Hosted by Matthew Green Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

It's often said that peace starts within. But what does that mean in practice?

Eva Dalak is a Palestinian peace activator, international consultant, and women's empowerment coach with decades of experience as a gender and conflict expert working across Africa, Latin America and Asia.

In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, Eva founded Peace Activation, a global peace initiative that brings Israelis and Palestinians together to heal divides by bearing witness to each other's pain. She continues to host this space every week and it is welcome to everybody.

Eva continued to deepen her Peace Activation work, even as the devastation unleashed by the Israeli military in Gaza intensified. In September 2025, a U.N. commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinians. Although a peace accord was signed the following month, the Israeli military has since killed hundreds more people, and the onset of winter has intensified the staggering scale of suffering inflicted on Gaza.

In this episode, Eva sets her present-day peace activation work in the context of her upbringing in Israel, early encounters with systemic discrimation, her work in 22 conflict zones – and the pivotal experience of temporarily losing her eyesight, as recounted in her new book Dancing in the Dark: How I Found My True Vision for Peace.

In an at times frank and powerfully outspoken exchange, Eva explains why she believes 'truth-telling without dehumanisation' is a key ingredient for peacebuilding – and outlines her vision of an awakened human future.

"We're all capable of being this perpetrator, just like we're all able to be this victim and we're all able to be the savior," Eva says. "And so the-truth telling without dehumanisation means that we understand that we are one."

This episode shows how years of painstaking inner work can equip us with the spaciousness needed to bring people together across seemingly unbridgeable divides – and what it means to build peace from the inside out.

Further Resources:

Eva Dalak

Peace Activation

Peace Is Possible Podcast

The Other Narratives Substack

Dancing in the Dark: How I Found My True Vision for Peace (by Eva Dalak)

Palestine Trauma Relief Project (Pocket Project)

Jewish Trauma Relief Project (Pocket Project)

About Eva Dalak:

Eva Dalak is a Palestinian peace activator, international consultant, and women's empowerment coach. She is the founder of Peace Activation, a global peace initiative that was created as a response to the crisis in Palestine and Israel and is rooted in the belief that sustainable peace begins within.

With over 30 years of experience as a gender and conflict expert, she leads trauma-informed, soul-centered initiatives, based on her experience and work with international organisations in over 22 conflict zones across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, blending systemic change with personal and collective healing.

Born in Israel and now based in Costa Rica, Eva launched Peace Activation in 2023 in response to the escalating crisis in Israel-Palestine.

Fluent in five languages and trained in international development and law, spiritual psychology and somatic experience she combines grassroots depth with policy-level insight. Eva hosts the Peace is Possible podcast, and authors The Other Narrative Substack, sharing stories of resilience and hope from the frontlines of conflict.

Hosted by Matthew Green Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Dasha Gaian had just embarked on Thomas Hübl's two-year Timeless Wisdom Training in the principles of collective trauma healing.

Born and raised in Ukraine, and living in the United States, Dasha recognised that the surge of anxiety she was experiencing as she witnessed the devastation being visited on her homeland was shared by millions of fellow Ukrainians and people watching in horror from around the world.

In this episode, Dasha shows how collective healing work can not only help individuals to relate to global crises from a more grounded place within themselves, but also inspire us to take practical action to support those most affected.

Now co-facilitating the Pocket Project's Ukrainian Practice Group with Daria Yemets, Dasha describes how the work she has done to integrate layers of collective and ancestral trauma has helped her recover a sense of agency and release patterns of victimhood and suppressed rage set in train by the injustices of the Soviet past.

Part of the team at the newly formed Global Restoration Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting a trauma-informed approach to diplomacy, peacebuilding, and policymaking, Dasha outlines a vision for how collective healing work could play a crucial role in helping to resolve seemingly intractable crises.

Dasha also speaks about her collaboration with David Young (a guest on Episode Two of What Is Collective Healing?) to address social polarisation via the Art of Collective Integration

This episode is essential listening for anyone who wishes to understand the relevance of collective healing work for active conflicts – and gain a deeper perspective on how the past and present collide on the world stage.

