Working with Blended Fields: Systemic Constellations in a Time of Complexity

Systemic constellations, formalised in the late 20th century, draw on relational insights encountered across cultures and contexts. Bert Hellinger’s exposure to South African Zulu relational worldviews — which echo patterns found across many sub-Saharan African cultures — informed aspects of his thinking about family, belonging, and ancestry, contributing to the way the work was articulated in Europe. The practice has since continued to evolve across cultures as a living, relational inquiry.

Zita Tulyahikayo brings her contemporary perspective to this work, showing how it unfolds today — across complexity, migration, and the subtle dynamics of human connection.

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We are living in a moment where many of the frameworks that once helped us make sense of the world no longer quite hold.

Families are increasingly blended. Cultures are interwoven. Histories sit side by side without having been fully integrated. At the same time, there is a growing pressure to take positions, to simplify, to resolve complexity into certainty. For many people, this creates a quiet strain — a sense that life is asking more of us than our inherited ways of understanding can easily offer.

Systemic constellations emerged, and continue to evolve, precisely at this threshold. The work is often associated with the late twentieth-century European articulation of the method through Bert Hellinger. Yet what he encountered and translated were not new ideas, but recognitions that exist across many cultures: that human lives are shaped by forces larger than the individual; that belonging matters; that time, ancestry, and order have a reality that cannot be bypassed by good intentions alone. These recognitions long predate their formal naming. They were held, practiced, and transmitted in relational societies where the individual was never imagined as separate from family, land, or lineage. What we now call “systemic” was once simply a way of living attentively within a larger whole.

Today, the work is meeting a different kind of field.

In places like the United States — a nation forged through migration, enslavement, aspiration, violence, and extraordinary creativity — complexity is not theoretical. It is lived. Distinct cultures, religions, and histories coexist at scale, often without shared memory or agreed meaning. This blending is one of America’s great strengths, and also a source of ongoing strain. It generates vitality, innovation, and beauty, while simultaneously exposing unresolved wounds that cannot be quickly healed or neatly resolved.

From a systemic perspective, this is not a failure. It is a reality that asks for new capacities.

Systemic constellations do not offer solutions to these conditions. They do not promise reconciliation, harmony, or repair in the way modern culture often hopes for. Instead, they offer something quieter and more demanding: a way of perceiving and staying present to what is actually moving within families, communities, and collective fields — without collapsing into blame, ideology, or withdrawal.

A lived moment from the work

In recent months, I’ve been working with a not-for-profit organisation in London, bringing systemic constellations to a marginalised community shaped by family rupture, migration, and historical loss. We meet once a month to work with the issues that quietly organise their lives.

Something curious happens each time. The men arrive early — present, attentive, and watchful. The women arrive later, carrying food, laughter, and conversation. The rhythm is familiar, almost archetypal.

One man came every month but never stayed.

He would arrive, sit quietly, and then leave before the work began.

Once, we had to change locations because our usual space was needed for a community fundraiser. When I arrived at the new venue, I found him already there. It turned out he had slept in the office overnight so he wouldn’t miss the session. That was the moment I understood: this time, he would stay.

When the work began, he waited patiently as others went first. Eventually, he raised his hand and said he was ready. What followed was slow and tender. Here was a large, strong man — an elder in the community, accomplished, rooted, an old-school Rastafarian — placing his trust in me and in the field.

The constellation was simple. Just him and a representative for his father.

He sat on the floor at the feet of the man representing his father, looking up — as a young boy looks up to a father — except he had never known his father in life. By the time he discovered who his father was, the funeral had already taken place.

I invited him to look at the representative and speak one sentence:

“I spent my whole life looking for you.”

That single truth released the grief he had carried quietly for decades. He wept.

Without instruction, the men in the group gathered around him, holding him as men in a tribe would hold a child — with steadiness and care. We hummed softly as the tears came, not to soothe, but to accompany.

After a time, something shifted. I invited him to stand and meet his father’s gaze.

They held each other. And when the moment was ripe, more sentences emerged:

“You were the right father for me. I carry you in my heart.”

“Thank you for the gift of my life. Bless me when I choose to live it fully and joyfully.”

Then came the outbreath, the kind that comes when something long carried can finally be laid to rest.

This is how the work often unfolds. Not through solutions or explanations, but through movements that restore relationship — to family, to ancestry, to life itself. I am not looking for answers in these moments. I am listening with my body for the movements that allow life to flow again. What happens next belongs to the person and their family soul, which knows far more than I ever could about what to do with what has been acknowledged and released.

Much of the work happens through the personal: family relationships, intimate partnerships, questions of belonging, loyalty, and exclusion. Yet anyone who works with constellations for long enough recognises that the personal is never separate from the collective. Family systems carry the imprints of history. Individual suffering often belongs to wider movements of displacement, loss, or survival.

At its roots, this is relational work — not in the sense of technique or treatment, but relationship as a way of being in the world. The practice is not psychotherapeutic in its orientation, even though it can be deeply therapeutic in its effects. It rests on the understanding that healing emerges through right relationship: with family, with ancestry, with life as it is, rather than through intervention or analysis alone.

In this sense, systemic constellations function less as a therapeutic technique and more as a practice of orientation. They help us sense where we are standing, what we are carrying, and what does not belong to us alone. They invite humility — an acceptance that not everything can be fixed, saved, or resolved within a single lifetime.

This orientation matters deeply in a time when many people feel both overwhelmed and morally pressured: asked to care about everything, to take sides on everything, and to carry responsibilities that exceed any one human nervous system.

Constellations offer a different stance — one that values restraint as much as action, and acknowledgement as much as change.

My own way of holding this work has been shaped by standing at multiple crossings: between cultures, histories, and ways of knowing. This does not grant special insight, but it does bring responsibility. It requires careful attention to where power, projection, and idealisation can quietly enter the field. Above all, it calls for fidelity to the phenomenological nature of the work — to what shows itself, rather than what we wish to confirm.

This is why the container matters so much.

It also feels important to acknowledge the places and people that have supported this work as it has evolved. Esalen has played a quiet but significant role in holding systemic and field-based inquiry over many decades, offering a context where practices could be explored, questioned, and deepened rather than fixed into doctrine. My own training was shaped by teachers who carried that spirit of openness and integrity, including Judith Hemming, whose influence continues to inform how I understand responsibility, restraint, and care in the field.

Esalen Institute has long been a place where inquiry is valued over answers, and where practices are explored not as dogma, but as living traditions in dialogue with the present moment. In a time of heightened polarisation and collective strain, such spaces are not luxuries. They are essential.

The invitation of this work is simple, though not easy: to remain human in complexity; to allow life to move where it has been held; and to recognise that peace, such as it is, may not arrive as resolution, but through what we choose to carry forward — in our relationships, our families, and the legacies we leave behind.

This is not work for those seeking certainty.

It is work for those willing to stay present.

Zita Tulyahikayo is a systemic family constellations facilitator, certified clinical hypnotherapist, trauma therapist, and systemic coach. Her unique approach and what sets her apart is the culmination of all her experience, skills, training, and heritage — Bakiga, Tutsi, Masaai, Barbadian, Welsh, Jewish, and British. Holding multiple belongings allows her to create profoundly transformative spaces for her clients and the systems they belong to, enabling them to overcome seemingly intractable issues, realize their potential, and enhance their relationships. 

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