What is Collective Healing?

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/

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

What changes when the body is no longer a place of suffering but of joy and presence? How does collective healing shape individual transformation? And how would the world change if women reclaimed their bodies as home?

Animated by these questions, Stephanie Pizarro joined María Troya and Karla Mejía to co-lead a Pocket Project International Lab exploring the theme "Embodying the Feminine" in 2024.

Joined by more than 40 women from 15 countries across Latin America, the year-long exploration helped participants to renew their relationship with their physicality – rooting them in deeper levels of pleasure, wisdom and resilience.

In this episode, Stephanie recounts the process of personal and ancestral healing that helped her begin to release the generations of stress that had accumulated in her system from the many decades of conflict in her native Colombia.

That journey, in turn, fired her passion for working with other Latin American women to dissolve layers of collective and inter-generational trauma – and restore their trust in the underlying intelligence of life itself.

Now focused on serving the wider cause of collective healing by writing a PhD on the qualities of effective facilitation, Stephanie's story will speak to anyone who wants to gain a deeper appreciation of the universal principles of trauma integration – and grasp the essential role that creativity plays in this work.

Further Resources:

Pocket Project

Pocket Project Lab: Inhabiting the Female Body

Academy of Inner Science Research

About Stephanie Pizarro:

Stephanie Renata Pizarro Coy is a Colombian researcher contributing to the evolving field of collective healing in social systems. Her work as an executive coach, author, and certified collective trauma facilitator is grounded in deep transformation, human development, and cultural healing practices. She is currently pursuing a PhD at Ubiquity University, where she researches the quality of facilitation required for collective trauma integration.

In 2024, she co-facilitated the Pocket Project Lab "Embodying the feminine", accompanying over 40 Latin American women through a felt exploration of fragmentation and dissociation in relation to wounded self-contact. The experience honored and reclaimed the cultural and ancestral resilience woven into Latin American femininity. Stephanie is the author of Al baño María: un encuentro sagrado contigo misma —a soulful guide for women seeking deeper self-awareness, inner flow, and personal purpose.

Hosted by Kosha Joubert. Produced by J'aime Rothbard

How to bring collective healing practices to people affected by gun violence, poverty and systemic injustice? And how to build structures to support the leaders doing this work to thrive?

These burning questions have animated Karen Simms, founder and director of the Trauma & Resilience Initiative, a nonprofit organisation in Champaign, Illinois, throughout her 20 years of working with marginalised groups.

In this episode, Karen traces her early influences — from childhood summers in Maryland spent memorising the speeches of Dr Martin Luther King while her cousins performed migrant farm labour, to a "tropical soup" of Afro-Caribbean and Christian spiritual lineages.

From her past work with women affected by HIV/AIDS, to her subsequent service in neighbourhoods struggling with many forms of inequity, exclusion and harm, Karen has always placed a "love ethic" at the heart of her approach.

A regular contributor to Pocket Project trainings and summits, Karen explains that she is now working to help "democratise" the collective healing work pioneered by Thomas Hübl and other practitioners to make it more accessible. Karen also describes the importance of creating circles of resilience to "help heal the healers."

This powerful episode opens a window into the transformational impact that collective healing practices can have in vulnerable communities — and the work that needs to be done to ensure this potential can be fully realised.

Further Resources:

Trauma & Resilience Initiative

Pocket Project

About Karen Simms:

Karen Simms, MAMFT, LMHC, is a seasoned consultant, trainer, facilitator, and coach with over 30 years of experience in building trauma-informed, healing-centered, and equitable systems and communities. She is the founder of Trauma & Resilience Initiative, Inc. (TRI) a not for profit that trains, educates, advocates for, and promotes resilience and justice for individuals, families, organizations, and communities. TRI works to reduce the impact of adverse community experiences by healing and repairing those who have been impacted by trauma; and equipping organizations, communities, and providers to be trauma and justice informed.

Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard

How can we release old ways of relating rooted in past trauma and instead allow our bodies and hearts to naturally relax together in the here and now?

