for everyone can make a huge difference in the world. We touch on the soul and how moving away from the model of heroism can lead us to a good life.

🧶Learn more about Judith:
Website: http://www.movingconstellations.com/
UK events: https://www.eventbrite.com/o/judith-hemming-7503870963

✨Here are all the links to things Judith and I talk about in this podcast:
Bertold Ulsamer : https://www.ulsamer.com/family-constellation/order-in-love/
Gestalt therapy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_therapy
Joseph Campbell : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell

If you have no idea what constellations are, I recommend listening to S1 Ep5: Family mythology, the told and the untold or read more about it here : https://www.laureporche.com/modalities

🎬You can also watch :

This very short explanation of constellations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOrBgWdcq3g
This talk by Rupert Sheldrake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty5lz9mVezU
Another self : https://www.netflix.com/fr-en/title/81380432
Ep 5 of Sex, Love and Goop: https://www.netflix.com/fr/title/81459349
This great video on hidden loyalties by Shavasti: https://youtu.be/Sd7umLz77Cw

Get notified when the Silken Mirror membership opens in 2023 : http://eepurl.com/dxzCk9

Follow us on Instagram @moonlitpathchannel

This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
If you're enjoying the podcast, consider sharing it or leaving a review on Apple Podcast :)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Laure: Hi, everyone. Before we dive into today's episode. I want to address some feedback that I've been getting about this series. While I announced in the first episode that I wasn't gonna explain what constellation is, I've gotten a lot of feedback asking me to do otherwise. And saying, this is great, but we still don't know what constellations are. So please talk about it. So I will most likely do an extra episode after the series to just lay down the basics. In the meantime in the show notes there are links to resources that you can watch if you're curious about what constellations are, because there's a lot of resources online, which is partly why I made the choice not to talk about them. 

[00:00:49] Because I wanted to focus on my actual experience and, the people that I interviewed experience with it as well. So in the meantime, if you're curious about what constellations are, how concretely it happens, you can go to the show notes and find all the links there. And I'll add, cause I know actually few people look at the show notes in general but in all episodes that I do, at least the most recent ones there's always links to all the people and things that we talk about in each episode. If my guest mentioned someone, or if I mentioned someone there's a link in the show notes to either their work, their website, their Wikipedia page. 

[00:01:34] Just, if you're curious, if you listen to one episode and you hear a name that you don't recognize and you curious about who we are talking about all these resources are always in the show notes. 

[00:01:46] On today's episode I am so, so happy to welcome Judith Hemming. 

[00:01:53] Judith's background is in education. An English teacher and a teacher of teachers then a gestalt therapist and trainer. And for more than 30 years at constellation facilitator both with family issues, especially with couples, and also in larger systems and organizations. She has traveled the world, helping to establish constellation work in a variety of cultures and settings and for a long time was part of the international faculty bringing together people from around the world to study and practice together. In all her ways of working Judith has been especially entranced by the power of stories and our drive to make them. And the way we use language both to divide and unite. 

[00:02:41] Just a note on this episode: because of technical difficulties, it was recorded using zoom. And so the sound might not be as polished as what you're used to. But I assure you that the content is well worth listening to. 

[00:02:57] Hi Judith. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast. So as always, I tend to dive straight into it by asking the first question, which is for me, the most important and the most interesting, which is what is your favorite story or one of your favorite stories? And what do you think it says about who you are?

[00:03:20] Judith: Um, I had a bit of a struggle thinking about this because it's a long time since I've bothered with favourites. So I had to go back, try and think about the stories that I never forgot, that I, and the ones that as a result of which I told my own children a lot, you know, that they carried that. And I realised that I was drenched in stories as a child.

[00:03:44] And I, both my parents read to me, the house was absolutely groaning with books. My father particularly made up stories all the time, every, everything was a story. And he could get me to do anything if he told me a story in the way that I discovered I could get my children to do anything as long as they were listening to a story while they were doing it.

