Morphic Field. The concept of morphic fields represents one of the most intriguing and controversial theories in contemporary science and therapeutic practice. Originally proposed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake in the 1980s, morphic fields offer a compelling framework for understanding phenomena that defy conventional scientific explanation—from the collective behaviors of organisms to the seemingly inexplicable information transfer witnessed in Family Constellation therapy. From a Gestalt and Somatic Experiencing perspective, this theory provides valuable insights into the embodied and relational dimensions of human experience that extend beyond individual consciousness.

Origins and Basic Concepts

The term “morphic” comes from the Greek word “morphe,” meaning form or structure. Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields emerged from his dissatisfaction with conventional biological explanations for morphogenesis—the process by which organisms develop their characteristic forms. He questioned how cells “know” what to become and how to organize themselves into complex structures without centralized guidance.

Sheldrake proposed that nature operates not just through physical and chemical mechanisms but also through invisible organizing fields that carry information and shape development. These fields exist beyond conventional space-time limitations and influence similar systems across distances through what he termed “morphic resonance.”

The core concepts of morphic field theory include:

1.   Field-Based Organization

Rather than all biological information being encoded solely in DNA, Sheldrake suggests that organization in nature also depends on non-material fields. These fields contain a kind of collective memory that influences the development and behavior of similar systems.

2.   Morphic Resonance

Similar patterns of organization tend to resonate across space and time. When a particular form or behavior occurs repeatedly, it creates a kind of template that makes the same form or behavior more likely to occur in similar systems elsewhere.

3.   Collective Memory

Information in morphic fields is cumulative and accessible to all similar systems. This explains why, for instance, when a significant number of individuals in a species learn a new behavior, others of the same species may spontaneously display the same behavior even without direct contact—a phenomenon documented in research like the “hundredth monkey effect.”

4.   Hierarchical Organization

Morphic fields operate at multiple levels simultaneously—from cells to organs to organisms to social groups and ecosystems—with each level’s field nested within broader fields and containing more specific fields.

Morphic Fields in Therapeutic Contexts

While Sheldrake’s theory emerged from biology, it has found particular resonance in certain therapeutic approaches, especially those working with systemic perspectives and somatic awareness. Three key applications include:

Family Constellations and Systemic Therapy

In Family Constellation work, the morphic field provides a theoretical framework for understanding how representatives in a constellation can access information about people they’ve never met. When individuals stand in as representatives for family members in a constellation, they often report physical sensations, emotions, and impulses that accurately reflect the experiences of the actual family members— despite having no prior knowledge about them.

From this perspective, the constellation creates access to the family’s morphic field—the collective, non- local information storage of the family system across generations. This field contains patterns, traumas, entanglements, and resources that influence current family members, often outside their conscious awareness.

Bert Hellinger, the founder of Family Constellations, referred to this phenomenon as the “knowing field” or “conscience of the soul”—concepts that align closely with Sheldrake’s morphic fields. Through the constellation process, these hidden dynamics become visible and accessible for healing intervention.

Collective Trauma Work

Therapists working with collective trauma increasingly recognize that traumatic events affect not just individuals but entire social fields. The effects of genocide, slavery, colonization, and war appear to be carried in what could be understood as cultural or social morphic fields, influencing subsequent generations even without direct transmission of trauma narratives.

Practitioners like Thomas Hübl and Françoise Leblond draw on field concepts to explain how trauma patterns repeat across generations and how healing interventions at the collective level can shift these patterns for many individuals simultaneously.

Somatic and Embodied Practices

From a Somatic Experiencing perspective, the body itself can be understood as participating in multiple morphic fields. Our nervous systems develop and operate not in isolation but in constant resonance with other nervous systems and environmental contexts.

This perspective helps explain phenomena like co-regulation (how one person’s nervous system state influences another’s) and the somatic dimensions of attachment. It suggests that our bodies directly access and respond to field information beyond what our conscious minds perceive—a key principle in trauma healing approaches that prioritize bodily awareness over narrative.