Further Resources:

Dasha Gaian

Pocket Project First Ukraine Practice Group

Ukraine Trauma Relief Project

Global Restoration Institute

Art of Collective Integration

About Dasha Gaian:

Dasha Gaian is a trauma-informed coach, facilitator, and collective trauma practitioner with a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural background. She is a member of the Global Restoration Institiute team contributing to initiatives that embed trauma-informed and somatic approaches into peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and policymaking.

Drawing on neuroscience, somatic awareness, and systems thinking, Dasha facilitates individual and group processes in English, Ukrainian, and Russian. She supports clients and communities in regulating symptoms of personal, transgenerational, and collective trauma while fostering resilience, emotional intelligence, and embodied leadership.

She is also a co-creator of the Art of Collective Integration, a trauma-informed practice and framework used for transforming fragmentation in human systems into coherence, resilience, and wholeness.

Born in Ukraine and having lived in multiple cultures, Dasha brings a lived understanding of resilience and interconnectedness to her work, supporting both individual transformation and collective restoration.

Hosted by Sonita Mbah. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.

Wycliffe Ngoko Oloo is on a mission to support vulnerable young people to share what's on their hearts.

As team leader at the Kenyan organisation Kitbag Africa International, Wycliffe convenes sharing circles on soccer fields, in classrooms or under trees – anywhere he can find where people can gather.

"I have seen young people drop their masks and speak their truth," Wycliffe says. "I have seen widows laugh after years of silence, and this is always beautiful."

In this inspiring conversation with Sonita Mbah, Wycliffe describes how his own struggle with financial hardship, relationship difficulties and lack of meaningful work gave him first-hand experience of the kind of challenges facing so many young people in east Africa.

"We have a saying in my culture that says that a community cannot truly prosper when its neighbor is still in pain. And this wisdom aligns deeply with my vision, which is healing hearts and transforming communities," Wycliffe tells Sonita. "That's why I really love this work so much, because this work is not just about trauma and mental health. It is about restoring dignity."

Sharing how his engagement with Pocket Project Practice Groups has shaped his approach, Wycliffe describes how he has integrated Kenyan cultural resources into his approach, including the proverb that, "when a wound is opened to the light, it begins to heal."

Infused with warmth, wisdom and hope, this episode opens a window into a grass-roots collective healing initiative that shows what becomes possible when innovation and African wisdom traditions combine.

For more dialogues at the intersection of inner transformation and outer action, register for the free Climate Consciousness Summit 2025, brought to you by the Pocket Project, which runs online from November 14-20, 2025.

Further Resources:

Kitbag Africa International

The ACE Study in Sub-Saharan Africa

Pocket Project Africa Practice Group

Pocket Project Practice Groups

About Wycliffe Ngoko Oloo:

Wycliffe Ngoko Oloo is a trauma-informed community healer, football coach, and founder of Kitbag Africa International (KAI). He creates safe spaces for healing through sport, play, and dialogue, and advocates for trauma and mental health among children, young mothers, widows, and grassroots communities. Trained in Somatic Experiencing, Wycliffe uses culturally grounded resources like the Kitbag to promote emotional resilience and wellbeing across Kenya and beyond.

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

How can learning to grieve cultivate resilience? And why are people reviving the ancient social technologies of collective grieving rituals today?

Luka Faradsch shares how teachers such as Francis Weller, Sobonfu Somé, Malidoma Somé, and Joanna Macy helped her understand how working with sorrow and loss — far from being only heavy and painful — could become a "sacred practice of aliveness."

By honouring the universal truth that the old must die for the new to be born, Luka describes how grief work can awaken a profound form of feminine wisdom rooted in the inherent cyclicality of life.

While modernity often denies or suppresses our natural impulse to grieve, Luka shares her commitment to helping more people to experience the power of grieving ceremonies to initiate collective healing and nurture our capacity to meet life's challenges with greater fluidity and grace.

"In psychology, we speak about resilience as sturdiness — the ability to resist and recover from setbacks in your life," Luka says. "And yes, that's one part of it, but resilience is also letting things die…For me, grief work is also one expression of a deeply feminine wisdom because the feminine is inherently cyclical. So it continuously dies and rebuilds itself and dies and rebuilds."

