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...

Unconscious loyalties to groups to which you belong, whether they be through family, religion, co-workers or other sources, can influence you in the way magnetic lines in the Earth’s field pull the needle of a compass to orient northward. The forces are invisible and subtle, and can exert a low-level background influence on your life and choices. By examining your loyalties, you can become conscious of which values are helping guide you along the path your soul chose for you in life, and which may be creating resistance and uncertainty. It’s a perilous thing to write about your family members while they’re still alive, and about your own formative experiences as a child. And in writing that sentence, the ocean of feelings behind it tell me I’m approaching the depth of this topic. The loyalties I developed to family messaging when very young are being challenged to do their job- to...

I found this compelling image while looking around on google images for something that reflects my feelings about this day. Symbols such as flags are receptacles for the feelings, values and images we choose to put into them. They are shorthand, representing something else that's larger, something that it would take more time and effort to appreciate with fullness and depth. As citizens of the US we value speed and efficiency, access and convenience. Generations younger than myself have grown up enjoying the ease of sending messages to someone to whom they are electronically connected in a second. To read about and appreciate the history of a nation as complex, troubled and aspirational as the USA becomes more difficult as a thin, terrible cloud of unknowing in the form of tweets and electronic residue settles on the outer folds of our collective cerebrum. On this day I make time and...

I recently traveled with Kelly Lyn, Wilma Pollard, and Amy Jackson to Montgomery, Alabama for the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative's National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the first site in the United States dedicated to remembering the thousands of African-Americans killed by lynching between 1877-1950, and all those terrorized by the practice. As we see in our healing work, those who are lost from the family without proper grieving and honoring leave an influence on the descendants. Sometimes a descendant unknowingly takes on symptoms of illness or depression as an unconscious attempt to restore the one who was suddenly or traumatically taken back into the family's awareness, even several generations later. In any system, balance and harmony is disrupted until all elements are given their place. A family system is no different. This trauma is held by all of us collectively in the U.S. on the systemic level, and as citizens we have an obligation to raise our awareness of how the unresolved energies of slavery, racism and lynching affect us all and keep us entangled in history. Regardless of your family's participation in slavery, or when your ancestors migrated to the U.S., you share the same responsibility...

When you’re still and alone and let yourself listen inwardly, what is the first image that arises in association with the word: “money?” And the next, and the next…? I was talking with a friend about the energies of finances, and she remembered her father sometimes expressing exasperation when comparing his level of success in the world to that of his brother. He would shake his head and say, in reference to the family he had created, “What is it with us?” When my friend spoke those words, I could feel the frustration, hopelessness, and resignation that he had felt come through her fully alive. The emotional charge on those words was still strong. She wondered if somewhere in her own consciousness, that energy was still with her. For many of us, when we were children our fathers were our first models for going out from the protected space of the family system, and for interacting with the world. This is not to say that women do not go into the world to interact and provide for their families; it is an acknowledgement of a deep imprint in social consciousness. This imprint is being challenged and is changing,...

My sun sign is in Cancer, which has given me a sensitive attunement to the energies of family and community. In this lifetime, the positive expression of group cohesion, creative expression and serving a community first budded for me when I began playing music in rock and roll bands in Detroit, and bloomed in a much fuller way when the music of West African drumming found me in the spring of 1992 at a dance class with the Uhuru Dancers in Decatur, Georgia. The exchange of joy and celebration between drummers and dancers set my life on a completely new and energized path that I still walk today. It wasn’t until later, when I began to study the drumming in depth, that I learned how to be informed by the ancestral lineage through which the music, culture and history passes over centuries. Thank you Brother Yusef, Stone, Mohamed Diaby, and dozens of other teachers for including me. I’m also aligned with the ideals of equality, freedom and opportunity embodied in the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and understand the responsibilities we all have as citizens to hold those in power accountable to manifesting those ideals to the best of...