What is Collective Healing?

Hosted by Kosha Joubert Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

Register for the community call Mapping the Conditions for Collective Trauma – From Data to Deeper Awareness on October 8

Lots of people talk about 'healing Earth'. But what if we need Earth to heal us? Could we learn to see beyond a narrowly scientific worldview to embrace more of nature's mystery?

In this episode, we welcome Tiókasin Ghosthorse, a musician, activist, and author most recently of Earth Mind, which is due to be published in May.

A citizen of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota, who hosted the longest-running Indigenous affairs radio show in the United States, Tiókasin has long been a leading voice sharing how Indigenous wisdom can cast our personal and planetary challenges in a new light.

Tiókasin speaks with Kosha about how we can learn to transcend a mindset based on separation from nature to come into deeper resonance with the more-than-human world. It's this process of recognising our essential oneness with life that can open new pathways to wholeness.

The dialogue covers topics including:

• Understanding that nature understands us
• How modern psychology can separate us from Earth
• Experiencing resonance with nature through the body
• Returning to a more intuitive culture
• Ancestors as guides to the 'ancient future'
• Addressing the legacy of colonial perpetration
• Mycelial consciousness
• Awe and wonder as nature's "original language"

We hope you enjoy this nourishing dialogue and also offer you these previous episodes featuring carriers of Indigenous wisdom:

Tending Wounded Places With Furious Love, with Hāweatea Holly Bryson

"How Can We Listen in a World That Is on Fire?," with Joshua Konkankoh

Restoring Relationships with the More-Than-Human-World, with J Dallas Gudgell

The Prayers of Our Ancestors, with Solea Anani

Pocket Project:

Pocket Project Global Social Witnessing Calls

Pocket Project

About Tiókasin Ghosthorse

Tiókasin Ghosthorse is a citizen of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation — Oceti Sakowin — Oyate Itazipčola-Mnikȟówožu Lakȟota — Mníša tióšpaye na Četáŋǧi thiwáhe, paternal band of Without Bows, of the Red Water Clan from the extended family Yellow Hawk and maternal band of Plants By The Water. He hosted First Voices Radio National/International from 1992 until the show's final broadcast in 2025, one of the longest-running Indigenous-produced radio programs in the United States, broadcasting weekly from Pacifica Radio Affiliates-WBAI in New York and centering Indigenous perspectives on ecology, culture, and "original wisdom." He carries the name Oyáte TȟokáheyA Wičhákiye (Places Nations First) and Tiókasin (Spirit Coming In). He considers himself a perfectly flawed human being.

He founded Akantu Intelligence, an institute dedicated to contextualizing Indigenous wisdom for contemporary crises, and has spoken internationally, including at United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues gatherings, on the relational worldview of Indigenous peoples toward water, land, animals and one another. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for his global advocacy and peace education. He co-authored Butterfly Against the Wind in 2017 and Earth Mind, to be released in May 2027.

You are warmly invited to join Kosha and Adrian Wagner of the Pocket Project's research team, who has been deeply involved in the Conditions for Collective Trauma Map, for a live presentation:

Register for the community call Mapping the Conditions for Collective Trauma – From Data to Deeper Awareness on October 8

Hosted by Kosha Joubert Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

We're joined by Pocket Project co-founder Thomas Hübl and technologist, facilitator and researcher Max Roth to explore the new Conditions for Collective Trauma Map, which goes live on October 8. Please sign up for an event introducing the map here.

Developed by the Pocket Project in collaboration with Max's organisation Connecting Intelligence, this three-dimensional visualisation draws on dozens of datasets to make the conditions associated with collective trauma – such as conflict, interpersonal violence, environmental degradation and forced migration — more visible. The map also points to societal resilience by representing factors such as democracy, peace, gender equality and wellbeing.

The aim is to support a wide range of actors — from policymakers, researchers and philanthropists to governments, international organisations and relief agencies — to locate their work in a wider landscape, and recognise the need for integrated approaches.

A wealth of data embedded in the map can also be used to support public dialogue on how to address the lasting legacy of collective trauma fields like colonialism, slavery and resource extraction.

As Thomas and Max explain, the Conditions for Collective Trauma Map does not attempt to measure how traumatised a society is: It offers a landscape for inquiry, intended as a starting point for asking deeper questions.

Their conversation with Kosha explores themes including:

• Genesis of the vision for the map

• What data can reveal, and what remains beyond measurement

• The challenges of mapping victimisation, perpetration and resilience

• How the map can support policymakers and organisations

• Mapping changing national boundaries and Indigenous territories

• Welcoming collaboration to help the map continually evolve

• How developments in AI made the project possible

• Recognising ourselves as a unified field of intelligence

To hear more from Adrian about how the Pocket Project is developing data-based research into collective trauma healing, listen to this previous episode featuring him in dialogue with Kosha:

Tending the Sacred Tapestry: What Happens Inside an Integration Lab, with Adrian Wagner

More From Thomas Hübl:

Thomas Hübl's website

More From Max Roth:

Connecting Intelligence

Max Roth on LinkedIn

Pocket Project Links:

Pocket Project Global Social Witnessing Calls

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.