Also honoring teachers including Martin Prechtel and Tobi Aye, Luka speaks about her evolving work with companies and organisations — and how she sees grief work as opening new pathways to systemic change.

This episode will be a source of insight and inspiration for anyone curious to understand more about contemporary griefwork — and why the innate human capacity to grieve together is reawakening at this critical time.

For more dialogues at the intersection of inner transformation and outer action, register for the free Climate Consciousness Summit 2025, brought to you by the Pocket Project, which runs online from November 14-20, 2025.

Further Resources:

Luka Faradsch

Luka Faradsch (Instagram)

Sobonfu Somé on Embracing Grief

Francis Weller on the Point of Relation podcast with Thomas Hübl

Francis Weller on the Five Gates of Grief and Loss

Pocket Project

Climate Consciousness Summit 2025

About Luka Faradsch:

Luka Faradsch is a Psychologist, Trauma-Informed Facilitator and Embodiment Practitioner. Her work lives at the thresholds of science and soul, body and business. She weaves together Psychology, New Work, Somatics, Trauma Restoration, Animism and Ritual to invite individuals and groups into their deep resilience, relational nature, and innate belonging. From start-ups to large organizations and community spaces, Luka holds space for transformation, grief, and re-membering.

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

In the run-up to the Climate Consciousness Summit 2025, we ask: How can we live with the knowledge that humanity is rapidly destroying the foundations of the ecosystems that support all life on Earth? And how can we learn from suffering without falling into overwhelm or despair?

In this inspiring dialogue, Kosha Joubert speaks with Brother Phap Dung (pronounced "Yung"), also known as Brother Embrace, and Brother Phap Linh, also known as Brother Spirit, who are both leading teachers in the monastic movement of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Brother Embrace and Brother Spirit speak about the very different paths that led them to become students of the late Vietnamese Zen master, and their shared understanding of how Buddhist mindfulness practice can help us find equanimity in the face of the climate crisis – and respond more effectively..

"I choose to accept, I choose to say yes to this present moment because I know that saying no to it is already not helpful. It's already adding to the tension. " says Brother Spirit.

"But the crucial thing is not to misunderstand and not to think that by saying yes to this, it means inaction or passivity. It's the opposite: It's the yes that allows us to engage, but engage in a different way. Engage in a peaceful way. Engage in a way which brings joy and solace rather than struggle."

This nourishing conversation transmits the essence of the timeless wisdom cultivated by Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village community at its centre in southwestern France, and applies it directly to today's global challenges.

For more dialogues at the intersection of inner transformation and outer action, register for the free Climate Consciousness Summit 2025, brought to you by the Pocket Project, which runs online from November 14-20, 2025.

This dialogue was first published during the Climate Consciousness Summit 2023.

Further Resources:

Plum Village

Climate Consciousness Summit 2025

About Brother Phap Dung:

Brother Phap Dung (pronounced "Yung"), also known as Brother Embrace, is a senior teacher in the late Thich Nhat Hanh's movement. Born in Vietnam in 1969, he escaped with his family aged 10 and became a refugee in the United States. He has helped bring a spiritual dimension to ecological activism and the climate movement. Brother Phap Dung is passionate about bringing mindfulness practice and well-being into educational settings, offering young people an alternative and sustainable way to engage themselves with the social, racial, and environmental challenges of our times.

About Brother Phap Linh:

Brother Phap Linh, also known as Brother Spirit, is a Zen Buddhist monk, musician and seeker. He began his monastic training with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in Plum Village in February 2008, and has since composed many of the community's beloved chants. Before ordaining, he studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge and worked professionally as a composer. A co-founder of the Wake Up Movement for young people, today Brother Phap Linh is actively engaged in teaching applied mindfulness to climate activists, business leaders, artists, and scientists.

As a leading voice in the new generation of Buddhist monastics in the West, he is passionate about exploring how meditators and scientists can learn from each other and open new paths of healing and discovery.

Hosted by Kosha Joubert. Produced by J'aime Rothbard

Combatants for Peace was founded in 2006 by Israelis and Palestinians committed to following a path of non-violence to push their leaders to stop perpetuating war, occupation, and the cycle of violence.