[00:04:03] So they were very important to me. The stories, not so much the form of the stories, but the actual, the characters were very important. And the ones that I went back to what they were definitely stories in which female protagonists found their way through love. It's very simple, you know, if I think about Sleeping Beauty, but since there was always an element of sacrifice and there wasn't always an element of courage that came from love.

[00:04:32] And there was one story, I don't know who it was written by, I know it's quite a well known story, that was made into a play called The Happy Hypocrit, and I remember my mother coming back from this play and telling me the story, and it was about an evil man who fell in love with a very beautiful woman who was frightened of his evil face.

[00:04:55] And he designed a, he got a mask designed for him of a absolutely beautiful person of shining goodness. And he wore this mask, and he wooed her, and he won her. And later on, an evil person came and whipped the mask away. That's the basis of the story. And when the wife saw his... She said, what are you fussing about?

[00:05:18] It's a beautiful face of a beautiful man. And so from that, I realized that if you lived a good life, you would become beautiful. That there was no such thing as external ugliness, and that there was some kind of magic involved in all of this. And the story stayed with me, and I think the idea that you might want to become a good person, or become a lovable person, and that there was a certain amount of magic in that, it wasn't an impossible task, but it was a little bit magic, stayed with me, and gave me a feeling that there was a sort of abracadabra in life that you could rely on.

[00:05:53] But, but obviously stories change, you know, and that's not my go to story now. When I started encountering Bert Hellinger, one of his stories stayed with me and I have told it a lot in groups because it means so much to me. And you'll probably know it, it's the story of the other Orpheus. Do you know this story?

[00:06:13] The story of what, sorry? It's the story of the other Orpheus. 

[00:06:17] Laure: I think I've heard it, yes. I might have. 

[00:06:19] Judith: It's a very simple story, really, which is to say we all know about the grandeur, the heroic, tragic story of who loved his wife so much that, you know, all these terrible things happened. But at the same time, there was a another who also played, who played at weddings and often got a bit drunk, wasn't he?

[00:06:42] He sometimes found his arm around the wrong woman and all those kinds of things. And he lived until he was 80 and was... Grandchildren and great grandchildren were there at his death. A very ordinary, unremarkable life, nobody knows anything about him, but life went on, and the idea of there being a non histrionic, non tragic, ordinary story of everyday which is good for everybody and doesn't need the drama of tragedy and heroism and so on, has stayed with me a lot. I think a lot of what I do with people is try to reduce the drama, reduce the large scale tragedy, and put things back into a more manageable, more everyday, more amusing in a way, amusing in that sort of wry way. And it's those stories that touch me the most, you know, the most sort of everyday stories. 

[00:07:37] Laure: Yeah, the stories of being a human being, basically, like being just a person. 

[00:07:41] Judith: Just a person. person who doesn't have to join in to these rather mad British stories of great power and great influence. And those stories that I grew up with the story of Great Britain.

[00:07:56] Yeah, that's quite a story. right. So I felt somehow that those stories injured truth and injured beauty and I was turned off by them. I knew they didn't fit. I knew they were incoherent. I had that kind of sensitivity. Um, so I have always been interested in, in re grounding. myself through stories somehow, even if they're obviously a fairy story, even if they contain magic, they can still be grounded.

[00:08:27] Laure: Yeah, it feels a little bit because when you were saying that sense that if you live a good life and you're, if you're a good person, there's some magic that happened, like that is intertwined in that, but that is not As you were saying it, like, it doesn't feel like a magic that you would go and seek, as opposed to these stories where you're trying to be this big thing or when you're, I guess, making things bigger than what they actually are or you're, as you say, enduring truth by...

[00:08:55] It feels like that this kind of dichotomy between that magic that you don't have any hands in other than living your life in the best possible way, and then the other grabbing or seeking for something. 

