I always enjoyed and sought out jumping into travel tunnels to be able to observe my current reality and beehive from a distance. Be it a bus, a train, a plane – anything that could take me far and provide me with the perspective, clarity and apparent detachment that only distance can give us. My most recent travel tunnel, an actual life change from one country, Brazil, to another, France, was a natural evolution in a life that has already been woven with many self seeking voyages.
́Just pretend it’s another summer camp ́ I said to my boys trying to reduce the intensity and immensity that changing countries can bring on one ́s small psyche. It’s too big, it’s better to just take it one step at a time, than to think this is for the rest of your life. It’s just another adventure. Your country will always be your country. I was probably more anxious than them, knowing full well the immensity that this change would mean in our lives.
´I prefer to define people by the paths they have taken, not by their roots´ said in an interview in 2003 the recently nominated perpetual secretary of the French Academy, the franco-lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. ´Travel and migration brings a space for self awareness.´
It certainly has brought me the powerful mirror I was seeking to notice the speed and patterns of my spinning, and the galaxy and galaxies I have been spinning in. We think we are going to get a break from ourselves but as the wise know, wherever you go, there you are. Still I am very grateful for this transition and blank sheet of paper where the same or new stories can be written, and noticing the urgent attempts to write on that paper is already a step into observing myself, and my need, as social mammal that I am, to feel connected / belonging to a community.
´In case you´re interested´ read the message I received via whatsapp with the link to the Collective Trauma Summit. I went in half heartedly, with a couple days of delay, not fully convinced that I would be able to remain engaged online for so long. But to my happy surprise it was the exact kind of input that I was seeking, and I was delighted that my hungry in-transition soul found the nourishment it was needing.
I was not able to attend all the sessions, but those that I did helped me zoom even further out than my geographical location, and not feel scared of the distance (or the void!), but enjoy the wider perspective on the different galaxies that we inhabit and travel in and out of throughout our lives.
Some of the messages that more strongly resonated with me:
- De-pathologize trauma: Trauma is actually the intelligent response that our bodies have to protect us from experiences that are too strong to process. However it has after effects and symptoms that we need to explore and heal – our healing process creates our wisdom. Thomas Hübl, PhD
- Collective healing to co-create collective health: We rarely stop to observe the effects that systemic trauma – massive polarizations, post colonial trauma wounds – has in our lives. We need a lot of inner strength, power and connectedness to overcome these issues. Thomas Hübl, PhD
- Compassionate enquiry for emerging futures: The importance of nurturing the conditions to integrate our past, to avoid envisioning moments that are born out of pain and / or reactiveness, when the past interferes with our present. Understanding that tension is actually the place that needs the attention. Dr. Gábor Máté, The Myth of Normal
- Interacting with the world is our teacher: Our mindset of individualism infects everything including therapy, but it’s only through each other that we can truly find meaning. Dr. Gábor Máté
“Resilience is not just bouncing back to the original, it’s actually being able to grow from what happened.”
Dr. Gábor Máté
- Trauma Informed Leadership: Exercise the practice of befriending our nervous system as we move forward and fully recognizing where violations have occurred and attend to what has happened. Leadership as a quality that arises when we are in a very secure space not as the act of fearful reaction like competitiveness.
“We change the world one nervous system at a time”
- Collective collaboration and leadership: We do not have to do it alone. When we hurt ourselves, our body has the inherent ability to heal, so have our systems, healing collective trauma is working together with the self healing mechanism of life – together being in an ecosystem of healing.
- Generational trauma: Once we have had trauma our nervous system becomes predisposed to it. Trauma response creates oxidative stress, associated with inflammation and this is the mechanism by which generational trauma gets passed on through generations, through epigenetics. Dr. Aimie Apigian
- Preventing crisis: We need to skillfully deconstruct our outdated global structures and channel this information into new structures, with care, relationality, interest and skill, creating the ecosystems that help us heal, instead of going into a crisis. Thomas Hübl, PhD
- Reinventing organizations: We have many organizational traumas like hierarchy, power over, the trauma of having to wear a professional mask, of not being able to step into your wholeness, the trauma of pursuing meaningless purpose, the trauma of our management and economic systems are built on scarcity. Begin with exploring how hierarchical models can migrate to circular models. Frederic Laloux
- Wellbeing: We are trying to reconstruct the world from a space that is disconnected, without emotion; we have not been interested in all the data, in our holistic complex selves. Wellbeing doesn’t mean constant happiness – Discontent and grief are good data, we have to grieve in order to move forward. adrienne maree brown
“Everywhere I travel there is a place where I can feel at home”
Adrienne Maree Brown
- Artist: Edge walking: listening to what’s coming ahead of the horizon, and learning how to bring it through and communicate it for others, that listening for what is coming, scanning horizons always looking ahead for the group and articulate it to them – how artist lives are dedicated to this, that there is a whole other level of communication that comes through.
The list goes on but I will pause on this last one, because it so strongly conveys what I was trying to articulate for myself. I realized that it had taken many travel tunnels and years, joy and grief to get to this exact point in time. Where I am in between nations, lives, and daily routines – where if I can keep myself curious and compassionate with my process, I can feel that relaxation that one feels when one arrives at one’s place.
Exploring myself and the world to understand myself and the world, and sharing what I learn is my purpose and my home.
If you´re interested in learning more, do check out the free videos that are available at the Collective Trauma Summit.