Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

How can we turn everyday moments of sadness, disappointment, anger and shame into gateways to awakening? And is there an easy way to dissolve the sense of separation that lies at the root of our suffering?

Building on last week's episode, which featured an introductory practice from the Wholeness Work, we're delighted to share this dialogue with Connirae Andreas, who shares the story of how she created this unique healing modality.

Matthew and Connirae explore the principles underpinning the Wholeness Work, the relationship between healing and awakening, and her unique approach to integrating individual, ancestral and collective trauma.

Connirae explains that the Wholeness Work supports us to access a more fundamental aspect of the structure of our psyche than we might have previously been able to reach. This process can help us transform our relationship with challenging life issues, reset our nervous system, dissolve troubling emotions and establish a greater sense of inner ground.

The dialogue covers topics including:

• How suffering arises from artificial separation in the psyche

• How a health crisis prompted deeper spiritual search

• Previous encounter with psychiatrist Dr Milton H. Erickson

• A months-long experience of deep peace

• Search for a systematic approach to spiritual awakening

• Development of the Wholeness Work

• Finding the "I" inside

• Moving beyond our "limited self structures"

• Turning daily challenges into gateways to awakening

• Building a global network of Wholeness Work practitioners

We're excited to be building connectivity between the Pocket Project, whose work is inspired by the collective trauma integration practices of co-founder Thomas Hübl, and other pioneers in the global healing movement such as Connirae.

We hope you find the introductory Wholeness Work practice featured on last week's episode a supportive resource. We're excited to share the story of how this work came into being in this latest episode of What Is Collective Healing?

Special Gifts:

Connirae has kindly offered these gifts to our listeners, both of which can be accessed by registering here:

1. Free Bonus Video

• Experience the beginning steps of Wholeness Work in a personal 12-minute guided session with Connirae — a gentle introduction you can try right away.

1. 10 Percent Off Live or Online Training

Obtain a discount code to Join Connirae in-person in Cologne, Germany from September 18-28, 2026 or live online — starting in November 2026.

Further Resources:

Additional Guidance to Support the Practice in last week's Bonus Practice Episode

AndreasNLP.com

TheWholenessWork.org

The Wholeness Work Essential Guide. Level 1: Healing and Awakening.

Pocket Project Links:

Register for the Pocket Project Community Call, Neuroinclusive Approaches: Cultivating Spaces Where We Can All Belong on September 23

Pocket Project Global Social Witnessing Calls

Pocket Project

About Connirae Andreas:

Connirae Andreas, PhD is an internationally known author and personal transformation and healing leader for over four decades. She is best known for her groundbreaking work developing Core Transformation, through which our limitations become the doorway to a felt experience many describe "love", "peace", "presence", or "oneness." Through the steps of the process, this felt experience offers a profound healing, resolving many limiting emotions and behaviors. Her new Wholeness Work begins by offering a precise way to experience "dissolving the ego," a long-time spiritual goal, in a way that releases stress and resolves many life issues. This work utilizes a new mapping of the unconscious, to uncover the "universal structures of the unconscious that hold problems in place" – and offers specific formats to transform each of them. Connirae's work is strongly influenced by her personal experience with the late Dr. Milton H. Erickson.

Notes by Matthew Green Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

Practice created and shared by Connirae Andreas. Used with permission.

The team here at What is Collective Healing? has long been intrigued by Connirae Andreas, an author and personal transformation and healing leader who's built a global following for her Wholeness Work.

In this two-part series, we're taking a deep dive into the Wholeness Work to explore how Connirae's approach can help integrate individual, ancestral and collective trauma.

In today's Bonus Practice Episode, we're offering listeners an opportunity to experience a 24-minute guided Wholeness Work practice led by Connirae. (You can find some additional guidance to support this practice here).

In next week's episode, Matthew speaks with Connirae about the remarkable story that led to the Wholeness Work, the relationship between healing and awakening, and her unique approach to integrating individual, ancestral and collective trauma.

We're excited to be building connectivity between the Pocket Project, whose work is inspired by the collective trauma integration practices of co-founder Thomas Hübl, and other pioneers in the global healing movement such as Connirae.

We hope you find this guided Wholeness Work practice a supportive resource and look forward to sharing Matthew's dialogue with Connirae in the next episode of What Is Collective Healing?

Special Gifts:

Connirae has kindly offered these gifts to our listeners, both of which can be accessed by registering here:

1. Free Bonus Video

• Experience the beginning steps of Wholeness Work in a personal 12-minute guided session with Connirae — a gentle introduction you can try right away.

