Sending warmth from my home in the Bronx. I saw our first snowflakes today! Cozy season is upon us.

Forgive me for sending out another thing related to my book. I’m in the midst of doing some behind-the-scenes work in prep for the new year and a new phase of work that’s brewing post-book launch. I promise I’ll be getting new, fresh pieces out shortly!

In the meantime, for those of you who—like me—enjoy a good audio journey (or just truly don’t have time to read), here is a recording of me reading Chapter 1: An Invitation of my book.

Grab your head phones and a cup of tea and join me!

If you’re looking to keep going, you can buy my book here or enjoy the Kindle ebook version for free for the next month.

Liz from We Heal For All is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Check out my new book, When the World Hurts

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wehealforall.substack.com

What is your soul’s vision of the world?

In these upside-down times, when so much is breaking down, what can we turn to for guidance? When our impact assessments fail and our political narratives implode, what sources of ‘knowing’ can we lean on?

Social change is always a moving target, but especially so now. We may never know if what we do creates the ch…

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This question might sound metaphorical: What's your relationship like with the world? "You mean, like, theoretically?"

But what I’m actually asking—and what I invite you into in today’s episode—is what’s yours like for real, for real?

What’s it like to be in relationship with the world these days—in very practical, everyday life kind of ways?

How is the world impacting you? And how does that affect how you impact it back?

In this episode, I unpack what I mean by ‘being in relationship with the world’ and explain why it’s at the heart of my work. I explore topics like:

* Seeing the world as an animate being - Meaning she is a ‘she’ or ‘he’ or ‘they’… or however you want to think about it! The world is alive. How does that reframe shift how you approach her?

* What being in ‘relationship’ means - There's a dynamic give and take between you and the world, and how you relate to her impacts how you show up.

* You’re part of the collective whether you like it or not - Even if you run off and be a cave yogi, you’re still part of the collective body. Therefore there’s the need to figure out your relationship with the world.

* It makes sense that you’re affected by her - Not just materially, but spiritually, psychologically and emotionally.

* Moving from ‘fixing’ to relating - Sure, yes we need to solve problems, but my pitch here is that meditating on our relationship with the world will help us do so, will impact how we respond and co-create the change we want to see.

Take a listen and let me know what you think!

I dive deeper into all of this in my upcoming book "When The World Hurts" coming this October. It's my debut book and I'm really excited and grateful to be getting it out there, I’d love for you to be involved.

Reach out, I'd love to connect.

Sending love to you and your relationship with the world,

Liz

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Ooph, just re-reading that subtitle "...do politics differently" does something for me.

Politics feels so inherently stuck these days. And not just on Capitol Hill—but for us as a people.

Our ability to relate to each other—to neighbors, to family members—has been seriously tested in recent years. It’s a waste of pixelated ink to write about how frequently relationships implode because of politics. It’s like our relational tools just can’t handle it!

Differing views of reality + the intensity of the times = make it seemingly impossible to be humans together right now.

Which is why the idea that we could do politics differently—and be humans together in this politically charged time differently too—inspires me. It creates a little space in the back of my heart for possibility to grow.

Which is what I invite you to explore with me here in this podcast episode.

What if we could do politics differently by meeting each other in the collective wounds underneath our political narratives, instead of the stories at the surface?

In this episode, I share my take on ideas like:

* Collective wounds drive our politics - Collective wounds are imbalances and emotional imprints carried by society due to harm, injustice, and unmet human needs. They’re at the heart of our politics—ie. the things we care about and want to change.

* We're all "tuning forks" for certain wounds - Depending on who we are and how we’re made up, different collective wounds will hit differently. It’s like our personal architecture (based on history, disposition, body) makes us more sensitive or attuned to different wounds, which explains why certain issues impassion us more than others.

* We can meet each other "below the surface" of political narratives - Our main M.O. for politics is arguing facts and political stories. Instead of getting stuck there, we can learn to recognize what collective wounds live underneath what the person is saying, even the most challenging (cough, cough horrendous) political views, and meet them there, human-to-human.

Take a listen and let me know what you think!

I do a deep dive into collective wounds in my forthcoming book, “When The World Hurts: Why The World’s Pain Makes Sense—And What You Can Do About It.” Coming out this October.

It maaayy be one of my favorite chapters in the book, so I’m excited to hear what you think.

Drop me a line, ask a question. Send me an emoji 😛 I’d love to connect.

Thanks for being here and being you, Liz

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Check out my new book, When the World Hurts

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wehealforall.substack.com

The theme of loss has been alive for me lately.

Two people in my life passed away last week—Joanna Macy, renowned eco-philosopher and activist behind The Work That Reconnects (foundational work within the field of inner-outer transformation), and Andrea Gibson, prolific poet and queer voice I’ve followed since my Philly college days. Referring to them as people in my life feels a little odd, as I didn’t know them personally. But they’ve been voices, teachers, lights influencing me for years, so their back-to-back deaths feels spiritually significant.

It has brought me into a larger reflection on loss—the many forms it takes, and the different qualities each one holds. The loss of a loved one, a relationship. Losing a job, a home. Losing yourself in something or someone for sometime. Wanting that part back.

And then there’s the more pervasive sense of loss that permeates the collective these days. I’m thinking about my country, in particular. A cultural decay, death spiral of sorts. The erosion of things as we seemingly spiral downwards.

