Since we are dealing with issues of the soul, there is, so far, no scientific explanation on how this approach actually works. The amazing thing is that it works, and some parallels to modern scientific research may be drawn as follows:

The English biologist Rupert Sheldrake has been working on what he calls "field-phenomena." According to Sheldrake, one can observe that dogs live in an invisible energetic field with their owner. When, for example, the owner leaves the house for a shopping trip and the dog stays at home, the dog shows an exact awareness of when the owner is on his way back to the house or when he interrupts his trip back home. To verify this, Sheldrake had camera teams record the actions of both the owner and the dog, and then compared the two results. The dog became very excited each time the owner made the choice to come back home. Very nearly every time, when the owner was still one street away from home, the dog ran to the door waiting with great excitement for him to arrive.

We may call this a kind of telepathy or instinct. Sheldrake came up with the term "morphogenetic field," suggesting that all visible phenomena, such as the birds flying in a flock each year to certain areas of the world, are controlled by fields of information which obviously expand around the world. These fields consist of a memory, a growing recording of all historical events and changes. Whatever has been thought or felt by mankind is available in the morphogenetic field of mankind. If you follow the path down, you may see the morphogenetic subfields of countries, ethnic groups, tribes, local areas, cities, villages and families.

Even locations contain fields of information. Sheldrake mentions a road in England where, for no apparent reason, many fatal accidents occurred. As he studied the history of that area, he discovered that it had been a battlefield some centuries prior. After his discovery, some people began to acknowledge this historic event by praying for those who were killed, resulting in the accident rate decreasing significantly.

Morphogenetic fields can also be observed in human beings over many generations. After attending a seminar of Bert Hellinger's Family Constellation Work in London, Sheldrake noted that now he was able to see the morphogenetic fields in action.

By taking people as representatives of the actual members of a family - also for those who died a long time ago - we are actually tapping into the field of historic information of that family. Within the framework of the Family Constellation we are able to gather very detailed information about the actual issues.

All members of a family participate in a field of memory and are remembered through this morphogenetic field. This kind of memory seems to be both timeless and independent of space or location.

When one member of a family emigrates overseas and is then murdered in a foreign country, all the other members who still live in the home country register this event on a subconscious level. Even if later generations do not consciously know what actually happened to this emigrant and forget him totally, somebody from a later generation will very likely feel the urge to emigrate too, or will somehow feel threatened. Indeed, the person who is identified with that emigrant does not consciously realize that he is living his life, in part, in the memory of that forgotten one. In this way the family soul seeks completeness and balance.

In the Family Constellation, the forgotten members are brought back together again where they can be remembered in a more conscious way, a way that is deeply healing.

Anne Schuetzenberger, a french psychotherapist, has studied the so called "Anniversary Syndrome," observing some recurring patterns of events in families over many generations. This may lead to the conclusion that the morphic field tends to repeat certain structures and events, as if a ritual had to be established over many generations. Any kind of repetition establishes a field of information. We may call this the customs of a family or an ethnic group. They become rituals that we create out of the strong bonding energies issued from a common tribal consciousness.

In Family Constellation Work, one may find that all the women in a family lost their husbands when they were about 35 years old, either to an illness, an accident or during a war. Now, a female client of such a family we just described comes to us, telling she feels a strong urge to leave her husband, but admits that she is actually confused and does not know why she would do that. So we ask her to look at all the women (representatives) who lost their husbands, and suddenly, she feels great solidarity and compassion for them; longing to be loyal, she also feels ready to lose her own husband. We let her say to all the women: "I see your suffering, it is too big a burden for me. Please, look friendly upon me and bless me if I leave it with you and stay with my husband!" We begin to change the pattern of loss for the client, by giving new information into the morphogenetic field to achieve balance and peace.

Dr. Schuetzenberger discovered how twists of fate can create a recurring, almost magic pattern within the family soul. She found that quite often that the marks of such events as divorce, accidents and deaths even happen on the exact same dates as those in later generations.

According to Mrs. Schuetzenberger, specific symptoms are often repeated or imitated by members of a family. For example, if ancestors died under the guillotine, later ones had eczema around the neck. In several cases these skin irritations could be healed by looking at the executed ancestors on a soul level, saying a prayer, and lighting a candle in their memory.