[00:09:09] Judith: I think the notion of coherence runs very deep. And when children are told stories, whether they're fairy stories or history, that have too much that's missing or too much that has been tugged or warped in it, they don't meet the narrative equipment in me and fit and bring me peace.

[00:09:31] They stay in a scratchy kind of way and cause me to make more stories to try and deal with that or, or tell myself things that are not easy to live with, like perhaps it was my fault or something like that. So I have a great sensitivity to how the brain and the soul and the body settles. When it meets either truth or beauty, I'm not sure, it's very different from each other, but something like that.

[00:09:58] And they have a lot to do with what Bert has made clear, which is that they have to include, and they have to tell the truth about what's big and what's small. People have to be in the right places. And somehow they have to meet the way I'm a story ing person. So I'm very aware of the fact that almost from birth, I would say we are storytellers and story makes.

[00:10:23] I'm not quite sure what happens before language, but I think even before language, I can see children making some kind of timeline out of something. And even before they can speak, you can tell them stories that either relax them or don't touch them at all. So, we know, from all that is understood about children, that, that that's the way we learn.

[00:10:49] We learn through stories. We don't have a part of our brain that knows how to abstract things or generalize or, that, that just is not, available to children. Everything that's meaning comes in the form of the story. So the grad grind that stories have everything. Yeah. So I think I just made stories absolutely central to me.

[00:11:11] I didn't want to study them. I never did any. academic, you know, I probably should have done a level of English or read it at university, all that kind of thing, because I knew I wanted to be an English teacher, but I absolutely didn't want to contaminate my sense of the kind of playful deliciousness of the content of stories with thinking about them as structure and form.

[00:11:33] I didn't want anybody else's academic opinions of them. And so I'm actually rather ignorant of that. I did become a language teacher and I still don't know very much about any of that. But I think the idea that you could use language and literature to give people a voice And that once they had a voice, they were off.

[00:11:53] That was really what they needed, to have a confident voice that they could tell their stories. Because, certainly in the environment that I grew up in, you know, working class schools, their stories are not well told. Ours, my sort of background stories, they're all well written up, but theirs are not. So, um, I was very involved in publishing and distributing stories of children who'd, you know, suffered migration.

[00:12:19] To learn new languages have have really amazing transformational experiences, which would not give very much voice. So that led really into my for form healing. Very, very inviting people, existential encounters with new stories. You know, inviting them to meet characters and to enact and to experiment and to kinda get the feel of their story by doing things to it.

[00:12:52] Yeah. That's how you discover the power of a field that carries this story in some way, and it speaks back to you. Yeah, so I definitely found that in my sort of original inclination as gestalt therapist when I moved into that, that I took people's stories very seriously, and I gave myself the right to deconstruct them, to blow them up, to add things, to say what if and let's pretend, and do you think if we could do it again, how would we do it?

[00:13:25] Or if this was present, how would we do it? So that stories are the thing that's captured at the moment. But they're not final. They're just what works at that moment. So I would imagine that the people that the years would say they have changed their stories. One way of describing a kind of greater confidence and... There's, they're can do stories rather than bloody hell I can't do, sort of story. 

[00:13:51] Laure: Yeah, and it feels like it's a kind of perfect introduction to Constellation, like going from that to Constellation. Because we talk about in Constellation of getting people to see a new image. And I wouldn't say necessarily that it's something that you create because it's something that kind of emerges from the field.

[00:14:10] But I've definitely tried things in Constellation of brought things that weren't in the person's consciousness or in the person's even understanding of their own story. And it feels like what you're talking about in Gestalt would apply itself really well to moving into constellation where you actually have people that you can...

[00:14:30] Judith: Definitely. Well, I think Gestalt has a view of the field, but the knowing field as it has been developed in constellations is even more fascinating. The field guides you. I mean, you have to set up the cast. It's not that you don't act creatively. You set up the parameters of the cast, which may get changed as the constellation goes on, but that is what you do.

