Category Archives: Family Constellations

Family Constellations, Training, Uncategorized

A Change of Heart ~ Reflections on In-Person Constellation Work

two people forming a heart with their fingersAdapted from a letter we shared in a recent newsletter to members of our family constellation community.

We have had a change of heart in regards to the format of our next Constellation Learning Group.

The Constellation Learning Group is our most in-depth, life-altering course, and we have offered it for 18 years now. No Learning Group is ever like the last one. They are uniquely formed by the community that gathers. It is your wisdom, your hearts, and prayers that inform the work that then changes all of our perspectives.

While our purely online version last year worked really well, so many of us are longing for the “real, live” version of this work, where we can include nature and all that surrounds us in the Constellations. With the opportunity to participate in several live constellations this summer, it felt bit like going from 2D to 3D. The emotional availability opened our hearts, the field informed us, and it felt delicious!

Since then, we’ve continued to reflect on how to best structure our 2021-2022 Inner Arts Institute programs. After careful consideration, we decided to revamp, allowing for a few in-person gatherings while still staying as Covid safe as possible.

Some of you are already signed up for Tending the Roots, our November Intensive which we are excited to host in-person.  For our 2022 Constellation Learning Group, we will offer a hybrid structure. The five-month Constellation Learning Group starts in January 2022 and runs through the end of May. It begins and ends with a 3-day Intensive in our wonderful new home at SaMa Sanctuary in Amherst, MA. (Additionally, the Learning Group includes 3 Saturday classes via Zoom and regular triad meetings of 3 participants if desired).

How do we stay Covid safe?

  1. The Constellation Learning Group will be limited to 15 people, which allows for plenty of spaciousness in our gathering space.
  2. Our mega air purifier will be doing its work throughout the meetings.
  3. Windows will stay open as needed as the wood stove keeps us cozy and warm.
  4. People need to be vaccinated or Covid tested before they arrive and then stay “in our bubble”. That means that we will hire a cook to take care of us and we can assist in renting Airbnb spaces nearby for those who need lodging.
  5. Everybody is welcome to wear a mask for their protection if they so desire.

Most of our programs for 2021-2022 are still meeting online. This has allowed us to deepen our explorations through the pandemic and include new friends from far-away places. But if you feel called to join the Learning Group, we will also be excited to greet you in-person, keeping your safety a priority as we learn and grow together.

• If you are drawn to join us in-person for Family Constellation Work, please browse our events page. We welcome beginners and those with prior experience in Constellation work.

Family Constellations, Training, Uncategorized

Implicit Blame in Collective Trauma Work

red heart symbol with bandaid and patchHow 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 →

Counseling, Family Constellations, Training, Uncategorized

Understanding Your Family Inheritance

heart on stone wallAt 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 →

Events, Family Constellations

Planting Flowers for 2019

cartoon showing animals planting flowers hopefully for 2019.
Source unknown.

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)

3 people on stage in a panel discussion
Samvedam, Christiana, and another speaker in panel discussion at ACEs conference in Bermuda.

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 →