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Inspired by pain?
In a day and age when the world’s pain is up in our faces like never before, how do we make sense of the rise in collective wounds—anxiety, confusion, despair, trauma—that we feel?
Does it mean we’re inherently doomed? Or is there another way to look at it that a healing-centered lens offers?
What I share here is the sense-making that’s been coming through me in response to these questions.
It’s a vision of collective healing, as I’ve come to understand it—a vision that sees opportunity in pain and holds a sense of wonder at the possibility that our awareness of our collective wounds may mean we’re resourced enough to heal them.
Fractal question at the heart of it
There’s an ear-worm-of-a-question that’s been wiggling around in me for years:
What can we take from what we know about individual healing and apply it to the collective?
If you’re familiar with fractals1, it’s the type of question that invites you to gather puzzle pieces at one dimension of life and see how they might fit another.
In this case, it’s the exploration of healing—what we know about how emotions, trauma, and transformation work for us as individuals; what the fields of neuroscience and clinical psychology tell us about this—and what insights they might offer us about the phenomena we see in society today.
In particular, the rise in emotional energy in our collective nervous system.
A vision of collective healing
In this podcast episode, I share an audio recording I did in 2021 for the Presencing Institute’s Global Forum.
In it I make the case that there’s a relationship between our awareness of ourselves as a system, the rise of collective wounds that comes with that, and the opportunity it presents to us as an integral part of our transformation.
It’s the thesis that’s at the heart of my forthcoming book.
This 2021 recording is one of the many iterations of me trying to put form to this felt sense calling around collective healing, especially the big picture vision of it. Even four years later, with the thesis continuing to evolve and develop, I like how this version turned out and am excited to share it with you.
I’d love to know what you think. Write to me and let me know. Share with a friend. Let’s go in on this vision of collective healing together.
Grateful,
Fractals are self-repeating patterns that show up across different scales of a system, key to how a system organizes itself. For instance, oak trees: The way their branches form and split off from one another follows a fractal geometric pattern. Starting from the trunk, each branch is smaller and smaller, yet resembles the larger ones, repeating this same pattern throughout the tree’s structures. This self-similarity helps the tree efficiently distribute resources, like water and nutrients.
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