The Family Constellation series : What does Story do? with Jane Peterson

🌳In this episode, I speak with constellation facilitator Jane Peterson about the stories we have forgotten but still carry in our bodies. We talk about the way bodies relate outside of the mind realm, how we all bring our systems with us wherever we go, what it means to be a human being and what story does in the world.

In June, Jane is doing an in person advanced training for experienced facilitators. I highly recommend studying with her :
https://human-systems-institute.mykajabi.com/sales-page-886741b4-186e-4142-aefd-d20c5d7be5fe

🧶Find Jane online:
Website: https://www.human-systems-institute.com/

✨Here are all the links to people Jane and I talk about in this podcast:
Sacagawea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacagawea
Barnett Pearce : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_management_of_meaning
Lakoff and Johnson : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff
Daniel Kahneman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman
Mary Oliver : https://genius.com/Mary-oliver-wild-geese-annotated
Gunthard Weber : https://constellationintensive.com/gunthard-weber-2/
Paul Ekman : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman
Robin Dunbar : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Dunbar
Arnie Mendell : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Mindell
Virginia Satir : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Satir
Don Americo Yabar : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hTPM0iHhrI
Svetlana Masgutova:  https://masgutovamethod.com/

If you have no idea what constellations are, I recommend listening to S1 Ep5: Family mythology, the told and the untold or read more about it here : https://www.laureporche.com/modalities

🎬You can also watch :
Another self : https://www.netflix.com/fr-en/title/81380432
Ep 5 of Sex, Love and Goop: https://www.netflix.com/fr/title/81459349
This great video on hidden loyalties by Shavasti: https://youtu.be/Sd7umLz77Cw

Get notified when the Silken Mirror membership opens in 2023 : http://eepurl.com/dxzCk9

Follow us on Instagram @moonlitpathchannel

This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
If you're enjoying the podcast, consider sharing it or leaving a review on Apple Podcast :)

Transcript

Laure: 0:27

Today I am delighted to welcome Jane Peterson. Hi Jane!

Jane: 0:32

Hi.

Laure: 0:33

And she is the founder of the Human Systems Institute and an international trainer of systemic constellation work. She has a PhD in human and organizational systems, and she's developed an approach called Somatic Imaging that finds the family system in the body. She's a wonderfully effective teacher whom I have been privileged to learn from, and I am so grateful to her for coming here

Jane: 0:57

today, Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Laure: 1:02

All right, so I'm gonna kick us off by asking you the question I asked everybody who comes on this podcast, which is, what is your favorite story and how did it help you in your life, and or what does it say

Jane: 1:16

about you? So uh, that was a tough question. First of all, I've I'm a story lover from way back, so I've been collecting stories forever and I, I think it's not so much that I have a favorite story as the role that story played in my early life. So as a little girl, I got the Disney, you know, fairy tale book and of course I was reading all those fairy tales. And then as I got a little older, my mother had one of the old original story books. So I got to read these same stories in much more complex form, you know, in late 1800's book of fairy tales. And the heroines were much more empowered, much more... it was so interesting the difference between those. So that was a moment of like, whoa, what is the story I'm being told? And then when I was a, a little girl, a little girl, my dad used to walk me down to the public library and he would read to me. And of course he was not so much into fairy tales and stuff like that, so he would get all these adventure stories of John Paul Jones in the Navy, you know, and, and he read me the story of Sacagawea, an old story, you know, here in the United States. And so he would read me all these stories and so very adventuresome stories. So they both fired at my imagination. And I also learned to be a little skeptical of story. Early on to realize that it casts people in different lights, even though I couldn't have explained that to you as a smaller, you know, child or as a, a young girl. So it really helped me see that stories conceal and reveal they set up certain possibilities and exclude others, and that they have an active role to play in the way that we construct our lives and they can enable us or constrain us. So I, I developed a relationship with Story. And of course I'd love to read. So I, I would read anything. I'll read Forbes magazine, if it's sitting in front of me, I don't care. I'll read this, read anything. It's just, you know, what is that story, right? What is that story? So and then I met Barnett Pearce when I was in my graduate program, who's one of the leading theorists of human communication. And he really had this way of looking at story to see what it does, how does it function, what does it do? So that relationship to story, I think is what I gained from my early encounters with story rather than a story that defined my life.

Laure: 3:46

Yeah. I mean, I completely relate to that. I also have memories of trips to the library when I was a, a young child and of discovering the original fairy tales with the original endings, which was usually much more gruesome than...

Jane: 4:00

Much more grim, right? Yeah. Consequences were really clear right?

Laure: 4:05

Like, oh, like, okay, this is obviously not for children.

