Honoring the Grateful Dead
Phil Lesh, a founding member of The Grateful Dead, died this weekend at age 84. As the tributes poured in, one that caught our attention was how the band got its name.
In 1965, Jerry Garcia, looking to name his newly formed band, opened a massive, unabridged dictionary to a random page. His eye fell on the entry: “Grateful Dead.” Without reading the definition, he declared, “That’s it. The name fits our music.” The Grateful Dead were born.
Hearing this story again, Dan had one of his bursts of knowing that the origin of the term Grateful Dead would be found in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. Like alchemy, Taoist, and Druidic practices like Samhain (Halloween), Kabbalah is one of many ancient, indigenous sciences refined through the ages by seekers, medicine women, sages, mystics, priestesses, mathematicians, and experimentalists.
Sure enough, his search uncovered a thousand year-old Yiddish folktale The Kindness of the Dead. It tells of a devout young man who enters a foreign city and sees an iron coffin hung by chains from an arch outside the palace. He learns the coffin contains the body of a Jewish merchant who was falsely accused of robbing the Sultan. Feeling deep compassion for the dead man’s soul, the young man pays the debt so the merchant can receive a proper burial with traditional prayers. Weeks later, on his return trip home, his ship is struck by a tempest and sunk. Hanging onto a piece of floating wreckage while others drowned, an eagle appears from heaven and carries the man home on his back. Once home, the eagle disappears, and a shrouded figure emerges revealing that both he and the eagle are the soul of the merchant. In gratitude for the mitzvah (good deed), the young man will be blessed with health and good fortune his whole life.
The lesson of the tale is that when the living attend to the body and souls of the dead, the Grateful Dead will be their guardians.
A Constellation Story
Reflecting on the meaning of the Grateful Dead, we thought of a recent Alchemical Constellation for a woman from Singapore who suddenly found herself in crisis concerning her father and his life-threatening cancer. As his illness worsened, our client felt her heart hardening towards him; deep feelings of rejection welled up inside without a clear source. The bitterness of rejection was compounded by the weight of guilt. These feelings tightened around her insides like rope on a spool until they began impacting her sleep and choking her other close relationships. She reached out to us seeking insight and relief.
Her Constellation traced threads of rejection and guilt through fractals of family dynamics and the cultural history of modern Singapore. In the end, as in the Yiddish folktale, the woman opened her heart to an abandoned ancestor who had not received proper burial rituals nor honored remembrance. In the healing meditation, this ancestor was seen and their gratitude unwound generations of tension between fathers and daughters in the lineage.
Weeks later, the client checked in with this report:
“Words cannot describe how grateful I am for the session we had. I was able to sense a love for my father that has been forgotten for a long time and it feels like an opening of a floodgate, I feel that I am able to receive and give love more abundantly. There is now reciprocity. We don’t know what will happen each day, but I have more peace and love in my heart.”
In Seeing with Your Heart Constellations, time and again, we see how the dead become guardians of the living when the living fulfill their responsibility to be guardians of the dead. By attuning with the eternal pulse in rhythm, the living and dead can find healing connections together.
Celebrating the Cycles of Birth, Life, Death, and Rebirth!
As the veils between worlds thin, whether you celebrate Samhain, Halloween, Succoth, Pitru Paksha, Obon, Umkhosi Wokweshwama, Día de los Muertos, All Souls Day, or any of the seasonal holidays that honor ancestors and the turning of the wheel of time, give yourself permission to recognize you are the dreamer’s living dream. Receive wisdom from humanity’s oldest natural science traditions – death is not an end but a transformation in which generations past, present, and future weave together and contribute to the greater tapestry of life.
Somewhere, someone, in this multiverse dreamed us into existence… parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, the continuation of life that stands behind us and before us. And this council of consciousness seeks reciprocity in presence and contribution.
