All posts by Laura

About Laura

Near-death experiences and Mystical moments throughout my life have never let me forget that life is much bigger than the ever-evolving personal identity I spend time polishing. This is both a humbling and fullfilling recognition. It is a deep recognition that has me wishing to find a community of like-minded/hearted individuals who wish to explore life beyond the limits of enculturation and the conditioned needs of ego-identity. My experience is that it is within the spaciousness of non-separation that we learn to honour the deeper Truths of our nature and the holiness of the life we share.

The Innocence of the Body as Key to the Universal Heart

Group Inner Constellations

T-shirt Art — Keira Madsen at vaedderstudio.com

Within the Inner Constellation Mobile (ICM), there is a Field Intelligence that can be perceived, witnessed, and felt. The most trustworthy way to attune to this intelligence is through our bodies. Why? Because our bodies are innocent in the simple direct way that they store information. There is a witnessing presence within the ICM container that allows the innocent hurt places to emerge in such a way that invites a deeper contact with our soul’s impulse. The invitation and the challenge are miraculously woven together as the beauty of our spiritual embodiment.

Our bodies are like listening to children before they have learned to layer over and identify with the habits of their family and culture. The language of innocence-speaking is simple, direct, and fresh—and often wise beyond the years of that body. In this open transparent state our bodies have an organic resonance with what is true: whether that be my unintegrated 3 year old fear, my grandfather’s depression, or the legacy of my culture’s unintegrated burdens.

However, our innocent contact with life only surfaces where there is a sense of safety that allows habitual defences or numbness to lay down their arms, rest, and begin to thaw. If our healing modalities are not connected with deeply embodied truth, we are prone to bandaid-solutions and wishful thinking. In other words, without embodying the truth of our wounding, there is no reconciliation. 

Deep work always includes past and present, the ancestors and the collective, because the intelligence of our bodies is all of that. Our body is nothing less than the pulse of life living itself into a gazillion different forms. We may have become frozen in particle and forgotten our wholesome belonging; but if we slow down to feel and witness, we begin to understand that our wounding and our innocence are partners in the path of reconciliation. The pain we have resisted—sometimes for lifetimes within our lineage and collective—becomes the precise medicine for our soul’s embodiment.

When a small group of people are committed to standing together in the fire of that medicine, we become one-life-healing. In so doing, we shake the roots of our known universe that is currently built upon habits of fear and division. Within the Universal Heart there is spiritual blessing that allows us to be with the wounded innocent of life. This deep medicine restores the division between our soul and our body and allows life to begin walking us home.

The Sacred Ground of Embodiment

Group Inner Constellations 

Elizabeth (Bette) Hicks (née Dobson)
(beloved mother, died August 31/23 at 101 years of age)

Being with my sweet and well-loved mother as she passed was a heart-opening mystical gift that I never anticipated. As with any mystical thinning-of the-veil, I will be integrating its heart-opening (and shattering) affect for a long while. As the woman I knew as “Mom” gracefully transitioned upward out of her body, my heart recognized the eternal grace of our embodiment. The air was electric with a timeless love in which I could also feel/hear the welcoming song of our ancestors. Tears of gratitude continue as I write this.

The mysterious veil between birth and death thinned as I found myself feeling joy for Mom’s arrival and moments later sobbing at her departure. The macro and the micro co-existed and neither were wrong. We are reminded of a similar death cycle in the Fall Equinox as summer’s bloom disappears and fall leaves  begin to fall. As part of nature, our bodies carry a death-wisdom and — although this may sound strange — our bodies thrive on this deep connection to embodied truth.

I understand our embodiment as a part of the living truth that our soul carries — a generational record-keeping of light and shadow that is individual, collective, and ancestral. If our spiritual practice includes turning towards the light and the darkened wounds of our embodiment, then our bodies begin to serve as the spiritual ground of our practice. The alchemy of spirit into matter begins as our lives and spiritual practice walk with increasing synchronicity and harmony.

The crisis of our time reflects how we have failed to walk spirit and matter together. While we can name this division in several ways — feminine/masculine, right brain/left brain, heart/head —  restoration begins when we begin to reclaim our inner-relationship with our soul and walk that spacious presence back into our life. Whatever our station in life, this blessed walk has 360 degree benefits. 

The benefits are wide and deep because spacious presence cultivates a living conversation between spirit and matter where light enters our awareness organically and in the right timing. As we learn to trust in a movement beyond our own contingency plans, we also open to the light’s deep-listening … and then … we just see what happens because we trust life. 

