Since we announced our 2020 Spring Spirit Journey to Peru, some have asked how our Spirit Journeys fit into the larger context of our work with Constellations and Breathwork. Here is how it all started. Many years ago when we were heavily focused on breathwork, we offered breathwork in a warm swimming pool here in the Boston area. And we all discovered that being held in warm water while opening the body and heart is incredibly beautiful and powerful. As we dried off and shared our experiences, the idea of doing breathwork in a warm ocean was raised. Continue reading Our Spirit Journeys: The Backstory
Implicit Blame in Collective Trauma Work
How do you feel when you’re blamed for something you didn’t do?
Often when we think of collective trauma, we consider the victims, most often with our love and compassion.
But how do we compassionately embrace the perpetrator’s reality? Thinking of ourselves as the perpetrator in a collective trauma brings up a lot of feelings. We feel guilt, shame and anger. Often, we feel rejected from the group of people we see as the victims who deserve compassion.
A White European Facilitating Constellations To Address Racial Trauma
I am a white European. Earlier this year, when I facilitated a course about collective trauma with black Bermudians, I gained a firsthand experience of the implicit blame towards me because of my ancestry.
As we opened the field for people to share their painful experiences related to race, story after story poured into our space. “White people” were the perpetrators throughout the stories.
This was difficult for me. What I felt was the implicit blame of my ancestors’ role in the abuse of people of color around the world. I hadn’t hurt anyone in the room personally, but the classroom was filled with tension and impatience. In other words, the room was filled with consequences of the wrongdoing and pain inflicted by white people in the past.
I had read about “white fragility,” and asked myself if that was what I was experiencing. Continue reading Implicit Blame in Collective Trauma Work
Understanding Your Family Inheritance
At the Inner Arts Institute, we focus on a mixture of methods to help a person release trauma from his or her body. One major concept behind our work is the transgenerational transmission of trauma.
Studies on epigenetics confirm that our ancestors, grandparents, and parents pass down wonderful traits like our gifts and talents, strength, and our body type. What our family also passes down is unfinished trauma.
But how do unfinished trauma transmissions work? How do we inherit our gifts and long-passed traumatic experiences from family members we may have never even met?
1. Through our DNA
| As seen here in a PBS video about the children of Holocaust survivors |
| Epigenetics, as written beautifully within the Atlantic Monthly, Oct 2018 |
| And revealed in Emory University’s 2013 mice and cherry blossoms experiment |
2. In Family Dynamics
| Through our family constellations |
| And through family loyalties and the morphogenetic field |
| We repeat experiences and burden sharing |
3. Through Our Culture
| In collective and cultural shadow structures |
Getting in touch with these three areas help us to become aware of the root of many of our personal issues. Although talking to a supportive person is helpful, talking keeps us in our higher brain functions and does not allow us to access our unconscious or transgenerational issues.
To connect with these issues, we need to stay in tune with our bodies and become highly attuned to our breathing patterns and physical states. When we are triggered, our mind and our logic is of little help. Our nervous system goes into fight, flight, or freeze.
These instinctive states are so deeply ingrained in our bodies and move faster than conscious thought. Fight, flight, or freeze overrides any logic or thought in the moment. Continue reading Understanding Your Family Inheritance
Planting Flowers for 2019
At the Inner Arts Institute, we spent 2018 “planting flowers” like the character in this cartoon. Our work expanded with an intensity that felt dizzying at times. What a joy!
In this New Year, I am so grateful for the incredible clients and collaborators who helped us plant seeds of peace and healing in our communities. I want to take a moment to acknowledge those who co-created with us. We can hardly wait to see what blossoms in 2019!
Connecting Family Constellation Work to Cultural Trauma
One of the brightest “flowers” we have been cultivating is deep training in how to help people integrate cultural trauma. First, I completed Part II of Thomas Huebl’s training in Collective Trauma Integration last spring. This profound journey brought personal growth, new friendships, and new tools for Family Constellation work; namely, a greater ability to hold space for the shadows of large-scale traumas such as war, famine, slavery, terrorism, and natural disasters…. and explore how these shadows reside in our culture and in each one of us.
Secondly, Thomas Huebl was also the keynote speaker at the 2018 North American Systemic Constellation conference, where Collective Trauma Integration is starting to be recognized as a natural evolution of Systemic Constellation work.
I had the privilege to introduce him to fellow North American “constellators” there, and also to lead a Collective Trauma Constellation workshop. Other members of the Inner Arts Institute team stepped into leadership roles at the conference, too. Comma Williams and I co-facilitated a Medicine Wheel Constellation, drawing upon the shamanic training that has influenced both of us deeply as practitioners. And Kimberly Clementi-Eadon introduced her work on Constellations with Adolescents.
It was a great joy to share our work in the North American Constellation Community which has provided so much inspiration over the years. We hope that we planted seeds that will flower in the work of Constellation practitioners far and wide!
Collective Trauma as a Source of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
An unexpected highlight of 2018 came when I was invited to present a talk on Collective Trauma Integration at a large conference on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in Bermuda. Research has shown that ACEs play a huge role in physical and mental health struggles in adulthood. This understandings has inspired new efforts to recognize and address trauma occurring childhood.
In Bermuda, racial issues stemming from colonialism and slavery have brought tremendous pain that continues to impact new generations of Bermudians. My role was to share insight about how children can inherit Collective, or Cultural Traumas that impacted their families… and to offer a model for healing such an enormous wound. The intensity between white and black people filled the space in our conversations. Continue reading Planting Flowers for 2019