[00:14:53] And you have some sort of vision of where the story might want to go and what might need to be included for this. in magic ingredient, really, of coherence to begin to, uh, settle with somebody. So I, the last workshop I did, there was a, a woman who was very, very angry with her father, and at the same time felt as if she had to obey him.

[00:15:16] And when we set up what the father was looking at, um, I don't want to go into the detail of it because it's so specific, but it was really clear that the preoccupations of the father took precedence over how he was treating his daughter. And once she could see it, her rage subsided. It wasn't that he had behaved differently.

[00:15:36] Yeah. But, but he had a story. He wasn't just a bad person. Her story, he was a person with an overwhelmingly difficult of his own, which she hadn't somehow, she hadn't given that space, and so she was just very angry. She was, she stopped being angry immediately when she saw that. So I think that's a way that the field takes us to what has been missing, which hasn't allowed for empiricals, and it

[00:16:11] takes us also to what it couldn't with this kind of circumstances. So it, it obeys. There are certain laws about stories in the same way that Rain does, in the same way that The Orders of Love do. There really do seem to be some givens. There are givens about structures of stories, I know. There are I haven't studied 

[00:16:34] Laure: I haven't studied either. When you said that, I thought about a workshop that I did years ago, not about the structures of story necessarily, but that was more kind of psychoanalysis based, like Jungian based, where you would take a story and you would kind of unravel it and equate it with your situation. You know, take this, Oh, this character, and I found that doing this in a very kind of mental way for me, completely took away the power of the story or the magic that happened in the non explanation or like the non understanding. So yeah, I totally understand the non, the not studying in order to not, no, I don't want to spoil the magic. 

[00:17:15] Judith: I think it'd probably be very helpful for your writing stories.

[00:17:18] I know that J.K Rowling, she was, she looked at these Joseph Campbell structures and so on, made sure it had the right. elements in it, and maybe great stories just naturally do, but I'm, I'm not so interested in great stories. I'm more interested in stories that restore strength and movement and love. On the whole, people want contact with me when those three qualities are in short supply, and they don't need me, and I don't need anybody either when I've got those.

[00:17:48] So those, those seem to me very simply. The things that we could always do more of, have more of, and get more out of stories. Strength, love, and movement. 

[00:17:59] Laure: And I feel that what you were saying about the constellation that you were talking about just made me think of the story you were telling about the mask, because I feel that sometimes constellation helps take down masks that we put on people.

[00:18:13] You know that you were saying, Oh, she couldn't see that she had this mask that she kind of put like this image of her father, like as a bad person, and then you concentration helps kind of take that down to see the person. 

[00:18:26] Judith: Well, we misremember things a lot. And this story that's told about a girl who said she was the victim of abuse, group sexual abuse.

[00:18:36] And so she's very frightened, mistrustful person. And when he set it up, and he set up. The site of this, the origin of it, she was operating it, and we rushed there, and obviously everybody was bearing down on her, and they did all have masks, and they weren't interested in how she felt, because they were trying to save her life, and she corroborated this, she knew it had happened, she hadn't connected it, and so she was able, instead of to fear these frightening people, she was able to thank them for her life.

[00:19:10] That all the fear and the mistrust literally belonged to that story. It fell away. Well, there was no context for holding it. And, you know, I think it's remarkable how quickly we can lose stories that destroy our capacity for love and movement. And it's remarkable how quickly we find them again. Once a story comes that has got this element, a match, somehow. Even if it's a story story, even if it's a fictional story, or even if we don't know anything about it at all. I know you, somebody must have told you about my work with the wives of Henry VIII.

[00:19:49] Laure: I would love to hear about this. 

[00:19:50] Judith: It's interesting because the playwright, wanted to bring all six wives together after death.

[00:20:00] They had never met each other in life, and nobody was there to notice how they'd managed in death. So although it was known about individual wives and their fate, this story was about the world of wifedom. So we set it up. And these six young women who they'd never done translations before, but they had no problem in tuning into the field many hundreds of years before in a way that historians who were watching could see was absolutely accurate.

