Creating Collective Healing Spaces

Hope for our shared future

We know that our world is full of inspired, innovative human beings who are passionate about creating nurturing, resourceful communities hopeful for and mindful of our shared future. We also recognize that in order to embody this vision we must engage wholeheartedly with the deep work of addressing the wide range of cultural traumas and unexpressed pains of the past.

We walk in the shadows of history

Too often humanity repeats cycles of escalating violence and age-old patterns of hurtful social division. The aftereffects seem to limit our capacity to address our greatest challenges from climate change and ethnic and gender prejudice to immigration crises sparked by warfare or even genocide. We walk in the shadows of history. Traumas that occurred generations before us continue to play out and will continue to impact us until we unearth, understand and shift their patterns.

How can we create spaces for collective healing?

We have been asking ourselves what if these unhealed traumas block the energy needed to shift to a healthier future. If we know that engaging in healing process can create transformative shifts on a personal level, what could it look like and how would it feel to create community spaces for healing at a collective level?

Beyond & deeper

Beyond cross-cultural understanding, dialogues, and diversity training, deeper more embodied spaces of connection and belonging are called for in order to bring about lasting cultural change. We believe we are entering a critical moment where new kinds of community spaces can create meaningful group experiences for witnessing and sensing deeper historical patterns so that we may unravel and mindfully integrate the unseen aspects of our ancestry.

A safe space

To do this well, we need safe spaces that allow human beings to go beyond habitual speech and invite us to open our hearts in order to access and embrace other ways of knowing. Ultimately, we need to discover how to create group experiences that foster belonging and enable post-traumatic growth where shared struggles propel us to higher levels of connection and resilience.  

How can we create spaces for collective healing?
Join us in shared inquiry to explore how to heal the past and create a wiser future.

A team of experienced facilitators from diverse professional fields in the U.S. and Europe has come together to prototype a process for creating experiences of healing at a collective level in community.

You’re invited

on August 18-21, 2016 (US, Florida) for the first of several gatherings calling together people who are ready to:

  • Explore, experiment, evolve, learn, and grow their capacities to create collective healing spaces with inner spaciousness, clarity, and strength,
  • Become part of a community of practice of healers, hosts, and facilitators working across the globe,
  • Explore ways that groups can understand and address pervasive multigenerational, historic and systemic patterns of collective trauma, and
  • Build new foundations for people to live together in right relationship to each other and the Earth.

As a prototyping event this gathering will be an opportunity to deepen our skills and work with others of similar commitment and passion as we evolve the edges of learning in this field. We welcome people from a variety of backgrounds who seek to develop and expand their capacities for creating spaces that enable collective healing.

Patterns & methodologies

The primary patterns and methodologies we will combine and drawn from are:

  • Circle Practice and The Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter
  • Systemic Constellation work
  • Expressive arts, including art, music, dance and writing,
  • Contemplative practices, including visualization, meditation and contemplative movement, and
  • Core elements of ritual and cultural ceremony, including respect for the sacredness of the land and the stories it holds.

Capacity to be present

Participants should be secure in attending to their own self-healing and feel ready to be in service of hosting healing at a collective level; this means participants should possess the abilities to hold a level of sustained presence and to witness others and historic dynamics with empathy. Prior experience with at least one of the methodologies offered – circle processes, systemic constellations, Art of Hosting, or other dialogic or meditation practice – also is helpful.

More information on place, price etc on the website Collective Healing. There is also a Facebook group that you can join, where a lot of resources will be shared over time.