Welcome to The Clearing
Where the wisdom of our relationship with place shapes our future.
Many of our challenges — personal, ecological, and organizational — arise from a deeper rupture in relationship. We make decisions faster than the land can speak.
The Clearing is where we slow down to listen — to place, lineage, and the wider field. Through ritual and systemic constellations, we discover what wants to be seen, understood, or restored.
“When you know you are part of a community of beings, caring for them is simply good manners." John Seed
A Way of Listening Beyond Words
When making decisions, we often forget that we exist within a larger, living world, that has both a past and an emerging future. We make decisions faster than the land can speak.
In The Clearing, we begin with a simple premise: the places we live, work, and love are alive, responsive, and in relationship with us. Through ritual and systems sensing practices, we slow down enough to listen to the broader system so that our decisions can be informed by this vast living web.
Systemic constellations make these relationships visible. They reveal what is out of balance, what has been forgotten, and where there is space for change. For individuals, this brings perspective and grounding. For organizations, it brings guidance that aligns decisions with place, responsibility, radical inclusion, and long-term stewardship.
As we face complexity, a deep need emerges: to bring the wisdom of systemic intelligence into the spaces where we plan, govern, design, and imagine the future.
Together we can do just that — not symbolically, but relationally — creating conditions to tune into field-based intelligence for insight, clarity, and regenerative direction.
This work can serve many contexts and questions. Below are some starting points for inquiry.
Starting points for an inquiry
Every inquiry begins with the need to broaden perspective—to see what we're not seeing. The processes we design can support you even when you're not sure where to start. Below are some ways this work can be applied. If you're curious to explore one of these paths or another angle of entry, please reach out.
Global and Ecological Questions
Engage in a process to illuminate large-scale environmental questions by revealing dynamics that can't be understood from the surface. We can explore how to respond to the climate crisis, how movements can be more effective, or why certain sustainable practices aren't being adopted.
Constellations make visible the relationships between humans, policies, land, and the more-than-human world—and show where change wants to emerge.
Organizations, Projects, & Community Engagement
Our processes offer clarity for organizations, teams, charities, and projects where there may be environmental impact or a desire to include the perspective of place in decision-making.
We can look at organizational structure, blocks to collaboration, or the wider impact of a project on the land and its beings. This helps groups understand what supports their work, what hinders it, and how to move forward in right relationship.
Governance, Estates & Land-based Decision Making
Our services offer a way for organizations, family estates, and land stewards to include the perspectives of place, lineage, and the more-than-human world in governance.
By representing the land, its elements, and the wider field, groups can sense how different decisions affect the whole system—not just the human layer. This supports ethical planning, long-term stewardship, and policies that honor both the people involved and the living world they're accountable to.
This work is designed for groups and organizations facing complex decisions where land, community, and future generations are at stake. Those interested in individual sessions or retreats are welcome to reach out to discuss possibilities.
Frequently Asked Questions
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In systemic constellations, the field refers to a subtle relational space in which the hidden dynamics of a system become perceptible. When we set up a constellation, representatives tap into this field and begin to sense emotions, movements, and impulses that do not come from their own personal experience.
Practitioners call this the knowing field: a shared informational space that holds the history, loyalties, and unresolved patterns of the system, allowing what is usually unconscious to be revealed.
In this work, the field becomes an ally. It helps us sense what wants attention, what needs repair, and where there is potential for movement or ease. It is not something we control, but something we enter into relationship with.
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When we talk about “place” we are referring to the multilayered aspects of a geographic location.
Place is a dynamic gathering of human experience, memory, and practice, through which past and present are continuously entangled and made meaningful.
When we inquire into “place,” we are engaging with the idea that a place is lived, not just located. Places hold memory, experience, and meaning. Places include human and non-human inhabitants, objects and architectures, and environmental processes.
Through constellations we can engage with elements of place - for example ancestors, water, and the emerging future - to build out a relational picture of current influences. -
Constellations are a relational, embodied way of seeing a system as a whole. By building dynamic maps of a system (whether ecological, organizational, or personal), dynamics become visible. What is hidden or tangled can be revealed, giving us a fuller picture of what is asking to be understood or restored.
Nature constellations widen this process to include the more-than-human world — landforms, waters, ancestors, and the beings we share place with. They help us remember that our decisions and well-being are intertwined with the health of the places that hold us.
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Developed by Daan Van Kampenhout, systemic ritual weaves together systemic constellations and shamanic rituals.
It has elements of constellations (such as representatives and healing sentences) and incorporates ritualistic elements (such as drumming, the Four Directions).
Systemic ritual can be done 1-1 or in groups, large or small, and is a beautiful practice to connect with resourcing aspects of the archetypal field, ancestors, and land.
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Every process begins by exploring the the question you're holding or what kind of process is needed for your unique situation.
Sessions can take a myriad of forms, from doing an online constellation with a map of the place you are engaging with, to in-person systemic constellations, or other kinds of workshop elements that support listening to place.During a constellation session, we work together, we map the elements of your system — stakeholders, places, forces at play, or unseen influences — and allow the constellation to unfold at its own pace. Representatives may be used to embody different elements (people, land features, organizational forces), revealing dynamics that aren't visible through conventional analysis.
A process may include land-based ritual (if in-person). Sessions can range from a half-day to multi-day retreats, depending on the complexity of the question and the needs of the group.
Each process is unique and developed collaboratively with your team to serve your specific context and goals.
Your guide
I’m Andrea Langlois, and I created The Clearing to work at the intersection of systemic leadership, ritual, and organizational life. For nearly three decades, I’ve worked inside and alongside organizations — from those rooted in human rights and sacred economics, to groups focused on biocultural conservation, land, and stewardship.
Across these spaces, I saw a common pattern: decisions were being made without a way to include the voice of place. Organizations were striving to honor the land, act in right relationship, and envision futures aligned with the living world — yet the processes they relied on often couldn’t hear the broader relational field.
The Clearing is my response.
Through systemic constellations, ritual, and field-based listening, we make visible relationships that are present but often overlooked — the patterns, messages, and ecological dynamics that shape how systems move.
My role is to create a container where strategy meets sensing, and where leadership can be informed by place and time: where rivers, forests, histories, and lineages can take their place at the table, and organizations can practice what many now call “Nature on the Board” — not symbolically, but relationally.
I collaborate with skilled practitioners in ritual, systemic constellation, and nature communication to support the work as needed.