1. 10 Percent Off Live or Online Training

• Obtain a discount code to Join Connirae in-person in Cologne, Germany from September 18-28, 2026 or live online — starting in November 2026.

Further Resources:

Additional Guidance to Support the Practice in this Episode

AndreasNLP.com

TheWholenessWork.org

The Wholeness Work Essential Guide. Level 1: Healing and Awakening.

Pocket Project Links:

Register for the Pocket Project Community Call, Neuroinclusive Approaches: Cultivating Spaces Where We Can All Belong on September 23

Pocket Project Global Social Witnessing Calls

Pocket Project

About Connirae Andreas:

Connirae Andreas, PhD is an internationally known author and personal transformation and healing leader for over four decades. She is best known for her groundbreaking work developing Core Transformation, through which our limitations become the doorway to a felt experience many describe "love", "peace", "presence", or "oneness." Through the steps of the process, this felt experience offers a profound healing, resolving many limiting emotions and behaviors. Her new Wholeness Work begins by offering a precise way to experience "dissolving the ego," a long-time spiritual goal, in a way that releases stress and resolves many life issues. This work utilizes a new mapping of the unconscious, to uncover the "universal structures of the unconscious that hold problems in place" – and offers specific formats to transform each of them. Connirae's work is strongly influenced by her personal experience with the late Dr. Milton H. Erickson.

Hosted by Matthew Green Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

What happens when men, women and people of other genders come together to acknowledge the previously unspoken distrust that exists between them? And how can we move beyond victim narratives to ask what lessons perpetrators may have to teach?

On July 1, the Pocket Project held From the Epstein Files to Inside the Manosphere – Tending to Fractured Gender Relations, an online Global Social Witnessing Call attended by more than 150 participants.

Pamela von Sabljar, Sean Talbeaux, and Matthew Green spoke during the call about their responses to abuses by powerful men revealed in the Epstein Files and the activities of misogynistic social media influencers.

In this episode, Matthew invited Pamela and Sean to return to the Pocket Project to extend the reflection they began during that powerful Global Social Witnessing call. Themes they address include:

• Relationship between safety, dominance, privilege
• Male muteness and shame
• The power of being witnessed in our perpetration
• Are we telling ourselves we're more fragile than we are?
• Working through reactivity with the Drama Triangle
• Challenges men face in showing vulnerability relative to women
• Societal dangers of casting all men as pathological
• Finding new ways to channel primordial masculine energy
• Healthy competition vs shadow competition
• What happens when men and women acknowledge mutual distrust?

This episode offers a rich and nuanced dialogue speaking to some of the key questions in collective healing work oriented towards bridging divides between men and women.

For more on this theme, please see these previous episodes:

Opening the Heart of Humanity by Healing the Gender Wound, with Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin

Calling Men Into Presence: Masculinity Beyond Separation and Struggle, with Kevin Young

Further Resources:

Pamela von Sabljar (Website)

Sean Talbeaux (Website)

What Doesn't Change (Sean Talbeaux's newsletter)

Resonant World (Matthew Green's newsletter)

Resonant Man

Pocket Project Links:

Register for the Pocket Project Community Call, Neuroinclusive Approaches: Cultivating Spaces Where We Can All Belong on September 23

Pocket Project

Pocket Project Global Social Witnessing Calls

About Pamela von Sabljar:

Pamela serves as a catalyst for leaders and organizations to create deeper human connection and supports them to foster the conditions for emergence.

In addition to co-hosting the largest global Emergent Dialogue training in the world, she leads the Facilitating the Shift Masterclasses, hosts training on cutting edge sensemaking platforms like Rebel Wisdom, Emerge Network, Foundation of Ekskäret. She is also a mentor for new paradigm leaders, Co-Initiator of the Nordic Women's gathering, and a sacred Spanda Tantrika.

Pamela has 25 years experience in leadership, personal development, and behavioral science. She has worked with businesses, public sectors, and private individuals specializing in personal, group, and organizational development. In addition, she has founded several systemic change projects and leadership programs in advanced self-awareness and self-leadership.

She is the author of books on self-development and gender equality pedagogy, also writing several children's books.

Pamela is operating in the borderland between science and spirituality; she invites people to go beyond what separates us to meet the most pressing need on the planet: to nurture a more conscious humanity and a more regenerative world.

About Sean Talbeaux:

Sean is certified in psilocybin facilitation, trained in trauma-attuned touch, somatic therapies, and group process work.