Scientific Research and Evidence

The scientific community remains divided on morphic field theory. Proponents point to several lines of evidence that suggest non-local information transfer consistent with morphic resonance:

Morphic Field – Biological Evidence

Studies showing that once a chemical compound has been crystallized in one location, the same compound tends to crystallize more readily elsewhere, even when controlling for conventional factors

Research on identical twins raised apart who develop similar habits, preferences, and even make similar life choices despite no direct contact

The rapid spread of new behaviors throughout animal populations in ways that seem to exceed what could be explained by observational learning alone

Consciousness Research

Studies on telepathy, remote viewing, and distant healing showing statistical effects that, while often small, consistently exceed chance probability

Research on collective intention and meditation showing measurable effects on random event generators and crime rates

Experiments suggesting that blindfolded subjects can detect when they’re being stared at, even through one-way mirrors or video feeds

Morphic Field – Therapeutic Observations

Consistent reports from Family Constellation facilitators across different cultures of representatives accurately depicting emotions, physical symptoms, and even specific phrases associated with the family members they represent

Clinical observations of transgenerational trauma patterns manifesting in families with no conscious knowledge of ancestral experiences

Reports of spontaneous healing in groups where related traumatic patterns are resolved in unrelated individuals

Critics maintain that these phenomena can be explained through conventional mechanisms like subtle cueing, cognitive biases, statistical anomalies, or placebo effects. The challenge in researching morphic fields lies in designing experiments that can differentiate between conventional explanations and genuine non-local information transfer.

Practical Applications: Working with Morphic Fields

Whether one fully embraces Sheldrake’s theory or remains skeptical, the concept of morphic fields offers valuable practical applications for personal development and healing work:

Exercise 1: Field Sensing Meditation

This practice develops awareness of information available beyond individual consciousness.

1. Find a quiet space where you won’t be disturbed for 15-20 Sit comfortably with your spine relatively straight.
2. Begin with several deep breaths, allowing your attention to settle into your
3. Imagine your awareness expanding beyond your skin boundary—first to fill the room, then the building, then the surrounding area.
4. As your awareness expands, shift from focused attention to open Rather than looking for specific information, allow impressions to arise.
5. Notice any subtle sensations in your body, emotional shifts, mental images, or intuitive knowings that emerge.
6. If you’re practicing with a specific question or intention (such as sensing information about a family system or work environment), hold this lightly in awareness without straining for
7. When impressions arise, note them without immediate interpretation or Sometimes information from fields comes in symbolic or non-linear forms that make sense only later.
8. After 10-15 minutes, gradually return your awareness to your immediate surroundings and
9. Record your impressions in a journal, noting both the content and the quality of the experience (how the information arrived—as sensation, image, emotion, ).

Regular practice of this exercise develops greater sensitivity to field information while strengthening the capacity to distinguish between projection and genuine reception.

Exercise 2: Ancestral Field Connection

This practice specifically works with accessing resources and healing patterns in family morphic fields.

1. Create a simple representation of your family system—this could be a family tree drawing, photographs arranged on a table, or simply names written on
2. Sit quietly with this representation and take several deep breaths, allowing your attention to settle.
3. State an internal intention to connect with the supportive and resourceful aspects of your ancestral (If this is challenging due to known trauma in your lineage, you might specify that you’re connecting with the wisdom and resilience that existed despite difficulties.)
4. Place one hand on your heart and one on your lower These points connect to both emotional processing and deeper instinctual wisdom.
5. Ask silently: “What strengths and resources from my lineage are available to support me now?” Allow your attention to rest in open receptivity.
6. Notice what arises—sensations, emotions, images, memories, or intuitive knowings. Some people experience distinct impressions of specific ancestors, while others sense more general qualities or archetypes.

7. If challenging emotions or sensations arise, acknowledge them compassionately without becoming Return to the specific intention of connecting with supportive resources.
8. When you sense a supportive quality or resource, breathe into it, allowing it to become more palpable in your awareness and
9. Complete the practice by expressing gratitude to your lineage for the life and resources that have flowed to you.

This practice can help reclaim positive aspects of family heritage that may have been overshadowed by difficult histories or relationships.

Exercise 3: Collective Field Healing

This practice works with the concept that individual healing contributes to collective morphic fields, potentially making healing more accessible for others with similar patterns.

