00:00:01 Kosha
What trauma really helps us to understand is that it’s where presence meets the unconscious levels of reality and where we are no longer able to see clearly what is happening and where we are no longer able to solve this individually. Because we need the eyes of the others who are able to see into places that I’m not able to see into. So we need each other’s eyes to see into the fields of trauma that takes us into a next level of overcoming separation. At the moment we have too many solutions that are being brought to the world which do not grow from embodied deep relatedness. I believe that another aspect of this methodology is that it can help to practice and bring each other home to related responses and to the unique responses that we are meant to bring to the world.

00:01:17 Rosemary
Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Kosha Joubert. Kosha, welcome to our podcast.

00:01:51 Kosha
Thank you, Rosemary, for welcoming me. I’m already feeling very warmly enveloped here by you, by your voice, and by this community.

00:02:01 Rosemary
That’s wonderful. I thought where we’d start is with your current role as the CEO of the Pocket Project. And in that role you work closely with Thomas Hübl and a global team and together you’re growing a culture of trauma informed care. Kosha, your full bio is included in the show notes, but as we begin, I’m wondering what else you’d like to share about yourself with our listeners to frame up this conversation.

00:02:30 Kosha
You know, I think there’s just a few words about the Pocket Project itself. Before stepping in to lead the Pocket Project, I was for many years leading the Global Ecovillage Network. And I, especially at the beginning, I often ask myself whether we shouldn’t pick a bigger name because The Pocket Project, it sounds strangely small. What is this? And the whole concept of creating spaces of healing, pockets of healing for pockets of trauma, is quite something to wrap my mind around. But the closer I get to it, the more I also understand that it is about creating or recreating intimacy between us, starting from the intimacy between me and myself, between me and others, between me and the world. And this does happen in pockets, right? It doesn’t happen in big chunks at a time, somehow Intimacy Is it can be huge, right? It can be between me and the divine, between me and the universe, between me and outer space, when I look up at the stars, right? But there is also always that intimate closeness. And for sure, another aspect of it is that we want to provide ourselves and each other with tools that we carry around in our pockets. And we want to unpack the baggage that we’ve carried in our pockets for too long. So, I’m just somehow drawn to the name in speaking a bit about it. And I think it’s… it also speaks to my own quest for finding the essential space between utter humility and allowing myself to expand into my full potential, and how close those two lie together. Yeah. Maybe the last thing I would like to say is that my whole life has been dedicated to healing separation in different ways and different levels. And in a way, that quest has brought me to look closer and closer at the sand in the system. And that is also what the work that I’m doing now is dedicated to looking at the sand in the system.

00:05:12 Rosemary
The sand in the system. Interesting. I’m very much looking forward to getting into that. And thank you so much for explaining the name. I had a question planned. It’s like, where did that name come from? There must be a story there, because you’re right, at first glance it seems misfitting, but how you’ve just described it, it makes perfect sense. One thing I’d like to do as we get started, that is a very dominant practice. Every Compassionate Inquiry session starts with the setting of an intention. I have set one for our conversation today, and I’m going to invite you, after I’ve shared mine, if there’s an intention you’d like to set as well. So Kosha, my intention for this episode is that our listeners get a solid understanding of who you are, the work you have done and are doing, the aims of The Pocket Project, and how Global Social Witnessing is supporting the collective healing of humanity.

00:06:13 Kosha
Thank you. That sounds beautiful. I feel honored by your intention. And I would say that my intention is to weave joy into this space, and to keep our listeners, you all who are listening, very close to my heart, to my awareness while I speak.

00:06:37 Rosemary
Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to start by going back 10 years in referencing your 2015 Ted Talk From Apartheid to Eco Villages. In that talk, you painted a very clear picture of the path that led you from the apartheid model into which you were born and in which you were raised to your passion for development that’s more organic…. That doesn’t separate people either from other people or from nature. Can you share that story with our listeners?