Jane: 4:08

No, very different stories, right? But they were told the children. So that's a really different shift in the way we think about children these days, you know.

Laure: 4:16

But that's the interesting thing, cuz I think, and I'm deviating a little bit, but the fairy tales as they were originally told, you know, like the Grim brothers. They just wrote down stories that had been passed down orally. And they were not for children originally. They came from oral traditions and they were for adults, you know, hence the gruesome ends.

Jane: 4:38

Right. Right. And they often had some kind of moral or ethical, you know, they were reinforcing the norms and values of their culture, and so that's what the stories did.

Laure: 4:47

And they got also modified by Christianity. There's a lot of things that happened to fairy tales and tales when Christianity arrived. And just like, you know,

Jane: 4:57

Right. Yeah.

Laure: 4:58

Some characters became demons or witches when actually they were not in the original tales.

Jane: 5:05

Yeah.

Laure: 5:06

Yeah, Babayaga is one of them. And so you started going into that. I think you have a lot to say about the place of story in your work. And we started talking about your dissertation about metaphor, and I'd love to hear more about that.

Jane: 5:19

One of the things I came across in my doctoral wanderings, I guess I'll call'em, my, my studies, was conceptual metaphor theory, which is uh, Lakoff and Johnson's theory that what we learned by being embodied beings in the world structures what we can think about. It structures the way, it's a very human way that we think about the world. So for us, toddling around on two feet up is good. Down is not so good, and. So, so we we tell stories based on our human experience and we use metaphor as a way of understanding things that are not so accessible to direct. You know, we can't necessarily put your fingers around them. That's a metaphor, right? But they give us a way to relate to our world. And so we're always making stories. There's some nice research, Daniel Kahneman is one of them, that shows that we kind of have a storymaking mind. We have a remembering storytelling mind, but we also have an embodied in the moment living, you know, kind of body mind, if you will, that experiences the world really differently. And those two don't necessarily know the same things. They kind of have different quote bodies of knowledge. And the storymaking mind is not tethered by the body so much, which is good in one way because it can imagine things that don't exist right now, so possibilities that are not present and bad in another is that it can really kind of, you know, leave reality. You know, stories are fascinating. They can keep secrets, they can you know, they work in families in sometimes ways that are corrosive because they hide, they reveal while trying to conceal the family is. And says you're forbidden to remember and forbidden to forget. Right? So they can work in really mysterious ways. Yeah, so story is is quite an active thing. You know, it's something that we're always making. We have to explain the world to ourself, to know how to interact with it. And how we do that and what we do with the stories we make, that's always fascinated me. So, I don't know if I answered your question, but hopefully I came close.

Laure: 7:24

Yeah.

Jane: 7:25

So in my dissertation, that was your question. So I came across a, a body of research that was a symposium at MIT and they were looking at assistive technology. And because we were having kids coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, missing limbs and, you know, needing this, I got interested in it. And what was so interesting about it was that they had different researchers presenting their research and the story they had of what human beings are, shaped the kind of research they did. So if you believed man was a machine, you tried to integrate human beings with machines. There was another MD who was working on spinal cord injuries, who had a metaphors of plants and he was actually growing neurons and stretching them and then, you know, using them to bridge the damage. And it was so fascinating the way the story that we have of what we are as human beings shaped the worlds that we made.

Laure: 8:23

Hmm.

Jane: 8:24

And so I got really interested as another way of seeing what does story do? How is it working in the world?

Laure: 8:30

That's fascinating. I'm so excited I'm listening to you. I'm like, oh, this is so cool.

Jane: 8:34

Yeah. So it, it was really stark, the difference, you know,

Laure: 8:38

Yeah.

Jane: 8:39

So the stories we tell are consequential.

Laure: 8:42

Yeah, they are. I think they're so consequential because our subconscious, that takes 95% of our decisions only responds to story.

Jane: 8:51

Story and metaphor. That's how it understands the world. Exactly. Right. Yeah.

Laure: 8:55

And so that makes sense that the, the stories and metaphors that we create or that we understand with our human understanding is what the subconscious is feeding upon to make decisions in our life.

Jane: 9:07

Right. So if we have a story of a tree that is lumber and fruit and shade that's how we treat a tree. And there's some really wonderful research that's been published in book form lately that shows about the mother tree, that shows that trees are actually communities, very complex living communities that shape climate, that do all this kind of stuff. But our story is lumber, you know, fruit. So we've taken this very complex ecosystem and simplified it down to things that are useful for humans. And so there's a place where we need a different story. We need a story that's more complex. We need a story that's more complete. Some of the older indigenous stories were those stories of relationship, relationship with another living system, not relationship with an object that's, you know, available for humans. Yeah, we need different stories in these times and people who can craft the stories that we need to inspire us cuz stories can be a source of inspiration and guidance and show us directions we can go. Now those stories are really important right now cuz they organize us.

