What is “collective healing?” An emergent field of practice & inquiry
This is a chapter from The We Heal For All Circle Training, a self-paced course that teaches you a model of community-based emotional processing you can take, make your own, and bring to your people today.
For many of us who are drawn to the term “collective healing” it’s something we feel or have a sense of more than a working definition. Which makes work around collective healing part of an emergent field of inquiry and practice - a field that’s emerging or taking shape as we go. Therefore us doing work on behalf of collective healing - in Circle and beyond - is actively co-creating and giving birth to this field as we go.
At We Heal for All a guiding question for our work is “What can we take from what we know about individual healing - in terms of psychology, spirituality, emotionality, and the like - and apply it to the collective?” This question guides us on a philosophical and poetic level, as we intuitively feel into what this fractal-like idea has to offer. And this question guides us at a practical design level - what tools, practices and knowledge from healing on an individual level might be useful to us as communities and institutions or for the development of our collective consciousness as societies?
Because by simply being alive at this time, we are all shepherds of a great societal transition and we all have big roles to play. Many of our social, ecological, cultural and political systems are in a process of transformation - addressing realities like the fact that 22 of the world’s richest men have more wealth than all of the women in Africa combined [1]; that the livability of our planet is under threat with rapid species loss, sea level rise, unsustainable consumption and growing population [2, 3]; and that climate disruption and systemic breakdowns like COVID-19 most gravely affect those who have had the least impact and input, such as the Coronavirus’s disproportionate effect on marginalized communities' health, hunger and job safety in the US.
Simultaneously we also live at a time of immense opportunity. Our world is abundant with resources and invitations to innovate, collaborate and create. Technological advancements connect us with information and each other like never before. Global partnerships and international cooperation have cut extreme poverty in half in just 25 years [5]. Innovation in medicine and healthcare, old and new, helps us live longer, fuller lives. Cultural shifts in work and leadership are redefining “success.” Social inclusion and civil rights continue to be bolstered, and untold parts of our history unearthed.
The interconnected nature of all of these realities makes working on behalf of collective change a practice in complexity, both intellectually and emotionally. At We Heal For All we believe that a growing part of the work we have before us as change makers is understanding and supporting the emotional complexity of our work. The emotional complexity of being alive in the 21st century.
Which has led us to think about the term "collective healing," and the needs it addresses in our world in two main ways. You can think of them as two dimensions of collective healing:
Support for change makers - Collective healing work is a way to support the emotional, psychological and spiritual needs and experiences of those who are working on behalf of challenging, complex and existential issues. Issues that are rooted in things like human suffering, loss, corruption, unfairness, and abuse. As changemakers, we are often drawn to work on these issues specifically because of the human suffering or loss we see; to be of service to that suffering and pain; to try to address those issues and make them better in some way. We either have firsthand experiences with this pain and loss or experience it indirectly by witnessing it in our communities and the world at large. Either way, our own heart, psyches, bodies and moral convictions are tied to our social, political, environmental work. Therefore we need resources that support this dimension of things so we can restore ourselves in times of burn out or depletion; to grieve and create space for feelings of heaviness or challenge; to process the up’s and down’s of the work and progress; and to slow down and make sense of our experiences in a safe, supportive environment.
Opportunity for deeper consciousness shifts that can lead to long term behavior change and cultural transformation - Collective healing work also offers us tools that can lead to more structural changes in our culture, behaviors and psyches. Let's look at this definition from the perspective of individual healing - when individuals do healing work (let's say, through therapy or coaching) it not only helps them manage their day-to-day lives better (stress relief, better able to function at work, have healthier relationships, etc.) but it can also shift things at a deeper layer that leads to greater maturity, growth, and evolution. Healing work has the potential to help people grow and transform parts of themselves that are ready to evolve, like outdated coping mechanisms or relational patterns. It often shifts the way a person sees the world and their role in it, resulting in deeper behavior change and consciousness shifts that can have lasting impacts. If we extrapolate from this phenomenon of individual healing and apply it to the collective we can see how processing and healing collectively-shared wounds has the potential to help us get at the deeper root causes of our global issues - like patterns of exploitation that lead to human rights abuses and the degradation of our ecosystems; or patterns of control and dominance that are at the heart of systems of oppression, toxic leadership practices, society’s relationship to the Earth, and our history of geopolitics and development. Collective healing practices have the potential to facilitate deeper consciousness shifts related to our worldviews and the paradigms we operate from, which can lead to the type of cultural change that is needed to shift unsustainable and inhumane practices and give birth to the world our hearts know is possible.
Circles offer us an opportunity to support both dimensions of collective healing work. The WH4A Circle model is a social technology that's designed to help facilitate collective healing in individual communities and beyond. The Circle’s theory of change goes like this -
If we have access to community space that allows us to emotionally and psychologically process the challenging aspects of world change then we will be in fuller, healthier relationship with the complex reality of our time, which will increase our individual and collective resiliency, improve our abilities to constructively respond and participate in society, and heal underlying trauma that perpetuates old paradigms of oppression, exploitation, and disconnection.
What do you think?
In her book Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-based Change, Indigenous rights activist, spiritual teacher and transformational changemaker, Sherri Mitchell Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset offers us this:
"…we must heal the wounds from the past. When we don’t allow ourselves to acknowledge the pain, the deep agonizing soul pain that results from historical trauma, we aren’t able to recognize that we all carry some measure of that pain within us. Instead we allow it to isolate us and keep us cut off from one another. We also fail to recognize that the cause of that pain is not only a violation against us, it is also a violation against life itself…
The wound that is causing the pain that we are now feeling as a society is not new. But how we respond to it can be. When properly addressed this pain can mobilize us and lead us towards the transformation we so desperately need. If we can find the courage to face it openly and honestly it will heal us."
Thomas Hübl, a modern spiritual teacher who’s making strides in the field of collective trauma, and Julie Jordan Avritt offer this description of ancestral trauma in the 2020 Collective Trauma Summit summary document:
"Whatever has been blocked, denied, or suppressed in the experience of one generation is simply energy or information—a modulated wave—that can neither be created nor destroyed; it must fulfil its movement. We might envision the impact of collective trauma, such as that created by the Holocaust, as a series of scars etched into the tissue of our shared humanity. Succeeding generations will enter the world bearing those scars, and it will be their task to integrate the psychological impact of whatever traumas created them."
🌿 Now it’s your turn - What are your thoughts on collective healing? Or what do you think it means to collectively heal in the 21st century? Why do you think it's relevant or necessary to offer community space for collective healing?
Hi, I’m Liz Moyer Benferhat. Writer, facilitator, coach, and development practitioner dedicated to the subtle interplay between how inner transformation feeds the outer transformation we need in the world. Welcome 🌿