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.

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.

Hosted by Kosha Joubert. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

How can we meet this time of polarisation, breakdown and chaos by turning our lives into 'instruments of repair'? How can we undertake the work of healing and reconciliation needed to restore relations between genders?

Amy Elizabeth Fox is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mobius Executive Leadership, a global transformational leadership firm, and longtime collaborator with the Pocket Project and its co-founder Thomas Hübl.

In this episode, Amy and Kosha build on insights from Leading in Chaos, Amy's new book co-authored with Nicholas Janni, to explore how to develop the inner ground that supports us to align with a sense of larger unfolding in this era of fluidity and change.

"We know that the operating system we've relied on in a command-and-control predictable world will not be sufficient to grapple with these times of uncertainty and churn," Amy says. "So we're going to have to build inside organizations what I've been calling nests, which are small groups, and the purpose of these nests is not functional or technical: It is just emotional support and care."

As leaders increasingly recognise the need to embrace more feminine principles to support their staff and navigate growing complexity, Amy provides a compellingly clear vision of how we can each integrate both our trauma healing work and a sense of devotion to something greater than ourselves to reveal the unique contribution that is ours to make.

"I think there's a natural impulse of the heart at this time to be of service and to be part of the reparative web, that is arising naturally in this time of great violence and cruelty and degradation of life in many ways," Amy says. "So the inner work is in part attuning to and defining and engaging with what your contribution is meant to be."

In the light of last week's Pocket Project Global Social Witnessing Call "From the Epstein Files to Inside the Manosphere: Tending to Fractured Gender Relations," Kosha and Amy also dive deeply into the question of how men, women and people of all genders can undertake the work of reconciliation and repair.

Amy emphasises both the importance of women continuing to support one another in healing from trauma and for men to come together to undertake the process of "unnumbing" from patriarchal conditioning. These complementary processes can, Amy says, form "the precursor for real co-creation and reinvention of how we relate to each other."

Infused with Amy's gift for illuminating core principles of healing and awakening with clarity, beauty and precision, this episode will nourish anyone seeking to lead with an open heart in this time of great peril and promise.

Further Resources:

Leading in Chaos: A Clarion Call to a New Future From Two Pioneers in Leadership Development and Transformational Change (Book)

Leading in Chaos (a series of seven online sessions with Amy Elizabeth Fox and Nicholas Janni, running from September to December 2026).

Mobius Executive Leadership

Amy Elizabeth Fox (website)

Related Pocket Project Programmes:

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

About Amy Elizabeth Fox:

Since 2005 Amy Elizabeth Fox has served as one of the founders and Chief Executive Officer of Mobius Executive Leadership, a global transformational leadership firm. For the last twenty years she has served as a leadership and culture change advisor to eminent professional services firms and Fortune 500 companies and facilitated immersive executive development programs for senior leaders. ​

​In 2026 she co-authored a book with Nicholas Janni entitled Leading in Chaos to help executives navigate the unique challenges of leading through increased complexity and adaptive demand.​

​Mobius offers top team intervention, business mediation, executive coaching and personal mastery programs all aimed at unlocking potential and building deeper trust, intimacy and connection within a company's top tier. Mobius also sponsors a professional development arm for maturing transformational practitioners called the Next Practice Institute and has an e-learning arm entitled Mobius Touch.​

​Since 2013 Mobius has had the privilege of partnering with the premier leadership advisory firm, Egon Zehnder, together offering sessions for leaders from around the world. Amy serves as the lead faculty for the quarterly Discovery program offered jointly to N-1 leaders. Further she has guided programs for long standing clients in tandem to overseeing the evolution and expansion of Mobius.​

​Amy is considered an expert in healing individual, family and collective trauma and has been a pioneer in introducing trauma-informed development and psycho-spiritual principles into leadership programs. ​

​In addition to her work with Mobius, Amy is a senior student of mystical teacher Thomas Hübl, serving as part of his online faculty team and as lead faculty for his two-year Timeless Wisdom Training. Together Amy and Thomas are guiding a first of its kind year-long certification in Trauma Informed Consulting and Coaching. ​

​Before starting Mobius Amy worked as a trainer for Vantage Partners, as a senior executive in Wellspace, and as the Director of Public Affairs for the Cathedral of St John the Divine where she supported Paul Gorman, Carl Sagan and Vice President Gore in a decade long effort to engage the American faith communities in responding to climate change and environmental degradation.​

​Amy has a Masters in Counseling from Lesley College and a BA in Psychology from Wesleyan University.​

Register for the July 1 Global Social Witnessing Event

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

We are living in a time when a new upsurge in systemic oppression, silencing and violence toward the feminine has become impossible to ignore. The Epstein Files, the activities of misogynistic influencers featured in the 'Inside the Manosphere' documentary, and a CNN investigation into the 'Motherless' online platform where men shared pornographic videos of their sedated partners and wives, have opened new windows into the extent and depth of gender-based perpetration, complicity and wounding alive in today's world. A lack of justice and accountability have compounded the harms.