His work is influenced by training in Hakomi, the Neuro-Affective Relational Model (NARM), and the philosophy of Internal Family Systems (IFS).

Sean has guided over 100 men through transformative, immersive experiences, both in 1:1 and group retreat containers.

But Sean believes the credential that matters most is this: He knows what it's like to be maxed out and still need to show up. To feel his nervous system hijacked by reactivity and have to find his way back to steady ground.

To lead when you don't feel like a leader.

The men Sean works with aren't broken. They're capable, committed, and navigating complexity that would flatten most people. They're just tired of being jerked around by their own nervous systems.

Sean helps them access the part within themselves that doesn't change — the steady center that remains present regardless of external circumstances. Not through concepts or strategies, but through embodied practice and relational work.

The men Sean works with say this work feels like something between coaching and therapy, between guidance and mentorship. There's nothing off-limits, nothing to fix, and no part of you that's unwelcome.

Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

During a 300-year period starting in the mid-fifteenth century, an estimated 40,000-60,000 people were executed in Europe after being found guilty of practising witchcraft. Taking into account the toll of lynchings, deaths from torture, prison deaths and suicides in detention, some estimates put the overall death toll from the witch trials as high as 100,000.

Recorded in judicial proceedings, woodcut engravings and contemporary manuscripts, the ordeals endured by the accused bear testament to a dark chapter in early modern history that might seem to belong squarely in the continent's past.

But how might the traumatic legacy of the false testimony, terror, torture, and shattered kinship ties associated with the trials — where 80 percent of the condemned were women — live on in our ancestry, bodies and cultures? And how might people today transmute the reverberations of this painful inheritance and loosen deeply ingrained patterns of fear, suppression, and self-censorship? What does it take to step out of the legacy of the witch hunts and reclaim the freedom to shape our lives through authentic voice, creative expression, and embodied autonomy?

In February, Andrea Livingston and Lysan Boshuyzen launched one of the more than 40 Pocket Project Integration Labs running over the course of this year to explore these questions and more.

Witch Hunts: Echoes of Europe's Witch Trials in our Bodies, Lineages and Culture is providing a space for participants to address the interplay of religion, colonialism, hysteria, capitalism, misogyny, and the erasure of Indigenous European spiritual and earth-based practices during the witch hunt era.

In this episode, Andrea and Lysan speak about the personal journeys that prompted them to address this topic and the many nuanced and complex layers of individual, collective and ancestral trauma the Lab is helping participants to unearth and integrate.

Themes they discuss include:

• Unexpectedly meeting witch trials during ancestral work
• Societal impact of technological innovation: The printing press and AI
• Use of "witch" as a derogatory term in contemporary politics
• Andrea's ancestral call to Scotland
• Liberating ancestral terror at the Orkney Witchcraft Trials Memorial
• Lysan's exploration of how the legacy of the witch hunts shaped inter-generational attitudes towards women and women's fears of sharing their authentic voice
• Intimacy of the trauma of witchcraft accusations within communities
• Impact of witch trials on relationships and trust between women and within families
• Societal upheaval and the formation of the early modern state
• Enduring impact of the 1486 Malleus Maleficarum, better known as the The Hammer of Witches, that went "viral" in the 16th century
• How exploring historical material impacted Lab participants
• Qualities needed to engage with collective trauma fields
• How some participants are feeling a renewed inner anchor and connection to the land
• Impact of the witch trials on men
• Pat McCabe's work on the archetypal "wounding of the human lineage"
• Exploring how witch trials shaped our modern world
• Global significance and future of collective healing work

This episode is a must-listen for anybody who wishes to understand more about how this grim aspect of early modernity may be continuing to shape contemporary experience. It's also an opportunity to hear from two leading-edge practitioners how collective healing works in practice.

To register your interest in future offerings related to the witch hunts by Andrea and Lysan, please click here.

The Pocket Project will be accepting applications for the next cycle of Integration Labs in January, 2027.

