What is family constellation — and why people fly to Bali for it.
Everybody comes to Bali to heal. IG promises waterfalls will rinse you clean and rice fields will rearrange your nervous system. And for a while, it works. You drink your coconuts, vibrate just right at some sound healing dome, and watch the sunsets drop into the waves. You tell friends back home you feel “lighter.” For rational Westerners, Bali is a gentle paradise where logic fades and sensations rule. It’s all softness, nurture, and maybe even energy, if you play that way. Through breathwork, touch, movement, rituals –— you shift something that’s lived in you for years. Healing without having to explain it all.
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Those from Asia arrive with a different hunger. Home suffocates with tight expectations. Bali’s chaos and mash-up of cultures is medicine. For both, a short time spent in Bali feels like the answer to everything. And then it stops working.
You see, Bali doesn’t erase the thing you came here to escape. And once the euphoria of the nervous system calming down passes, you are again confronted with your usual patterns. You think you’ve turned a corner, but the same arguments, the same sensations find their way back to you. New job, new partner, new country – the same old tensions underneath.
That’s your nervous system running oldscripts. Like a Spotify playlist set decades ago. You keep hitting “next” – journaling, talking to your inner child, reasoning your way through – but the same songs loop back in. Insight doesn’t rewrite a survival response. You can understand your fear and still be hijacked by it. You can forgive your parents and still react like a child at certain triggers.
What’s worse is how early the nervous system sets its rhythm. Mostly before memory, before language. What you can’t even recall is running your body. And your life.
This is what many now understand as generational trauma – those unconscious, inherited patterns that shape how we react, attach, avoid, perform, or overextend. Was your dad an alcoholic, numbing the pressure passed down by his cruel father? Was your mum emotionally absent, stretched thin by the weight of doing it all alone? If your parents were shaped by pain they never resolved, chances are you carry echoes of it too.
That’s where Deepika comes in.
“Healing doesn’t mean the past didn’t happen. It means your body isn’t bracing for it anymore, and may be more attunedto new possibilities on how to be.”
Her background includes systemic constellation work, with certifications in integral somatic psychology and nervous system regulation. Her most potent tool is Family Constellation, a practice that reveals how unconscious patterns, especially from family, shape your reactions, choices, and sense of safety.
Therapy? Not quite. It’s more like stepping into a room where something invisible becomes visible – and then starts to move you from the inside out. It’s strange. However, all somatic work is.
In a group session, participants are invited to bring forward a question, conflict, or emotional knot. Others in the room are then intuitively chosen to “represent” key figures – perhaps your father, your mother, or even a younger version of yourself. Guided by the facilitator, these representatives begin to move, speak, or react based on what they sense is right. They all enter the field without knowing your story, but from there, something surprisingly accurate unfolds. A subtle yet profound relational intelligence that lies beneath the surface.
In this work, facilitation is everything. The space needs to feel safe enough for your nervous system to loosen its grip. Deepika’s soft boundaries carry a pleasant weight. The way she tracks everything – each move, each gesture, each turn of phrase – grounds the room. She picks out what’s yours, what belongs to the one representing another person, what’s just noise, and what’s a thread worth pulling – all grounded in potent principles of life and healing.
You feel it. You understand why they did what they did, how they felt. Their shame. Their confusion. It doesn’t change what happened. But your body begins to understand, and lets go in a way logic never could.
Why does it work? Somatic science points to research showing how emotional states can be mirrored and shifted in safe relational containers, especially when movement and presence are involved. From an epigenetic perspective, relational witnessing can interrupt inherited stress responses. And then there’s the bigger picture the collective consciousness, the unseen.
Deepika says she’s witnessed many transformations. She recalls a 60-year-old woman releasing the weight of her husband’s lifelong infidelities. Have you ever tried getting someone past 50 to change their mind about anything? That alone is remarkable.
What’s most striking is how this work exposes the gap between your true self and the traits you’ve unknowingly inherited. A trader who keeps losing opportunities – not from his own hesitation, but from his father’s risk aversion lodged deep in his nervous system. A new mother who’s overly permissive, rejecting the control she grew up with. Family Constellation helps you separate what’s authentically yours from what was taken on, often out of loyalty or survival. It’s a way of untangling your true personality from burdens that were never yours.
In constellation work, the family is treated as a living field – one that holds memory, emotions, and loyalty across generations. In that field, you might find yourself carrying your grandmother’s guilt. Or repeating the silence of a mother who never had the chance to speak – an echo of trauma passed through DNA and nervous systems.