[00:20:30] They didn't stray into fantasy. They began to alliances began to emerge and very deep recognitions between these women began to emerge and their strength in living with the difficulty of that man and it grew and these young women left the day feeling they could now improvise and create the play and it wasn't just from improvising it was very definitely from we were lucky enough on this occasion to Do the workshop in Hampton Port.

[00:21:07] So we did it in the rooms that they lived in, which probably did make a difference, felt special, but somehow they were now, they had drawn the energy from the building and the, and the wishes of the playwright and the history of these. And it was beginning on its own to create a story. It wasn't my story.

[00:21:27] I dunno what happened to these individual women. I can't even remember which one has died in the. But they, they knew, and there was something about... Being at peace with that history that emerged, which I found very interesting, that there was no silly talk, there was no ultra feminist perspective on this.

[00:21:49] This was a very complex, historical situation that didn't merit that kind of thing. It was being taken for granted. Totally on its own terms. These very courageous, trapped women trying to serve a king who knew his country, you know, all these things. It all came outta the story, and it was very bizarre hand.

[00:22:14] Laure: Yeah, and it's beautiful that it's in service of creation, creating something that honors the reality of these people who lived. 

[00:22:22] Judith: Well, I think a lot of constellation equipment allows us to do this kind of creative work. It's not what any constellations necessarily want to do, and it may be my background that has got me more interested in it.

[00:22:36] So that I'm not. always so interested in ancestors unless they have very things to say, but I am very interested in making stories coherent so that they can move into the past. So it often happens that people arrive needing help because at certain points in their life they've got jammed up. Something was so overwhelming that the evolution of their thinking couldn't get a leg up.

[00:23:05] So I had somebody who came His, both his sister and his best friend died within a week while they were at school. And the crisis was huge and the school was closed down and he was sent to the other side of the world, to a safer place. Yeah. wouldn't have to be reminded of that. So there was this incredible event, and it was still in Aspic.

[00:23:29] It was still waiting for something to happen, and so was was in his forties, he was still a, you know, sad teenager. So I set up the things that didn't happen, the gathering of the dead bodies, and the mourning of them, and the completion of them, and the funerals, and the promises and the, you know, all the things which in better circumstances would have been given to him to help him make this enormous and very sad transition.

[00:24:00] And every, you know, there were 30 or 40 people in the room, they all played parts, but if the environment had been supportive, would have been given to him. And you could almost feel the need for this and the action of this somehow locking into place, and him relaxing. And after that, his life went into movement, and he found a partner, and he felt his sister and his best friend were always with him, instead of having...

[00:24:32] I consider that a bit of a mixture of constellations. Constellations because you can't go any further than the field allows. But Gestalt, in a way, also, because you are inviting something that could exist and could be reacted to, but happened not to exist. Would have been better, perhaps, if it had. So I feel like I'm often summoning stories, summoning the ingredients.

[00:24:57] It's summoning the permission and the energy for stories to go better. And I know in my own life, not as a consulator, but as a story writer, as a memoirist, that every time I manage to capture a bit of my life and get it into a story. The things and kept me at it die away. So my head, in a way, gets emptier and emptier, more and more available for now, you know, less cluttered with stories I can't quite put down, or stories I desperately want somebody to know about.

[00:25:30] So I know there is something about good form, finding aesthetic good form, which is absolutely central to our life as healthy human beings. 

[00:25:39] Laure: Yeah, I'd like that idea of finding what is missing or what hasn't happened. That opens a lot for me in terms of facetation because, I mean, there's some aspects of constellations do that.

[00:25:50] I'm thinking for instance of when you work with interrupted reaching out movement and you finish that movement of the child towards the mother that couldn't happen. And that obviously didn't happen that you're recreated in a way, but I liked the idea of Being, I guess, more imaginative with it or more feeling into the cracks of where is the, the lack, like the thing where the person doesn't have stability because it's lacking.