Healing has an inherent rhythm and flow. As our nervous system learns to relax and trust this flow, an unconditional and uplifting sense of well-being may surface. Soul’s light informs the body through a nature-attuned intelligence that respects life’s inherent rhythms and cycles: “(1) For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: (2) A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up … (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)

As our bodies learn to trust in a Silence beyond time, we learn to embody life in new and surprising ways. No longer revolving solely around ongoing patterns of wounding, we experience occasional inner-glimpses of the expanded nature of the Universal Heart.

When we give space for inner-learning, the miracle of timeless healing begins. What has been disconnected, abandoned, and made numb comes to life as presence, beauty, and trust. As we practice with like-hearted/minded others, we begin to understand that our spiritual nature and our embodiment are not two: and that our body is a unique and “perfectly imperfect”* vessel for the sacred ground of our embodiment.

The 6-month zoom-hosted Universal Heart series (October 2023 to March 2024); free zoom-hosted Universal Heart Quarterlies (Wednesdays Sept. 20 & Dec. 20); and the recently introduced in-person Nature-informed Silence Practice Days (Saturdays Sept. 30 & Dec. 23) are all designed for the blessing of our embodied remembrance — that life is sacred and we are here to walk that generous reality into our everyday lives. 

* A Tao phrase

Nature-Informed Silent Retreats

Reflections, Silence Practice

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss

Nature holds our bodies in a way that allows us to relax. Relaxation allows the nervous system to down-regulate. 
A down-regulated nervous system is one that listens. 

In listening, we discover that we are not separate from nature or from all life—our heart pumping, our breath, the feel of our feet on the ground, the smell of the roses and lavender, the taste of tea-–all of this is nature enjoying herself through our body. 

Attuning to water, wind, trees, birds, wood, bugs, grass, flowers, dirt and more—through smell, hearing, touch, sight, taste, and the timeless intuition within Silence-- we discover home.
Attuning to nature involves slowing down to listen with the body through the five senses, intuition, and knowing. Many of us feel ourselves respond to Nature’s flow and deep wisdom because the same rhythm exists within our own bodies; an unconditional movement that includes joy and suffering.
.
As the western half of humanity, we have achieved remarkable things. However, our achievements have often caused immense suffering as they lacked a conscious understanding of our relational wholeness. Our lack of connection has harmed nature, indigenous peoples, animals, and ultimately our own connection to our depth. At a deep level, we intuitively know that separation is not our true place. When our mind, heart, and body cohere, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue unconscious harming-habits .
.
Our disconnected dynamic makes the integrative relational structure of Nature a great teacher for these times. Many of us sense this and regularly seek to “get away” into Nature to replenish and restore ourselves. If we slow down to feel the magic that we seek in Nature, we discover there is no place where there isn’t communion with nature. Within a humble blade of grass, the feel of our feet on the ground, the smell of a rose, or an authentic dialogue, there is a quiet hum of a palpable sensation with a higher ordered-intelligence. The Tao te Ching addresses this timeless order:
Man follows the earth
Earth follows the universe
The Universe follows the Tao
The Tao follows only itself.
(vs. 25, trans. Stephen Mitchell)
.
Reminders that we are beings with an unconditional place in Nature are incredibly calming to the nervous system. Even our suffering habit of separation is included within Nature’s pulse and flow. We start to see that many of our suffering habits come from feeling separate and isolated. Truly seeing our separation, rather then making it something to fix, opens a compassionate heart that can include the disconnected wounding of our world.
.
Inner stillness and Silence allow us to attune to life through a wholeness that includes the “underdeveloped parts” of ourselves. We literally begin living and breathing within a different relational field that becomes an organic transpersonal blessing rather than a personal achievement; a surrendered listening, not a conquering; the feminine right-brain in relation, not the  masculine left-brain managing the parts.
.
Seeing an expansion of our collective consciousness and a growing awareness of our strength as a collective gives me a sense of future possibilities. As embodied beings, we are meant to be here … together … within the wholeness of Nature; sharing what we learn as we learn to listen through the powerful transmission of Nature.

Summer’s Sacred Blooming

Group Inner Constellations

Summer and Winter solstice form the cyclical flow of nature in connection with itself. Within this energetic symbiosis, one part exists in relation to the other: Summer as a reflection of a fruit-bearing movement and Winter as a reflection of the depth of unformed Silence. Each exists in connection to the mysterious whole of life.