“It’s all a dream we dreamed
One afternoon long ago
… It’s just a box of rain
Or a ribbon for your hair
Such a long, long time to be gone
And a short time to be there”
~ Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter, Box of Rain
Seeing with Your Heart awakens your body’s organ of perception to reclaim trust in your evolutionary ability to receive and transmit consciousness beyond the ordinary. As a modern alchemist, you will train your heart to digest old family, soul, and historical traumas and transform them into nourishment for new growth, love and health.
In this module, you will learn:
- The foundations of Systemic Constellations in the tradition of Bert Hellinger.
- How to bring your body into rhythm with the pulse of the Earth’s using drums, instruments, and somatic vibration.
- To cultivate a direct, open and connected relationship with your ancestors and guides.
- The insights of quantum theory and epigenetics that support the validity of this work.
- To practice facilitating the basics of Seeing with Your Heart Constellations.
Living from Your Heart challenges your conditioned worldview for you to rediscover who you are and what you are here for. As we move deeper into the training, your unexamined perspectives on life will surface and be examined for what they are: survival strategies, belief systems, and cultural ideologies that were planted by your family and homeland. Through exploration and active participation with your training peers, you will meet your resistance in the blind spots of innocence and good conscience.
In the Living from Your Heart module, you will:
- Identify the paradigms embedded in your conditioning that prevent you from trusting your embodied knowing.
- Learn synergy of sound and energetic practices to maintain clarity in a world filled with chaos and discordance.
- Create a generative life path that flows towards the future beckoning you forward.
- Liberate eros and intimacy from inherited and acquired shame.
- Practice altar, object, and one-to-one Constellations.
- Understand techniques for finding healing movements in family, romantic, and work relationships.
Leading Through the Heart places our individual experiences in context of the quantum information field. While our bodies are finite, our consciousness is a holograph of the infinite universe. Without disconnecting from the ordinary here-and-now, we can attune with the field recognizing the ways that an individual’s desires and entanglements weave with the patterns of the greater universe.
Constellation work is profoundly impactful work. To lead through your heart, you will learn to treat yourself, clients, and the consciousness that arrives through the field with a strong sense of responsibility and respect. Most importantly, this means discovering your unique artistry and a path for authentic creative expression that supports a financially sustainable practice model.
In the Lead through Your Heart module, you will:
- Awaken the heart of humanity and the evolutionary advance of human consciousness.
- Create your unique offering using soulful strategy and field Intelligence.
- Meet the polarity of your intention and learn to embrace its shadow.
- Transmute inherited imprints and conditioning around money
- Learn to facilitate oral transmissions.
- Facilitate individual and group constellations with confidence and genius.
Back to the Roots
May 14-19, 2025 (Constellations Retreat & Game Drives)
May 19-25, 2025 (Tour of Mother Africa, Constellations at Sacred Sites, and Wisdom Teachings from Zulu Sangomas)
South African Family Constellation facilitator and trainer, Erik Andersen, and his wife, 5th generation native of KwaZulu-Natal, Christel (Engelbrecht) Andersen, are pleased to welcome an international circle of consciousness evolutionaries, led by Seeing with Your Heart co-founders Dan Cohen and Emily Blefeld to South Africa. This promises to be a once-in-a-lifetime immersion in Mother Africa on the lands that influenced Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellations. This unique gathering includes a 6-day Seeing with Your Heart immersion on a wild game reserve, five open safari game drives within the retreat experience, and a 7-day optional tour to sights of natural and spiritual significance in KwaZulu-Natal, led by Christel, shamanic rituals led by Gogo Nomzimane (a Zulu Sangoma), and constellations facilitated by Dan, Emily, and Erik.
We welcome you to embark on a profound journey of systemic transformation and healing. Held in the embrace of Africa, this retreat and excursion will connect you to the streams of consciousness that pulse with ancient, unified wisdom. It is time to embrace the eternal heritage of the Earth and the life it grows. Come to open your hearts to love and enlivened joy, while connecting back to the roots of all that you know and all that you seek to remember.
If you are interested in working privately with Dan and/or Emily, we welcome you to CLICK HERE to learn more about our services. Together we will identify the inherited patterns present and the pathways to create space for the possibility of the future calling you forward.
