Symbiosis: What we unconsciously live with. Lecture by Thomas Geßner, May 2022 in Nettersheim, Spring Academy Nelles Institute Shortly after the Peaceful Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall, as a student, I led a university council in the auditorium maximum of...
I feel like that blue fish in the South Seas that you’ve probably heard of. One morning, his neighbour asked him how he found the water that day. The blue fish replied, startled: ‘What water?’ This illustrates the premise of my experiment on the zeitgeist and its role in the interplay between the collective and the individual. We will have to leave the water for a few moments in order to perceive a little of the zeitgeist that surrounds us.
Wilfried Nelles: The World We Live In. Consciousness and the Path of the Soul. Innenweltverlag, Edition Neue Psychologie. Cologne 2020. Review by Thomas Geßner First of all: Dr Wilfried Nelles from Marmagen (Eifel) was already an internationally renowned systemic...
The coronavirus is bringing to light what has been hidden beneath the surface. Just as inner and interpersonal conflicts are becoming apparent in many people’s personal lives, the psychology of our public and political life is also being affected by the pandemic. The reign of fear, the fragmentation of the reality in which we live, the fall into outdated absolute categories of right and wrong, good and evil, the separation between what we pretend to be and what we actually do, are some of the neurotic symptoms with which the virus has infected not people’s bodies but the public mind. A psychological analysis of what is happening may perhaps bring to the surface some of what is going on in Germany in the debate about the coronavirus.
Every major crisis brings to light what has been waiting to reveal itself for a long time. We seem to unconsciously fall back on what saved us in the past, both individually and collectively. However, almost none of this helps anymore, because today is not the past. What role does truth play in this, and what truth helps us?
Contribution by Dr Wilfried Nelles. Does coronavirus bring death? Yes, it brings death – into our consciousness. The shock of being so drastically confronted with our own mortality has led to a virtual paralysis of life in order to avoid dying. In this way, the almost global lockdown has inadvertently highlighted something very fundamental: those who cannot or will not die cannot live! The price of the unconditional avoidance of death is the loss of life, of vitality. The coronavirus shows us this. Can we see it?
Trauma is not the event itself, such as an accident, psychological or physical assault, act of violence, war or natural disaster. Trauma is a complex internal survival mechanism that enables us to survive such an event and go on living.
Trauma is essentially a single illusion. It is the illusion that the devastating threat still exists. The fact that the danger is over, that I have survived and am now safe, has no reality for the trauma.
We have seen how trauma works physically, how illusion plays a fundamental role in this process, and how the soul itself traumatises us through our consciousness (‘I am’). Trauma comes from the human soul and it is also from the soul that it can be healed. Let us therefore look at the phenomenon of ‘spirituality’ as a general code for accessing the soul, the inner side of our aliveness.
Counseling is a process between adults on equal footing. The responsibility for one’s own path remains entirely with those seeking advice; it is not taken away from them. This allows them to discover what steps they are ready to take toward the future.
In a relationship we either learn over the years to see ourselves and others through adult eyes, or we suffer. The suffering comes from unconscious childhood demands. These cannot be fulfilled by anyone. The point is to transform them into adult needs. Then a whole new world opens up.
Constellations use representatives to reveal the inner connections of a problem, symptom or crisis. They also show the direction in which a solution can be found. Here I describe in practical terms how the work usually proceeds in a constellation seminar.
To see is to surrender. To see is to recognise love in all that is, even in its blind form. Blind love does not see what is now. It remains bound to what was before. It does not know that the threats of the past have passed. How does it learn to see?
Adult spirituality surrenders directly to life as it unfolds, with all that it demands and gives. Adult spirituality lives in surrender. This is alien to modern consciousness. It lives in juvenile concepts, including those of ‘spirituality’.
You follow your own inner steps at your own pace. I provide the safe space for this and serve as a guide with my professional resources and experience whenever necessary. It is a process between adults on equal footing.