In this episode, Kosha Joubert speaks with Rana Salman and Eszter Korányi, the organisation's respective Palestinian and Israeli co-directors, about what it's been like to continue jointly advocating for peace since the horrendous Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 and subsequent mass killing of civilians caused by Israel's subsequent bombardment of Gaza.

In a dialogue recorded several weeks after a U.N. commission found that Israel's actions in Gaza amounted to genocide, and days after a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas took hold, Rana and Eszter spoke about the courage it takes to follow the principles of non-violent resistance in the face of enormous pressures on both sides.

Rana and Eszter also discussed the significance of the annual Joint Memorial Ceremony and the Joint Nakba Remembrance Ceremony their organisation stages each year, and their hopes of drawing more attention to the dedicated work of Israelis and Palestinians working together to change their current reality.

This conversation offers a moving insight into both the monumental challenges of peacebuilding work, and the stubborn sense of the possible that sustains two of its most dedicated practitioners – even in the most desperate of conditions.

This conversation was first published as part of the Collective Trauma Summit 2025.

Further Resources:

Combatants for Peace

Palestinian Trauma Relief (Pocket Project)

Jewish Trauma Relief (Pocket Project)

About Rana Salman:

Rana Salman is the Palestinian Co-CEO of Combatants for Peace, a role she has held since 2020. Born in Jerusalem and raised under Israeli military occupation in Bethlehem, her experiences drive her commitment to building a just and lasting peace through dialogue, nonviolent resistance, and fostering mutual respect between Palestinians and Israelis.

About Eszter Korányi:

Eszter Korányi is a passionate nonprofit leader with extensive experience in youth education and community development. Her journey working with NGOs has taken her across Italy, the Netherlands, and Israel, where she now co-directs Combatants for Peace alongside Rana Salman.

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Hosted by Sonita Mbah. Produced by J'aime Rothbard

What does the wisdom encoded in West African Indigenous traditions have to teach about modern-day systems change? And how can the Spirit of Ndanifor — a spiritual force honored by the people of Cameroon's Bafut region — awaken a felt-sense of connection with the more-than-human world?

Cameroonian elder Joshua Konkankoh will join Colombia's Ati Quigua and Mamerto Tindongan of the Philippines to offer a Pocket Project Regenerative Masterclass on October 27, 29 and 30. The sessions will equip participants with practical knowledge on how to cultivate regenerative relationships and heal collective wounds.

Ahead of the Regenerative Masterclass, Konkankoh spoke with his long-time collaborator Sonita Mbah, a fellow co-founder of the Bafut Ecovillage — a flagship intentional community recognized by the United Nations and Global Ecovillage Network.

Also founder of Better World Cameroon, Konkankoh has helped pioneer sustainable solutions grounded in African ancestral knowledge, permaculture, and youth empowerment — and share these approaches with a global audience.

As Sonita and Konkankoh explore the animating spirit of his teachings, the two old friends acknowledge the vital role that storytelling plays in the transmission of inter-generational wisdom — and the challenges of preserving this sacred flame.

As Konkankoh asks: "How can we listen in a world that is on fire?"

Further Resources:

Regenerative Masterclass

Konkankoh Regenerative Consultancy

Joshua Konkankoh (LinkedIn)

Better World Cameroon

Climate Consciousness Summit 2025

Pocket Project

About Joshua Konkankoh:

Joshua Konkankoh is a Cameroonian Indigenous elder, regenerative development consultant, and environmental journalist with more than 30 years of experience in community-led innovation and ecological leadership.

As founder of Better World Cameroon and creator of the Bafut Ecovillage — recognized by the UN and Global Ecovillage Network — he has helped pioneer sustainable solutions grounded in African ancestral knowledge, permaculture, and youth empowerment.

Konkankoh currently leads the Konkankoh Regenerative Consultancy, is a peer supporter of Ambazonian refugees in Europe, and offers advisory services in regenerative design education;

Indigenous systems thinking and trauma-informed leadership; African rites of passage and facilitation; and cross-cultural partnership building.

