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...

"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...

A constellation can be a safe way to open a window into the deeper energies that make up the ongoing streams of your family’s story. Setting up and working through some of the layers of a constellation allows you to observe and explore, with trained guidance and from a little distance, some of the sticky and confusing threads in which you have been suspended in your family life since your soul agreed to incarnate into your unique circumstances here on Earth. The word ‘constellation’ signifies that you are one of many members of a family system that is part of a much larger lineage of many generations. By expanding the lens and looking at more of the picture, you may come to see hidden connections that channel much larger forces that have been directing the system without your knowing. After working with hundreds of clients we have seen in most cases that a simple historical fact like: -my father has an older brother that died just a few weeks after birth; -my grandfather died of a heart attack at age 45; -my mother’s youngest sister was sent away to live with other family members because it would be safer...

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...