The Healing That’s Only Possible When We Come Together

[gentle music] We are in the thick of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, and it has been...

I would say it's been a hard summer in a lot of ways.

Summer is feeling really different than it used to, with so much new and unfamiliar climate crisis and emergency to navigate.

And so there is this dissonance of, yeah, the time of year that is so often associated with joy and ease and longer days, beautiful weather, sunshine, and also a kind of, at least for me, a feeling of, yeah, being unsettled, really deeply unsettled.

And I think I'm not alone in that feeling.

And yet, here we are, holding all of this multiplicity and learning to continue to go on and orient around what feels important to us, stay connected to what matters, and, you know, trying not to collapse into e-either extreme of over or under feeling and responding.

Or at least when we do collapse into one of those extremes, being gentle with ourselves and, and returning to a kind of equilibrium.

It's a practice, right? This kind of constant toggling back and forth and, and really being asked to hold so much more than any, any one of us knows how to really do alone.

And that is kind of the topic of this week's conversation with my friend Kai Cheng Thom that I'm so excited to share with you all.

We really drop into this place that is so juicy and exciting and pleasurable, I think, for both of us around talking about the healing that can only happen when we do it together.

The c- the healing that can only happen collectively.

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, a somatics teacher, a mediator, and a master Jungian life coach, and she's based in Tkaronto.

She's the author of several award-winning books, and she's a widely noted expert on group facilitation and conflict transformation.

So you'll hear in this episode, we'll talk about becoming somatics teachers, deciding to leave the world of psychotherapy as practitioners and, and what kind of led each of us to, to making that decision.

And we'll really talk about the possibilities that we've seen emerge when working with groups when we stop trying to heal alone, when we stop trying to heal collective wounds alone.

We talk about leaving the world of therapy, what the body knows that the clinical models that we've trained in often miss, and why shame specifically can really only mend in relationship.

And then we really look at how groups have this particular potency and capacity to metabolize rupture and harm and allow us to come out more connected than ever to one another.