In this episode, co-host Matthew Green joins J'aime Rothbard, the producer of What is Collective Healing? to discuss the upcoming Pocket Project Global Social Witnessing call on July 1 at 8:00 PM Central Europe time (7:00 PM UK, 2:00 PM Eastern) dedicated to creating a space to digest the revelations in the Epstein Files and related material.

J'aime and Matthew discuss how Global Social Witnessing serves as a participatory, embodied practice that can start to build the kind of ground that could ultimately support restoration and repair. In that sense, the free call on July 1 is an opportunity to participate directly in collective healing and experience what becomes possible when we tend to our collective wounds in community.

Further Resources:

Register for the Global Social Witnessing call: From the Epstein Files to Inside the Manosphere – Tending to Fractured Gender Relations

More on Global Social Witnessing in Episodes One (Manda Johnson) and Episode Fourteen (Bayo Akomolafe)

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

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

Kosha Joubert on Global Social Witnessing as a Portal to Collective Healing

The Resonant Man

About Matthew Green

Matthew Green is a journalist and facilitator working to show how an understanding of collective trauma can help solve the climate crisis. As global investigations editor at the non-profit DeSmog, he leads coverage of the global climate crisis, energy politics and global struggles for environmental justice. He is a co-host of the What Is Collective Healing? Podcast at the Pocket Project and co-founder of the Resonant Man international men's initiative.

Hosted by Kosha Joubert. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

John Kania joins Kosha Joubert to explore the evolving relationship between systems change and collective healing. Drawing on decades of experience in social innovation and collective impact, John reflects on how his work has shifted from focusing primarily on structures, institutions, and collaboration to recognizing the profound role that trauma, resilience, and healing play in shaping the systems we live within.

Over the last 30 years, John has been a practitioner, researcher, writer, teacher, and speaker on how organizations and people can achieve change together. John is currently the Executive Director of the Collective Change Lab, a nonprofit catalyst and thought leader placing healing at the heart of social and environmental systems change.

In February 2024, John published a ground-breaking article with Katherine Milligan and Laura Calderon de La Barca called Healing Systems which explored how recognising trauma in ourselves, other people, and the systems around us can open up new pathways to solving social problems. The article has been downloaded more than 80,000 times showing the huge amount of interest there is in how collective healing can unlock systems change – which is also the central question we're exploring at the Pocket Project.

Laura Calderon de La Barca studied intensely with Thomas Hubl over several years and was an early guest on this podcast.

Kosha and John explore why sustainable systems transformation cannot happen through policy and structural change alone. John shares how the Collective Change Lab has increasingly focused on creating the conditions for healing by beginning with resourcing, resilience, and reconnection. Rather than leading with conversations about trauma, he emphasizes the importance of helping individuals and communities reconnect to their own innate healing wisdom and capacity for relationship.

Ultimately, John highlights that collective healing is both a personal and systemic process. Healing individuals and communities is essential, but so is transforming the conditions that continue to produce harm. This conversation offers a hopeful vision for how healing centered approaches can strengthen our ability to redesign systems, build resilience, and create lasting social change. It also highlights the growing alignment between the Collective Change Lab and The Pocket Project, whose shared commitment to collective healing is helping shape a new paradigm for transformation.

With its lively and fresh take on the nature of resilience, this conversation provides deep insights into a foundational element of collective healing work, and the vision underpinning the Pocket Project's global mission.

It' s not too late to join us in the Resilience Program training. Follow this link to sign up for the self-study course of Phase I. Registration is open for Phase II of the training which starts in July.

Further Resources:

Collective Change Lab podcast: https://soundcloud.com/collective-change-lab

Recent podcast featuring John Kania: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4K3wihrIN1Fw97k4Rhrma2?si=jn9eEWpvTO-PNRhvTBP8Bg

Healing Systems, article by John Kania, Laura Calderon de la Barca, and Katherine Milligan in Stanford Social Innovation Review. (This was a heavily downloaded article that explores intersection of collective healing and systems change).

How Embodiment Transforms Systems Change, latest article from John Kania, Louise Marra, Laura Calderon de la Barca and Lian Zeitz.

Pocket Project Resilience Program

Pocket Project Resilience Circles

About John Kania

John is a visionary social sector leader with a passion for inspiring and empowering others to create transformational change. Over the last 30 years he has been a practitioner, researcher, writer, teacher, and speaker on how organizations and people can achieve change together. John is currently the Executive Director of the Collective Change Lab, a nonprofit catalyst and thought leader placing healing at the heart of social and environmental systems change.