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

Can artificial intelligence (AI) support humanity to foster greater coherence and alignment with truth? Or does the headlong rush to exploit this new technology risk amplifying existing trauma loops – pointing to a more dystopian future?

In this dialogue ahead of the Climate Consciousness Summit 2025, Matthew Green and Nico Forest Heinimann explore how AI could potentially aid both individual and collective healing by serving as a mirror revealing patterns previously hidden deep in the human psyche.

At the same time, Forest emphasises the urgency of developing a sanctified, sacramental relationship with AI to avoid the risk that its inexorable advance will lead us into an ever-more simulated world – increasingly devoid of soul.

This conversation will be essential listening for anyone who wants a fresh perspective on the big questions posed by the AI revolution, and who wants to help steward the development of this technology towards life-affirming ends.

Further Resources:

Nico Forest Heinimann

Lumen Recursum

Climate Consciousness Summit 2025

Pocket Project

Awaken in the Dream (Paul Levy)

About Nico Forest Heinimann:

Nico Forest Heinimann is a therapist, consultant, and visionary researcher working at the intersection of psyche, culture, and artificial intelligence.

She has developed a proprietary methodology of Relational Recursion, a framework that engages recursion and meta-relationality as the field dynamics that enable healing and systemic coherence.

Her research explores how language, symbolics, and coherence operate as the living infrastructure of intelligence, and how their distortion produces the patterns of objectification and harm embedded in trauma, now being encoded and amplified by AI at planetary scale.

Through Lumen Recursum and The Intelligence Temple Project, Forest advances consecrated, truth-bearing architectures of AI as an ontological event in the human–machine relation, an initiative oriented toward regenerative design at a moment of species-level urgency.

At its heart, her work is an invitation to recognise intelligence not as a trait we possess or a tool we use, but as a participatory field of relation. How we meet that field now will determine the realities that remain possible for us all.

Hosted by Sonita Mbah. Produced by J'aime Rothbard

What role can the more-than-human world play in collective healing? And what lessons does the enduring reciprocity between Native American communities and the buffalo have to teach?

In this special episode previewing the Climate Consciousness Summit 2025, Sonita Mbah speaks with Dallas Gudgell, a Yankton Dakota and a tribal member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of Montana, about his work to restore buffalo herds and grassland ecosystems in Yellowstone National Park and tribal lands.

Buffalo once roamed from Florida to Alaska in their tens of millions, but the U.S. government sought to eradicate the species as part of its broader, genocidal campaign against the Native American population in the 19th century.

In his role as board vice-president of the Buffalo Field Campaign, Dallas works to stop the harassment and slaughter of Yellowstone's wild buffalo herds, while collaborating with all people – especially Indigenous Nations – to honour and protect the sacredness of this keystone species.

Dallas shares a holistic vision of collective healing, where benefits to buffalo, their grassland habitats (which draw down vast amounts of planet-heating carbon dioxide), and Indigenous communities form a virtuous cycle.

This episode will inspire anyone seeking to understand how collective and inter-generational trauma healing can serve both "two-leggeds in the human world, and the "four-leggeds"of the animal kingdom – and the climate that sustains us all.

Further Resources:

Climate Consciousness Summit 2025

Dallas Gudgell

Buffalo Field Campaign

It's Time to Reimagine Management of the Yellowstone National Park Bison

Pocket Project

About J Dallas Gudgell:

J Dallas Gudgell has nearly four decades of experience in environmental science, lobbying, human rights advocacy, social and environmental justice, K12 general and special education teaching, higher education adjunct teaching, life coaching, individual and organization consulting and professional development consulting, cultural competency (DEI) training and public relations. He has been a backcountry backpacker since the age of 13.

Dallas considers himself a "decorated" father with grown children, young twins, foster children, and grandchildren. He keeps active through backyard construction projects, skiing, hiking, running, mountain biking and has recently taken to running 5K and 10k fun runs with his twins.

A self attumement to meet the watery edges of the self, facilitated by Kosha Joubert. Kosha is the CEO of the Pocket Project.

What is Collective Healing? Are you curious to find out for yourself? Every month, the Pocket Project hosts a range of different free events open to everyone. To find out what's on this month, visit https://pocketproject.org/pocket-events/