Andrea Livingston's Website, Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin

Lysan Boshuyzen's Website, LinkedIn

Further Resources:

Timeline, interactive map, resources, and image gallery

The Memorial Project Commemorating the Victims of the Orkney Witchcraft Trials

Pat McCabe speaking on her experience with the witch trials

Book: Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, by Silvia Federici (2018); Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, by Anne Barstow (1994)

Podcast: BBC Witch

Documentary by ARTE: Witches, Chronicle of a Massacre

Historical Texts:

Daemonologie by James VI and I ( James Charles Stuart) (1597)

Malleus Maleficarum, better known as the Hammer of the Witches (1486)

Pocket Project Links:

Pocket Project

Pocket Project Integration Labs 2026

Upcoming Global Social Witnessing Calls:

The Earthquake in Colombia: Opening our Solidarity & Care (August 26, 2026)

About Andrea Livingston:

Andrea Livingston has been a dedicated student and practitioner of individual, ancestral, and collective healing for over a decade. She holds an MA in Consciousness and Transformative Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Ecotherapy from JFK University and is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. She has been studying with Thomas Hübl since 2014 and now serves as an assistant in the Timeless Wisdom Training. She is currently the Associate Director of Engagement at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) where she produces events that bring together the wisdom of both science and spirituality.

About Lysan Boshuyzen:

Lysan Boshuyzen is a facilitator, coach, and advisor of mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) in humanitarian and post-conflict contexts, with a special focus on collective and generational dimensions of trauma. Over the last decade, she worked at the Dutch MFA, ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre and with peacebuilders and changemakers worldwide, combining in-depth knowledge of trauma fields with political and practical experience. She also co-founded a foundation supporting resilience and mental health worldwide. As a certified Collective Trauma Facilitator, she integrates 15 years of bodywork and meditation practice into her approach.

Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

Therapist and teacher Markus Hirzig has pursued a central question throughout his decades-long career: Why, despite our enormous human potential, do we so often get caught in patterns that limit us and drain our energy — and how can we break these cycles?

Having started out as a physiotherapist and osteopath, Markus began looking for answers in the body by deeply exploring patterns of movement and tension.

Then, after meeting Thomas Hübl, co-founder of the Pocket Project, more than 20 years ago, Markus went on to play a pivotal role in helping to pioneer collective trauma integration practices in Germany.

Markus has since worked to bring principles of collective healing to a global audience via his own in-person and online training and by co-leading a team of assistants supporting Thomas' two-year Timeless Wisdom Training and other offerings.

In this episode, Markus reflects on the journey since his early days of working with groups in Germany with Thomas, when collective energies linked to the Second World War, the Holocaust and the East-West divide began to surface in striking ways.

Markus explains how he learned the crucial importance of supporting participants in collective healing processes to gradually learn to regulate their nervous systems — a practice he also shares in his free Open Trainings.

Markus sees this self-regulation capacity as essential to creating the kind of stable ground from which deeper exploration, integration and change become possible.

Themes Markus and Matthew explore include:

• Early days of learning to work with collective trauma

• Collective trauma patterns as "bubbles" in the wider field

• Role of self-regulation in collective healing work

• Origins of collaboration with Thomas Hübl

• Working with Germany's undigested past

• Surfacing ancestral war-time memories

• Germany's reckoning with the Second World War and the Holocaust

• Creating spaces to host the emergence of new possibilities

• Using intention to address specific fields of collective trauma

• Building collective healing architecture on a global scale

• Role of outside perspectives in national collective trauma work

This powerful episode offers a chance to hear directly from one of the luminaries in this field about how collective trauma integration work has evolved over the years, the wisdom accrued along the way — and where the global healing movement might go next.

Further Resources:

Markus Hirzig's Open Trainings

Related Pocket Project Programmes:

Resilience Programme, Phase II (A standalone facilitation training).

Pocket Project

About Markus Hirzig:

Markus began his journey into healing in the 1970s and 80s, becoming a physiotherapist and later an osteopath. For decades, he worked in private practice while also teaching classes.

Starting from a deeply body-oriented perspective, Maruks trained his perception of movement and patterns within the physical body. Along the way, he also discovered a connection to what we might call "subtle energetic perception" — or a deeper field of information behind the physical.

This opened up questions that have shaped Markus' work ever since: Why do we have so much potential, and yet so often find ourselves caught in patterns that limit us and drain our energy? How can we break these cycles? And how much of what we experience as individuals is connected to our families, our ancestry and the collective?

These questions led Markus into decades of exploring individual, family, ancestral and collective patterns and trauma. Over time, Markus came to understand self-regulation as an essential foundation for this work: the capacity to recognise when we are triggered, stay present with what arises, and distinguish between our own experience and what may be connected to larger family, systemic or collective fields. Again and again, returning to regulation creates the ground from which deeper exploration, integration and change become possible.

Today, Markus works as a therapist and teacher, both in person and online. Markus regularly offers free online Open Trainings where people can experience this work firsthand.

Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

When we embark on a healing path, there will inevitably come a point when we meet parts of ourselves that we'd previously managed to deny or avoid.

At the personal level, this can look like reflecting on things we said or did in the past that we now regret, or gaining a new perspective on habitual patterns of relating that we've started to outgrow.

As we widen the scope of our integration work, we may meet transgressions committed by our ancestors, or discover how legacies of perpetration carried out at the collective level — from war crimes and genocide to racial oppression and gender-based violence — live on in our own system, shaping our perceptions of ourselves and each other in limiting ways.

In this episode, Thomas Hübl shares core mystical principles for working with the "shadow trauma" of perpetration at the individual, inter-generational and collective scales, and why he sees this work as so essential at this time.

A key dimension of his approach relates to the spiritual principle of grace.

When people suffer trauma as a result of experiencing transgressions committed by others, the flow of grace is much more readily available to support the healing process, Thomas says.

But when we commit acts of perpetration — whether as individuals or collectives —then access to grace can be drastically curtailed. The parts of our nervous system that might allow us to feel what we have done to the other are shut down. It thus takes a special effort on behalf of the perpetrator to overcome the unconscious impulse to turn away from past transgressions committed and instead look clearly at what happened. That act of turning-towards the ethical violations can allow grace once again to flow.

"On the transgressor side, we have to be awake enough to say, 'I want to look at this,'" Thomas says. "And that motivation comes out of a growing sense of love and compassion and responsibility that wants to restore the ethical confusion. Then it reactivates grace, and then support comes."

Other key takeaways from this episode include:

• Thomas' concept of 'Divine Law' and its relationship to internal alignment and right action

• How the healing process might bring us into contact with pain we had previously numbed and why that's a sign of progress

• The importance of healing communities in meeting transgression

• Finding a healthy relationship to our ancestral lineage

• The connection between our integrated trauma and global events

• How healing perpetration trauma restores Divine Law and opens up new pathways for ethical action

• Why peace is not the absence of conflict — but arises from cultivating our capacity to stay in relation when we disagree

This lively and accessible dialogue offers core insights into some of the most challenging aspects of individual and collective healing work and the mystical principles that can orient us even in the face of life's darkest shadows.

This conversation was first published on Thomas' Point of Relation podcast.

For an introductory dialogue between Thomas and Matthew on healing and awakening, please click here to access last week's episode of What Is Collective Healing?

Related Pocket Project Programmes:

Resilience Programme, Phase II (A standalone facilitation training).

Further Resources:

Point of Relation podcast (with Thomas Hübl)

Thomas Hübl

Thomas Hübl on Instagram

Pocket Project

About Thomas Hübl:

Thomas Hübl, PhD, is a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator who works within the complexity of systems and cultural change, integrating the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science. Since the early 2000s, he has led large-scale events and courses on the healing of collective trauma.

His new book, co-authored with Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, is called Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral and Collective Trauma. Thomas is also the author of Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World and Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. He has served as an advisor and guest faculty for universities and organizations, as a coach for CEOs and organizational leaders, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.

Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

Healing from trauma — whether inflicted in our lifetime, passed down by our ancestors, or present in the collective — is an inevitably uncomfortable, messy and ambiguous process, which may never feel entirely resolved or complete.

Many contemplative practices, by contrast, hold out the promise of a sudden awakening experience that reveal our sense of a separate self to be an illusion, and thus cut through our mind-created suffering like a sword.

In this episode, teacher and facilitator Thomas Hübl, a co-founder of the Pocket Project, explores this apparent contradiction by demonstrating how the paths of healing and awakening are properly seen as aspects of the same revelatory process.

"This is one mountain," Thomas says. "Deep spiritual traditions usually have different practice areas, 'departments' if you will. But they are all working together as one consciousness stream."

Thomas goes on to develop an integrated vision of how trauma healing, spiritual awakening, ethical conduct, and participation in supportive communities form four mutually reinforcing pillars to support us to embody more "light" and share our gifts more fully.

As we practice this approach, we realise that we are not following some preformed trail that's waiting there for us to find it — but that our path is being created as we walk.

"What does it mean to be authored by life — not by the horizontal expectations of other people — but by the real stream of life?," Thomas asks. "What's really coming out of me that's unique in my expression, and how can we support that?"

Thomas emphasises that this commitment to self-realisation is an essential contribution to growing our collective capacity to tap into the inspiration and innovation we need to tackle today's interlocking crises.

"I believe we are living in a time of collective awakening — this is the moment. So [we] need more embodied light so that we can really ground a new state of consciousness as humanity. And that is also going to be the answer to some of the pressing issues that we see in the world."