00:07:12 Kosha
In that story I share a bit about my personal life path, just as a child growing up within the apartheid system and waking up to the reality of it, where there was quite a discrepancy between what I was seeing in the world around me and what I was told I was seeing. And the feelings that were created in me, of deep discomfort, a sense of injustice, a sense of fear, because I could feel the brewing of times that are changing, and the misfit of the societal model with life itself. That misfit between life flowing and what the system was creating, in terms of separation, was so palpable and I did not know where to go with it. And it caused great discomfort in my nervous system, as a child, in my interactions at school, and with adults in my family. And that discomfort grew and grew as I became a teenager. It became protest, explicit protest became anger. As a child, I had nightmares. As a teenager, I dreamt of terrorist acts. You know, at that time I, I seem to have been very attuned to Nelson Mandela and Mkhonto we Sizwe [the armed wing of the African National Congress] and… but very strange to walk around with those dreams. And in the end it led to a point in my life where I dropped all my needs for security, just because I didn’t know what else to do. And I went on a pilgrimage through my country and I think often when we want to overcome separation, especially when we’re in warlike societies, and definitely apartheid was a warlike society where I was told that to side with the other side would be to betray my people and to send my own family into death. That’s the rhetoric that people in war zones are told everywhere in the world. If you open your heart to the other side, if you speak up for the other side, that is a betrayal. 

And so to grow up with that, it took courage, to say the least I can do is to walk into this, without any protection and to go and see for myself. And that led me to meet a community where white and black people were living together in one of the homelands, something that I had no idea even existed. And I found in that a healing movement that I decided to follow. A healing movement that I could really grasp, where I could feel how this was laying a foundation for a future society where white and black people could live together in a peaceful way. And I think that path continues to develop alongside everything that was done in The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, all the limitations of that, all the healing motions of that. Yeah, and for me, that kind of overcoming apartheid was very strongly connected then to an experience of starting to understand the globality of our systems of oppression and separation. And understanding that apartheid has actually been, I would say that, colonialism has been transformed into many other, much more subtle systems of separation and oppression.

00:11:29 Rosemary
Yeah, I would agree with that, and I love how you described it. It was both a cognitive and somatic dissonance that you felt in your body until you came across this mixed community, which may have been the first sort of Eco-Village that you had encountered. Would that be correct to say? Or how would you define what an Eco-Village is or is not? Was this a prelude to the Eco-Village work that you went on to do?

00:12:01 Kosha
Absolutely. I mean, from there it just felt because before that I was exploring dedicating my life either to academia because that’s where both my parents came from, and I thought changing the systems of knowledge. But I realized very quickly that academia as a system, as an institution, brought so many limitations with it that I did not want to have to move within it. And I have to say that was a long time ago and I’m not speaking for all of us. And the whole academic venture in our world. It’s hugely important. And we work with research to bring forth more understanding for collective trauma integration all the time. 

And the other pathway was activism protest, which I absolutely practiced and went for ,and then found that it was not my way, that I could feel that I was becoming more angry. That I was in a way hardening frontiers in the way that I was practicing my activism. And even though it was great to allow for an expression of some of what had got stuck in my nervous system, that wasn’t going to be my life path. 

So this became like a third path where I understood that we can change systems, bottom-up. I started understanding that I personally have a very deep trust in the human being, in our original form, our unbroken form, I have a deep trust in the power of the human heart, but also the sensitivity of the human nervous system and our capacity to attune, our capacity to step into heart to heart communication with each other and with the living world around us. You know, I’ve often said that one of the most underused resources in our world is the good intentions of human beings and our longing to offer positive contribution to the world. And if we could learn how to unleash that resource in humanity, how to put our full focus on unleashing the human potential of love, care, that will make all the difference. And in a way, this is very close to what The Pocket Project is doing right, building cultures of care.

00:14:44 Rosemary
Yeah. And  I really appreciate your extreme sensitivity to separation because as you said, the work that goes on in the academic realm is invaluable. And yet there is a bit of a gap between the academic world and the everyday world. So there is definitely a need for that someone to interpret or bridge that gap. And it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing. But I’m curious before we go there. You’ve supported the work of GEN International, which is a global network that supports the ecovillage movement and aims to accelerate the shift of sustainable lifestyles. You’ve done that work for over 25 years, and you’ve worked across 48 or perhaps more than 48 countries at this point. What I’m wondering is how your journey through that world prepared you for the work that you do today, The collective healing work with Thomas Hübl.