In the episode I share with you here, I explore the invitation that’s alive for me within this reflection: what it means to really sit in the experience of loss and see what it has to offer. What is the deeper purpose or meaning buried in this loss? And can I support myself to be with it—be with the experience of loss—in a way so that it can show itself to me?

In the first half I dive deeper into these reflections, and then the second half I offer a guided meditation that invites you to do the same. To create space for your experiences of loss—whatever forms they may take—to see what they might reveal to you.

The guided meditation is for paid subscribers.

Grateful for you being here.

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This week’s episode’s a special one.

I'm reaching back into the vault to a recording I made in August 2022. It’s one of my many attempts to put words to the moment we’re living in. Even though it's a few years old, and some framing and nuance has shifted, the core ideas remain the same and central, and are at the heart of my upcoming book.

The recording dives into a smoldering questions that’s been shaping me for over a decade:

How can we shift things at the collective consciousness level?

Through reflections on sociologist Émile Durkheim’s work on the collective consciousness, I explore how the expansion of our global awareness is bringing with it not only overwhelm and disorientation—but also opportunity.

What if this moment that we’re living in, and the unimaginable growth we’re experiencing in our collective awareness of ourselves as a world, is a new entry point we can explore this question through?

What if the crisis of consciousness that so many of us feel right now, as our awareness of global suffering outpaces our tools to process it, actually creates an opening?

It’s the case and call to collective healing as I’ve come to see it. Collective healing that helps us digest everything and show up more wholeheartedly, and—of extra importance and relevance to this piece—helps us tap into the evolutionary potential of this moment, that exists within what’s happening.

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If you've ever spent any time diving deep into emotions, you may have come across the term: core emotions.

Core emotions are often thought about as the bread and butter of our emotional landscape—our anger, sadness, disgust—and they're often contrasted against what can be called inhibitory emotions like anxiety, or shame, or guilt.

If this way of thinking about emotions is totally new to you, no worries—because in today’s episode, we’re going to break down the difference between these categories and play around with the question:

What makes a core emotion ‘core?’ Why are they thought of as different than, let’s say, shame? And does that change across cultures?

I am joined by the one, the only, Dr. Anees Benferhat—known as just Anees to me. He’s a healing-centered psychiatrist and psychotherapist here in New York City, and happens to be my husband, partner, love of my life, and rock.

We go deep on exploring the differences between these categories of emotions—and have some fun doing it too.

Having maps like this to understand our inner worlds is such a gift that the times we live in offer us. And they’re tools we can use to learn how to navigate all the gut-wrenching, confusing, heinousness of the times that we live in.

So my hope is that you walk away with more grounded frameworks and tools to think about and explore your inner world—both for your own sanity, and mental and spiritual health, as well as for the unique role that you're meant to play in this world, right here and now.

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Check out my new book, When the World Hurts

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wehealforall.substack.com

Collective wounds come in all shapes and sizes.  

Some are specifically held by certain communities and family lineages due to histories of conflict or oppression. Others are shared across a whole country, such as experiences of war or pandemic. And then others are held by identity groups that span across locales, such as shared experiences of injustice or alienation.

Getting to know what collective wounds are, and the unique ones you are naturally attuned to is more important than ever. It can give you more insight into yourself—your body, your family lineage.

And it can also give you more insight into the role that you’re meant to play here on Earth at this time. What are the values that you’re being called to protect? To shout from the rooftop? To manifest more fully into the fabric of our culture these days?

In this offering, I do something a little bit different than what I typically do for my guided meditations. Instead of a pure meditation visualization, what I'll do is share a framework for thinking about collective wounds—specifically using a time-based framework, organizing them as ones related to the present, the past, and the future.

You'll then have an opportunity to see that framework in practice through me sharing my own lived experience with the current wildfires in Canada and the smoke that's coming down the Northeast from them.

The invitation here is instead of passively listening to my share, engage with it from a place of inner observations. So noticing what you notice as you listen—your body, your mind, your heart. Noticing what shifts or changes. In order for you to start to build a felt sense of this framework, and an embodied understanding of what collective wounds are and how you personally feel and sense them.

I would love to know what you think, how this lands, how this feels. Please write to me and let me know at [email protected]. And if there are others in your life who you think would resonate with this or need this, please share it with them.Subscribe: wehealforall.substack.com

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"If you’re a Republican, this is over," his mentor of ten years told him. Just like that, a decade of work—conversations, memories, laughs—would be down the drain if he dared to be the dreaded "R" word.

“This is why I’m a moderate,” my friend, a lifelong Democrat, told me. “I can’t get down with that.”

If you’re like me, you’ve seen this before. You know this story. It’s a dynamic on the left that’s been around for a bit now. One that’s hurting people—especially from within—and driving them away.

It’s what I want to create space for here—the reality of political-relational wounds and what we can do to heal them.

In particular we’ll look at ones related to left-leaning politics, although the larger theme here is applicable across the board. We’ll look at:

* What political-relational wounds are and how they live in social fields.

* Why—of all things—I’m putting a sharp eye on parts of the left.

* The opportunity we have in front of us.

* Ways I’ve been experimenting with how to create spaces of cultural healing for them.

If you’re looking to offer collective healing space like this, consider checking out my We Heal For All Circle training—a self-paced program to get you started.

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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.

In this podcast episode, I share an audio recording I did in 2021 for the Presencing Institute’s Global Forum. 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.

Grateful, Liz

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Check out my new book, When the World Hurts