Coming Home Meditation Tomorrow Morning 9am EST ~ Collective Healing
A meditation on tomorrow's meditation (link included)
Dear Friends,
On Mondays I will send a brief essay and a link to my Tuesday morning meditation on Zoom. The essay will offer a theme, then we sit together to discuss and feel into it the next morning. If the theme speaks to you, join us! Please use this link for the meditation tomorrow morning (Tuesday) from 9am-10am EST.
Starting April 1 the live meditations will be open only to paid subscribers.
Tomorrow’s Topic: Collective Healing
I spent the weekend at a retreat for healers. The intention was “Healing in Community” and the venue was the magical retreat center of my friend, David Sauvage. There were ten participants with a variety of healing gifts: empaths, trauma healers, mediums, women’s circle holders, a tea master, psychedelic facilitators, a psychic, a psychiatrist and psychologist.
I walked not knowing what to expect. I was instructed to come with a personal intention. Mine came quickly and I felt clear about it: I wanted to work with my inner critic. But, something happened the moment I walked in the door on Friday and didn’t let go of me until I left on Sunday afternoon: the group intention, the intention to heal in community was the dominant force in operation. Ultimately, my personal intention did get addressed, but only after I surrendered to the collective healing that wanted to unfold in and through us. I had to come to see that personal healing IS collective healing and collective healing is operating beyond our small, personal desires. I walked away healed in ways I didn’t even know I was wounded!
Holding a group healing session requires a great deal of steadiness and lots of space. I don’t mean physical space…I mean psychic, energetic space. When we move into group containers held with compassionate awareness, the energy of our dynamics will bring up anything that is incoherent, fragmented, and unhealed. The healing can be brutal for anyone holding resistance to it—and most of us are holding a great deal of resistance because it means change, discomfort, and stepping into the unknown. It’s a death and rebirth process.
And yet, this is precisely what needs to happen now. Many people have embarked on personal healing journeys. This might look like taking up a mindfulness practice, learning yoga, taking better care of your health, trying plant medicine, seeking psychotherapeutic care, working on our trauma, kicking addictions. This is all wonderful and necessary—it must be done. But, at a certain point, you begin to see that there really is no such thing as purely personal healing. Whenever we heal, we impact those around us in obvious and material ways. We impact the field of family karma; healing our ancestral trauma is felt ”forwards and backward” through the lineage. We also impact the collective field of trauma that whole societies can and do hold. When I heal an eating disorder, I make a dent in the collective trauma of body dysmorphia. When I integrate my divine feminine, I digest a piece of the collective wound of the feminine in a culture that still denigrates it. When we heal a conflict with a neighbor, the whole neighborhood benefits. Likewise, we are the beneficiaries of all the courageous healing work that has been done and is done every day by individuals and groups around the world.
Collective trauma is what keeps us cycling through painful patterns of history. What we haven’t dealt with keeps presenting itself for healing until we take a look. The trauma makes us numb, dissociated, and reactive until we are able to face and effectively transmute it. This is what’s present in the current war in Ukraine. I was present for a talk by the mystical teacher and collective trauma authority, Thomas Hübl, recently when he addressed this current crisis in Europe. He framed it in a way that was helpful to me. He said we are in a detox process on the planet: “It’s the detox of power abuse hierarchies.” It will look like fragmentation and polarization of our democracies, he said, but it is actually the process of dissolution and transmutation that will (or could depending on how we handle the crisis) ultimately allow for a higher order of democracy to arise that is centered around something sacred and real; around a higher-level organizing principle. We need for the rot to come out of the system for that to emerge. He named that the fragmentation is very threatening. But this is precisely where we need to rise to the occasion, bring a high level of presence and compassion to bear. We can start with our own experience—in the body—and then work with the experience of our friends and family members and our community. We can use our voices and resources to provide safety, space, boundaries, clarity, compassion and love. Without attachment, without aversion, and without indifference, these were the guiding words of the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, as shared with me by a friend recently (thank you, Sandra).
The weekend’s experience gave me the opportunity to witness at very close quarters and in an immediate way how the collective field of healing works. I have been a part of many collective trauma healing experiences in the past, but there was something different about this weekend. I will try here to encapsulate a few of the main takeaways.
Healing happens at its own pace. It cannot be rushed or pushed. The only way to help it along is to commit to providing space and safety in the container. It’s like surfing: if we move too fast or too slow, we miss the natural wave that is moving through the collective ocean. Most humans at this moment in time are not sensitive to these currents. Facilitators who are very sensitive to subtle energies can help hold the group at the pace of healing.
There are often interrupting energies in the field of healing. These energies can be shadow presences or entities that are not interested in allowing the healing to happen. They can work through humans and their actions. They show up as incoherence or a kind of “splinter” in the fabric of the group. A leader must be very attuned to the presence of this kind of energy in the space so they can deal with it or eliminate it in a compassionate way if it is not available to be transmuted. These energies are not to be confused with the natural resistance of the psyche to change, with shadow. Entities are real obstructions. Again, a facilitator for the healing process (or a shaman) can sense this and knows what action to take to restore safety and coherence to the container.
A collective field of healing requires a collective orientation and perspective. Mostly, we are still in an individualistic paradigm in the West: What’s wrong with me and how can I fix it? Or how can I improve my situation through healing? In group healing experiences, this leads to a tendency to treat all participants as equal, but separate. Each person is oriented around their own process and needs and the facilitators are, too. This makes a group identity impossible and reduces it to a collection of individual “I”s. In this paradigm, the best we can hope for is cooperation and a kind of benign harmony. This can feel democratic, fair, and equitable, but it doesn’t actually serve a collective healing process. To tap into the power of a collective healing field, we have to start with the recognition that an individual is an individuated aspect of the whole; that our personal experience is interpenetrated with a bigger movement of the group, the collective. When we truly orient around how we fit into the group and who we are in relation to the group; what we share, and what we want to heal together, we can access bigger energetic movements and count on bigger shifts in the field. We do each other’s healing—or more accurately, we ARE each other’s healing. It’s a humbling and miraculous thing.
What supports this orientation around the group is clear intentions and clear rules. Clear intentions align the group and create a strong coherence; it attunes and trains energies and imaginations towards a shared objective. Clear rules are important as we dissolve personal boundaries and learn to trust the bigger movement of energies. We need to feel safe enough to let go of our own ego trips and surrendered into the good of the whole, even when it might temporarily require something of us that is challenging or counterintuitive. We have to be willing to sacrifice something in order to get to the place we all want to go—that higher order healing. We can digest more trauma together than any of us can alone and this is what is being called for now.
These insights aren’t yet fully refined and I know they will deepen over time. I have been facilitating group experience for decades now, but group healing is really a special case. There are dynamics that need to be held with great sensitivity and subtle awareness. We have to begin to feel into the field, not just relate to what seems to be happening on the surface of things. I look forward to offer some retreats this summer that will offer a group and collective healing experience.
The main thing I received this weekend was a new understanding of the interconnectedness of our journeys. We are all wounded, we are all healers, and we are all the medicine for each other. Healing shows up all the time, even when you’re not looking for it; healing sometimes looks like conflict, tension, chaos, and dissolution at first. Healing together is more potent and more true to reality-as-it-is than healing alone (we never really heal alone anyway). Accepting and exploring this truth will be what leads us into the deeper experiences of community and communion we’re all seeking.
I’d love to hear from you if something here resonates or if you’d like to share your own principles and observations on collective healing.