[00:26:17] There's something there that should have been there and that isn't. And getting that experience into the body. 

[00:26:23] Judith: Part of what helps, I think, is the language. I think another really wonderful bit of that's teaching is to discern the difference between primary and secondary and systemic and metalanguage. A lot of what I do see's people with their own language, cause language very quickly gets weakened and dirty up.

[00:26:52] by deflections and strange familial habits and awkward shaming, blah, blah, blah, all those things, where it doesn't, we think it's trying to achieve this, but actually it hasn't got the form to do it. So I think that giving people sentences that carry the narrative in this very pure, primary, direct, soul touching way creates an uninterrupted art and relieves people of having to try and tease the meaning out from all the rather crappy, over wordy things that people end up with.

[00:27:32] So I'm a great champion of beautiful, simple, direct, powerful, truthful sentences. They tug the story, they are the pilot boats, you know, that carry the story to its harbour. 

[00:27:48] Laure: Yeah, and English is such a good language to do that. Yes. I've been struggling when I move back to France, so like, oh, how can I do simple sentences in French that have...

[00:28:01] Judith: Yes, I can imagine that it must be very difficult, actually. 

[00:28:04] Laure: It's not. Yeah, the language doesn't lend itself really. It's really interesting to work with different cultures because they obviously have different stories going on in their bodies and their understanding of the world. And some things are more available with some people and then some things are less available, which I think is a good, school.

[00:28:25] Judith: I have talked and worked with people from all over the world, but least of all the French. I'm not surprised. I think it's partly that they need it to be in French, not English, but it seems to be something more to do with keeping something very French, you know, that they haven't on the whole come very much to the training, to the international training, so.

[00:28:47] Laure: No, because they don't, the language is a huge issue. I know that there's no French people in any of the international community, so I think it's the language, partly. 

[00:28:56] Judith: Well, are you French Canadians?

[00:29:00] Yeah, 

[00:29:01] Laure: they're more present French Canadians in the community, I think, than French French. So I was talking about the arc of story that you were, you were talking about the arc of story and like finding the arc of story. That kind of brings me to my next question, which is what's the arc of your story? If you had a, you know, if your life was a story and What is the arc bringing you to, or what have you been, and we've touched on it partly, but if you can see, again, if you were talking about a hero's journey, I know that neither of us have studied the structure, but there's usually a quest of something or, or something that has been lost in the beginning that the hero has to find again.

[00:29:47] And what do you think that is for you? 

[00:29:48] Judith: Well, probably it is the opposite, you know, I think there was a lot of grandeur and glamour in my upper middle class childhood and a lot of stories that weren't very true and missed out crucial people and were not very kind and I couldn't work out, I could not hold the story of my family, it just kept breaking apart, I couldn't work out why my family had broken up, I didn't understand any of it and there were too many things that were not spoken.

[00:30:18] So one of the things it did is it made me want to be a person who influenced people. I was certainly very, very keen on giving power to people who didn't have it. So I only taught that kind of thing. But I think what happened when I met Constellations was that I finally, there was a technology. that was wide enough and scrupulously truthful enough to help me create a story which would settle, you know, and it involved breaking a lot of taboos and secrets in my family's story, and it changed everything.

[00:30:55] It happened after my parents, they were no longer around keeping the story was still pretty alive. And so, in a way, that heroism didn't have much interest for me, but being able to stay stable and love a man and love the children that we made together and become a reliable and helpful teacher and member of the world community, that meant a lot to me.

[00:31:21] You know, so it was very sort of steady. It was definitely a teaching element, and I know that I, as a child, I told stories to my frightened sister, even when we were extremely four, that that was the way I knew how to come and. It was assumed that I would have to do something important, but the only thing I could think of that I wanted to do really was to teach, so I have, that's what I've always done, I've taught whether it's children or the shelter or conservation, so I am through and through thinking pedagogically about how something can be, can become owned by somebody else, because a lot of what passes for contact and communication doesn't land, there isn't a landing place for it.