In the same way, the energies of equinox seasons could be described as transition bridges—Spring calling us into the world as in the fullness of summer’s blooming, and Fall calling us into depth as the timeless spaciousness of the unformed. For this reason, tuning in to our body’s nature-cycles can be a strong spiritual resource: we discover our short time on earth as form in deep connection to inner depth and Silence. With a visceral experience of life’s innate wholeness, we begin to trust enough to let go into an unknowable, yet thrilling intelligence that courses through our nervous system. As spiritual bodies, we are the living bridge between form and formlessness.

While healing our individuated selves has been a useful focus in western psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, I believe we are being called into a collective blossoming as a species—a call to know our form within an expanded relational consciousness. In whatever way that calling is initiated in us, it will begin to deepen our embodied sense of depth, wisdom, and compassion. We begin to know ourselves within the unconditional and timeless spiritual dimension.

As a vast intelligence opens within us, it brings the shocking realization that we are the living incarnation of an imperfect ancestral bloom and the unformed stillness of depth. Our life radically changes when we understand life as a process of evolutionary inclusion from both dimensions. From an embodied spiritual perspective, inclusion is an unconditional relationship to form—however imperfect that appears. What we perceive to be imperfect in ourselves or others is here to expand the relational capacity of our hearts.

So… we learn to breathe, pause, and listen to (feel) our body as the imperfect form that harbours variations of numbness, fear, and judgement. We actually rob ourselves of our authentic form when we exclude our imperfections. We create an inhospitable world when we refuse to connect with the unintegrated fear and pain of our ancestors and the collective. We have been born into a world where the violating nature of our disconnection is either normalized through numbness or pushed against as attempts to “fix what is wrong.” Either way, we lose a relational connection with the imperfect process of our human blooming (evolution). 

Remembering our depth through inner-stillness allows depth to become a resource in our lives—a bubbling up of deep nourishment for Summer’s blooming. As we  restore our connection to our depth, we naturally become a restorative agent for humanity. In bowing to the evolutionary process we liberate an organic blossoming in our lives. The abundant energy of summer is a living connection to depth becoming manifest: an inner timelessness becoming soil for an outer blooming.

On Wednesday, June 21 we will explore where and how depth is blooming in our lives: how our relationships, consumer choices, felt connections with nature, or relationship to ourselves is informed by both unexamined conditioning and Soul’s purpose or calling.

Spring is Definitely not a Wallflower

Group Inner Constellations

Spring in the northern hemisphere could be compared to the earth giving birth. As earth’s kin, we might even experience Spring as a sense of revival, a waking up to the bold imperative of creation that moves within our bodies. This is the same power that pushes cement out of the way if it has to, or grows trees precariously rooted in a rock face. As any woman knows who has given birth naturally, the process is deeply engaged, powerful, and uncompromising in its direction. Spring is definitely not a wallflower.

Nature is a force of immeasurable intelligence and capacity. Nowhere do we see this more than in the Spring as branches that look dead begin to come to life. Our human collective however, has become like wallflowers on the side-lines of life. We seek our belonging in pre-determined ways from outside of ourselves. It is a confused and confusing phenomenon. Teilhard de Chardin reminds us that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, not a human body that has a soul. The latter creates wallflowers, while the former aligns with the power of surging Spring life.

Spiritual embodiment is a flow of connected intelligence that is beyond our control. When the truth of life flows in our neural pathways as raw emotions we are informed by life holistically. While living in the world of time, we have a simultaneous experience of timelessness. Throughout much of human history, our ability to separate life from how it really is has allowed us to carry on under huge duress. We have learned to survive this way as a species, but it has also set us adrift from embodied wisdom— the wisdom of life as it is. 

Being set adrift from ourselves and life-as-it-is leads to a tendency to experience life as something that happens to us. We become wallflowers looking the part rather than embodying life as part of creation. Spring is life dressed in full regalia—proud, regal, and uncompromising. If she could speak, and we could listen, her rousing pep talk might go like this: “Away with your fine ideas of how I should be. Come out and play with me in your naked vulnerability, your authenticity—give your humanness to me as you are— your pain, joy, rage, fierce love, tender love, numb, hopelessness, shyness etc.— just be real so we can dance.” 

Spring percolating within our nervous system is the mystic’s heart in full voice and the gestated depth of winter’s stillness appearing in the world. Spring is an unconditional celebration of  “now” where body, soul, heart, and mind are danced into one unified song. Gratefully we surrender “ideas” of life for a more fluid and alive relationship with life. Living life from the sidelines just doesn’t make sense anymore.

