Content warning: This email touches on sexual violence, ancestral trauma, and the weight of secrets carried in the name of movements and families. Take care of yourself as you read.

I woke up to the news with my phone alarm still ringing.

A headline. Dolores Huerta. The New York Times. I didn't need to read past the first line to understand what had happened.

I couldn't listen or read it. Not yet.

Two days before, I had done a ceremonial bodywork to release what was burdening my physical body. What came forward was the burdens of the maternal line. It is not the first time I have worked the maternal line — because if you are a woman, or if you consciously carry the stories of the women in your lineage, then you know this is ongoing work. I have been at it actively for almost two years: releasing generations of pain living in my body, in the silence of those who came before me, in the inherited weight of witnessing how patriarchal systems harm all of us.

After the session the facilitators told me I might feel melancholy in the coming days as the body releases what does not belong to it.

And then the story of Dolores hit. Sixty years of silence, broken. Two pregnancies she carried alone. Two children raised by other families in secret. Two encounters — one where she felt she couldn't say no, and one where she had no choice at all — kept hidden because she believed the movement needed protecting more than she did.

The melancholy came forward even more. And then — the familiar questions:

• Why must women prove the violence they experience?
• Why must we sacrifice ourselves for the movement?
• Why do we carry everything on our backs?

I sat with those familiar questions. And then I saw a pattern I hadn't quite named before.

Those questions are about judgment.

And judgment, while necessary in a society disconnected and patriarchal in nature, is not the whole medicine.

When I put on my family constellation lens and look at Cesar Chavez, I don't drop the gravity of what he did. I don't erase it. I stay with it — and I ask different questions.

• How many generations before him were taught that power and control were the price of belonging?
• Whose silence made his behavior acceptable?
• What did the women and men in his ancestral line suppress or hide in order to stay close to the movement — and what did they teach their daughters, consciously or not about sacrifice?

Debra Rojas. Ana Murguia. Esmeralda Lopez. These women are brave beyond what most of us can imagine. Some were daughters of organizers — girls brought into the inner circle of the movement, absorbed into a system that was already asking women to disappear into sacrifice.

Dolores herself said she never identified as a victim — but now understands herself as a survivor. She is 95 years old. She kept this for six decades. Not because she was weak. Because the conditions of belonging in that system required her silence.

This is a systems constellation problem as well as a family one.

From the lens of family constellations, we understand that violence doesn't live only in one person. It moves through systems — families, movements, organizations — until a proxy is born or awakened into the lineage who says: no more. Who refuses to carry what was never theirs to carry.

In our own family lines — all of them — somewhere across time and space, we find both survivors and those who caused harm. We carry both. This is not about equivalence. It is about restoring balance and rooting out the violence from all of our systems.

Some of the inherited beliefs that live in us without our knowing:

Dolores Huerta's breaking of silence doesn't just release her own burden. It releases the invisible children. It names the pattern inside the UFW. It creates an opening for the movement itself to look honestly at what it was built on — and to choose differently.

That is what the ancestral field is always asking of us.

Not erasure. Acceptance. Transparency. A new beginning from a truthful foundation.

Cesar Chavez will always be part of the UFW's origin story. Removing his name from murals and streets may be necessary. But erasing him from the history of the movement closes the very wound we need to examine. We must be able to hold the complexity: that a man can build something that changes the lives of millions, and still cause devastating harm. Both things are true. The movement does not belong to him alone — it never did.

I want to ask you something. Take a breath before you answer.

What secret have you been keeping — about your own experience, your family, your lineage — because you believed something or someone else needed protection more than you did?

• What condition of belonging has kept you silent?
• What would it mean for you to say: my silence ends here?

This is the first of two reflections. Next week I'll be sharing what this story reveals at the organizational and movement level — what systems constellations shows us about how violence becomes institutional DNA, and what it takes to interrupt it. That piece will come from The Lineage Lab, my community of practice for executives, coaches, healers, and movement leaders doing this work inside organizations.

But first — the personal. Because it always begins at your family’s kitchen table..

And these questions — the ones about your own lineage, your own conditions of belonging, your own silence — are not rhetorical. They are the questions that live at the center of your liberation and all my work in the Wild Dreams Coaching Program.

Wild Dreams is for women and femmes ready to work the personal and collective lines of liberation. To ask the different questions about the conditions of their origin story. To release what does not belong to them. To stop organizing their lives around the secrets, silences, and sacrifices of systems that were never designed to protect them.

This is the work. It is not comfortable. It is also not optional — not if you want to live differently than what was handed to you.

We will begin soon. The doors for registration close this Friday, March 27 and will not reopen til 2027.

If something in this email stirred you — that stirring is information. Trust it.

P.S. If you, like me, are a survivor and this email brought something up, please be gentle with yourself today. You don't have to do anything with it right now. And when you're ready — I am ready to accompany you.

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