Laure: 10:18

Yeah. And I think one of the reasons that we are where we are is because we've lost the story of interdependence along the way. Yeah. That's why stories are doubly important because I think at some point we knew, how our metaphors were shaped around interdependence. And then as, you know, civilization grew and Christianity and like, you know, colonization... colonization and all of

Jane: 10:41

Yeah, the story of money, the story of being able to take two completely unique different force and make them the same by having them be the same amount of money. Right. So the story of money and the way we exchange, you know, give and take, is so important for us as human beings in our societies. And that story has really, I think, separated us from the uniqueness of life. And each, each place is unique. Each plant is unique. You know, each human is unique and somehow we've kind of made them into interchangeable parts and that separated us from our own soul, I think in many ways.

Laure: 11:18

I really feel that, and I love how you put it into words cuz I've, I'd never really considered that one of the reasons why we struggle so much is because we don't have that story. It's not in our metaphor, we don't see it anymore. It's like, we are blind to it, of that story of interdependence with the world and with the universe, and, and we don't feel it in our bodies because the way that we live is not, you don't feel it in your body.

Jane: 11:46

You can be completely surrounded by human made things, right? And not even see those as things that somebody made for you. That there's a relationship in that thing. You know, that that sofa, that chair, that whatever, that plate of food, right? So I think we really have lost the story of connection, the story of interdependence. So we need to, we need to tell those stories, right? So we need to start writing those stories and sharing those stories and reminding what we know at such a deep level. And I think the story that we have right now, even though it's, you know, there's many, there's stories that can be told, there's untold stories, there's lived stories, there's, you know, stories that can't be told. And one of the stories that is being told right now in people's mental health, in their bodies, is the story of being lost. If I had to say there's a theme among a lot of my work is the story of being lost, of being disconnected, of being isolated, of feeling alone. And we're, we didn't evolve that way. Right. Somebody once said, I think you can take the human out of the savannah, but you can't take that savannah out of the human, right? You know, we come from where we come from as social people and social creatures. And so when we lose that, we do feel lost. And then a lot of illness stems from that.

Laure: 13:02

Yeah. Absolutely. I really believe that, and I, I feel like the more I work with people and the more I work with groups and the, the more I see that the only thing, most of the time, the only thing that's needed is to feel connection. And then the system starts kind of like reorganizing itself and, you know, everything starts shifting.

Jane: 13:23

Yeah, exactly. We have something to organize with and around, you know, by ourselves. Like, I see you can't really take a human off of Earth very well and have a human anymore. What is it that you've got? Right? We just need each other so much and need this world so much.

Laure: 13:40

Yeah, we do. Cuz we're in a body.

Jane: 13:42

Right? Yeah. And that's been one of our more especially in organizations, one of our more interesting stories is that we could be minds on a stick, right? As if there's nobody there. No body there, right? So how, how does that work? Right? It's the organizations, the bodies are messy. They need things, they fall in love, they get in fights, they die. You know, it's like bodies are messy. So they have been excluded from a lot of parts, from our religions, from, you know, our workplaces. And it's like, how are we supposed to be whole and healthy in a place that doesn't have a story that includes the body, right?

Laure: 14:17

And especially since the body holds our story as you know very well, cuz you're the magical body reader.

Jane: 14:26

Yeah.

Laure: 14:27

Which, you know, I should say for the people who listen to us, that Jane can read people, like she can see somebody and have a lot of information about their story. And I'm, I'm curious about that, you know, like how, how that came about for one and how you navigate it. Cuz I'm sure it's not always easy to have so, so much information also and also maybe talk a little bit, for people who don't know, like how, you know, from birth like the story gets imprinted from the very beginning.