In five years of facilitating the Inner Constellation Mobile, I have concluded two things: firstly, this is the hardest work we will ever do (few do); and secondly, the simple beauty of this work is life’s best-kept secret (from ourselves). We have forgotten that life is meant to be a wild ride designed to wake us up. Are we not being reconfigured, re-wired, and transformed at an astonishing rate through our current challenges? Old ways are crumbling as subtle capacities begin to emerge from the rubble. 

Is this not a reason to allow the exiled and wounded parts of our collective to enter into the Spring festivities? Their unconscious soil provides rich nourishment for birthing the hope, wisdom, laughter, and love of humanity. Let’s find our place in the ground that grows the impossible just as trees find their roots in a rock face. Spring is not a time to be a wallflower. It is time to live everything we have ever dreamed of by leaning into everything we never imagined we could. Together in our courage, we celebrate the beauty of Spring as she sings us back into life from the sidelines.

Heart Feet: Walking with the Ancestors

Group Inner Constellations, Reflections

Clarence Dalton Hicks (“Grandad” circa 1918)

“Heart Feet: Walking with the Ancestors” is the Workshop title for the next Inner Constellation Workshop on Saturday March 4, 2023.

For many years of my life, I did not realize the importance of my roots. I was focussed on my individuality and the blessings of my wings, rather than the deep embodiment of my roots.

I was unaware of the division and lack of peace this isolated paradigm was creating in my life. I felt as though I was an alien in the world, and therefore sought my belonging within the spacious light of mystical dimensions. In these moments I felt a belonging in a spiritual or timeless sense, but not on the ground. I was very connected vertically (with soul in God/source) but the flow did not continue easily into the horizontal (relational) dimension much of the time. My becoming and belonging were not synchronized. 

The traits of our genetics and DNA, and the way our ancestors have treated one another, create the substance of our horizontal realities. We are born into them. In my case, I experienced the horizontal landscape as hostile towards the inherent grace of soul’s vertical resonance. The fragmentation between our “wings of becoming” and “roots of belonging” is ubiquitous. It has created famous sayings like “be in the world, but not of it (Jesus),” or “engage but don’t enrol (Thomas Hübl).” If we are going to live in peaceful ways, we are tasked with befriending these disparate parts of ourselves—because the ground we stand on is where peace begins.

The science of epigenetics is now showing how unresolved wounds continue through the generations. Like our hair and eye colour, trauma patterns are passed down through the generations. Until they are seen, felt, and integrated into life, they are experienced as a lack of belonging roots (as in my case) or a lack of becoming wings (experiencing the light)–or both. Many times we are not aware of where our divisions are, we just feel the symptoms as some kind of gnawing discomfort or suffering. Eventually, we may come to accept our “symptoms”  as normal and just “how life is.” 

Collectively, we share a wounded humanity that is still largely in unconscious denial of that wound. Where denial is active, projection is strong and we make “how life is” someone else’s fault. A blaming syndrome is driven by fear and separation.  It alienates us further as life  happens “outside” of us rather than through us. We become limited by victimhood rather than free to participate.

According to Ken Wilber the evolutionary movement of our consciousness is one of transcend and include. Like me, you may have been pretty good at the transcending part and have forgotten about the including – the roots of your authentic belonging. Although painfully challenging at times, I have found new ground in my heart through walking with the ancestors. It has freed me from entangled ways of relating that were habitual (survival oriented) rather than authentic. Contact with ancestral patterns helps us to befriend—rather than distract from—the wounded life we are born into and walk with. When vertical transcendence includes horizontal embodiment, we gradually become everything we have longed for–eventually realizing that we have been looking everywhere else for a very long time.

Grounding Thought: Making Sense of the Present

Group Inner Constellations, Reflections

For most of us our thought habits and patterns interfere with our ability to be still and present in life. Although this doesn’t have to be the case, thought patterns often become a disembodied helicopter whirring around on-top of life — a sort of  “life-manager.” As a consequence, we tend to divide life circumstances and people into parts: safe and unsafe, good and bad, with me or against me. Unchallenged thought-patterns continue until we pause to feel the energy driving them—often a younger self where we have had to pull away from life to protect ourselves.

Divisive thought patterns lack the warm intimacy of an organic relational trust in life. Experiencing the truth of our wounding is not a mental process, but a surrendered willingness to experience what is true. The beauty of this gesture also allows the soul’s spaciousness to be felt in our nervous system. A state of innocence and unconditional belonging arises when disconnected trauma wounds are felt, witnessed, and understood, rather than managed.