About Max Roth:

Max Roth is the founder of Connecting Intelligence, working at the intersection of organizational development, collective intelligence, leadership, inner development, and technology. With a background in physics, he is researching how people and organisations build trust, coordinate under uncertainty, and develop the human and cultural conditions needed to navigate complexity well.

He supports teams and leaders in high-stakes environments through facilitation, coaching, and participatory culture work. Rather than approaching culture as something designed from the top down, Max is interested in how social architectures can be co-evolved from within, the patterns of relationship, power, attention, communication, and decision-making that shape how a group actually functions. His work explores how these patterns can create greater conditions for safety, aliveness, coherence, learning, and meaningful coordination without eliminating difference or uncertainty.

A particular focus of his work is the human side of responsible and deeply aligned AI: how trust can scale, how collective intelligence can be strengthened, and how teams working on difficult technological problems can remain reflective, adaptive, and ethically grounded.

Through Connecting Intelligence, Max also develops custom software for mission-driven organizations, especially where technology can support more complex forms of participation, reflection, and coordination. Most recently, he built the Conditions for Collective Trauma Map for The Pocket Project, an interactive exploration of the conditions that shape collective trauma.

Across his work, Max is researching human alignment, embodied ethics, resilience, trust, and playful collaboration and how these capacities might help groups meet difficult problems with greater depth, intelligence, and responsiveness.

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

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

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, founder of the Global Compassion Coalition, and New York Times best-selling author.

His seven books have been published in 33 languages — with a million copies sold in English alone. He's lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centers worldwide. An expert on positive neuroplasticity, he is co-host of the Being Well podcast, now downloaded 30 million times.

In this cutting-edge conversation, Rick and Kosha explore a question at the core of the Pocket Project's mission: How can we draw on what we now know about neurobiology, cultural evolution and trauma-informed practice to build social movements capable of tackling global crises?

Rick draws on his work on Restoring Healthy Human Politics at the Global Compassion Coalition to share his vision of how a species that spent 99 percent of its history as hunter-gatherers can leverage mechanisms that retained social cohesion in groups of 30 to 50 people to deliver transformation at a planetary scale.

"I'm very interested in fostering structures and frameworks so what worked in our bands of 50 people can be scaled up to eight billion people," Rick tells Kosha. "That's why I love the idea of the Pocket Project, because you're creating cells of sanity inside the larger body of humanity."

Themes Rick and Kosha discuss include:

• Our naturally whole and healthy state of being
• How early experiences structure our nervous system
• Cultivating compassion and self-responsibility
• Evolutionary origins of our 'negativity bias'
• Three ways to practice: 'Let be, let go, let in'
• Need for larger-scale groups to impact systems
• Addressing past injustices and present harms
• Toxicity of 'helpless outrage'
• How human culture is grounded in our tribal nature
• How to scale up the mechanisms that maintained balance in hunter-gatherer bands for global impact
• Opportunities to build up the cellular structure of civil society
• Need for deeper coordination among nonprofits
• Using the power of compassion to mobilise collective action

This conversation will be a source of insight for anyone interested in how the work we do as individuals and groups to integrate collective and inter-generational trauma can form a foundation to address systemic challenges.

This episode also sounds a clarion call for individuals, networks and organisations to embrace the depth of collaboration needed to address inequality, social fragmentation and injustice at a global scale.

For more on these themes, please see these previous episodes:

Relational Resourcing Before Repair: The Missing Foundation of Systems Change, with John Kania

Walking the Talk: How Organisations and Non-Profit Cultures Can Truly Become Trauma-Informed, with Maria Leister

Impacting Systemic Injustice & Collective Healing, with Karen Simms

More From Dr Rick Hanson:

Global Compassion Coalition

Global Compassion Coalition: Restoring Healthy Human Politics

Learning to Learn from Positive Experiences (Journal of Positive Psychology)

Dr Rick Hanson on Social Media:

Instagram

Facebook

LinkedIn

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 Rick Hanson:

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times best-selling author. His seven books have been published in 33 languages and include Making Great Relationships, Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Just One Thing, Buddha's Brain, and Mother Nurture –- with over a million copies in English alone. He's the founder of the Global Compassion Coalition and the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, as well as the co-host of the Being Well podcast –- which has been downloaded over 25 million times. He offers free newsletters, and his online programs have scholarships available for those with financial needs. He's lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard. An expert on positive neuroplasticity, his work has been featured on CBS, NPR, the BBC, and other major media. He began meditating in 1974 and has taught in meditation centers worldwide. He and his wife live in northern California and have two adult children. He loves the wilderness and taking a break from emails.

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.