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...

When you are at peace with your parents, there are two powerful openings that occur in your life. First, you’re able to look at your mother and father and accept them just as they are, without judgment, and without wishing they were or had acted any differently. This allows for you to be receptive to the full power of the life force that they passed on to you, with all the conditions to which your soul agreed in order for you to have your life. You can experience all the strength that comes through your ancestral lineage without any dilution. Secondly, when you’re free from any entanglements with your parents’ fates, the choices they made in their marriage and their parenting approaches, you no longer have to use any of your energy in secretly trying to change anything about them or any of the ways that they have acted in life- either...

One of the strong medicines in the healing method of Family Constellations is the valuation of acceptance of all that has happened in our lives, over the practice of forgiveness of another. Before I came to this work I had more understanding of forgiveness than of acceptance, both at the cosmic level through the sacrament of confession in the Catholic Church and the forgiveness of sins, and through my socialization which impressed upon me the necessity to do what it takes to eventually forgive another who has hurt me. When younger, I felt that the compulsion to bestow forgiveness came from a place of superiority, and the vague sense that I would prevail as a better person than the bully who insulted me if I didn’t hold a grudge against him. I would rise above his unworthy level. It’s clear to me now there was a twisted sense of revenge...

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...

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...

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,...

An Elder Blessing I’ve just returned from a three-week trip to Guinea, West Africa with one of my teachers and good friends, Mohamed DaCosta. Mohamed got married over what was Christmas holiday weekend for Christians, although it’s not much celebrated in Guinea as it’s predominantly a Muslim country. There were three days of ceremonies, gatherings and celebrations for the wedding, with all the family members very involved in the planning and preparations. I was able to attend most of the events with some other American friends who were on the trip, and we were always given prime seating at the very front of each gathering. There was a party called a sabar that was just for the women; there was a religious ceremony in the bride’s family courtyard; there was a short legal ceremony with a lot of humor in a really hot government hall; and there was an enormous traditional ceremony in a big park with hundreds of people, lots of food, a band and a famous praise-singer. It was all exciting, colorful, and joyous. During the religious ceremony there were praise singers, drummers, and a DJ all performing. There was a period of time when...