[00:32:09] And that's because we're not sensitive enough to what that landing strip is actually like. So I think, for me, pedagogy behind these beautiful practices, whether it's the Sturt or constellations or English teaching, is about Becoming very, very sensitive to where the other person is. So what you have to offer and what they need to do in order to make it their own can take place.

[00:32:34] It's quite, learning is a lot more complicated than teaching. And it requires... real time and the right order of encountering, and it requires us to pace up. We have to put our stamp on it. It's not a passive process, even if the stamp is just breathing. There has to be some way in which we convert sound and fury into meaning.

[00:32:59] Um, so I, I think I've got very interested in that, and it's made me, uh, sort of... Quite a nifty and economical teaching. Yeah. 

[00:33:07] Laure: It feels a little bit looking for true connection, like something that's, or connection and truth like in the person's truth and in your, how do you find a place where that kind of comes together and that it transmits from one person to the next?

[00:33:20] Judith: I think it's also some mixture of iron fist, and velvet. I had a couple this morning, and they were having a terrible row. This was really boring to listen to. And I stopped them and said, I'm just going to give each of you a sentence to say to each other. And the sentence is, I blew it. So it was very shocking to them because they were so set on being right.

[00:33:46] They got that sentence. Then a different story could start. So I'm often interested in sweeping away the obfuscations that keep us locked in something that won't ever become a beautiful story. And I blew it. It's a perfect story.

[00:34:07] Laure: I can't say that in French, unfortunately, but it feels, yeah, it's a very powerful story and one that nobody wants to say. 

[00:34:16] Judith: They wouldn't say it on their own. Yeah. It's one of the ways that I can help. Yeah. 

[00:34:20] Laure: We all spend so much time trying to avoid the I blew it story. I remember Bertold speaking about guilt in his training, one of his trainings and the way people reacted to the exercise was enlightening. Like, the lengths to which we're willing to go to avoid having to own I Blew It or whatever sentence.

[00:34:45] Judith: I think Bert did an extraordinary thing. He gave a gift to storytellers and to people generally. that you could carry guilt with dignity, that he gave you. So he actually re described guilt.

[00:34:59] He described guilt as no longer frantically heading for the center of the pack, being courageous enough, or somehow or other, being on the edge of the pack, or off it. And then there are costs and consequences to that which give you debt. And if you have debt, you can swap guilt for depth. It's quite a good swap.

[00:35:21] So storytelling equipment is in renaming certain words that have really become ugly. 

[00:35:31] Laure: Yeah, there's a lot to do with words and expanding on the meaning of a word or the vibration of it. There's so much I feel in words that we don't use or that we don't, we're not aware of, like so many dimensions in one word.

[00:35:46] And when you start kind of feeling into that, and if you have that own knowledge for yourself, if you have that own, like embodied sense, Of the dimensions of the word. When you use it, you can transmit all the dimensions to the people that you're using it with. That's something that I really enjoy working with actually.

[00:36:06] Judith: I think another thing that's, um, that I like about stories in this context is we can have experiences that, that, that are not yet possible, but we can get a taste from. I know as a child, I used to read English writing and romance comics and all kinds of things that were disproved of. I would put them behind a copy of the New Statesman or something like that so people couldn't tell I was reading them.

[00:36:32] But they were all about imagining the next stage of my life. So they were about girls who got kissed by people, you know, which at that stage of my life wasn't happening. And girls who got into trouble or dared to do things. And Sometimes in a constellation, I will give somebody the experience of being with a man who's truly suitable.

[00:36:54] Just so that they can tolerate receiving something safe, you know, because I've done that. So, listen. And that, just saying, this, this is a story that's going to work, this is just a little bit of a story, but it's going to work out well. It's like reading a bit of In the Garden or something. You can just enter it and see whether you like the feel of it.

