We consider ourselves individuals, but we are also members of multiple groups and systems. These systems - especially our biological family of origin - exert a powerful, yet often misunderstood influence on our thoughts, feelings and actions. With little conscious awareness, we take suffering upon ourselves and inflict it upon others.

A Constellation circle frees participants from mindlessly repeating the grief, guilt and aggression that runs in our families. Entanglements can last for generations. Resolution of a particular issue can take months to unfold. But the release itself occurs in a profound moment of insight. Despite years of sorrow and pain, a broken heart can heal in one beat.

Dan was a founding member of the City of Cambridge Peace Commission in 1982. He helped construct the New England Peace Pagoda in Leverett, MA, was the co-Director of Boston Area Children of War, and led international teenage peace exchanges in the United States and abroad. A descendent of Jewish Holocaust victims, he lived in Germany and Palestine to learn about tribal hatred and the movements toward peace. Dan brings more than 30 years of experience in the art of peacemaking to each personal issue that presents itself in a Constellation circle.

Every Problem Contains a Hidden Solution.

A single woman in her 30s whose father was alcoholic and emotionally abusive wrote Dan two years after her Constellation, "I was just thinking about you the other day. I think I finally know what it means to be in love."

More recently, a veteran of the Desert Storm war, who has suffered from PTSD for 14 years, reported after his Constellation, "I was having my usual nightmares but at the end I was healing the same people that I wounded. When I woke up, I had a smile in my face."

The Constellation process was refined by the German-born Bert Hellinger (b. 1925), who lived for 16 years with the Zulus of South Africa. It integrates existential-phenomenology, family systems theory, and Taoist philosophy into an illuminating process that takes less than an hour. Today, thousands of practitioners worldwide are adapting and expanding the Constellation experience.

Dan Booth Cohen trained with Bert Hellinger and many of the world’s foremost practitioners of Systemic Constellations including Gunthard Weber, Hunter Beaumont, Albrecht Mahr, Jacob Schneider, Francesca Mason Boring, Harald Hohnen and Stephan Hausner.

The Constellation begins with the simple question, "What is your issue?" Participants respond by asking for help with seemingly insoluble problems:

• A man seeking his lost children.
• A woman diagnosed as clinically depressed.
• A man who is profoundly lonely.
• A woman whose child died.

Within minutes the Constellation process reveals an extraordinary picture behind these insurmountable problems. Working slowly and with utmost care and respect, Dan guides the seeker to see the "problem" through a different lens. Acknowledging and accepting the past opens a canal for inherited suffering to gradually drain away and gives renewed strength for healing and growth. As Carl Jung wrote, "Emotional entanglements of the family system bring about the damming-up of the energy of life. What is the use of paddling about in this flooded country? It is more important to open up drainage canals."