Prior to founding the Collective Change Lab, John was an Executive-in-Residence at venture philanthropy New Profit, where he co-led the launch of a systems change practice. From 2001 to 2018, John built and ran FSG, a social sector consulting firm and think tank. As Board member and Global Managing Director at FSG, John focused on inspiring FSG's Leadership Team, consultants, and operations staff to achieve excellence in their work, leading strategic initiatives incorporating equity and systems thinking into FSG's culture and strategic perspective.

John is a co-author of the ground-breaking Stanford Social Innovation Review articles "Collective Impact," (most read SSIR article ever) "The Dawn of System Leadership," and "The Relational Work of Systems Change." He is also co-author of "The Water of Systems Change," which is being used by practitioners around the world to bring clarity to how social change happens. John currently serves on the boards of Catalyst Now, Third Sector Capital Partners, and the Center for Action and Contemplation.

Hosted by Kosha Joubert. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

What is the true meaning of resilience? And how can cultivating our capacity to stay related to life's challenges help us align with a more authentic future?

In this powerful episode, Pocket Project CEO Kosha Joubert and the teacher and facilitator Thomas Hübl. explore the essence of the kind of resilience work practiced in the Pocket Project's Global Trauma Relief Projects and the next phase of the Resilience Program training, which starts in July.

Thomas explains how a burden of unprocessed trauma can weigh us down and keep us stuck — much like an overloaded boat marooned in a shallow river. Growing our resilience is like restoring the flow of water — helping us to start moving again despite what happened to us.

The work of resilience-building is not, in that sense, a return to the past, but a form of post-traumatic growth that allows us to orient towards a more emergent future.

"When we integrate the hardship, we are always moving forward. It looks like we are coming back to a more baseline state, but actually we are going to a new form of baseline that is more enriched and a bit wiser than the state before we got hurt," Thomas says. "We're not restoring backwards, we're restoring forwards."

Kosha and Thomas also explore how trauma shows up in social systems — acting as "sand in the engine" that hinders collaboration and leads to miscommunication, polarisation and fragmentation.

"And as long as we don't see this because it's unconscious, we are fighting all the time with the symptoms," Thomas says. "Collective and intergenerational trauma healing is to turn that into a conscious process, see what we are dealing with, and then from there develop methods and technologies to integrate it."

With some concerned that collective healing practices could inadvertently serve to strengthen unjust systems by helping people adapt to oppressive circumstances, Thomas explains that the goal is to establish the level of social coherence and maturity needed to change systems "from the inside out."

"That is where I think social justice work and collective trauma work, and maybe the spiritual and mystical work, need to come together to create the pathway to do that," Thomas says. "Healing-centered approaches are a way to pay back the mortgages that we took for thousands of years."

With its lively and fresh take on the nature of resilience, this conversation provides deep insights into a foundational element of collective healing work, and the vision underpinning the Pocket Project's global mission.

You are invited to join this global movement. This dialogue was recorded during a session in Part 1 of the Pocket Project's Resilience Program training that ran from May to June. Click here to learn more and register for Phase II of the training which starts in July, or to do the self-study course for Phase 1.

Further Resources:

Pocket Project Resilience Program

Pocket Project Resilience Circles

Pocket Project Global Trauma Relief Projects

Thomas Hübl

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.

He is 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. He is a co-founder of the Pocket Project.

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

What are the barriers standing between men and collective healing? And how can we establish more of the kind of spaces where men can move from confusion, suffering, pain and competition into deeper levels of presence, relatedness, reverence, and grace?

In this episode, we welcome Kevin Young, a life coach and meditation teacher based in County Down in Northern Ireland. A facilitator of the Compassionate Inquiry® approach developed by Dr Gabor Maté, Kevin is also a co-host of the Gifts of Trauma podcast, which grew out of the Compassionate Inquiry community, and has just published a four-part series on masculinity.

In just the past few months, the revelations in the Epstein Files, the misogynistic male influencers portrayed in the Inside the Manosphere documentary, and a CNN exposé of the Motherless online platform where men swapped tips on how to sedate and assault their wives, have made made male abuses of power seemingly more visible than ever.

Against this disturbing backdrop, Kevin and Matthew explore the nature of the suffering experienced by many men struggling to navigate changing cultural expectations, increasingly difficult economic conditions, and a sense of confusion over what it means to be a man in society today.

Fresh from a two-week silent retreat in Arizona, Kevin speaks about the journey that led him to forms of spirituality starkly at odds with his upbringing in Northern Ireland – and how that journey has allowed him to bring the balm of lightness and humour to even the deepest wounds.