[00:37:14] And once you've done it, once it's occurred to you that you can actually say yes. Or say, or reach towards somebody, even though it's only in the safety of a workshop. Once it's done once, it can be done again. So I think generally, being steeped in fiction is very good for us to realize what an incredible range of creative possibilities there are for the next ten minutes of our life.

[00:37:43] It doesn't have to be the way it was for our parents, or the way it was for us. for our last ten minutes. Imaginative possibilities are endless, and if we see them in stories... They help us. So my daughter, one of them, loved a book, which you may have come across, called Rita the Rescuer. It was back in the days of writing these feminist, legendary stories, and Rita the Rescuer could rescue everybody.

[00:38:07] She was just brilliant. And she had got sprouted wings when she was needed. And I watched in difficult situations, literally summoning, Rita wasn't in our family. There wasn't anybody quite like that. But every now and again in her tough school world, she needed Rita and she summoned her. So, I think we can expand our stories.

[00:38:28] into what either has not yet happened or couldn't ever happen, but wouldn't it be lovely if it did? And I had somebody recently who came because she'd, she'd got to go to divorce court and make a plea for the amount of money she wanted from her very powerful husband. And she was absolutely convinced she couldn't do it.

[00:38:48] She was far too nice, and he was far too powerful. And so I invited her to pick somebody to be her voice for him, um, who wouldn't have any problems with the husband or the judge, and she picked Mrs. Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher. And so we rehearsed her as Margaret Thatcher for a bit, and, and it went brilliantly.

[00:39:09] She got everything she needed. So it was a story, it was just on the edge, you know, it was just waiting to come in, just needed, somebody, she nosed Mrs. Thatcher, but it was a needed attribute, that was missed, way of being able to live a story, once it came in, and the story flew on, so I liked it, I like, Peering around the corner of the present into a future, which then invites that future for people, because that's the way of undoing the stuck movement.

[00:39:42] Laure: Yeah, I relate to that very strongly. I did a whole episode last year about how you can borrow fictional characters. to help you through situations in life. Cause it's, it works. It's wonderful. It's expensive. Like it expands you. So I'm keeping an eye on the time and I don't want to go too much over, but I'd like to ask you the last question of the podcast, which I asked to everybody.

[00:40:08] However, you understand the word soul that might have many different dimensions. Uh, when do you feel closer to your own soul, and when do you feel closest to other people's soul? And it might be the same thing, or it might be different. 

[00:40:22] Judith: Well, qualities of the soul, um, remind me a little bit of when you knock on a large ancient bell, and it just goes on and on and on, that resonance, that reverberation.

[00:40:36] And it belongs to the world, it doesn't belong to you, you know, so that all the other bells or guitar strings or whatever, they all wake up to that same resonance. And so it's very moving, and I think the qualities of the soul are about being moved, they're about awe and love and longing, you know, hope and so on.

[00:40:57] They're not straightforward emotions, they are qualities of the wider Worlds that we participate in, and I think whenever we touch into these wider worlds and this bell rings, you know, it's not, if, if it's cracked, if it's, if it's not a good story, it's, it's a quick thud, and nothing happens, and then you know that the soul is keeping out of it, so, I mean, there are lots of kind of obvious things to say about the soul, but I think of it more as capacity in my body has, to live in its depths and not be alone, you know, because being separate and alone is clearly a epistemological mistake, not one that the soul makes, ever.

[00:41:43] So I think I'm very guided by the soul, and it used to about it a bit more coherently, but as I get older, I find that I don't have so much to say about these things. I just know they're there. And And I certainly don't think of souls being more like glove shapes into which we may fit, and for a time we all operate together.

[00:42:10] Laure: I love those images, they're really poignant, living in the depths of your body is something that is a lifetime, lifetime of work.

[00:42:23] Alright, well thank you so much for coming and doing this. 

[00:42:27] Judith: Well, it's been very nice to meet you and, um, I hope it all works out well.