— Unfortunately, this book is out of print at Innenweltverlag and is currently only available second-hand. —

Contents

It was all worth it.

This realisation marks the beginning of the inner freedom of adulthood. You look at your own life without wanting to improve it. Everything that has happened – whether difficult or easy – has led to the present moment. In this way, our past can become a source of strength for the here and now. This is not paradise, but a very earthly and loving path with oneself. This is what our book is about: ‘Wilfried Nelles/Thomas Geßner: The Longing of Life for Itself. The Life Integration Process in Practice.’

In it, we describe Wilfried Nelles’ practical work with his new constellation format in a training course and show how men and women look at their lives with this support. For example, they discover a strength in the hardships of their childhood that they hardly dared to use before. They recognise in the arrogance of their youth an effective protection that they still use today. They search for their shadows and find light. Some encountered deep fatigue and were finally able to relax with this long-fought-against attitude towards life; some thought they had to earn their lives and encountered carefree joy – as their actual task in life. What is happening here?

The Life Integration Process (LIP) is not just a new format in constellation work. In a broader sense, it describes the attitude of unconditional love for reality. We ourselves, our becoming, appear as an expression of the ‘longing of life for itself’. Wilfried Nelles discovered the LIP in 2011 when he began to use his consciousness model for constellation work. His model is based on the observation that human life proceeds in stages. Each of the seven stages contains its own horizon of experience, an opportunity for development offered by life itself, and a specific access to the world resulting from this. Each stage has a consciousness that can be clearly distinguished from the other stages and described. It has a corresponding counterpart on the collective level of human existence.

The Life Integration Process as a constellation format gives adults the opportunity to look at their own youth, childhood and time in the womb from the perspective of self-awareness. The representatives for these stages of life show precisely what is relevant in each case. You face yourself, so to speak, and thereby create a certain distance from yourself. This is healing, because much emotional suffering stems from the fact that we do not realise the temporal distance from what may have burdened us. This applies, for example, to traumas, identifications and ‘shadows’ in general.

The physical, emotional and rational patterns that enabled us to deal with the situation at the time are often still active. Today, we often find them burdensome because they no longer have anything to do with the here and now of our lives and repeatedly pull us back into our embryonic, childlike or adolescent consciousness. Many people are looking for a way to escape these patterns, to leave them behind, to find solutions. The Life Integration Process does not seek solutions of this kind. Rather, it validates our ‘patterns’ and ‘weaknesses.’ Nothing about them was wrong. They are achievements that the adolescent, the child or even the embryo accomplished in order to survive. It is simply a matter of seeing them in their entirety, with their pain and their life-sustaining function.

This is a great challenge, because then the truth of our lives comes to us. We face it and see that we are alone. Only then can the basic melody of our lives reveal itself – right at the beginning, in the representative for the time in the womb – that which life has called us into existence for, our inner vision. It is a great source of strength and at the same time an imposition, because it does not ask for our will. It simply takes hold of us and wants to be lived by us.

Our book ‘The Longing of Life for Itself: The Life Integration Process in Practice’ can be a guide for anyone who feels this longing within themselves. The LIP can sometimes shake you up quite a bit, but in the long run it leads to more serenity and love. Therapists, counsellors or consultants who want to achieve a certain lightness and at the same time a great strength in their work could benefit greatly from the inner attitude and therapeutic insights of this book.

Wilfried Nelles, Thomas Geßner:

The Longing of Life for Itself.

The Life Integration Process in Practice.

Innenwelt Verlag Cologne, 350 pages, paperback, £17.95.

ISBN 9783942502306

Unfortunately, this book is out of print at Innenweltverlag and is currently only available second-hand.