I am here because of my mother.
And my father.
And my older brother.
And our ancestors
They came first.
Their weight, their contradictions, their unfinished stories. These are the soil of my being.
I stand in that soil now.
Others may come close, but I do not confuse nearness with origin.
Or I loosen my depth.
My belonging is already given.
My energy flows. Through them.
From this orientation, I meet the world and the moment.
This friction, the one born in family, has always drawn me toward the wider systems we inherit and replicate. What begins as a personal tension becomes a philosophical, political, and cultural inquiry.
There is a tension in this course I’m offering. I offer this course as a counter-generative to conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom that prizes cold intelligence over warm intelligence. Mind over soul. Conventional wisdom that says institutional credentials are king. That systemic capitulation is safety and ease. That democracy and racial injustice can coexist.*
We need extra-institutional learning now because the crises we face (ecological, political, relational) cannot be solved by the same systems that created them. The academy can confer credentials, but it does not teach soulful congruence. True learning must happen in living fields, through embodied contact, reciprocity, and practice meeting the moment as it is, again and again.
“To be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society is no indicator of health.” -Krishnamurti
Despite having played the people-pleasing good girl for a while, doing the conventional world things, earning the degrees, following the rules, it’s always been in a bed of desire to clear the rot to my rerooted rebellion.
During my professional coach training in Italy in 2013, an Italo-German coach introduced me to the concept of constellations. I was in awe. I didn’t know it would become so central in my life.
In 2018, after a bad breakup, I learned how to grieve in constellations workshops where I represented many Others. I experienced the avoidant sister as an anxious sister. The predator while being prey. The men of NYC. The unacknowledged and ungrieved dead. So many of those. And I’m getting even more from those representations right now as I recollect them in the here and now.
I saw my maternal grandmother take my brother in her arms. I saw my mother turned half-toward and half-away. I felt everyone’s fear of my father. I wept unashamed. I lost my false innocence. And there were many witnesses.
What began as family became field. The interrupted movements I witnessed in my lineage were the same ones that pulse through communities and nations.
I learned the invisible choreography of systems, how power and fear, distance and desire, belonging and exile all move through the collective body. Letting the body become instrument and witness taught me that transformation doesn’t come from identifying with a role, but from allowing it to move through for ongoing balance and emergent order.
I began my formal training the day after Bert Hellinger, the founder of this work, died in September 2019.Our training ended during the first weekend of lockdown, and then another level of training began, grieving ten people in four years, beginning with the most tragic one.
The personal and the collective kept dissolving into one another. What I was learning about grief, lineage, and loss in my own life was inseparable from what was happening in the world: the reckonings, the ruptures, the unfinished mourning.
My teacher Suzi Tucker said on that first day, “This work provides a large enough landing strip for all of your gifts to be held in.” I remember looking across the room at a cohort peer who mirrored my amazement at that notion.
The language, the movement, the permission to feel systems as living fields felt so natural. I accessed a well of infinite curiosity that I was relieved could not be fully quenched in this lifetime. I sensed a field large enough to hold all of me and my gifts, a field wider than the sociopolitical and psycho-industrial complex we often mistake for all of reality.
The constant quandary and inquiry of what’s mine, what’s yours, and what’s ours has defined my life’s work TO LEARN. The hyper-vigilance that once kept me safe as a child has evolved into a capacity to read a field, to sense imbalance and disorder before words appear or when truth begins to move again.
Through contact with the basic truths of my personal story, my ancestral field, and the greater collective soul, I’ve lost and regained my essential dignity many times. That cyclical restoration, the iterative contribution of returning to wholeness and offering it back to life, is the foundation of my teaching.
And now, I offer this course back home, in Vermont.
The state’s motto, Freedom and Unity, is a wonderful invocation for constellations work - the dance between individuality and belonging, autonomy and interdependence.
Yet Vermont also carries its own hidden field: the performative denial that can accompany small-scale progressivism, the myth of purity that conceals deeper roots of exclusion. We’re so great but everyone I know is so lonely. We’re so not racist but all people of color here I know share experiences of racial harm. To teach here means to stay in contact with both: the aspiration and the amnesia, the beauty and the blind spots.
Vermont’s rhythm and scale make it possible to learn in a way that is still human and local. Vermont insists that nothing is achieved quickly or hubristically, but through slow presence, through belonging that can bear contradiction.
*inspired by Nikole Hannah Jones, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2fpQqXi2rA
MEETING THE MOMENT
Family & Systemic Constellations Facilitator Course
Eight weekends of in-person, soul-centric education in Burlington, Vermont
Meeting the Moment invites participants into a rigorous, embodied exploration of systemic constellations and soul-centric leadership.
Over eight weekends we’ll study and practice the principles that allow us to face reality, hold complexity, and facilitate transformation.
The course is designed for facilitators, educators, therapists, organizers, and anyone drawn to this work as a path of healing—for themselves, their families, and the wider systems they belong to. Together we’ll practice staying present with what is, to move toward greater individuation and belonging.
Five percent of proceeds will be donated to the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, in recognition that systemic healing must include the social, ancestral, and political fields we inhabit together.