Kevin and Matthew go on to address what it might look like to support young men to navigate the transition into healthy forms of manhood by providing both the role models and rites of passage that are so often lacking.

"How might we work with fear? How might we work with shame? How might we work with how you've been conditioned to believe that you should be?" Kevin asks.

"I think of compassion, and I think of love, and I think of forgiveness, and I think of reverence and grace — and collective healing can be in there too. For me, these are the fruits or the flowers on the tree of healing. And we can't force these fruits and flowers to bloom or to grow, but what we can do is tend to the tree."

This conversation will inspire anyone interested in the question of what collective healing can mean for men, and how to cultivate new models of masculinity oriented towards protecting all that is sacred.

Register for the July 1 Global Social Witnessing Call on Tending to Fractured Gender Relations, hosted by the Pocket Project.

Further Resources:

Kevin Young

Kevin Young (LinkedIn)

In-Mynd (Kevin's company)

Gifts of Trauma

The Hakomi Way: Consciousness & Healing, the legacy of Ron Kurtz

Compassionate Inquiry®, Dr Gabor Maté

Pocket Project Resilience Program

The Resonant Man (Matthew Green)

About Kevin Young:

Kevin is a truth seeker from Co. Down in Ireland. A Compassionate inquiry® facilitator, educator, steward, life coach, meditation teacher and sound bathing experience facilitator. He works privately with individuals and organizations around the globe, is passionate about people, healing, happiness and encouraging compassionate connection. A lover of music, poetry, conscious conversation and spiritual growth, Kevin's favorite word is 'awe'.

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

What relevance do timeless mystical principles have for the way we work with groups of people today? And how can contemporary forms of "applied mysticism" help us rise to the challenge of these chaotic times?

For 35 years, Robin Alfred has been facilitating transformational processes for groups ranging in size from six to 600 people and encompassing everyone from U.N. climate experts and nonprofit leaders to government officials and corporate executives.

In his forthcoming book Emergent Leadership: Applied Mysticism for Complex Times, Robin distils the essence of what he has learned about applying mystical principles in these contexts and the breakthroughs this approach can unlock.

In this episode, Matthew and Robin dive deeply into a question at the core of both Robin's book and this podcast: What does it take to establish the kind of coherent field that can change the destiny of individuals and organisations, foster innovation and genius, and help heal the individual, ancestral and collective trauma that traps us in repeating loops from the past?

Robin explains how the phrase 'applied mysticism' came to him during a training he was running two years ago called The Art of Facilitating Transformational Fields, which explored how to tap into a higher organising principle to help guide what happens in a space.

"Contemporary mysticism is a mysticism that is continually being revealed. It's not something that is fixed in time. It's not something that is thousands of years old. It has a contemporary updating aspect to it," Robin says. "And embodied mysticism also means that it's a mysticism that isn't just a philosophy, it's something that lives in the cells of my being."

Robin shares his sense of the growing willingness of people working in many different kinds of organisations to embrace more soul-oriented approaches as the planetary crisis reveals the limits of business as usual – and the opportunities this opens up.

"They know that there has to be another approach, that the existing approaches don't work," Robin says. "So the inner life of the leader is important. The collective fields are important. How do you create a healing field at work? That's important. Belonging is important. All these things become more and more important because people see that the traditional ways of approaching all this have led us into this huge dysfunction."

Matthew and Robin also explore the role of presence, precision, intention and humility in working with organisations – and some of the most striking and challenging moments from Robin's long facilitation career.

This conversation is a must-listen for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of how mystical principles can be applied to support organisations to evolve – and hear more about how they can equip us to play a leadership role in the face of the world's escalating challenges.

Robin's book Emergent Leadership: Applied Mysticism for Complex Times is published by Open Circle in August.

Further Resources:

Pocket Project Resilience Program

Open Circle Consulting

Emergent Leadership, Robin's training in applied mysticism

The Art of Facilitating Transformational Fields (Article by Robin for Mobius Strip)

About Robin Alfred:

Robin Alfred is an executive coach, facilitator, and organisational consultant with over 35 years of experience working globally with NGOs, top teams, SMEs and individuals. A former criminal justice social work manager in London, Robin later co-founded Open Circle Consulting, bridging inner and outer transformation. His trauma-informed, emergent approach integrates frameworks including Appreciative Inquiry, Process Work, and Archetypes at WorkTM . A Senior Student of Thomas Hübl, he supports international trainings on collective trauma and mysticism. Robin also serves on the Pocket Project's Trauma Consultancy Team and teaches "Emergent Leadership," a training in applied mysticism.