So … where should we begin? Addressing systemic racism.

With the help of systemic constellations, shamanic journeying and circle technology, we will look in both directions – the now, to identify what you can do to lessen racism in your day-to-day-life. And we also will look into your lineage and the possible entanglements that been passed down the generations to you.

From a systemic perspective, we unconsciously wish to love our ancestors unconditionally. If we neglect and avoid seeing the parts of our ancestors that harmed other individuals, then we unconsciously tend to approve of their deeds and unconsciously try to prove that they were right in continuing doing what they did in a similar way. In this way we keep alive to some extent our ancestors’ ways of thinking and acting. At the same time, we also may identify with our ancestors’ victims by unconsciously forbidding ourselves to lead a full and happy life. By doing so we unconsciously feel close to the victims and hope to atone for our ancestors’ deeds, which again allows us to keep loving them, as we assume wrongly to unburden them. This way of identification always is a futile attempt to atone. It is an impossible child´s wish to undo things that took place a long time ago.

In My Grandmother's Hands, which we strongly recommend, Resmaa Menakem sees the reluctance of white people to look into their current involvement in a system of racism and how they profit from that system, whether they wish to acknowledge or not. Menakem considers white people’s entanglement with their ancestors’ involvement to be a trauma reaction response, fueled by a centuries-long trauma of white bodies first hurting other white bodies in Europe and then bringing this dynamic of hurting other bodies to the New World evolving it into white bodies hurting black bodies.

A trauma reaction does not evolve from the conscious mind and is not accessible by conscious choice or reasoning. Rather, it is an unconscious reaction. In order not to go into a “freeze-reaction,” a typical response to trauma that is remembered too quickly, we are going to carefully approach your own story.

As a circle, we will create a container to help each of you take one step further in the real world in dissolving a racist system. However small this step might be it, it will be just enough.

Facilitating, we often look for the smallest step to take, a movement that can create a small, immediate change and initiate a little, ongoing motion. Whatever changes too quickly and too much at once, may fall back to its original state just as easily. Sustainable changes often look small and slow, just like the soul movement that is said to move by walking, as a pedestrian. Slow motions have a special power.