00:15:47 Kosha
Yeah, thank you so much. My work to explore this, our dedication to do good in the world did bring me at that time, and this was in the early 90s. I went on that pilgrimage through South Africa in 1990/1991 and from there on I traveled to communities and Eco-Villages around the globe. But became… at that time the Internet was just like a mini seed and everything was word by mouth, and there were all these hidden places on our planet that once you landed into the network, you were just sent from one…. And it was truly travelling from Oroville to Damanhur to the community of Findhorn in Scotland, to the farm in Tennessee. It was a world of magic, you know, a world that I had known nothing about before. And to walk into circles beyond circles of people that were stating very clearly, we’re living beyond our means on the planet. And they’d started doing this in the early 70s, the 60s, you know, we need to change how we relate to the world. We’re destroying the world that we live on. We need to come back to other ways of living together and to learn from these groups of elders that have been doing this already for 30 years by the time I recognized it. And of course, the lineage goes back into the Indigenous communities and was literally born from inspiration from many Indigenous communities, but that inspiration was just an incredible stream of upliftment for me. You know, I ended up having friends in just about every country in the world, that I could go and visit at anytime, that were absolutely dedicated to restorative work. And so you can just imagine how that coming from the apartheid system, well, that absolutely transformed my way of seeing our world. And I have fallen in love with our world and humanity through that window of seeing how humans have been creating places, healing physical communities dedicated to healing the natural world, the social systems between us, the cultures that we come from and are embedded in, our connection to the subtle worlds, to the spiritual world, and the economic systems that we are part of and are dedicated to doing that in their very lives. So the beautiful thing is that life, in itself, is a dedication to restoration of broken relationships and healing the separation that I had grown up in.

00:18:50 Rosemary
Thank you so much. That was beautifully said. And the quote that you shared earlier came, I believe, from a book you authored in 2015 called Eco-Village: 1001 Ways to Heal the Planet. I’m going to repeat it again because it’s worth hearing a second time. You said, “One of the most underutilized resources we have on the planet today is the good intentions of citizens and our willingness to make a difference.” So the picture you just painted of traveling from such disparate parts of the world to others landing in these magical communities, that… it makes perfect sense in terms of the transition from the work you have been doing for so long. And it’s not a from-to really, it’s a yes-and, from my understanding, you haven’t left that world behind you. You have added, you’ve expanded, you have included the world of collective healing. Is that accurate?

00:19:50 Kosha
Yeah. I mean, what I experience in the Global Eco-village Network is that there are all these amazing, amazing spaces. And I want to include the indigenous villages around the world that I have also been visiting, from Maori communities in New Zealand to African deeply capacitated communities that are healing the ecosystems around them, but not growing from Western models of restoration, but from their own knowledge that the groves of trees are sacred and the waters are where the ancestors live. And this is of course, alive and kicking. Whether you move to China, to Thailand, to Colombia, to the Native American communities of Turtle Island, to the Sami communities in Europe, it doesn’t matter where we go. This knowledge is alive and kicking, and we can learn from them and with them, and there is great respect. I do feel that, as I’ve traveled and lived in community and learned from community around the world, that I have come home to myself and to my own body in a way that I wasn’t before. But what I’ve also learned is that in all these communities, it felt to me, as if with all the psychological tools that we brought, and there are therapists in mass in all these communities, you know, so there is a lot of therapeutic knowledge, but that there was something that we could not address fully. And I, I couldn’t put a finger on it, but I found it wherever I went, that it felt as if communities – and right now I’m living in a community here, in Findhorn in Scotland, which has been existing for close to 70 years now. – but where the initial impulse is strong and beautiful and it meets what I call sand in the system. So I come back to the sand in the system. So what I mean with that is it’s like small, very fine networks and fabrics and particles. I would call it particles, to start off with, of conflictions materials, which feels like conflictions materials resistance. In a way. It is resistance to what is, you could call it. Resistance to what we meet in ourselves and what we meet in each other and what we meet in the collective sphere. Because it’s too painful to meet fully.  

