Jane Peterson, PhD & Don Chitwood

Human Systems Institute was founded by Jane Peterson and Don Chitwood, life and business partners. They have been married since 1981. HSII is a small, focused organization with the goal of developing and teaching effective methods of healing and knowing ourselves.

Jane Peterson, PhD, is the co-founder and executive director of the Human Systems Institute, Inc. She is the originator of Somatic Imaging and the somatic-resonance approach to constellation work. Her work is internationally respected for being tailored to meet the high learning demands of adult professionals. She was a faculty member at the International Intensive Workshop on Systemic Resolutions in Bernreid, Germany for 9 years. Jane is an INFOSYON certified Master Trainer and has served as an advisor and author for the Knowing Field journal. She has taught systemic constellation work in Asia, South America, South Africa, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and the U.S.

In 2005, she organized the first U.S. Conference in constellation work. Her Institute offers trainings in Somatic Imaging and systemic constellation work, including training in organizational constellations. The institute is currently offering it's seventeenth year of training programs.

Jane started her professional career as an engineer and manager in a high tech firm (the first woman engineer hired into her department) and knows first-hand the demands placed on leaders in the corporate environment. In the course of becoming a constellation facilitator, she has also been a professional ceramic sculptor and ran her own fine arts studio, Laughing Bones, Inc.

Jane is a master practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming, a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, a Certified Professional Behavioral Coach and a member of the American Counseling Association, VOIS, OHA, and ODN. She has studied Process Oriented Psychology with Arny Mindell and Max Schupbach, Group Dynamics with Michael Grinder, Peruvian energy healing with Don Amèrico Yàbar, Attachment and Trauma work with Dan Siegel and Diane Poole Heller, a Psycho-biological Approach to Couples Therapy with Stan Tatkin (Level 2), Coordinated Management of Meaning with Barnett Pearce, and continues to learn with other research-driven leaders in the fields of personal and social evolution. She holds a doctorate in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University, and has been a post-doctoral fellow of the Institute for Social Innovation.

Our Story

Jane met Bert Hellinger and Hunter Beaumont in 1998 and was immediately taken with the systemic, somatic-based approach to resolving human suffering that constellation work offered. Something powerful was happening in these “constellations”, and quickly!

Jane wanted to understand the magic of the process, and to share this powerful work effectively with others. Out of that impulse, the Human Systems Institute, Inc. was formed in 1999 with the mission of introducing constellation work in the world. Twenty years later, due to the efforts of Bert Hellinger, Gunthard Weber, Albrecht Mahr, Hunter Beaumont, Sneh Schnabel, and many others who love this work, constellations seem to have taken root, with many wonderful teachers and facilitators in over 30 countries world wide.

There is still much to do, of course. Constellation work needs to find a home within the larger field of human healing and evolutionary work, and to be developed in ways that make it more accessible to more people. Our institute is engaged in that effort through trainings, workshops, individual consulting sessions and research projects.

Our Mission

Our mission is to equip innovative leaders and professionals with the skills, tools, and transformative concepts they need to evolve themselves and those within their sphere of influence. 

Whether you are a consultant, a coach, a business leader, a therapist, physician, healer, or a lawyer, or mediator… if your work involves influencing people for the better, you will gain valuable abilities to enhance yourself, your practice, your organization.

The Story of Our Logo

What organizes the seeming chaos of our lives? How do we develop patterns where we create the same result over and over again in a company, even with different people in the roles? How can unresolved trauma ripple down through a family for generations?

In 1999, when Don and I were founding this Institute, we came across the concept of “strange attractors.” These attractors organize the behavior of complex systems, which can be groups of people that interact often over time like families or companies, but you can’t see them. What we do see are the results, the sometimes unwanted repeating patterns of behavior that seem resistant to change. At any given moment in time, a couple might get into haggling over a long-standing disagreement that has not been resolved, or triangulating with a child. A business owner may be hiring and firing people for the same position but unable to get the desired performance. A work team may continue to wrestle with “clashing personalities” and unable to tap the full creative potential of the members of the group. Those moments, or states of the system, over time yield the patterns we sense but cannot quite get in our grasp.

The strange attractor is the term physicists use to describe the underlying repeating patterns in systems. Even though the system is never in the same exact state over time, the patterns emerge. Physicists devised a method for measuring the state of physical systems over time by representing it in a geometrical space. The resulting images reveal the underlying pattern that governs the behavior of that system. Here is the original image of a “strange attractor” that inspired our first logo.

Constellation work is like the physicists map of the changing states of a complex system over time; it reveals the underlying “strange attractors” that shape the dynamics. We’ve learned that each person who is involved in a living system of relationships over time carries the map of those interactions in their body, in their “felt sense” of what is happening in their relationships. By tapping this felt sense, we can make visible the dynamics governing the interactions that affect us.

Our original logo was a very literal image of the strange attractor, however, different from the original presentation, we saw in this image a bird taking flight and the movement out of old patterns of stuckness into new possibilities of freedom. 

In 2009, a graphic designer updated our image and simplified the “bird” and added the golden swoosh to show a horizon and the potential of a better future. Finally, in 2015, our current designer, Lubosh Cech, further updated the logo to the current form you see on this website.

For those who want to delve deep into understanding more about dynamical systems, here is a great introduction.

And, now you know the story, and why this image continues to inspire us. Our work reveals the hidden dynamics that shape our living web of relationship so the we can discover the possibilities for growth and freedom that lurk within patterns of despair.