You walk into a room and see a group of people in a circle watching a young lady in the middle moving her right foot back and forth, crying desperately. Next to her is an elderly woman dancing with a big smile, surrounding the lady with wide open arms. Also in the circle is a young man trying to reach the crying woman, but he seems invisible to her. She is too consumed by her tears and begins to shout that she cannot stop dancing ballet as yet another woman tries to comfort her without success.

What would you make of this scene? The common assumption may be that you are watching a cast of actors rehearsing a play. For some conservative observers, however, it would be easy to believe that an evil force has somehow possessed these individuals. The truth is that this is a session of an unorthodox therapy called, Family Constellations.  

Bert Hellinger is the founder of this therapy, which is heavily influenced by systemic psychotherapy, psycho-genealogy, and transgenerational psychotherapy. Usually the practice takes place in a room with a large group of people who are standing in a circle. The subject selects individuals from the group to represent members of his or her family system.

In what follows, the spontaneous actions of those selected reveal the inner conflicts that the subject of the therapy is attempting to solve. As the session advances, these actions change and evolve, shedding light on a way to resolve the inner conflicts at hand. Organically, a natural order is eventually reestablished in the family portrayed at the heart of the circle.

“There is a force that overtakes me and does all the work through me. That’s why a phrase or a movement comes to me,” says Rosa Scardino, a Family Constellations therapist currently working in La Paz. This force, which is known as the collective consciousness, is what prompts the actions and behaviour of the people participating in the therapy.

English biologist Ruper Sheldrake has developed a similar idea in his morphic fields theory. According to Sheldrake, there is a collective memory that resonates in all kind of things, from crystals and animals to human beings.

Traditional psychology doesn’t recognize the value of Family Constellations therapy because it doesn’t have scientific bases. Nevertheless, the number of psychologists who unlearn traditional practices and theory to become Family Constellations therapists is growing rapidly.

I’ve witnessed shocking scenes during these sessions, in which people characterize someone else’s life, including my own. My family, my feelings, my pain, my emotions, my present and my past. It is unexplainable but amazingly true how these people can embody, if for a moment, your whole life as it is.

The growing popularity of Family Constellations is explained by the fact that one session can sometimes be enough to heal deep and unconscious issues that might take a year or more to resolve in traditional therapies. Furthermore, when one person ‘constellates,’ or is the subject of the therapy, it helps to heal his or her family members as well, bringing order to the larger family system across generations.

As Scardino explains, the sessions reveal what can at times be an invisible reality. It brings conflicts that are in the unconscious, to the conscious level, so that the subject can see them, understand them, and solve them.

I feel fortunate to have found this therapy for myself. I am grateful for having been at rock-bottom, where you lose your defense mechanisms and start looking for help. I share these words so that they may reach someone who needs the therapy, but I am aware of the limits of written language. To fully grasp the value of this practice, one has to partake in a constellation.

Healing is our duty in this lifetime. This is a great way to begin.

Spirituality comes in many shapes and forms, and that is certainly the case in La Paz. To show off the variety of religious systems found here, we have created a map showing seven of the most intriguing sacred places in the city. To help us with the map, we sought help from Milton Eyzaguirre Morales, director of outreach at Bolivia’s National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore, who explained some of the history and traditions of each location.

‘Apus’ and ‘Apachetas’

Location: Calles Buenos Aires and North Yungas

When we first asked Milton about famous spiritual areas in La Paz, he responded with apus, the spirits of mountains, and apachetas, the spirits of smaller hills. In the past, apus and apachetas were worshipped by the Aymara. During August, the month of the Pachamama—Mother Nature—the hills are activated, and people give offerings of llama foetuses to bring economic luck, success in studying or business, and a healthy family.

Milton said, “‘These spiritual places are being forgotten, but you will still notice a stash of wine, bread, and fruit in some buses, which drivers use to make blessings to the ancestors when they drive over the hills.”’

Churches

Location: Plaza Murillo

A few blocks off the Prado lies Plaza Murillo, the city’s main square and the location of the National Congress and the Presidential Palace. It is also home to the Metropolitan Cathedral of Nuestra Señora de La Paz. This area was once a sacred site, where offerings were made to the Pachamama. After the Spanish arrived, churches, plazas, and government buildings were built over sacred Andean locations. In 2005, when excavators were working in the area in preparation for the new national folklore museum, they found human bones in the ground, leading archaeologists to believe the site was once a sacred cemetery.

Festival of Skulls

Location: General Cemetery

Every year on the 8th of November, people flock to the graves of their ancestors at the General Cemetery with hundreds of skulls, known as ñatitas (usually stolen and then bought at a black market), and ask the dead to protect and help them during harvest. This festival marks the beginning of the ‘Season of the Dead’. To celebrate this, people extravagantly decorate the skulls,; give them cigarettes, alcohol, and coca leaves,; and then rebury them.