That fundamental question has guided Danny Cohen's many years of psychotherapeutic training and spiritual practice – and also lies at the heart of his pioneering programme, the Art of Communication, which helps people transform how they communicate and connect in everyday life.

In this illuminating and moving episode, Danny describes how his deep search for ways to restore relational intimacy since his teens was driven by a combination of personal suffering and inspiration he derived from accounts of illumination from spiritual masters.

In 2015 Danny began studying with Thomas Hübl and in 2017, joined the first Pocket Project training. Danny describes the profound influence Thomas's teachings on relational attunement and the mystical principles of trauma healing have had on his work – which is also rooted in insights from Dr Marshall Rosenberg, the developer of Nonviolent Communication, and Steve Hoskinson, creator of the Organic Intelligence approach to trauma healing.

The episode concludes by considering how trauma healing relates to the cycles of collective trauma playing out on the global stage — and the spiritual resources needed to sustain such work in the face of so much darkness.

This episode will speak to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of how trauma shapes our default ways of relating – and how we can reconnect with our natural impulse to meet one another from a place of giving, tenderness and care.

Further Resources:

The Art of Communication

Pocket Project

About Danny Cohen:

After finishing his degree from the Wharton School of Business in 2010, Danny made it his business to explore what had been missing for him in that education. It's been a deep dive into wisdom traditions, psychotherapy training, mindfulness (including 15+ months on silent retreat), systems thinking, mysticism, and Nonviolent Communication. Having worked with thousands of educators in his time as a Guiding Teacher at Mindful Schools, as a founder and senior teacher with hundreds of seekers coming on retreat with Or HaLev: Jewish Spirituality and Meditation, and with CEOs and business executives as part of the core faculty of the Evolve Foundation, as well with many parents, activists, therapists, and people working for systems change, and other human beings around the world, Danny has found consistent principles and competencies across cultures and contexts that open the doors to a more beautiful, effective, and regenerative way of being alive together.

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

Born into a farming family in Cameroon, Sonita Mbah grew up imagining that she would always be able to make her living off the land. But as she began to recognise how far patterns of colonialism, extraction and displacement still ruled the lives of African farmers, Sonita felt a deeper calling begin to stir.

In her inaugural appearance as a co-host of What Is Collective Healing?, Sonita shares about her mission to transform the "trauma architecture" of exploitative global food systems in line with a more equitable and sustainable future.

Rooted in a profound appreciation for Indigenous ways of living in harmony with the more-than-human world, Sonita explains how her approach was shaped by her time living among Indigenous communities in Cameroon, and deep dialogues with the Makhuwa people in Mozambique.

The conversation reveals how Sonita's journey as an advocate for conscious food systems is intimately braided with her personal process of transmuting the collective trauma of colonialism. Not only does this global imprint live on in her own nervous system, Sonita explains, neocolonial ways of relating continue to deprive Indigenous communities of acknowledgement and resources to this day.

This deeply moving episode casts a new light on the many ways in which personal, inter-generational and collective trauma histories are enmeshwed with the exploitative ways we produce, trade and consume our food.

Sonita's commitment to reweaving these outdated patterns will inspire anyone with an interest in the relationship between collective healing and the kind of systems change needed to pull life on this planet back from the brink.

Further Resources:

Designing for Deep Regeneration from the Edges: A Guide for Conscious Transformation of Food Systems in the Polycrisis

Conscious Food Systems Alliance

Pocket Project

About Sonita Mbah:

Sonita serves as communications coordinator at the Pocket Project and holds a Masters in World Heritage Studies. She is a passionate food grower, permaculture designer and facilitator. For over 10 years, she was the administrator of Better World Cameroon and co-initiator of Bafut Ecovillage, an off-grid learning center. As Executive Secretary of the Global Ecovillage Network Africa, Sonita brings regenerative community and social enterprise development to several African communities. In 2017, Sonita received the Gender Just Climate Solutions Award from the Women and Gender Constituency for empowering women with earthen cook stove technology. Driven by her passion for healing colonial trauma, Sonita took the Principles of Collective Trauma Healing course with Thomas Hübl.