Everything is true. Everything counts.
Not only do we have a soul, but the soul also has us, in connection with all that is. It shapes us and our lives and seems to want us to become whole within ourselves.
Chinese – European Conference, Nelles Institute China. Let the other culture known by China and let the Chinese culture known by the world. 目的: 让世界文化走进中国，让中国文化走向世界！Main Topics 主要内容: 主要内容：1. Love and relationships in modern times
现代社会的爱与关系 2. Life Science in Chinese Traditional Culture. 中国文化中的生命科学 3. Parents and children 父母和孩子 4. Family, society and the individual 家庭，社会和个人
1. Refugees are human beings. You can see that: they walk upright on two legs, they feel, they think and they speak.
2. Refugees are foreigners. They feel, think and speak differently to us. You can usually see that too.
Let’s see what this little distinction between ‘human beings, i.e. creatures like us’ and ‘foreigners, i.e. different from us’ can reveal, clarify and make understandable.
Reality always provides me with challenging adaptation patterns of my own past dependent love. They are still at work despite the fact that I am out and alive. Those situations invite me, by sometimes harassing me badly, to perceive them from the inner place of self-love and to take them not personally. So I learn to see what I really had done in dependent love and what my self-love now requires from me. So I learn to love, the love I am. Read more from the lecture I was invited for to Nelles Summer Academy 2016 in Nettersheim, Germany.
This is about the work a problem does for us if we let it. A new approach to „problem and solution“.
You accept your parents by leaving them. It is both a letting go and a finding. When I, as an adult, give up all internal and external expectations of my father and mother, two things happen at once: I begin to realise my true freedom. At the same time I realise that I am alone. I am completely with myself. I find myself. Just as I am.
I accept my mother and father as they are, without expecting anything more from them as parents. For most people this sentence would simply be a call to betrayal, to betray their own ideals. That is what it is, and it is necessary. Without this ‘betrayal’ of one’s ideals, without the inner step from the ideal image to the reality of life, no one can grow up inwardly.
We cannot see the real people behind the image of our parents as long as we maintain the ideal of them, both in terms of their ‘good’ and ‘bad’ qualities. Nor can we see ourselves, because the ideal of our parents is always linked to an ideal self. Nor can we see the world, at least not as it really is, because our ideal of the world is naturally shaped by our ideal of our parents. One cannot exist without the other. Read more …
I accept myself as the child of my parents, just as I am now, without wanting to be different. First of all, I’m not writing here about how to get rid of your ‘patterns’. That’s not possible. And that’s not what this is about. Letting go’ and ‘getting rid of’ are based on the illusion that you can effectively work on yourself. For adults, however, the time for ‘working on yourself’ is over, both in your personal life and in therapy and counselling. Working on yourself is working against yourself. This is about letting yourself be, including your ‘patterns’.
I don’t believe in entanglements with our past as an active part of. The past itself can not do anything, and nothing can be done to it. It is over, that’s all. As well: nothing can be done to the future, and the future itself does nothing. It is not here, not yet. The only moment you can do something, and the only moment something can be done to you, is now. Your life is nowhere except in the present moment, and this is the only moment a constellation can be a mirror for. Read more …
When sick people come to see me, our first work together is to follow their symptoms inwardly. A striking number of symptoms take us back to the middle of the Second World War. They do not yet ‘know’ that peace exists. Now, in the safety of the present, they can find peace.
1. You did not choose to enter into your relationship. You will not decide when it ends. 2. If you are suffering in your relationship, it is because of you. Your partner is suffering in the same way, only with himself. 3. …
Imagine being able to choose who you want to sit with under the Christmas tree, raiding the gift table and falling into a roast goose coma at the dinner table. That is, if you don’t pass out before dessert because you got a bit confused about who to invite to your dinner party.
Constellations reveal the present state of a person or their relationship system and the past attachments that are currently active. This is where their accuracy lives. They do not reveal the past itself, although it often seems to.