Milton said, “‘The dead are seen differently in Andean context. Here they are seen as spirits coming to earth to protect the people and bless a successful harvest,”. said Milton.’

San Francisco Church

Most tourists into La Paz take a trip to the beautiful San Francisco church, but most may not notice the pillars at the front of the church that rise up out of two stone heads in the ground. These heads are linked to the Andean traditions of the dead helping the harvest, growth, and farming, and were built into the church to represent the Catholic Church working together with Andean traditions.

Curva Del Diablo

Location: Autopista La Paz–El Alto

Five minutes by car up the freeway to El Alto, there’s a rock structure about 15 metres in diameter and four metres high. This place, Nnicknamed ‘The Devil’s Corner’, this is a site for spiritual animal offerings, such as dogs, cats, and llamas, to the Pachamama. Traditional offerings at this curve began when thieves and robbers started to come here to ask for forgiveness for their transgressions.

Although it is nicknamed ‘The Devil’s Corner’, Milton explained, “‘petitioners originally gave offerings to the supay—translating to ’the dead’ in Aymara. But when the Spanish heard them they thought they were making offerings to the devil.”’ There was confusion between devil and death!

Witches’ Market

Location: Calles Santa Cruz and Linares

Uphill from Sagarnaga, the central tourist market in La Paz, lies a slightly more unusual bazaar. At the Mercado de Hechecería, or Witches’ Market, you can find anything from coca leaves to llama foetuses, even trinkets and talismans, all meant to appease the gods of the sun, moon, and earth. Here, women tend the products they sell, as they have done for generations. The market began when women from Oruro travelled to sell plants and animals, starting a system of informal commerce.

Milton said, ‘It should actually be called the women’s market—again, there was a confusion between Spanish and Andean terms.’

Fiesta del Gran Poder

Location: Central La Paz

Translating to ‘Festival of the Great Power’,  the Gran Poder is a religious celebration paying homage to Jesus Christ. This dramatic celebration features thousands of folkloric dancers parading down the sprawling streets, flaunting their colourful, extravagant costumes. Although Gran Poder has developed and changed over the decades, many Aymaran traditions remain, making it a one-of-a-kind event. Every year, more than 30,000 dancers take to the streets and dance along a six-kilometre route, beginning at Parque Ben Hur and ending at Avenida Simon Bolívar.

FRANCIS IS ARRIVING

Pope Francis, in his last youth conferences in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, presented a motivational and enlightening message for the thousands of devoted young Catholics who had the opportunity to hear him speak. The pope expressed to the assembled faithful that the Catholic Church is like a football team in a match, and the laity comprises hinchas, or fans, of that game. When unconstructive criticism about the management of religion and about the church as an institution is made by those outside of the ecclesiastical authority, it is like the hinchas shouting outrageous insults at players who make bad passes or don’t convert easy-goal opportunities.

With this metaphor, Pope Francis affirmed that the church has a notable absence of forwards (especially taking into account that this writer is a young Catholic who still has significant doubts about the human—but not the divine—element of the Catholic Church), and that he passes this opportunity to us, putting himself back as the last line of defence so that we can play as forwards in the centre. Without a single doubt, and because of the passion felt for everything to do with football in the Latin American hemisphere, it was not difficult to imagine putting on the No. 9 shirt and entering a colossal stadium overrun with spectators, ready to play a match that would truly present all of the challenges that one could hope to face. In this imaginary match, one here would represent Bolivia, playing for a chance to advance to the World Cup.

All of this means that it is important to stop idealising the church and accept it with all the imperfections that come with any institution that is managed by human beings. Undeniably, it will consist of more than just the ideology, beliefs, and the values it imparts. Before being critical, we have the opportunity to be protagonists and have the chance to turn the tables with regards to the mad perception of the church that has been established over the last few decades—because this does not have anything to do with faith.

In Bolivia, with the establishment of the Andean cosmovision that has been adapted by our leading politicians, it was thought that President Evo Morales would be a fervent player on the team opposing the Church. In fact, he declared in 2009 that the church was a symbol of European colonialism, and must be wiped from the country. He also took action to abolish religious material in schools.

A few weeks ago, I was happily surprised to find out that the government had confirmed Pope Francis’s visit to Bolivia, to the cities of La Paz and Santa Cruz, and that it had been working with the representatives of the church to coordinate the arrival of the Sumo Pontífice. This visit illustrates that Morales is aware of the country’s large Catholic population, and the importance it places on the unifying spirit and message that the Pope represents. Indeed, it could be a stimulus to face up to our differences as a country, and to once again recalculate ideological differences.

This type of visit also unites us in a single beat, from the planning, logistics, and the arrival, just as we were united by the Bolivian football selection as they entered the North American pitches to play in the 1994 World Cup.