Holding the responsibility of healing through the personal and the collective
Charla and I explore the layers of the personal and the collective and how we move through the "pearl necklace" of karma, which is the way we respond habitually through the lenses of trauma, ancestral gift, cultural worldview. We explore together what it means to belong, how we feel and deal with anger and where its expression belongs, performative belonging versus authenticity and the question of why is it important to have a voice? This is a quantum and personal conversation with a dear dear friend of 20 years.
Charla is concerned about the ways in which humans, both the collectivity and individual humans, are embedded in community and in larger systems, including the somatic, psychological and spiritual implications of that. As well, Charla tracks the sociopolitical consequences of: being embedded, being engulfed, being dissociated, or being conscious of one’s own role to play in this lifetime; the contingencies that led to the position one finds oneself in; and the ways in which their role and trajectory impacts the larger systems. They are concerned with the relationship between our responsibility to show up fully within larger systems and the knowing that there is a larger, vast, expanse in which these larger systems and our roles within them are playing out. Their work is an exploration of what it means to be able to hold both perspectives of personal and collective, and to show up in both ways for oneself, for other humans, and for the innumerable beings that live on our planet.
Charla is a psychoanalytic therapist living and working on Abenaki land, or New Hampshire USA, though strongly identified as a Californian. Though they work with all, they have a special interest and lived experience in trans-affirmative care, specifically focusing on work with queer and trans youth. They have practiced and facilitated rites of passage work, somatic healing sessions, sacred wilderness practices, are a longstanding practitioner of American Zen Buddhism. They anticipate entering into training for psychedelic-assisted rites of passage and psychotherapy at some point in the near future.
https://www.charlamalamed.com
Music: Carry this All by Ahlay Blakely
Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely is a descendent of Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, and British folk. She is an artist, singer-songwriter, communal grief tender, community organizer, facilitator, and ceramicist walking the path of ancestral healing and the reclaiming of lost cultural memory. Her community singing album Spells from the Unknown offers songs for collective transformation, inquiry, and living in service to the future ones. Her second album, WAILS: Songs for Grief, was recorded with a 200-person choir and is entirely dedicated to grief, inspired by the Whales of the Sea, the wails of our times, and Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow, especially “the five gates of grief.” Her forthcoming third album, Anthems for an Apocalypse, arrives September 2025 and explores themes of collapse, courage, and abolitionist love. Through her music and gatherings, ahlay invites people into deep feeling, collective remembering, and the restoration of belonging across time.
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