And it took me until 2010 before I could share with Thomas Hübl the name “Trauma” to use the name Trauma for that sand. I’m not sure it’s always the very best way of naming it, but I think it’s pretty good and it comes pretty close. In 2008, I co-organized a summit, a conference with Thomas Hübl, who’s the founder of The Pocket Project, together with his wife, Yehudit Sasportas, called The Power of Collective Wisdom. And it was especially addressing, actually, communities worldwide to learn more about how, because at that time I was completely exploring this question of how can we within communities over time, not start meeting around the lowest common denominator, but come to meet around the highest common denominator, where creativity and co-creativity can truly stream through. And that was my absolute exploration. And I was naming it at that point, you know, that on certain levels in communities, I watch us move to the lowest common denominator where the conflictious material between us becomes so strong and we’re not able to address it and it actually pulls us down. And I think we’ve all had that experience in our teams, in our organizations and people with the best intentions come together and break apart again, or just settle under a certain ceiling of functionability where it feels as if the constant evolving stops. And I’ve seen that within communities, Eco-Villages, I’ve seen that within the global Eco-Village as a whole. I’ve seen that within global institutions like the United Nations, going to the conferences. So on all these different systemic levels, where we, what I call, run into the sand in the system, but I think the deepest insight around it, and what trauma really helps us to understand is that, it’s where we meet, where presence meets the unconscious levels of reality. And where we are no longer able to see clearly what is happening. And where we are no longer able to solve this, individually, because we need the eyes of the others who are able to see into places that I’m not able to see into. So we need each other’s eyes to see into the fields of trauma. That takes us into a next level of overcoming separation.

00:25:24 Rosemary
Yes, you’ve shared so much there. Given that the work that you’ve done over the past 25 years, you’ve come in from a very high level view of all of these different aspects of systems and how they overlap, where they overlap. And you’ve brought us down through identifying the sand in the system, the trauma, to land in a place where you know, again, it evokes something from the country where you were born. It’s the confliction, if you will, between the Ubuntu philosophy and the competitive colonialism, capitalism, the myth of the independent human being. You’ve landed right down in that place. Does that sound like a reasonable recap?

00:26:15 Kosha
Yes. And I would say that taking it right down to the level of particle, firstly to say, and I believe that all of these levels are always present within each of us, and that we are active acupuncture points that resonate into all of these levels. We have an effect, by the way we are and the way our nervous systems resonate, on our most intimate circles, but also on the systems that we are part of, and the societies we are a part of and the planetary systems that we are part of. So there is no distinction, there is no clear separation between any of these. And we are, each of us, like a medicine or a particle that is brought into an ocean that has the power to exude an influence into the whole of the ocean, which is strange to think that way, but also not strange. If we take interdependence seriously and we take Ubuntu seriously, that intricate coming together of absolute humility with absolute oneness is true for each of us. Yeah, and I believe that I have learned to carry that more in myself. So I would say that the movement from the Global Eco-Village network to the pocket project was one of meeting the limitations in a slightly more surface level restoration movement to moving deeper into the more subtle level of the restoration movement.

00:28:11 Rosemary
Yeah, I could see that totally. And sharing your own story was very illustrative, I believe for our listeners, because a picture formed in my mind when you were talking about flying from an eco village here to another over there to another over there, and the unique magic of each of those experiences. And now, how you have friends all over the world. That’s your story. But it’s also our story. If we can release ourselves from the isolation of separateness, our self perception of ourselves as separate, independent beings. And again, you brought up the metaphor of the ocean. We each really are just water drops in the ocean. We just often don’t perceive ourselves as that interconnected with the whole.

00:29:03 Kosha
Right. And see how on a very intimate level within our nervous systems, it does come together so closely. The places where I carry my personal attachment trauma, which is shaped and has been formed from generations of trauma coming together in my parents, and the collective that I grew up within. Thomas Hübll often speaks about the fact that we carry inner nervous systems and individual nervous system, which carries my personality and my attachment trauma and my potential. And then an ancestral nervous system where I’m able to lean into the nervous system of my ancestors and connect to my grandmother and feel how healing my relatedness to her can heal a place in me, but also heal a place in times that seem long past, that are still alive now, and that this is again related to the collective seers. So there is this fabric that weaves us into the global sphere that is real. It’s not an abstraction. The space between us is full. Not in an abstract way, but very real nervous system resonance.

00:30:29 Rosemary
Yeah, beautifully said. It’s a matter of shifting how we see ourselves from a separate entity that as these connections come alive for us, it’s oh, isn’t that interesting? When in fact it’s just how life flows. It’s how we are interacting, interconnecting in the ocean. So it’s really interesting. I love how your life really set you up to have this sensitivity to apartness because you’ve spent your life to date bringing people together, integrating people, supporting inter-dependent collectives. And it’s true for all of us, but most of us don’t get the perspective that you just shared. So thank you for sharing that. That’s been very valuable for people to hear your story and realize that, that is me. Maybe I didn’t work with Eco-Villages and I didn’t work between 48 different countries, but in my part of the ocean I am deeply connected to many other people and cultures.