As Thomas acknowledges, in darker phases of life, we can sometimes feel cut off from the light – but we can still sense the echo of something higher.

"Even if it's an echo, we feel that there is something bigger than our suffering. It's very important not to forget that even if it feels stuck or hard or challenging right now, there's something deeper also that is always — even if it's in the background — present."

This visionary dialogue penetrates to the heart of some of the most profound and mysterious concepts at the heart of collective healing practices in an exceptionally lively and accessible way.

This warm-hearted conversation will also nourish anyone who feels ready to let go of struggle, embody more of their essence, and let life's infinite intelligence be your guide.

This conversation was first published on Thomas' Point of Relation podcast.

Related Pocket Project Programmes:

Resilience Programme, Phase II (A standalone facilitation training).

Further Resources:

Point of Relation podcast (with Thomas Hübl)

Thomas Hübl

Thomas Hübl on Instagram

Pocket Project

About Thomas Hübl:

Thomas Hübl, PhD, is a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator who works within the complexity of systems and cultural change, integrating the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science. Since the early 2000s, he has led large-scale events and courses on the healing of collective trauma.

His new book, co-authored with Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, is called Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral and Collective Trauma. Thomas is also the author of Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World and Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. He has served as an advisor and guest faculty for universities and organizations, as a coach for CEOs and organizational leaders, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.

May Pundak is the Israeli co-executive director of A Land for All, a joint Palestinian-Israeli movement working towards a political framework in which two democratic, sovereign states exist within a shared homeland, rooted in equality, freedom, and dignity.

In a dialogue first broadcast as part of the Pocket Project's World Women Summit: Women Rising for Peace in March, May speaks about her commitment to keeping "that spark of constructive, practical hope" alive despite the devastating escalation in violence since the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel. In September last year, a U.N. commission of inquiry concluded that the Israeli state had committed genocide in Gaza in response. Israel's government rejected the findings.

"We have to keep that flame of political imagination of an alternative so that people, when they are confronted by this conflict, their immediate response won't be, 'oh, it's impossible', but rather 'you know what? I've actually heard of a really interesting new idea,'" May tells host Kosha Joubert.

By envisioning a form of confederation, with gradual steps towards freedom of movement and residence for all Israelis and Palestinians, A Land for All's 'two states, one homeland' model aims to offer national self-determination without domination, shared governance without erasing identity, and security without subjugation.

"Maybe the most hopeful thing that I can share is that we're a movement that is growing, that is since October 7th, we've been growing," May says.

This moving dialogue shows how Israelis and Palestinians are coming together in the most challenging of circumstances to build a shared vision for peace, and powerfully articulates the importance of love and belonging as the foundations for all peace-building work.

Further Resources:

A Land for All

Support the Pocket Project's Work in the Middle East:

Jewish Trauma Relief Project

Spaces of Belonging: Resilience and Community for Palestinians (Fundraiser)

Palestine Trauma Relief Project

Catch Up on the Podcast Episodes Mentioned:

Bonus Poem Episode, with Carolina Herbert

Building Circles of Resilience in Ukraine, with Daria Yemets

About May Pundak:

May Pundak is a mother, daughter and granddaughter, a partner, feminist lawyer and activist and co-director of A Land for All. In her previous role, she worked at the New Israel Fund in the United States. May assisted in establishing a legal team to support political struggles in East Jerusalem and co-founded an educational dialogue group program. May is a graduate of the Mandel School of Educational Leadership and a graduate of Harvard University's Leadership, Community Organizing and Activism course. She holds a teaching certificate in civics and a bachelor's and master's degree in law in the field of public and international law, with an emphasis on human rights, including Transitional Justice studies, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A Land for All is a joint Israeli-Palestinian political initiative rooted in the lived reality of this land. It was founded by people who know the conflict not from headlines but from daily life. Together, we have dared to imagine a different future and have crafted a shared political vision grounded in dignity, equality, and belonging for both peoples.

We are a generative source of ideas and expertise for policymakers and peacebuilders seeking to advance a two-state solution that is not only equitable in theory but workable in practice - for both peoples. Our model rejects zero-sum thinking on complex issues like Jerusalem, settlements, and refugees, and instead promotes creative and fair solutions.

