Consider the battle between the caterpillar and the butterfly within it. A caterpillar carries within it, throughout its caterpillar time, something scientists call imaginal discs. These discs are grown while the caterpillar is forming inside its egg, before it hatches. There are discs for each of the various body parts the butterfly will need- eyes, wings, legs etc. In some species, the discs remain dormant until the caterpillar’s transformation to butterfly begins, and in others they activate sooner. At some point in nature’s timing, when the caterpillar has fed itself on sometimes hundreds of times its weight in leaves per day, it hangs itself up, its skin begins to harden into a chrysalis or it spins a protective cocoon, and it starts to dissolve its own inner tissues. The imaginal discs activate and begin to feed on the soupy biomass inside the chrysalis. What is left of the...

Our Relationships With Our Bodies I had a milk allergy when I was born, and instead of gaining, I started losing weight in my first few weeks on Earth. A pediatric doctor prescribed a hospital stay for a week in an oxygen tent. That profound experience of isolation at such a young age formed what I came to know as a schizoid defense characterology in my energy field. My pre-verbal consciousness decided that it was less safe here in the physical than in the realm of spirit from which I had just traveled. My energy body probably stayed only loosely seated in my physical body so it could leave quickly to cope with the time in the oxygen tent where I was deprived of touch and emotional contact with anyone. I’m thankful for the four years of study and healing I received through the Barbara Brennan School that helped me...

“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...