00:31:37 Kosha
Right. And just add to that, if we heal in any one place within that complexity of different levels, it has a healing impulse on the other. So I find that my intimacy with people from other cultures deepens as my intimacy with my own inner child deepens, as my intimacy with my great grandmother deepens, and that the apartheid melting into connectedness is something that happens simultaneously. It’s like a coming home to the essence of who we are and a melting back into the stream of life. It is one movement. And the beauty of this is that there is an adventure journey. Wherever we start in our healing journey or healing adventure, all of life starts coming home to us.

00:32:38 Rosemary
I’d like to bring in support from something between the conversation we’ve been having. Social connection is so essential for the health, strength and resilience of individuals in society. That is a quote from the World Health Organization Commission on Social Connection. They published a report this year on loneliness and social isolation, which they see as major public health challenges that affect nearly one in six people. One in six people! And the social isolation and loneliness causes almost 900,000 deaths annually. This research isn’t new. It’s a new study, but the research isn’t new. Gabor Maté has been speaking about the need for human connection for years, and he wrote about it in his 2008 book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. And he said repeatedly that, “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but connection.” So addiction is an expression of trauma, which is sand in the system. Again, I’m curious Kosha, how does the collective healing movement address this burgeoning global loneliness epidemic?

00:33:53 Kosha
I think in a way one part of my answer needs to be to address the uniqueness of each human being. So that when we say, let’s come back to connectedness, we already spoke about the fact that the entrance door might look very different for each of us. And where I start my journey is very different from where you start your journey. And we have been so trained up to compare and compete and so little prepared to meet ourselves fully in the full trust that we are exactly who we were meant to be, and exactly in the place that we were meant to start out in. And that this is me. And that each of us brings that unique contribution that only we can bring. Because I believe that we come out of centuries of trauma piling upon trauma on individual, ancestral, and collective levels, without the tools to address this, to see it. And that it’s only in the past, really 200 years, that human beings have been able to look at the unconscious material we carry out. And of course, it started with the ability to see individual trauma and then starting to see the collective aspects of that trauma and slowly, in a way, growing. And I’m not saying that there were not indigenous wisdom keepers who held much deeper wisdom about these systems. So I also need to frame what I’m saying. So let’s say in the Western world, we’re waking up to this, and we’re waking up to needing to clean up our act. And cleaning up our act has started with like cleaning it up on an individual level and going back and sometimes getting completely lost and cleaning up our individual shadow material. But, you know, I feel like we’re slowly but surely coming to recognize that we need to clean our collective transgressions. That we’re starting to take that responsibility more seriously in larger groups of human beings while we’re still continuing to inflict trauma, yeah, and continuing the wheels of repetition were also waking up to the need to clean up because I love that epidemics of loneliness builds on, you know, grows from us sitting on these layers of trauma, because that shadow material creates at least half of our reality. But if our presence and the resourcing that comes floating down our ancestry, creates part of our reality, the other part is created by unconscious material. And that is where the discrepancy comes from. Our parents telling us one thing, but our nervous systems perceiving something else, and these discrepancies creating separation, fragmentation, you know, and that is where the loneliness comes from. Because if we cannot fully see each other, we cannot be fully seen by each other. Our communication misses the point again and again, because we’re not able to see the point together. Now this is what the sand in the system creates. It creates separation, it creates a distancing, it creates loneliness. So that is where we sit and all of what we’ve spoken of creates that healing movement. And I, I love Gabor’s way of speaking to this, and the resonance between our communities in addressing this and the healing movements that we’re creating together.

00:37:49 Rosemary
Thank you, Kosha. I’d like to go back for a moment to what you said about how we perceive ourselves. And again, that dissonance has come up again, the dissonance between how we see ourselves, how we perceive ourselves as flawed, as incomplete, as imperfect, based on what our expectations are, what our culture is, and who we truly are, which is all we need to be. It’s in that space, that gap between what’s possible and what percentage of that possibility is actually realized… And I pulled that from some information about your new program, Global Social Witnessing, because I’m very curious about that. I’d like to speak about that and even though I read the Global Social Witnessing announcement emails and I watched the videos and I still really struggled to understand this concept. Kosha, what is Global Social Witnessing? Can you share a story or what’s the best way to communicate what this is?