Since 2012, we have brought together activists, academics, diplomats, and thought leaders around a simple and powerful truth: this land is home to two peoples. Any lasting resolution must affirm the equal right of both nations to self-determination - while honoring their unique identities, histories, and needs. Our lives are already inextricably intertwined, not only emotionally and historically, but in the most basic, everyday ways: through shared aquifers, electricity grids, labor markets, and security realities. A shared peaceful future requires a political framework that reflects our interdependence, alongside our separate needs. Without it, we remain trapped in the cycles of fear, violence, and loss.

The brutal attack on Israel on October 7th and the unprecedented and unrelenting violence that has followed in the Gaza Strip and West Bank have laid bare the urgent need for a just and lasting resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Decades of occupation, escalating violence, and the erosion of democratic space have brought us to a critical turning point, revealing the patent failure of efforts to "manage" the conflict.

In response, the international community has renewed its support for the two-state solution. Yet the assumptions underpinning the Oslo Accords - rigid geographical separation and indifference towards deeply held historical and identity ties - have proven unworkable. The time has come for a two-state solution that can actually work--one that guarantees self-determination for both peoples while embracing our interdependence and common attachment to the land.

A Land for All: Two States, One Homeland - was founded by Israelis and Palestinians as a joint movement with a vision both simple and transformative. We envision two democratic, sovereign states - Israel and Palestine - linked together in a confederation with gradual steps toward freedom of movement and residence for all Israelis and Palestinians across our shared homeland. Our model offers national self-determination without domination, shared governance without erasing identity, and security without subjugation.

Poem written and performed by Carolina Herbert. Used with her permission.

Introduced by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

In this special episode, we bring you a poem by Carolina Herbert, a PhD Arts Psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and expressive arts practitioner. Entitled 'Between Inheritance and Hiraeth,' the work explores ancestral work, collective memory and forgiveness.

The poem grew out of Carolina's experience in Being White British: Colonised and Colonisers, one of more than 40 Integration Labs the Pocket Project is hosting this year to address different aspects of collective and intergenerational trauma around the world.

Carolina writes:

"What the Lab created was a quality of collective presence and witnessing that I have rarely encountered, and it became the conditions in which something that had been forming for a long time could finally find its shape.

"The deeper roots of the poem go back several years. I have been on a long exploration of ancestral work, collective memory and forgiveness, asking what it means to truly reckon with what we have inherited, both the wounding and the wisdom, and what responsibility we carry to those who came before and those who will come after.

"This inquiry took a very specific form through Sori, a travelling podcast I created exploring apology and forgiveness in communities and cultures around the world through creative arts, therapy, music and songwriting. We have recorded 14 episodes across several countries, holding conversations about what forgiveness means across different cultural and ancestral traditions.

"When I returned to the UK after twenty years of living and working in Cambodia, I found it deeply confronting, the sense of collective sleeping around the level of harm that colonisation has caused and continues to cause around the world. Coming home, in that sense, was not a homecoming but an awakening to something I had perhaps been circling for years without being able to name it so directly. The Lab has helped me begin to focus and explore my own deeper response to this, to find a form for what I was carrying, and for that I am profoundly grateful.

"The Lab gave me the opportunity to consolidate and channel all of this into this poem. I arrived with all that accumulated inquiry sitting in me somewhere, and the quality of witnessing in the group gave it permission to emerge in this form."

We hope this episode will mark the first in a series featuring creative work emerging from the Pocket Project Integration Labs.

We welcome any Lab participant who would like to submit poems or other forms of creative expression for consideration to contact Matthew here.

Further Resources:

Carolina Herbert

Blue Pearl Institute

Carolina on LinkedIn

Carolina on Facebook

Carolina on Instagram

Pocket Project Integration Labs 2026

Contact Matthew

About Carolina Herbert:

Dr Carolina Herbert is a PhD Arts Psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, educator, consultant, celebrant and expressive arts practitioner with over 25 years of international experience in trauma-informed practice, humanitarian mental health and psychosocial support, and leadership development. Her work has taken her across South East Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia, accompanying individuals, communities and organisations through some of the most demanding circumstances human beings face.

At the heart of her practice is a deep trust in the creative and imaginal capacities that human beings carry, the capacity to make meaning from suffering, to find form for what has no words, and to discover in the arts a pathway back to what matters most. This trust has shaped everything: her clinical work, her training programmes, her organisational consultancy, her songwriting and her writing.

She is the founder of Blue Pearl Institute for Expressive Arts: Therapy and Leadership, based in Gower, Wales, the UK's first nature-inspired expressive arts therapy and leadership institute, and a member of the International Network of Expressive Arts Institutes. Blue Pearl delivers practitioner training, accredited CPD and nature-based wellbeing programmes across Wales, Cambodia and online, with an international faculty of teachers.

