“Sometimes when I write, my artistic self feels tapped into the ‘common mind’ that connects people across time and space …Other times, my confidence utterly collapses, and I doubt myself into hopelessness and despair that is difficult to escape from.”

~ Seeing with Your Heart workshop participant

In recent Seeing with Your Heart workshops and private sessions, we have been asked to set up Constellations to help creative professionals understand at a deeper level how confidence inevitably peaks and troughs as tasks and projects move forward. What these Constellations reveal again and again is that humans are composites of all the life that created us. Layers of ancestral consciousness run wild within us, at times fueling our greatest productive output and then, paradoxically, stopping us with obstacles that are seemingly impossible to surmount.

We worked recently with a screenwriter who received a substantial advance from a Hollywood production company for an $8-10,000,000 movie project. As the deadline for delivery of the first draft drew closer, the writer felt himself falling deeper into an inescapable trap of anxiety and despair. He asked for a Constellation with us. When we tuned in and set up representatives, we recognized that even though the story was set in contemporary Texas, the author’s ancestors who escaped the Armenian genocide were both driving his creativity and crushing his spirit.

What revealed itself in the field was that memories of Armenian genocide victims, their Turkish killers and Russian provocateurs were integral to the development of characters, themes and plot in his present-day psychological thriller. The themes of destruction, displacement, betrayal, obsession and redemption traced though the family and become reworked and shaped into a new narrative in the script’s pages. None of this was obvious or overt. Nor is it to anyone of us as we struggle with buoying our confidence in our gifts.

For all of us, what moves us forward and what holds us back have aspects that are inherited. We cannot recognize this for ourselves because what thinks and feels us is indistinguishable from our own sense of individual self. This is where tuning-in and standing in representation can help. Constellations are the most effective tool we know of to separate the strands of the braided threads that are our greatest gifts and heaviest burdens.

No one can sing like Aretha Franklin and few of us share her level of confident self-respect. How do we continue with what we are doing when the confidence leaves and unwanted feelings move in? Our answer is to open your consciousness to realms beyond your personal judgments and narratives. If you allow it, your body’s inner intuitive knowing will reveal what your mind cannot comprehend.

We carry humanity’s entire consciousness in cellular memory. We carry everyone who still longs for healing and remembrance from our past. We are instruments that life plays its haunting and magical melodies on. Far beyond whether we mate or procreate, we carry the seeds and eggs that birth humanity’s future.