Solidarity, Connection, Coherence
Solidarity, Connection, Coherence
Details of some nourishing virtual and in-person gatherings.
If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
Resonant World #115
I’ve been working through some fear, anger, revulsion and grief over the past few days — and also a degree of confusion, searching for orientation.
I’m also midway through the latest four-day online seminar in my year-long Collective Trauma Facilitator training, with Thomas Hübl and team, which started on Thursday. (Resonant World#79: Why I’m Training as a Collective Trauma Integration Facilitator).
The space has served as an “island of coherence” where I’ve felt resourced to host a greater degree of emotional, political and ethical complexity in my system than had felt comfortable, or even possible, in the middle of the week.
At the same time, I’m torn: Where does a healthy impulse to transcend polarisation by including people with very different views shade into complicity with harm? How can we know where to draw that line? What do parallels with past moments in history have to teach? What don’t I know that I don’t know?
I don’t have answers to these questions — but I do have a lot of faith in bringing people together to form such “islands of coherence,” which I believe can exert a stabilising and harmonising influence beyond their immediate participants.
In that spirit, I wanted to share details of some initiatives informed by a similar principles that I’m either co-facilitating, or that are run by friends of Resonant World:
Ecodharma: A Relational Approach to Building Solidarity
Primarily aimed at those exploring Buddhist practice, my great friend Zhiwa Woodbury (
) is facilitating a two-hour exploration tomorrow for One Earth Sangha to kick off this year's cohort of EcoSattva training.Zhiwa writes of the session:
“I'm going to talk about how bison turn into a storm in order to best get through it, and how that aligns with bodhisattva ethics. Shared responsibility for the climate and biosphere, in other words. And we’re going to explore how we can take advantage of these times to build solidarity with Tribal/Indigenous communities, why that remains so important, and how we can take advantage, as well, of our most powerful ally: Gaia herself. We'll explore co-regulation (i.e., practicing self-regulation in relationship with Nature) as self-care, as well as Eco-tonglen (taking on the suffering of the world). We'll have breakout groups and some Q & A.”
Zhiwa holds a profoundly wise, compassionate and nourishing space. If this calls to you, register here:
Where: Zoom (link will be sent after registering)
Date: Sunday, November 10
Time: 11:30 to 13:30 Eastern Time / 08:30 to 10:30 Pacific / 17:30 to 19:30 CET.
The Resonant Man
and I are holding the first of our weekly men’s circles, the foundation of our Resonant Man initiative, tomorrow evening (UK time). We have a core group of participants who got to know our work via the Resonant Man summer dialogues, and we welcome more men who are committed to working with themes including:
Cultivating vision, purpose & creativity
Creating accountability and mutual support
Connecting with ancestral resources
Pioneering and embodying a new science of collective healing
Transformative dialogue and collective intelligence
Integrity in relationships
Transcending energy drains and addictions
Masculine/Feminine Balance
Our theme for this month is Aligning with our Authentic Future.
We ask for a monthly fee of £125 ($165), which includes access to four online men’s circles a month (each lasting 90 to 120 minutes), and a WhatsApp group that forms a connective tissue between sessions. To register, click here:
Where: Zoom (link will be sent on registering )
Date: Sunday, November 10
Time: 19:00-20:30 UK (GMT) / 14:00-15:30 Eastern Time / 11:00 to 12:30 Pacific.
Should I Stay, or Should I Go?
Climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek, (who appeared on the Resonant World podcast in February), and I are co-hosting a one-day workshop at the The Conduit in London to support a small group of people to explore the professional dilemmas they face in relation to the climate crisis. (Resonant World #65: A New Lens on the Climate Crisis).
We’ll provide a space for people from diverse career backgrounds to open up the core question so many of us are confronting: We want to be part of a meaningful response to the climate crisis and ecological collapse, but our workplace is either buried in denial, or an active part of the problem.
Steffi and I have witnessed time and again how — when we create the right conditions — a form of collective intelligence starts to emerge that affords each participant new perspectives, ‘aha’ moments, and ideas about what do next that we’d never have reached on our own. (Resonant World #90: What is Collective Intelligence?)
We called the workshop “Should I Stay, or Should I Go?” to reflect the dilemma I spoke about in a video of the same title in July last year: (Resonant World #35: Should I Stay, or Should I Go?). Tickets are £275 including lunch, and you can register here.
When: Saturday, December 7
Where: The Conduit, London
Time: 10:10-16:30 UK (GMT).
Climate Conciousness Summit 2024 Starts on Friday
I’m excited to be serving as as co-host on the Climate Consciousness Summit 2024, staged by the Pocket Project in partnership with DeSmog. This unique gathering will bring together leaders from the climate movement and global trauma healing community for seven days of generative dialogues. See you there!
Note from the Editor: It’s a big boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount energises my mission to support the global community of practitioners engaged in supporting people to integrate individual, inter-generational and collective trauma. Thank you!
Matthew, I constantly feel I'm on the same wavelength. These words today: "At the same time, I’m torn: Where does a healthy impulse to transcend polarisation by including people with very different views shade into complicity with harm? How can we know where to draw that line? What do parallels with past moments in history have to teach? What don’t I know that I don’t know?"
Thank you for being you. I will join one of your gatherings, I know I will. K.
Thanks Matthew. I love hearing about your experiences. I feel like it connects me to the same fields of resource that you are connected to, which is supportive.
These words are also resonant in what I have been walking with in the last months. "At the same time, I’m torn: Where does a healthy impulse to transcend polarisation by including people with very different views shade into complicity with harm? How can we know where to draw that line? What do parallels with past moments in history have to teach? What don’t I know that I don’t know?"
I especially love the last question, “what don’t I know that I don’t know?” I was recently in a situation where someone was strongly asserting that we need to draw a line and take action (not host something that was arising in the space), and when I honestly felt into that expression, I felt a lack of flow. I really longed in that moment for the capacity in the group space to be strong enough/coherent enough to host all that was arising in everyone involved. I felt an unmet potential trying to rise through the hosting and digesting of all perspectives that were arising, but it didn’t get realized, because not everyone present could host the level of discomfort that arose in hosting a radically different perspective than their own. I had a sense that if we could slow down and process at the emotional level, the different threads that were arising, rather than trying to figure it out at the level of content, clarity and wise action would arise as a natural outcome of that digesting. But at any rate, I appreciate knowing that others are walking with these questions at the same time and that there are group fields gathering around these questions and exploring in this way.