Jane: 14:55

Right. So let's start with that. There's a beautiful poem by Mary Oliver Wild Geese. She says,"you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves". Tell me about your, just bear yours and I will tell you mine and i, I have thought of that poem many times in terms of the soft clay of your body, the soft, you know, this animal part of us that is shaped by all of the things that happened to us from before we come in to, through, you know, gestation to birth all of the events of our lives and all of those are relational. So it's almost like our body is like this image of all the relationships that have been important to us. They've shaped the way we stand, the way we speak, the way we breathe. You know, those have all been shaped by relationships. If we're in supportive relationships where we can be ourselves, you'll see people actually literally take up space, their chest will actually have space. If they've been in a dangerous place, you know, you see the armoring on the back and the collapse and the high breathing, and that shapes everything about how we see the world. I sometimes torture my students a little bit I I make them get into very uncomfortable tense postures and then have another person tell them a short emotional story and ask them what they thought of the story, right? Because our state affects our perception. And then I let them relax and tell the same story. And they say, well, that's a really different story, are you sure it was the same? Right? Because the state that our body is in shapes what we're able to receive from our environment. And so if we've come through a history or her story or their story of difficulty, then that is gonna shape what we can receive and perceive from the environment, how we see things. And there's plenty of, you know, this is one of those evidence-based areas where there's plenty of research that backs that up, that if we're tense and tight, we don't hear things, we see a neutral face as angry and so on. So yeah, so this is our preceptor, this physical self is how we must interact with all realms. And if it's unhealthy or if we've grown up without even knowing what freedom is in our body, then it's hard for us to perceive that in relationship with the outside world. If we've grown up feeling lost and unwanted, which unfortunately is true for many people in this world it's hard for us to even imagine what it could feel like to belong, what it could feel like to be safe, to have a place. And I know since you're working with therapists, often we have to start there. People have no reference experience. Like I say, trying to cook with oregano when you don't know what it tastes like. Right. How are you supposed to... what is safety? If you don't know what it is, how do you make yourself feel safe? Right? You've gotta discover that in relationship cuz those are relational wounds that have shaped us at the same time, there can also be possibilities where people believed in us, you know, inspired us or you know, cheered us on when we needed encouragement. So all of those stories of relationship in our experience are there. The thing that I found that helped me understand, cuz once I actually had a conversation with one of our German leader teachers, Gunthard Weber, where I was fairly new, and he's a big German bear of a guy, really sweet guy. He says, I can tell you by looking at a person's face, whether they were misused or who's most important to them, he rattled off this bunch of stuff and I didn't know him very well, so I said, well, that's a big claim, prove it. And so he started with me and then my husband. So I was like, oh, that's, you know, that was pretty accurate. And so we actually started a little project where I took some of my students' pictures before and after Constellation and had him look at what he saw in the face, and then I'd done their work so I knew what their story was and he was like 80%. Like, that's really good. So that got me started. I studied Paul Ekman's work, you know, the primary facial expressions. I studied everything I could. And because he was saying that about the face, I started to think, well, if you could get that from that face, what can you get from the whole body? Right? So I just started experimenting and I found that I could tell a lot from people's body by using my own body in relationship with theirs. So by letting people just stand in space and kind of presenting a challenge to them with another body all kinds of stuff would show up. And, you know, I could even start to see what was there. And then when it's like the scales fell from my eyes, I'm like, why don't we see this? You know, how, how is it we go through life without actually seeing each other. And that's where I came across Robin Dunbar's work, the Social Brain Hypothesis. And he was looking at primate troops, and noticed that when they got to a certain size, they split. Mm. And his theory is that it takes a lot of social, you know, to keep track of, do I owe you lunch today or do you owe me, right. To keep track of all that it takes a lot of mental space and so we can really only handle so many close connections. So like, I don't care how many friends you have on, on Facebook, you know, our capacity to really track close relationships is not that big. And so I think in our modern world, we don't grow up in tribes where everybody's known everyone since the time you were born. And so we've learned to blunt our vision to slide by each other without seeing. And that is functional when you're in a workplace or you're going to the subway past three or four hundred people and seeing their suffering would not help you with your day, right? But when we take that home, it's not functional. When that becomes the way we go through the world of not really perceiving people, not bringing ourselves into relationship with them. And just to give an example of you know, some of the things that I've seen, there was one woman where I would usually start about six feet away because at six feet you start to perceive bodies, not faces, you get closer and our brain switch, start to see face. So I start just outside of that and would stand in front of the person. And I stood in front of one woman and I had the urge to hit her. She flinched and I had the urge to hit her. And I thought, who is this? Cuz I know that would not be my normal thing. And so I just, to see what happened cuz we were, you know, just playing around and she was, I was not gonna hurt her. I raised my arms and she had protection over her face so fast. And I thought, okay, who is this? She had been in an abusive relationship and her husband would come at her with both fists from the front. And so she had that instinct just like it was just there in her body. And the complaint that she had is, she said, I had a great boss. I really like my boss, but I'm always angry with him and I dunno why. And so after this little experiment, I said, well, how does your boss approach you? And he would come, probably because he wanted to be respectful, he would line up and approach her from the front. Which is where her body had learned that's danger, right? So when we were able to separate the boss and the ex-husband she could feel more relaxed with him there. So she could you know carry on with her work and enjoy her good boss, without having this old unknown trigger, you know, that was there as a story in her body. So we could see it and bring it out.

