Constellation

restore balance, bring the hidden to light

What is Systemic Constellation?

Living constellation work is a dynamic practice that connects with the knowing field to diagnose and reveal deep and unresolved systemic traumas in the family lineage.

In a respectful setting and honoring of the soul’s journey and its order in the universe, this practice unfolds dimensionally and spatially to reveal those places that hold the tensions of unresolved entanglement.

This journey can be very moving, cathartic, and even fun, as discoveries are made and insights evolve based on observing the family dynamics in a safe manner.

In this way, the flow of love and acceptance now has the capacity to restore these spaces, potentially creating understanding, healing, and peace for the seeker.

“With the practice of constellations, you are part of a spacial mapping of your family system. No one goes missing in the night, just like the star’s map of our heavens”

— Sarah MacLean Bicknell

“Constellation names the forgotten and excluded, thus freeing up more dynamic love, a sense of belonging and inclusion to flow through the lineage into present life”

— Sarah MacLean Bicknell

Sarah’s relationship to constellation work

My training as a facilitator has been with Francesca Mason Boring, complimented by further work with Stephan Hausner.

Constellation work includes medical, business, money flow, family, and exploration of social issues — in many cases, anything named or unnamed can be constellated. I will also often work blind (where only the seeker and facilitator know the back story and who the representatives are representing), which allows for complete privacy.

For those who have represented before, we are very aware of the gifts and widening of compassion that opens up within us by standing as someone’s mother, uncle, operation manager, or even a natural disaster or country.

I lay my own recent personal growth at the feet of this work, as it has broadened my perspective and taught me much respect for trauma and all of its radiating circles. It has given me a respect, that when the energies are standing in right order and relationship, the love that has been formerly blocked now flows again directly through the representatives and into the room. I experience a little bit more of what I didn’t know, coming up into the light of my day.

Pictured:

This is Sarah’s constellation lineage. From left to right: Susan Schlosser, Francesca Mason Boring, Sneh Victoria Schnabel, and Sarah MacLean Bicknell. Sneh learned directly from Bert Hellinger in his earliest circle, and she taught Francesca who taught Susan and Sarah.

Sarah's Shamanic Approach to Constellation

For Sarah, the knowing field that constellation work reveals is not separate from the field, she has walked with as a ceremony keeper for thirty five years, and the two have grown into each other until they can no longer be pulled apart. Her ceremonial adoption into the Hunka’waye tradition of the Lakota Nation in 1991, her decades of sweat lodge practice, and her ongoing shamanic teachings have taught her that the ancestors, the land, and the dreaming body are already present in the constellation before a single representative steps into the field, and that the work of the facilitator is to recognize what has already arrived rather than to summon something new.

Where classical constellation asks a representative to notice sensation and impulse, Sarah brings a shamanic attunement to what else is moving in that same body, the animal that appears unbidden, the ancestor who steps forward without being called, the weather or the season or the mineral memory of a particular stretch of ground, and she has learned to trust these arrivals as fully as she trusts the words a representative speaks. She often works with the felt intelligence of the land itself as a member of the system, understanding place not as backdrop but as kin with its own unresolved grief and its own capacity for healing, so that a constellation held outdoors, or one that simply remembers it is happening on living ground, can open into depths that an indoor room rarely reaches on its own.

This is the thread that runs beneath her nature and dream constellation retreats, and it is why seekers often describe her constellations as feeling less like a technique being applied to them and more like a ceremony that has been waiting, patiently, for them to arrive.

International Facilitator Trainer

Sarah has trained facilitators and led constellation work across continents since 2014, carrying the work between Mexico and the UK long before it became the shape of a career, learning early that the field speaks the same language whether the ground beneath it is limestone or lava rock, jungle or moor. She is known as a teacher, returning to the UK yearly to facilitate family constellations and offer trainings for facilitators. She has continued to deepen her own capacity as a student by attending other facilitator trainings. This way she keeps herself in relationship with her own unfinished learning even as she guides others through theirs.

What she brings to a training room is not a method to be applied but a way of listening to be inherited, and this is where her approach lives, in the relational field between facilitator and participant, in the quality of attention that lets what wants to emerge actually emerge, rather than what the facilitator expected to find. People come to train with her manner is unique, because so much facilitator training teaches technique and so little teaches presence, and because thirty five years in the indigenous fields of learning has taught her that the most important skill she can offer another facilitator is not a set of steps but a way of being still enough, and curious enough, and humble enough, to let the client, the ancestor, the land, or the dream, teach the room what it needs to know.

Sarah Maclean Bicknell is an Internationally Recognized Professional Constellator through Constellators International.

Monthly Constellations in Seattle Washington

Join Sarah and her local Seattle community for monthly in-person constellation events. Choose to join as a seeker or representative and experience this powerful and insightful healing tool together in community.

Seeker spots fill fast, so register ahead in advance if you wish to participate as a seeker.

For questions, email hello@sarahmacleanbicknell.com

upcoming 2026 dates: