Gesturing Towards a Trauma-Restoring Media Culture

A new essay, and a podcast with Pocket Project CEO Kosha Joubert.

Thank you for reading Resonant World 🙏.

“Trauma can also be a portal”: A clip from remarks I made on the closing panel at the #MediaStrong conference on journalism and trauma at City University in London on July 2, 2025.¹

Resonant Events: I’m excited to be speaking on an online panel on Climate Journalism & Mental Health: Strategies for Covering a Planet in Crisis on Friday, October 10 at 1600-1650 BST as part of the Mental Health in Journalism Summit. Register here.

Danny Cohen, a friend of Resonant World, is opening the doors for a new cohort on his incredible 10-week course in the Art of Communication, which starts in November. I can think of few better places to learn the relational skills that can turn difficult conversations into opportunities for deep connection. Details here.

Meanwhile, if you’re a man and you enjoy Resonant World, do consider joining the men’s circle myself and

Jacob Kishere

host online every Sunday from 1900-2030 BST as part of

The Resonant Man

. For more details and to book a discovery call with us, click here. We have a great regular group and have some spots available for new joiners.

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Resonant World #158

A big part of my current focus is integrating what I learned during my career as a foreign correspondent with my study of collective trauma with Thomas Hübl and team.

At many points during the past four years of training, I’ve wished I could have returned to my old job equipped with the radically enlarged perspective this work has afforded me. I would’ve approached the people I was meeting in the countries where I lived, and told their stories, in completely different ways.

While the work with Thomas has certainly brought me into contact with new ways of experiencing temporality (in particular the notion of retrocausality — that the healing we perform in the present can affect people in the past), travelling back in time is not (yet) an option for me.

Nevertheless, I feel a strong impulse to join those already exploring how an understanding of the principles of integrating individual, inter-generational and collective trauma could lead to new forms of storytelling. I also believe this emerging paradigm could birth entirely novel forms of media organisation — far more suited to respond to the demands of the moment than our legacy media system, which tends to be a vector of retraumatisation, as opposed to an agent of healing.

I’ve been exploring these ideas for several years now in Resonant World, but over the summer I attempted a deeper elaboration of what a “trauma-restoring media culture” might look like, and how to seed it, in an essay for Emerge called No Longer Burying The Lead: A New Media Culture for the Metacrisis.

The essay starts like this:

BEARING WITNESS IS A SACRED ACT. In the moment when we are truly present to another’s pain, or listen from a place of true receptivity, emotions that seemed overwhelming, or ideological positions that seemed unassailable, can start to soften and shift. This is a fundamental principle of trauma healing, and why the spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl says:

“Witnessing is the subtlest form of intervention.”

In our hearts, all true journalists know this. We intuit that there’s something profound at stake in the way we conduct our work that cannot be captured in conventional metrics of success — whether clicks, likes or awards. At the same time, growing pressures on legacy media are making it increasingly difficult for reporters and editors to honour the core values of objectivity, fairness and courage the profession — at its best — has always prized. From a collapse in audience trust and the erosion of business models by digital advertising and now AI, to self-dealing by billionaire owners and toxic work cultures of burnout and moral injury, the industry is exhibiting analogous symptoms of decay to the corporations, governments and institutions it’s supposed to be holding to account.

In this time of chaos and collapse, it’s easy to envisage how a combination of post-truth politics, authoritarianism, and AI-powered digital manipulation and surveillance could lead to an even darker future, where the last vestiges of shared reality and democratic discourse almost entirely dissolve. But let’s assume for a moment that there’s at least a possibility that breakdown could lead to breakthrough: What would a new media culture capable of responding to the demands of the metacrisis look like? How would it be different from what’s gone before? And how could it be built?

To read the rest of the essay, please click here.

I would like to thank

Tham Zhiwa

of

THE DHARMA BEAT

for encouraging me to write the essay, for providing essential feedback on an early draft, and for encapsulating our shared explorations of this topic in this beautiful post, “Witnessing Is the Subtlest Form of Intervention (Thomas Hübl): How Quantum Journalism Can Save the World.” The essay was also heavily influenced by the work of

Karen O'Brien

— another friend of Resonant World — on quantum social change. Monika Hung has also been a great source of encouragement.

A Portal to Collective Healing

In the essay, I wrote about how the ‘quantum newsroom’ of the future could apply a practice known as Global Social Witnessing — where groups of people come together in community to attend deeply to overwhelming events in the news in a more mindful, embodied way than our addictive, 24/7 news feeds allow.

I could imagine staff in news organisations working with Global Social Witnessing to create a more coherent group field — which would then inform more “emotionally-intelligent” forms of storytelling (as my friend James Scurry, one of the conveners of the MediaStrong conference on journalism and trauma, likes to say).

Beyond that, what if Global Social Witnessing started to take root in wider society — as we transition from a passive style of individualised news consumption that leaves us feeling drained, powerless, and stuck in our heads, to a collective form of engagement that helps us rediscover our agency, and connection to our hearts?

At about the time I was writing the essay, I recorded the below conversation with Kosha Joubert, CEO of the Pocket Project, which holds Global Social Witnessing calls and trainings, for the What Is Collective Healing? podcast that Kosha and I co-host with Sonita Mbah.

Global Social Witnessing, Kosha explained, is birthing “a new way of being in the world” where we experience our innate inter-dependence in a more intimate, tangible way. The practice doesn’t start from any preconceived idea of what we should feel or do in respond to what we see in the news — but it sometimes helps participants to recognise “the one sacred thing” that they feel called to do next.

“And I think our hearts resonate with that one thing,” Kosha told me. “And the more we are in a space of softening, opening, melting, slowing down, relating precisely, the more the chances increase that we are able to see it.”

I believe Global Social Witnessing represents the kind of social technology that could revolutionise how we produce and consume news media — and support our collective bodies to both metabolise the global trauma waves, and uncover the impulse towards ethical restoration hiding just below their surface.

If you have thoughts about trauma-restoring media, or would like to collaborate to bring this vision into reality, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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

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Join Us For The Genesis Experience in Brussels

Genesis Experience returns this weekend (September 27–28) at Commons Hub Brussels — a live experiment towards generative polarisation.

When empires collapse, cultures are reborn. Monasteries once carried Europe through the fall of Rome. Today, eco-villages, urban and digital commons can unite to form grounded and life-serving communities able to master polarity work and lead from emergence.

Genesis is a sacred space where power is named, claimed, and held in service of life. Masculine and feminine, centralised and decentralised, conservative and progressive. Through dialogos, ritual, and somatic intelligence, contradiction is lived so today’s deeper cultural drive can manifest. Builders of Europe’s future, this is the moment to gather and create the conditions for a possible next culture to emerge. More details here.

1. The title of this post was inspired in part by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts and research collective.