Laure: 22:39

That's wonderful. And it's also so interesting that, that you responded to the story in her body. Like your body responds to the story in her body.

Jane: 22:48

We do that automatically with each other without realizing what we're responding to, right? So we don't know. We just pick it up. This is one of the reasons I like Arnie Mendell's work because he talks about two bodies sort of dreaming each other up, the the dream body, right? And we do that all the time. So people think that constellation work is this kind of isolated stuff where people are somehow channeling their dead, you know? But let me tell you, your dead, whatever relative, is there with you in, in the story of your body. And if I'm sitting in a quiet space with you and just receptive, I can pick it up. You know, I remember doing a piece of work with someone where as I looked at their face and their posture, I said, you know, what happened to your mom? And mom had committed suicide when they were fairly young. And I could see that. I could feel it. So the challenge is, this is where all that masking that we do gets in our way if we want to understand somebody, because I have to take my mask off.

Laure: 23:49

Yeah.

Jane: 23:50

I have to be available and willing to see and willing to feel what's there in another person's body's story for me to be able to perceive it. And then I have to be very careful and, and I learned this a hard way cuz I could get so quickly to really core stories, you know, where we live. That I have to be careful how I bring that, how I reflect that I have to have a lot of permission and create safety. Cuz those are big stories for us.

Laure: 24:19

Yeah, yeah. I, I relate to that cuz I feel like I don't see as well as you, I wouldn't be able to say anything about what I see, but I kind of pick up the cause behind effects very quickly usually.

Jane: 24:32

You're seeing more than you know you're seeing.

Laure: 24:34

I know, I know that just like, I know that I see more than I know. I see. But I can't, you know, it's just like, I...

Jane: 24:40

You just can't name it. You can't, that's all, you haven't learned to categorize it. Name it.

Laure: 24:44

But I get to the underlying cause, usually almost immediately. And I agree. It's so obvious. It's so easy that sometimes I bypass. It's hard to, to be like, oh yeah, the person is not there at all. You have to take them to that story that they, they can't see for now. And if you just like, blurt it out... they're not gonna respond very well

Jane: 25:05

Yeah it's not gonna be very good. No, it isn't. And I, and the other thing I think is that when I do this work, the thing that I learned really quickly is that I needed to do it as a collaboration. Because those are really private, you know, like we don't even know that we know some of those things until somebody like, you know, and, and then to think that other people could see that is, especially if it's kind of a secret story in our family, you know, like the case of the suicide is a secret in the family, right? People have shame around it. And so this ability of creating a collaboration of like, we're doing this together and I'm doing this with you, not to you, that is a really important part of any kind of work with the body, I think because we have such a story of like, I'm a mind, you know, or I'm a soul. Like I don't actually have this other thing, that those are tethered to. And so when people start to deal with this part of us that's real, that we may have actually split off from, be dissociating from, it's, it can be really shocking. It can be really upsetting. So I've learned the hard way to make sure that we're in a partnership, to make sure that we're collaborating and to have the skills to be able to hold things that come up with people. Cuz it can be you know, the old traumas are sitting there.

Laure: 26:19

I know, I was just just before this I had a session that was like...

Jane: 26:24

Yeah. Okay.

Laure: 26:25

all of the trauma. And that's what makes me think of this cause it's can be tricky, especially when the person, when the body holds a story that either doesn't belong to the person or the person doesn't remember the story. And it happens a lot with birth, I think.

Jane: 26:41

Yeah. Birth is a biggie.

Laure: 26:43

Birth is a biggie. And it's hard, you know, for some people it's hard to understand that whatever they've going on for them is like actually direct relationship with that. Cuz they don't remember it and we have this story that babies don't understand anything. That they don't, you know,

Jane: 26:59

Which is total baloney, right? Right. And there's some really wonderful, like Masco Tova and you know, Annie Brooks and all the people that have unmasked that, you know, that babies really know a lot and, and that there's natural processes. You know, reflexes need to get switched on and switched off at different points in the process. And if you skip those steps, your body doesn't know how to do things.

Laure: 27:26

Yeah.

Jane: 27:27

Doesn't even know how to feel certain things. So, yeah. And the, the biggest one I see is, birth is a lot of work, right? Not just for the mom, but for the baby. That's a cooperative adventure. Right? They're totally in sympathetic arousal, their nervous systems are totally aroused and we have interfered with the natural process of putting baby on the belly that would switch people out of that activation. So a lot of people go through life without knowing how to switch down, how to down regulate and rest. They're just kinda left there in activated mode. And I wonder sometimes if that doesn't drive some of the frenetic pace, cuz we're up, we don't know how to actually go through a normal rhythm of activation and relaxation. And so we're busy all the time.

