Working with the Trickster in the Field
A bonus half-day constellation workshop taught by Sarah Maclean Bicknell and Uncle Kevin.
There is a figure who has been waiting at the edge of every ceremony humans have ever kept, wearing a fool's bells in one century and a spider's eight legs in another, walking backward into the wind on the Plains and hauling whole islands up out of the sea in the South Pacific, and on this one day online we will sit together and let him in the door.
Join us for a Zoom teaching on the trickster, an afternoon that moves from the English court fool who alone could speak the unspeakable truth to a king, through the masked guisers of a Scottish winter, into the Lakota Heyoka whose sacred contrariness cracks open habitual perception, and out across the Pacific with Maui, the demigod who stole fire and fished up land through sheer nerve and mischief.
We will ask what this ancient, unruly, holy fool wants from us now, in our own circles and our own constellations, when the unexpected laugh or the sudden reversal shows up right in the middle of our most careful plans.
Come ready to be surprised, because that is the only way the trickster ever really teaches.
All participants registered for The Invisible Thread: Shamanic Dimensions within Systemic Constellations will get free access to this bonus class.
Exchange for those not attending The Invisible Thread:
Benefactor - $140
Equity - $100
Seed - $80
Not registered for The Invisible Thread but want to join this bonus class?
Sarah's Shamanic Approach to Constellation
For Sarah, the knowing field that constellation work reveals is not separate from the field she has walked with as a ceremony keeper for thirty five years, and the two have grown into each other until they can no longer be pulled apart. Her ceremonial adoption into the Hunka’waye tradition of the Lakota Nation in 1991, her decades of sweat lodge practice, and her ongoing shamanic teachings have taught her that the ancestors, the land, and the dreaming body are already present in the constellation before a single representative steps into the field, and that the work of the facilitator is to recognize what has already arrived rather than to summon something new.
Where classical constellation asks a representative to notice sensation and impulse, Sarah brings a shamanic attunement to what else is moving in that same body, the animal that appears unbidden, the ancestor who steps forward without being called, the weather or the season or the mineral memory of a particular stretch of ground, and she has learned to trust these arrivals as fully as she trusts the words a representative speaks. She often works with the felt intelligence of the land itself as a member of the system, understanding place not as backdrop but as kin with its own unresolved grief and its own capacity for healing, so that a constellation held outdoors, or one that simply remembers it is happening on living ground, can open into depths that an indoor room rarely reaches on its own.
This is the thread that runs beneath her nature and dream constellation retreats, and it is why seekers often describe her constellations as feeling less like a technique being applied to them and more like a ceremony that has been waiting, patiently, for them to arrive.