Bert Hellinger called them Ordnungen der Liebe: The Orders of Love. These are the principles that family systems, at their healthiest, seek to organize themselves around. The list of orders is short – it includes who gets to belong, who has seniority, how to deal with transgressions, and balancing giving and taking. But the first […]

To be honest, I have no idea what the “Self” is, truly. 😉 I simply know, through the evidence I see in constellation work, that each one of us is or has something we might as well call a “Self.” I regularly see the cost of having a fragmented or partial self, and the extraordinary […]

I invite you to consider joining in my first fully online constellations training that starts next month. But first… For me, it’s been several weeks of locking the doors to keep smoke out here in my Oakland home. Day after day, I experienced a terrible fear of what’s “out there,” both the more local bad […]

Are you Zoomed out yet? After the first few weeks of the pandemic, many of us felt that way. But the pandemic went on, and we still longed for connection and learning, and for some us, we found that there were some advantages to this strange new online world. It gave us access to teachers […]

Imagine with me, two different images: First, see yourself on a hillside, holding up a giant boulder. It takes all of your effort. You are trying to move it up the hill, but the truth is, you are barely keeping it from falling down on you, and yet you are using all of your strength. […]

“Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture.” – Resmaa Menakem Most of my clients come to me with radically decontextualized suffering. It seems like their problem is just about them. People around them may have been saying it’s […]

“Can you help me belong somewhere again?” Childhood abuse and family secrets can lead to a lifelong difficulty with belonging. My clients who’ve had these experiences – which is most of them, to one degree or another – in adulthood, can find themselves repeatedly stumbling in work and relationships. Something about belonging has gotten deeply […]