Laure: 28:15

Yeah. And even when we're not busy, because I, I can feel that in myself. I mean, as you know. And I I'm really aware of the struggle that I have to switch down really, even though I spend so much time not doing anything and resting, but I know that I'm not actually resting. I can feel that my system is always activated in some ways.

Jane: 28:35

Right. It's seems pretty normal for our society, and I think that's part of the the disconnect is like, it's uncomfortable, so we're gonna disconnect from our bodies.

Laure: 28:44

Yeah.

Jane: 28:45

Right. So being able to get some of these natural processes working again. Especially being able to have other people help us, you know, that I think is one of the major tasks of a lot of therapy is being able to learn how to have somebody else help us calm down, manage our nervous system.

Laure: 29:04

Yeah.

Jane: 29:05

Yeah.

Laure: 29:06

Exactly. And then, that gives me a transition into textile. Cuz we talk a bit about textile on this podcast. And I know you, you have some relationship to textile cuz you sew, I think you used to?

Jane: 29:17

I sew, I do, I haven't so much since we've moved out to the farm, I've had more, have a relationship with plants. But for many years I sewed and I also, I actually have almost completed a Bachelor of fine arts. That was one detour but I did paint silk and dye colors and, and paint and work on silk for many years and, and sold some of my work during my artist phase, I guess you could say. So yeah, just interacting with textile and its relationship to color and the medium of dye and, and what silk does, you know, how it shapes on the body and yeah, I always loved that. I always had a hankering to be a weaver, but I ended up working with clay, working with the soft clay of, you know, being able to, you know, build bodies. And, I think you asked me what my favorite thing I made was, and it's an impossible piece. I kept pushing the limits of the material, and this one is, the word is Zuah which is a Chinese three-legged vessel. And this thing, I don't know how it got through the kiln. What? You know, it's a very delicate kind of container that you pour from, sitting on three very thin legs, and somehow that made it through the fire, you know. So it's just this kind of like, wow, amazing things can come that you don't expect. I thought it would be broken in little pieces and it wasn't. I had the vision and I didn't know if it could be made, and it was, it was possible. So I still have that piece.

Laure: 30:44

And it's a wonderful metaphor for the strength of fragility or something that is very, that looks very delicate

Jane: 30:53

Right.

Laure: 30:54

And can absolutely sustain the fire.

Jane: 30:58

Yeah, it's, it's actually quite tough stuff, right?

Laure: 31:01

And I wonder what that says. I mean, that must say something about you.

Jane: 31:06

It must. Yeah. Well, I certainly, the part about stretching the limits of the material, I had these very beautiful platters that were very fine, very thin, very refined on the edges, you know, that were sitting on three legs and this idea of what's the minimum for stability, right? And then the expansion and the reach on that. Um, And that would probably define the way I've gone about things, because I've done many different things. So there's this reaching, but there's also this, you know, what's the minimum that's required for stability? The need for a certain level of order and balance to support the expansion and always kind of testing that. I'm testing that limit right now with my little farm, right? Oh, I have this other business and I'm doing this and... I know. But the world is such a fascinating place. Like how can you not explore the way it feels to me. And I'm so privileged, you know, I'm so privileged to be in a place where I can, especially as a woman, to be able to pursue my interests and try things and follow my, my muse.

Laure: 32:06

Definitely lucky.

Jane: 32:08

For sure. Yeah.

Laure: 32:09

There's some perks to being born in disconnected cultures.

Jane: 32:14

Yeah. At least material. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm sure you know the work of Riane Eisler and others who said that we didn't start with the patriarchy?

Laure: 32:25

Yeah.

Jane: 32:25

Like there are other forms of governance and commerce and we take what we have now as the way it is, but it's one human invention. It's not the only one. Some are more functional perhaps than others.

Laure: 32:40

And we've lost, we've lost the stories of the other ones, which is partly the thing. And every, every now and again and more and more now, the stories of women start bubbling up to the surface of like, you know, how they were entrepreneurs and they were that got erased.

Jane: 32:57

Right. Well, that goes back to who gets to tell the stories,

Laure: 33:02

Yeah, of course.

Jane: 33:03

Right? And what stories are not being told. And that's a really interesting way of thinking about things. You know, story is received.

Laure: 33:10

Yeah. Francesca Mason Boring always says, you know, when somebody tells you a story in your family, you should consider who is telling you the story and why.