Gathering in groups where non-bypassing-presence is priority allows thinking patterns to ground through a felt sense of their energy-flavour. Our mind-dominant culture has been hypnotized away from a direct experience of life. With courage and room to explore, we begin to trust that our bodies, hearts, and minds are a process of life-evolving and not solid and fixed. We are “life in process.” Feeling life may initially be more uncomfortable than managing it, but it is also a starting point for engaging in an abundant life of deep connection and belonging.  

What is arising in you while reading this blog post? It could be a mix of resistant thoughts as well as an uplifting heart-glimmer that feels a call to a new life. It is helpful to feel the two different paradigms running through our nervous system: one from the contracted density of our unintegrated ancestral and cultural conditioning and the other from the expanded light of our soul calling us home to our life. 

Even a small taste of the generous abundance of our true nature can be a huge blessing in our life because we discover a miracle: that we can relax and be here in the simplicity of how things are. Managing life creates a lot of ungrounded (disconnected) thinking that robs us of our life-vitality and our life-place (which always begins where we are). Pausing to be touched by the suffering under repetitive thoughts can make the timeless whisper of our soul more audible. As divisive thoughts are grounded through the felt-awareness of our individual, collective, and ancestral bodies, our life changes.  Our life begins to make deep sense through the timeless stream of our soul’s embodiment.

The Deep Silence of Solstice

Group Inner Constellations

Solstice Silent Prayer 2022

May we dwell gracefully in the darkness of the silent unknown.

May our inner-stillness provide a womb for the unborn light that shines through eternity as the inexplicable mystery of our life’s belonging and purpose. 

May the light of the universal heart show the way in these darkening days.

Words of depth and Silence are strong medicine for the yearning heart of the mystic. The Soul hears them from a timeless transmission that brings them into the present moment. In presence, they find a unique home within our body, heart, and mind.

The language of depth is transpersonal and yet intimately personal. Although it touches every moment in our life unconditionally, we only feel its influence as our knees bend in gratitude, and our heart softens towards life’s unfoldment.

Our soul’s innate capacity to embrace the unknown has become burdened with divisive mental structures in our collective. These structures favour the security of scientific materialism, secularism, and/or religious fundamentalism. The vast inner-spaciousness that continuously nourished our heart as young children can seem distant and remote.

This is never to lay blame, but to become curious about what might be blocking our connection to the fecund nature of the soul’s dark womb. What do we fear losing? Or perhaps more accurately, what do we fear discovering? Often it is the life-altering discovery of the light that we fear the most. Light gives us nothing to hang on to … and yet everything we long for …

May we learn to rest in this dark time: to still the restless mind and heart and to listen to the distant intimacy of the light beckoning from beyond the veil of the dark unknown. We are truly blessed to be living in this enormous time of change.

I hope you will join us for the free Universal Heart Solstice zoom gathering on Wednesday, Dec. 21 2022 (10 to 11:30 AM Pacific).

Divine Light shining in the ground of my being,
Draw me to yourself. 
Draw me past the snares of the senses, out of the mazes of the mind. 
Free me from symbols, from words, that I may discover the signified,the Word unspoken in the darkness that reveals the ground of my being. 
(Dessert Father’s & Mother’s 4th Century CE)

Belonging in our Becoming

Group Inner Constellations

My Birthplace: Nova Scotia’s south shore
(Elaine Olmstead photo)

I was graced with strong essential contact as an eight year old. With the confidence of innocence, when asked what we were going to be when we grew up, I announced to the class and my grade three teacher that “I [was] going to be me.” I knew it with my entire body and being; and with the powerful uncompromising joy of that experience I was unable to do anything but announce it with absolute confidence.

Through my family and cultural conditioning I learned that this kind of experience —  however true and beautiful — was awkward, unwelcome, and misunderstood. Although I learned to develop an acceptable “belonging-self,” I have always encountered strangers who “saw through” that. Although their encouraging statements were confusing at the time, they helped to keep a delicate soul-flame alive in my heart.

My experience is a personal reflection of a larger colonizing “power-over” paradigm where the profound connectivity of indigenous wisdom is denied and forced into the collective unconscious or shadow. My life has been a “reconciliatory dance” between this outer/inner conflict — a journey of  both “coming out” and “coming home” and sharing it with interested others.

Like a collective orchestra warming up together, we may not sound terribly coherent as we learn to play our authentic instruments. Confusion, deep division, outrageous violence, and dominator paradigms appear to be increasing as trauma continues to erupt from within our collective and personal shadow-fields. Patience, intention, and attention to life as it is become helpful navigational tools as we discover our unique inner-instruments and learn how to play in harmony with life and each other.

