The road to nakedness

My recent attendance at some of the online interviews and discussions at the Collective Trauma Summit taught me a new vocabulary to comprehend trauma on a variety of levels. Above all, it made me realise that I am far from alone in my attitudes towards grief, the environment, and war.

A dominant theme that was articulated repeatedly was that we need to learn to feel each other at an emotional level, in order to create and sustain a lived awareness of interconnectivity with one another, all life on earth, and, indeed, the cosmos. For, life, when it is hurt, is cold, distant, and repetitive in endless hamster-wheeling cycles. And who wants that?

The conversation between summit organiser Thomas Hübl and climate grief expert Britt Wray confirmed that humans, both individually and collectively, frequently cling to a refusal or an inability to "digest life" as Hübl put it. Covid, for example, was a collective trauma which we did not digest fully, either at the time or since, and, as such, it was a "lost opportunity for harvesting learning". The avoidance of distress manifests as an inability to honour, let alone deal with and channel it, and is a mark of emotional immaturity that resists natural change, growth and transformation.

So, an overarching question is: How can we channel distress into care and action? The more aware we are of any distress we feel, and the more tools we summon to help us channel this distress, the freer we become to "release our burdens" and to choose to lead our selves from one present moment to the next.

As Hübl said several times during the summit, "Trauma is the inability to be present". Closely related is his profound statement: "Presence does not have an other". 

Hübl emphasised that each individual who practises self-leadership, and who has the tools to regulate their own nervous system, has a healing impact on the collective, even if that impact may not be obvious to themselves or others. This was corroborated by bestselling author Gabby Bernstein, who shared how she "wrote herself back into life" after her soul (her unconscious) made it impossible for her not to face the trauma, and its cloaking by shame, of sexual violation. She highlighted the fact that healing takes place "one person at a time".

My personal favourite session was the conversation between Hübl and Prentis Hemphill on 'The Transformative Power of Vulnerability', where 'power' was redefined as:

... openness: Can I be soft enough to listen to what is asked in any particular moment? When I receive you in myself, and our combined agency, power is the creation emerging between us. When both are willing to be fluid, ego steps back.

Hemphill issued the wish that she would want to it to become commonplace for humans to "help one another to shine". Again, the topic of discomfort came up, and that our capacity to be in the discomfort of the world, with all the pain it brings, equals our capacity to grow into our own ability to 'shine'.

"When I let the pain do its work, something changes in me," Hemphill, or Hübl, said. My notes do not indicate which one of these two remarkable people actually uttered those words in that moment, nor would either of them need to claim the quote for themselves, as both live it, have learned to engage with the process of working patiently with pain, whether individual, ancestral or collective, and to trust what emerges from it.

"Kindness at the heart of human beings is the medicine that brings us back home." This quotable quote emerged during the conversation between Kosha Joubert, CEO of the Pocket Project, and somatic practitioner Linda Thai, which touched on multiple levels of trauma, ranging from war (which Thai called "an over-exposure to death"), refugee experiences, the transgressive dissociation from nature (for example, when ancestral land is turned into property), to vicarious trauma due to "hyper-attunement" to the other - which can cause collapse of the self, flipping into existential nihilism or hopelessness. 

One talk I attended, with such hunger that I did not take any notes I can quote or refer to now, was the discussion between the two co-directors of Combatants for Peace, Rana Salman and Eszter Koranyi. Their revelations came as a trauma relief mission to me personally, as the two women represent an organisation that speaks my language and my own heart's truths, namely: There is another way.

I have been near to hopelessness in regard to the war in Gaza, having seen friendships break up around me because of it. In the fray of that I remember saying:

I stand for no flag, I stand for the naked human body. Between Israel and Palestine there lies this form in the sand, and I see it clear as clear with my mind's eye: a naked human body. Who will pick up that body and rescue it from the madness of violence?

After attending the Collective Trauma Summit, I see that this body is being held and nurtured, not only by Combatants for Peace, but by all who refuse a language of othering, who refuse a violating, blaming language, and choose, instead, a creative, courageous language: There is another way. That way does not avoid pain, it does not avoid discomfort, it does not avoid trauma, but faces them all, and chooses to grieve together with 'the other', to hear the other, to see the other, and so to heal the Self.

Then, life itself becomes a poem, becomes attuned to what we could call the poetry of being, and begins to sing.

The creative way