“Why should families go unchallenged by the reality that comes to them through their children?” -Rachel Cusk, essay entitled ‘The Spy: On seeing without being seen’, Harper’s magazine October 2023 How is it that different family members are impacted very differently by the family wound? How is it that several siblings may appear to thrive in life, while another seems to struggle and may become, in an unspoken way, the identified problem by the rest of the family? What does the different child bring to life to show the family, and how can that sensitive child find the gold in their individual wounding? These are not easy questions to answer. With the hundreds of people we have worked with we can say that most are sensitive, empathic people who have a deep longing for something to be different, in their own lives, with their place in their family,...

There’s an old idea that, before incarnation, the soul makes agreements and is seeded with a gift of purpose and direction entirely unique to itself- and then that purpose is forgotten along the journey to conception. In the flash of the union of egg and sperm, cells paradoxically and simultaneously begin to divide and multiply, the ephemeral spark of the divine anchors in the physical dimension, and a human being starts to take on flesh and bone. The womb-enclosed initial days on the life path start out in tension between the eternal longing that will stay with the individual, and the inescapable limitations of the myriad agreements into which the soul agreed to be born- choices regarding family members and their circumstances, inherited patterns and unresolved material; health and illness; historical era; societal values; location on Earth; and other elements related to the decision to come to life. It might...

After our relationship with our parents, the connections we have with our brothers and sisters are among the most formative and significant in our lives. It is with our siblings that we traveled to life through the same portal that was created through the union of our mother and father. In the case of twins or triplets, that journey happened at the same time. With our other siblings, it’s likely that the life situations and interpersonal dynamics between our parents were similar over various birth years. At the same time, our siblings carry their own soul programmings and individual lessons they came to life to study which may be very different from our own. Navigating those differences as we grow, mature, and develop our own adult power while building on the same shared early foundations of inherited family loyalties and values is challenging for all of us. Our siblings...

It’s in the ends of things that new beginnings are found. In our human tendency to hold on to what was good, we can fail to appreciate the need to let go of what served us- what supported traveling our path in life, and even what helped us find the path- in order to open anew to where our soul is asking us to travel now. In the turbulent, incoherent and at times volatile collective energies of the United States in which we’re living, it’s becoming more clear that things we’ve taken for granted, and things with which we and our recent ancestors were familiar, are ending. Seasons, weather cycles, bird migrations, the timing of blooms, even a benign Earth may no longer be reliable. Institutions of all kinds functioning to serve the greater good with integrity are becoming more scarce. The sense that there is a unifying story that...

“And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.” -Wendell Berry One of my favorite visionaries is Michael Meade, who often tells the story of the old woman in the cave who is weaving the most beautiful garment in the world, and the black dog who comes in while she is stirring the pot at the back of the cave and takes the garment in his teeth and shakes and pulls at it until it completely unravels. Meade teaches that the dog and the unraveling are necessary for the ongoing cycles of creation in the world, and that what we need do in times of confusion and despair is take...

I’LL HURT YOU BACK A LITTLE LESS We learned the sad news of the death of Bert Hellinger, the creator of Family Constellations, on September 19th, 2019. While Kelly and I never got the opportunity to study directly with Bert, we will always be grateful to our teachers, Peter and Jamy Faust, for integrating what they learned from him and passing it on in their program they named The Constellation Approach. Peter and Jamy studied directly with Bert for several years in the first cohort of students in the U.S,. and they have trained many facilitators in the ways to heal through the family lineage, working with the numinous energies of the family soul. Through Family Constellations, Bert brought great wisdom gained through his observations working with thousands of individuals and families. He also embodied his life’s many profound experiences, growing up the son of Catholic, resistant parents...

““If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” -from the Secret Gospel of Thomas, part of the Gnostic Gospels found in a large clay jar by peasant Arab farmers at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, December 1945. I was recently discussing with a friend my relationship with money. She was in town visiting Kelly and I, and staying with us while attending a conference called “Master Your Money.” She admitted that, when invited to reflect on some of the questions raised at the conference, she had never considered having a relationship with money, and was exploring what that meant to her and what inner images related to money she carried in her unconscious. We ended up having a long exchange about the elements in...

"Vulnerability is not weakness, and that myth is profoundly dangerous." -Brene Brown "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." -Carl Jung One of the purposes of shame is to keep secrets hidden; a healing response is to look bravely at what happened until its power to restrict is gone. -Constellation Journeys In one of our recent seminars I was asked to represent toxic shame in someone’s constellation. In addition to key family members, important phenomena that the client has inherited as part of the family consciousness are sometimes represented in order to have more of the energies of the family soul acknowledged and included in the transformational process. Once I was placed in the constellation as toxic shame, I found I had little personal connection with the other people in the group. Their presence was not that important...