We live in exceptional times. I am happy to be here and thrilled for this opportunity to explore the relational depth of an alchemical process — a download I have named the Inner Constellation Mobile (ICM). Within a group of committed participants, the organic movement of the ICM deepens levels of relational understanding where all of our human dimensions belongs. New possibilities become palpable as trapped cultural and ancestral energy are included as an essential part of the whole. Hidden from the time bound structures of conditioned awareness are the living waters of our inner-being and the universal truth pulsing within our own hearts.

The peace and beauty we seek is within us. The passion, presupposition, and exploration of my doctoral dissertation has two primary presuppositions: (1) unresolved trauma is spiritual amnesia (i.e., as a collective we have forgotten who we are and therefore our relating-place within life); (2) our nervous system contains a timeless soul-intelligence where trauma is neither wrong or mistaken. This work fills my heart with the joy and gratitude that comes from the truth of being alive “as me.” My eight year knew something beautiful and also that it had to be shared — or blurted out! For all of us the recognition of our inner-beauty is our most precious gift — in both the receiving and the sharing.

Healthy Ancestral Relationships/Healthy World

Group Inner Constellations

My Father 1922 – 2016

Is it possible to be in healthy relationship with our divided and wounded world? Responsible spiritual embodiment is a viable pathway to such a relationship. For many of us, this involves the soul discovering its authentic calling or ground in the world. Soul contact is essential for healthy spiritual relationship. This is especially true now, as old world structures collapse and new, more collaborative energies emerge. Soul’s deep presence becomes a steadfast compass as new life possibilities emerge and habitual structures dissolve. 

Soul’s movement is often felt as a quickening in the nervous system as new possibilities land in our awareness. As authentic soul-individuation raises the energy of our nervous system, it also reveals slower, unintegrated shadow patterns. As we consciously embody these slower (uncomfortable) patterns in our nervous system, we might discover them to be ancestral energy patterns. Strictly speaking, they are not ours, but ours to include and bring home.

Contrary to what we might imagine, conscious inclusion of our ancestors does not involve “looking back.” It has more to do with presencing ancestral gifts and shadows as our nervous system’s substance or matter. This can be difficult because we are trained to navigate life through mental habits rather than the subtle awareness of our nervous systems. Being alive within life is the embodiment of our soul’s authentic belonging. Including the ancestors while transcending the limitations of time heralds the soul’s arrival in our bodies, emotions, and heart in every moment. 

By “including,” we are free to transcend because embodied spirituality is about being here. We are not so much seeking the light as honouring (through sensate presencing) where the light is not … where our ancestors lost contact with the flow of light in their bodies. Until a felt awareness touches our frozen ancestral blockages we, like them, will attempt to manage life rather than relate to the difficult parts. Our relationship with life becomes an abstraction from rather than a living with, and its dire consequences are increasingly apparent. 

The buildup of denied shadow in our collective energy field is challenging to resolve on our own. Small group practices such as the Inner Constellation Mobile help us to experience our nervous system as not simply “ours,” but as a multi-generational evolutionary intelligence living through us. When given space to be as it is, wounds and all, life becomes an intelligent flow with immutable and sacred laws. As the hardness of our individuated self begins to soften, the more relational “soul” individuation comes into view. Our bodies, hearts, and minds become compost for a new life purpose as we digest stored ancestral trauma.

Unintegrated trauma precludes soul individuation because mysterious synchronicities exists between the soul and the world in which we live. As our soul’s belonging grows, so does our capacity to authentically host the world. We learn to include the repetitive nature of unintegrated trauma through our ancestors and the collective. 

Nervous system attunement is essential for Soul’s embodiment because the body is a truer expression of life than the mind—at least at the beginning. Deep intimacy, respect, and trust in the course of life develops as we experience life as an intelligent process that includes us as we are. This radical change in perspective allows us to feel spacious gratitude even when we may not understand or like what is happening. Courage is a grounded heart that can authentically engage in life and initiate us into a larger whole.

A direct and felt relationship with the ancestors is an intimacy that deepens our soul’s individuation and purpose. The heavy collective trance of our conditioned individuation has taught us to project difficulties onto the world rather than feel our unique relationship with those difficulties. Conscious inclusion of pernicious unconscious defense structures is nothing less than a re-writing of history and the birth of a new future. Together, we walk the ancestors home with a new human story.