Carolina is also a Global Social Witnessing facilitator and the founder of the Sori Project, an inquiry into apology, forgiveness and collective repair across cultures. Her poem on ancestry arises from this territory: an invitation to attend to what we carry across generations, and to ask what it means to respond.

She is based on the shores of Gower, Wales.

Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

How can the apparently catastrophic collapse of the person we thought we were clear the path for who we are meant to become? What might change when we dwell less on what we're doing to serve others, and focus more on the quality of consciousness from which our action arises?

Dr Rola Hallam is an award-winning humanitarian recognised for her extraordinary role in building hospitals and bringing medical aid to Syria during a decade of mass killings of civilians unleashed by the country's now-toppled dictatorship.

In this episode, Dr Rola speaks about the transformation she experienced after trauma and exhaustion she accumulated via her humanitarian work led to a 'dark night of the soul' that radically changed her understanding of herself and her service in the world.

"I was desperately trying to pull us forward and into a better future because the present seemed so unbearable. And I think that crash that I had was really this almighty sort of cataclysmic rupture that in some ways forced me to sit in the cracks," Dr Rola says.

"The pain, the grief, the rage, the powerlessness — everything that I had suppressed in all those years, I had to feel them, I had to learn to be with them, I had to integrate them and transmute them so that I could also reconnect to more of that unconditional love, more to joy, more to beauty, more to my right responsibility."

Called to the role of doctor from childhood, Dr Rola also felt a strong sense of warriorship from a young age — a combination of archetypal energies that would propel her later relief work in her Syrian homeland, where women and children bore the brunt of the former regime's atrocities.

Dr Rola's burnout experience helped her to unravel how some of her own early traumas had shaped her path as a "wounded healer". But it also reflected her experience as a "wounded visionary" — struggling with the pain of the mismatch between the world she could imagine and present reality.

With the support of her Sufi practice, various trauma modalities, and psychedelic-assisted therapies, Dr Rola began to harvest the gold hidden in her dark night experience and now offers programmes to support people to build resilience and navigate the collapse-rebirth cycle.

These include her new nine-month journey called Wise Warriors. "I would say that is the home of this transformation from clever to wise so that we can all become this healing impulse, this healing presence…for collective liberation, for collective awakening," Dr Rola says.

This dialogue provides a vivid illustration of the power of grace to transform our most vulnerable moments into portals for growth and awakening. It also reminds us of our innate capacity to tap into a living stream of inspiration to meet personal and global challenges.

"It's so easy to look at the scale of everything and feel too small and too insignificant," Dr Rola says. "But I hope that if nothing else, our conversation today is a reminder of not just our responsibility, but of the agency, of the potency in each one of us to really be a positive contribution. And that is all that is asked of us."

Further Resources:

Dr Rola Hallam (website)

Wise Warriors

The Resilient Leadership Workshop

Saving Syria's Children (BBC Documentary)

Related Pocket Project Programmes:

Resilience Programme, Phase II (A standalone facilitation training starting in July).

About Rola Hallam:

​Dr Rola Hallam is an award-winning Syrian-British doctor, humanitarian, trauma-informed coach, speaker and spiritual teacher whose work sits at the meeting place of healing, leadership and sacred service.

As founder of CanDo, Rola helped build seven hospitals in Syria and supported care for more than four million people in conflict-affected communities. She has witnessed the devastating impact of war, burnout, moral injury and trauma, not only in the world's hardest places, but also in the bodies and hearts of those who serve.

Honoured as the first Syrian TED Fellow, Rola has spoken on global stages alongside presidents, celebrities, grassroots activists and changemakers. Her talks have been viewed more than 11 million times, inspiring people around the world to reimagine what healing, leadership and social change can look like.

After her own experience of burnout and PTSD, Rola's work evolved beyond emergency medicine and humanitarian action into a deeper exploration of nervous system repair, embodied resilience and spiritual transformation. Today, she guides sensitive leaders, healers, frontline workers and changemakers to move from survival, self-abandonment and depletion into wholeness, truth and sacred responsibility.

Her approach brings together Western medicine, trauma healing, somatic work, Sufi wisdom, embodied resilience and expanded states of consciousness. At the heart of her work is a simple but radical invitation: that our presence is medicine, and that when we heal what lives within us, our service becomes less about sacrifice and more about devotion, aliveness and right relationship with the world.