0:00 What is Collective Healing?

1:49 Introduction to Sonita Mbah

5:13 Being in Community is a Healing Process

7:20 Conscious Food System Transformation

10:20 Story : Discovery of Palm Wine

13:50 Corruption within our Global Food System

19:30 Colonialism's Impact on Food Systems

27:00 Confonting Internalized Colonialism and Healing

31:10 Stories from working with Ecovillages in Africa

43:11 Conscious Food Advocacy within larger International Agencies

44:20 Enriching the Indigenous Sources of Knowledge & Practices

48:20 Future Implications & Possibilities of Restoring Indigenous Wisdom

This grounding attunment is a prelude to our next episode Crafting Conscious Food Systems, with Sonita Mbah. It delivers new depth, color and gratitude to anybody curious to explore a mindful eating practice. As you are sitting down to your next meal, you are welcome to settle in with this meditation and receive its sumptuous invitation to connect with all of the elemental, human and nonhuman worlds that when recognized, unlock deeper nourishment of food into mind, body and soul.

About Sonita Mbah:

Sonita serves as communications coordinator at the Pocket Project and holds a Masters in World Heritage Studies. She is a passionate food grower, permaculture designer and facilitator. For over 10 years, she was the administrator of Better World Cameroon and co-initiator of Bafut Ecovillage, an off-grid learning center. As Executive Secretary of the Global Ecovillage Network Africa, Sonita brings regenerative community and social enterprise development to several African communities. In 2017, Sonita received the Gender Just Climate Solutions Award from the Women and Gender Constituency for empowering women with earthen cook stove technology. Driven by her passion for healing colonial trauma, Sonita took the Principles of Collective Trauma Healing course with Thomas Hübl.

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

Description: For Dr Bayo Akomolafe, Global Social Witnessing is a way to "be with each other in the fires, and not burn."

As the Pocket Project prepares to launch Phase Two of the Global Social Witnessing Facilitator Training on September 3, 2025, this episode features a dialogue between Bayo and Kosha Joubert, the Pocket Project CEO, from Phase I of the course.

"For those of you who would like to show up for this sharing together, this is not a place of checking each others' stories – it's a way of holding with compassion the stories that are emerging," Bayo tells participants.

"If we don't start to cultivate the capacities to hold nuance in this way, then we are unfortunately part of the projects of war," Bayo says. "This is an invitation to a stranger kind of paradigm. It's about being there with each other in the fires, and not burning."

This episode offers key insights into the principles of Global Social Witnessing — a potent tool for establishing a sense of presence, sensitivity and agency in relation to the pain and suffering transmitted through the news.

It also opens a window into what to expect from Phase Two of the facilitator training and self-study courses offered by the Pocket Project in this essential practice.

To find out more about regular Global Social Witnessing calls hosted by the Pocket Project, please click here.

Further Resources:

Pocket Project

Phase Two of the Global Social Witnessing Facilitator Training

Self-Study Course: Holding Space for a World in Transition

Global Social Witnessing Calls

About Bayo Akomolafe: Rooted with the West African Yoruba people, Bayo Akomolafe is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books: These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak.

Bayo is also the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species.

He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, 'We Will Dance with Mountains' And currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, and sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).

0:00 Introduction to What is Global Social Witnessing

1:39 What is Global Social Witnessing?

5:34 Significance of Greeting Each Other

6:55 Curating an Intentional and Emergent Space

7:50 Story of Martin Luther King and Harry Belafonte

9:13 "Integrating into a burning house"

14:30 The Continuity of Wartime

18:05 Going Deeper, Beyond Consensus and Becoming Different

20:05 Being Habituated into Forgetfulness

22:40 Staying Open to the Cracks that Are Emerging

24:50 Invitation for Participants to Sit Together

25:50 Guidelines for Global Social Witnessing

29:30 As a "Ritual of Presence"

30:50 Participant refelctions

32:50 The Future Potentials of Global Social Witnessing

35:10 Phases of Global Social Witnessing Trainings & Invitations