Collective Healing Matters
Last week's conversation with Matthew Green focused on why healing collective trauma matters, and we reflected on how it can enhance our capacity to respond more effectively to global problems.
Last week I had the pleasure of talking to Matthew Green, author of the Resonant World newsletter and global investigations editor at Desmog, a nonprofit climate news service. This was the first in a series of “Conversations that Matter,” where I explore what quantum social change looks like in both theory and practice. We recorded the first 20 minutes of the conversation (see above) before opening it up to participants.
I love Matthew’s passion for looking into how patterns and potentials for social change are shaped by collective and intergenerational trauma. I also admire his integrity — he walked away from a position with the mainstream news media because of the company’s lack of integrity on climate change.
Matthew and I have had multiple conversations about quantum social science and the implications for climate action, including one that was part of the 2024 Climate Consciousness Summit. Last week was an opportunity to build on these conversation and include more people and perspectives.
Our dialogue focused on the importance of recognizing how collective and intergenerational trauma affects us all and influences our ability to show up and respond effectively and impactfully. Integrating trauma can be a powerful source of energy for social change. Matthew talked about the way healing collective trauma can release “an undiscovered, untapped human potential that is so abundant when we know where to look for it.”
If you want to read more about this topic, Matthew published a wonderful post-conversation reflection in his latest Resonant World newsletter. Here, he goes deeper into the inquiry, “Can quantum social science provide a theoretical framework to explain how collective healing works?” This is a critical question with practical consequences, given our current geopolitical and environmental crises.
For me, the conversation format proved to be much more inspiring and energizing than a typical webinar or podcast, as participants had the opportunity to engage and share their insights and experiences. Matthew summed it up well: “There's an empowerment that becomes available to us when we come together in groups in an intentional way and recognize that we have this quantum potential, so to speak.”
My next “Conversation that Matters” will take place on Thursday, April 24th at 8pm CET, and my guest will be Laura Zanotti, a professor of political science at Virginia Tech University and author of Ontological Entanglements, Agency and Ethics in International Relations: Exploring the Crossroads. We’ll talk about ethics and political agency, what this means for current world politics, and whether a quantum approach can help us to re-imagine how we inhabit the world.
In the meantime, let’s engage in conversations that matter every day — they can change the world!
When detached, suppressed, and disconnected, we cannot come together to address or resolve systemic problems or existential crises. Climate change is a symptom of collective trauma, and our delay in forming an intelligent and coherent response is the same.
— Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma
Conversation Notes
00:03 — Introduction
02:51 — What does quantum social change mean to you?
03:48 — Default classical worldview vs quantum perspective
04:30 — Superposition, entanglement, fractals, agency, consciousness
04:48 — Quantum social change as theoretical framework for collective healing
06:13 — Risk of grossly underestimating our capacity for social change
07:42 — How does collective trauma relate to global crises?
08:04 — Origins of collective and inter-generational trauma work
10:38 — How collective trauma healing works
11:41 — The shift from the classical to the quantum human
12:16 — Healing backward and forward in time
13:06 — Group healing work as catalyst for fractal agency
15:54 — Potential for global coherence-building to support rapid positive change
16:47 — How to respond to people who say it’s ‘game over’?
18:53 — How presencing unspoken emotions can unlock a new quality of agency
19:32 — Engagement in collective healing practices likely to grow
20:37 — Quantum ‘wild cards’ for the global future
20:46 — Social reality is not what it seems
I was pleased to find this conversation with my friend Matthew Green, who I met when he attended the seminal gathering of Climate Change & Consciousness in 2019 that I organized in Scotland. Climate Change & Consciousness has gone on to generate quantum social change through the resolution of trauma, focusing now on Regenerative Health for A Climate Changing World. Our next major event in this direction is The Mother of Medicine. launching in May. I must note that my book We Are All in Shock, reissued recently in a new edition but originally written in 2005, was a prediction of the shock of climate change. This was followed by the publication of my book They Were Families: How War Comes Home. This is literally a parallel to everything discussed in this interview. We are in resonant community together right now, and we have been, even without knowing it!
This is such a rich dialogue and deeply resonant for me as you two draw the parallels of collective trauma and how our current climate crises is both a trauma field AND a collective healing field - even if we sometimes forget. Thank you matthew and karen for recording and sharing the first part of The Conversations that Matter. I noticed a remarkable shift in any heavy anesthesia i start to carry when matthew spoke of the power of collective and the intergenerational trauma HEALING fields we are all semi entangled in too.
Perhaps your voice tapped into the energetic memory of my time well spent with Thomas Hubl, Lissa Rankin, Dick Schwarz and other creative spiritual healers inside of a quantum field of collective presence ever since the pandemic and our poison leadership bombarded my humanity. Now It feels like an energetic transmission in intergenerational healing because i remember now how it resonates when my Ancestors are with me - in body soul and spirit. They have faced times like these and are resources for me - as yours are for you. This is Fragments healing in real quantum time. Thank you Resonant Ones - i look forward to more of this rich soul food in future real time🙏💕🙂