““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...

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...

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...

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...