Jane: 33:19

Right? What is the story doing? What's its purpose? Right? How is it working, right? Yeah. Stories are tricky, tricky, tricky things in families, right? And even when you're working with, you know, yourself or a client, stories, conceal and reveal. They, if you've learned to listen to stories and the body... so there's two stories that anyone ever tells you. You know, there's the"story story", the mind story, but they're also telling you a body story. And I find most people get stuck with the mental story and they miss the relationship between the body story, the body's telling the story and the story that you're hearing with your ears, the mind story, and whether those are congruent or incongruent. Or sometimes one story's being told by the body and another one is being told by the mind. And then where did they get the mind story? Right? You know, you can look at a face and see suffering and have this story that everything's fine. And you're like, huh, those stories don't add up.

Laure: 34:17

Yeah. And then you add the third component of language, of vocabulary, because also somebody can tell a story and then the lexicon they're using doesn't fit. Is telling something completely different.

Jane: 34:30

Right.

Laure: 34:30

That's something I really like to watch for. I'm better at picking that out than the body, like the body I, I get, but it's unconscious and like the...

Jane: 34:39

that's a body to body transmission, Yeah. Right.

Laure: 34:43

But the words the colors of the words and the, the images that they bring, it's so interesting.

Jane: 34:49

Yeah. Yeah. Story tells so much.

Laure: 34:51

Yeah,

Jane: 34:52

For sure.

Laure: 34:53

So you were saying that you, you wanted to be a weaver.

Jane: 34:57

Yeah, I've always loved weaving, right? Yeah.

Laure: 35:00

So let me, let me bring you a metaphor: which are the, the threads that you weave in your life, the main threads.

Jane: 35:08

Well, you know, I'm, I'm not so young anymore, so there've been a lot of threads over my life. I mean, I've been really gifted to have many wonderful teachers. And so those threads have been woven into my life. I have the thread that I started out with, which was the engineer, which is my parents said, we'll for college but you either have to go into business or science So I loved music and art and story, but I could see the practicality of making a living So I went and somehow managed to get through, you know, my chemistry classes and get a job as an engineer. And I was the first woman hired in my department. So that was a story. And that was a learning, right? The first woman engineer hired in my department. So I was often sitting in a room by myself as a woman with men. Right. And that was watching the way they told stories, right.

Laure: 36:00

Mm-hmm.

Jane: 36:00

And that the game was not about what's really happening, but whose story is gonna win. That was an education. I'm grateful for that early start. It wouldn't have been something I natively would've chosen and it gave me kind of discernment and the ability to really analyze whether something made sense. So it gave me a basis for critical thinking and then I, then I left that and went to fine arts. I went 180 the other way, right? As fast as I could go. And that was a tough period for me cuz I just dismantled the identity I'd been given. And I went through a process of really going down into my depths and having to, you know, did a lot of therapy that's where I met Arnie Mendell and his group and process work. And I wish I'd known more about trauma then but I have since learned, right? So that was a, you know, process work and the arts are kind of woven together for me in another thread. And I learned you can take something you love and crush it, trying to make money. That was a helpful lesson. And then someplace in there, I was doing my own personal, I ran into NLP and Milton Erickson's work and Virginia Satir's work and ran into Bert Hellinger quite rather by accident. There's a story around that. But, I met Bert and um, was gobsmacked by what I saw going on, and the engineer in me wanted to know what happened there, how does that work? And that launched me on this whole path of, you know, traveling and teaching, trying to figure out what are we doing and how does it work and what enables us to do the best work for our clients? And that's been a big question for me. And so, you know, I ended up, and there's a whole story around what happened in Portland. I lived in Portland for 38 years and ended up being part of a self-organizing neighborhood that sued the city of Portland over the illegal sale of land in my backyard. And that launched us out of Portland. So now permaculture and farming. And as I started to wanna build a new house, I discovered how destructive building is, how destructive agriculture, that our current practices are, and wanted to do something to contribute to what else could we do. So we're out here on five acres right now trying to bring this really beat up land, it was an old nursery where they sprayed it to kill everything and then covered it with plastic and then put big pots on it.

Laure: 38:23

Oh God.

Jane: 38:25

So even the weeds looked sick when we got here. We've been trying to, you know, bring that back to life and create a teaching space and a place for young market gardeners to come and get a start. So we've been trying to, struggling, learning a lot. Nature has been teaching us rather ruthlessly, um, and we're right in the middle of climate instability. So, it's been one of those fasten your seat belts, hang on, kind of rides. So that's been a big thread right now and, and, you know, permaculture and nature have been teaching me a lot. The idea of What happens when we start to allow complexity to come back in and diversity to come back in to our, the world that we've made, right? And to work with nature rather than try to impose. I've tried imposing things, I still try that, but I'm still trying to get those lingonberries, you know, like I really want some lingonberries. Yes. So we're still working on those.