1. Identify a personal pattern you’re working to heal or transform—this could be a relationship dynamic, emotional response, limiting belief, or physical
2. Find a quiet space where you won’t be Sit or lie comfortably.
3. Begin by acknowledging that this pattern, while personally experienced, likely exists in a wider field beyond just Many others, including those in your family system and wider cultural groups, may share similar patterns.
4. Place your hands over your heart and set an intention: “As I work with this pattern in myself, may this healing influence extend to all who share similar “
5. Bring compassionate awareness to how this pattern manifests in your body, emotions, and Without trying to change anything, simply witness with curiosity and kindness.
6. Visualize or sense this pattern as existing within a larger field that extends beyond you—perhaps as a thread in a vast tapestry or a current in a wide
7. Imagine that as you bring healing awareness to your personal experience of this pattern, this awareness creates a resonance that influences the entire
8. If an insight or shift occurs for you during this practice, silently acknowledge: “May this understanding become more accessible to all who share this “
9. Complete the practice by returning attention to your individual experience while maintaining awareness of your connection to larger

This practice combines personal healing with altruistic intention, potentially amplifying both through what some traditions call “the merit of working for the benefit of all.”

Integrating Morphic Field Concepts with Other Approaches

The concept of morphic fields can be integrated with various therapeutic and personal development approaches:

With Somatic Experiencing

Somatic Experiencing already works with the nervous system’s innate intelligence and its relationship to wider contexts. Adding morphic field awareness can help practitioners recognize how individual nervous system patterns relate to family, cultural, and collective fields. This expands the resources available for regulation and healing beyond the individual’s personal history.

With Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt’s emphasis on present-moment awareness and the contact boundary between self and environment aligns naturally with field concepts. The Gestalt principle that “the field determines the meaning of the event” resonates with morphic field understanding that individual experience emerges from and contributes to collective fields.

With Trauma Work

Understanding trauma through a morphic field lens helps explain why similar trauma responses appear across different cultures and how collective trauma patterns (like intergenerational trauma in marginalized communities) persist despite individual intervention. This perspective supports approaches that combine individual healing with collective and systemic work.

With Mindfulness and Meditation

Mindfulness practices can be expanded to include awareness of participation in various fields—family, cultural, ecological—enriching the experience of interconnection and providing access to wider resources for healing and growth.

Philosophical and Ethical Considerations

The morphic field concept raises important philosophical and ethical questions that merit consideration:

Determinism vs. Freedom

If we’re influenced by morphic fields containing patterns established over generations, how do we understand individual free will and responsibility? This tension echoes ancient philosophical debates about fate and freedom but with a contemporary scientific framing.

Most practitioners who work with field concepts suggest a middle path: acknowledging field influences while recognizing our capacity to bring conscious awareness to these patterns and potentially transform them. In this view, freedom comes not from absence of influence but from expanded awareness of the influences operating through us.

Individual and Collective Responsibility

If our personal healing affects collective fields, this suggests an ethical dimension to personal development work. Our individual transformation potentially makes similar healing more accessible to others through morphic resonance.

Conversely, this perspective invites consideration of how collective field healing might support individual transformation. This aligns with indigenous wisdom traditions that have long practiced community healing rituals to address individual suffering.

Science and Spirituality

Morphic field theory represents an area where scientific inquiry interfaces with experiences traditionally framed as spiritual or metaphysical. Rather than maintaining rigid boundaries between these domains, the concept invites us to explore how seemingly disparate ways of knowing might inform each other.

This integration aligns with emerging paradigms in therapy that recognize the limitations of purely materialist approaches to consciousness and healing, without abandoning the rigor and evidence-based orientation of good science.

Conclusion

Whether understood as established scientific fact, useful metaphor, or provisional theory awaiting further investigation, the concept of morphic fields offers valuable perspectives for those engaged in healing and growth work. It provides a framework for understanding phenomena observed in therapeutic contexts that defy conventional explanation while offering practical approaches to working with the non-local dimensions of consciousness and relationship.

From a Gestalt and Somatic Experiencing perspective, morphic field concepts align with fundamental principles: that we exist in complex, interactive fields rather than as isolated individuals; that our bodies hold wisdom beyond conceptual understanding; and that healing happens not just through insight but through reorganization of systems at multiple levels.

By engaging thoughtfully with these concepts—neither dismissing them as mere pseudoscience nor accepting them uncritically—we can access their practical benefits while maintaining appropriate epistemological humility. The field itself continues to evolve, shaped by the contributions of practitioners, researchers, and individuals exploring their own experience of these mysterious dimensions of existence.

 

Keywords: Anxiety, polyvagal theory, gestalt therapy, psychotherapy, parents, parental trauma, somatic experiencing
Contact us: Feel and Heal Therapy Office