Laure: 39:20

I've been trying for butternut squash for like four years. I want those.

Jane: 39:25

I know. So it's like, someday I'll figure it out. But I've had to like, mm, okay. There's some feedback, you know, accept regulation and feedback is one of the permaculture principles. Like, okay, this is feedback. So slowly, I'm getting some lingonberries, I have to say. But yeah, so those have been, you know, that and the fact that I got to travel and to work with so many great teachers in the constellation field. So those, those have all been important threads for me. So I feel incredibly blessed. I'm kind of to that stage of my life where I wanna give back. I'm trying to figure out what form that needs to be in.

Laure: 40:04

I feel like the, the main, I mean, the thread that I'm hearing is understanding how things work.

Jane: 40:10

Mm-hmm. I think that's true. Particularly people, they've been the thing that has been like, what are we Why do we do the things we do? How are we gonna survive ourselves in each other? Right. Stan Tatkin's been one of my big teachers recently with the secure functioning and couple's work. And so all of these people have shone a little light on that question of like, what is a human being? How do those creatures work? Right, because if we don't figure this out sooner or later, we won't be here. So it's kind of a pressing question: we gotta figure out ourselves, I think before we can successfully, you know, support the biosphere that supports us.

Laure: 40:49

Yeah.

Jane: 40:50

So it's a big, a big weaving, threads I could never have predicted. So I'm really glad somebody else is writing the script.

Laure: 40:58

Well, your soul is writing the script. Your soul is like, I'm here.

Jane: 41:01

It's going someplace, right? I'm along for the ride.

Laure: 41:04

And so that brings us to, you know, the last question cause we we're coming to the end, of this wonderful conversation that could go on for much longer. So when do you feel the closest to your own soul? And when do you feel closest to other people's soul?

Jane: 41:21

I feel closest to my soul when I wake up in the morning. It's like my soul has been traveling in the night, and when I wake up, she returns to this ordinary world and whatever, wherever I've been visiting, whatever, you know, things I've been traveling through there's this moment of reassembly when I wake up where parts of me that have been out wandering come back to the part of me that's here day to day, and so there's ideas, there's problems to solve, there's insights. You know, that little moment when you first wake up is a really precious time for me. I also studied with a Peruvian teacher, Americo Yabar for a number of years. And the first time I met him which was in a camp up in Manti LaSalle beautiful woods up in Utah. He took a stone and he put it in my hand and he said, you travel. You travel at night, you're a dreamer. So I had never really put the pieces together, but it made sense. And he said, and then he, after he put the stone in, he said, be careful stones make you travel after he put it into my hand. So I'm like, oh, oh. And so I've learned to embrace that. I've gotten great novel ideas from some of those stories, you know, to be able to, to let that wandering and the reconnection be kind of a special moment to see what gifts my soul has collected at night. And it's wandering in the moonlight, if you will, right? And so that would be when, when I'm closest to my soul. I think when I'm closest to someone else's is when we really reach the lived truth. When we're able to touch the truth that is alive in their body being, that resonates with the stories of their history and past, and when there's no longer a need for secrets, when they can feel safe enough to reveal themselves, for them to be seen and not feel judged or unsafe, but to be accepted. So those moments of revealing, I guess is when the kind of ordinary steps aside and we see the beauty of the being, of what is it that is bigger than just what we think we are. So those moments I think for me are special.

Laure: 43:34

Yeah, I relate to that.

Jane: 43:36

Hmm. I think that's why we do the work we do,

Laure: 43:38

Exactly.

Jane: 43:39

because it's those moments of realness where people are alive and it's real. And the the artificial stories we've told that keep us from ourselves have been put down, put away.

Laure: 43:52

Yeah. I really relate to that. And here I was thinking, I, I just like to see people cry.

Jane: 43:59

There's crying and there's crying. Yeah, you know, real tears wash away all that old stuff. Right.

Laure: 44:05

Exactly.

Jane: 44:06

Those are the tears of truth.

Laure: 44:08

Tears of truth. I love that. I'm gonna keep it.

Jane: 44:11

Help yourself!

Laure: 44:12

Seeker of the Tears of truth. That's a good character name for a novel.

Jane: 44:17

Yeah. There you go, right? Yeah.

Laure: 44:20

All right, well this was wonderful.

Jane: 44:23

I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Laure: 44:24

Thank you so much for coming

Jane: 44:26

It's a pleasure.

Laure: 44:27

and for sharing all your, your knowledge and history and softness with us.

Jane: 44:33

Yep. You're welcome.