00:38:58 Kosha
Yeah, it’s so interesting. You’re really bringing me home to myself, Rosemary, because I’m realizing it’s bringing me back to the same perceptions of multilayered reality, you know, and I’m suddenly experiencing this coming together, layering of my child self to my young self, to my self that is completely dedicated and motivated to spread the global Eco-Village network, restorative community work, to myself now to the global social witnessing. Yeah. Thomas Hübl brought the practice forward in 2016 as a healing impulse for the way that we meet the world. And the first way he invited us to practice Global Social Witnessing was by taking a very small snippet of news. Just two sentences of news and decent with it. Not for long necessarily, but instead of just reading and reading the news in your news feeds today, to allow just two sentences to stick. And maybe they call you forth. Or it’s one photograph that calls you forth, and you notice that you are touched by it, and you allow that to slow you down, and you start watching your soul in a more embodied way, and you start noticing, how is this data, this information actually touching me in my heart, in my body? What are the parts to me that could just start crying as I read this? Where are there parts that are shying away from it, that want nothing to do with it? That would love to just turn away as if I never read this today. What are the parts that are going into panic mode feeling like all I need to solve this now and I don’t know how and I’m feeling overwhelmed. And what are the parts to me that can attune more deeply to what is actually happening on the other side of that information, that piece of information? What is actually happening to the person that is experiencing this right now? So in a certain way, I’m relating much more deeply with myself and I’m relating much more deeply to the world. And then we’ve expanded that process to the Global Social Witnessing calls that we offer every month for free in The Pocket Project that anyone would be so warmly invited to join us, where we invite human bodies who are experiencing what is in the news right now, to share with us, so that I am meeting the news through an alive human nervous system. And that brings me back to my experience within the global Ecovillage network and traveling to community, beyond community, and experiencing hunger in Africa first hand, experiencing gender mutilation first hand, experiencing female children disappearing first hand, experiencing civil war first hand. And it’s very different. I could feel how my nervous system was needing different modes of processing, how I needed to increase my practice of presencing, of grounding, of self regulation, of co regulation, of having therapeutic support systems, of being, you know, here, I’m just finding the incredible. I’m, as I said, I’m living in Scotland at the moment and the past week I had time with friends. So I went swimming in all the cold rivers and all the cold seas around and I could see how the crystalline waters, how they helped my nervous system to land. I’ve experienced how planting seeds is one of the best ways of helping my nervous system to process. But this kind of coming into more intimacy with the world, and relating more deeply with the world, and relating more deeply with my soul, and that sits at the heart of Global Social Witnessing. So it’s a way of meeting the world in a fully embodied way.

00:43:48 Rosemary
I had an experience that I think may fit your description. When I first became involved with the Compassionate Inquiry community, I was in a compassionate inquiry circle. That was my first introduction. It was January 2022. One of the participants was based in Georgia, and when the war in the Ukraine broke out, when he checked in. I’m getting goosebumps just sharing this story. When he would check in as part of the Circle, he was sharing what that was bringing up for him. He remembered when Russia invaded Georgia when he was a kid, and it gave all of us in that Circle a totally different perspective on what was happening in the Ukraine. He was sharing stories about his family and about himself when he was younger and how he was fearing the repetition of what he had experienced himself. How he was seeing these same things happen again, how the headlines were so familiar, how what was being covered, how the media coverage was so familiar and inaccurate. So I just share that because a light bulb went on for me. Is this the sort of, I’m not even sure what the right word is… Exposure, experience, interconnection that can come through Global Social Witnessing?

00:45:13 Kosha
Really shifting from a mental way of interpreting data to a full bodied, full nervous system and related way of understanding data, which is… The one is completely transformative and pure medicine, if we partake in it in a resourced way, take care that we are grounded and our capacity to process is online and the other the nonrelated way, the mental way actually becomes a knife edge that sharpens the polarization in the world.

00:45:52 Rosemary
I feel that very much personally, after the story I shared, it was an ideal environment to have that experience in a Compassionate Inquiry circle. It was facilitated. We were helped with our somatic responses, and it was as opposite as you could experience from something else that comes to mind, 9/11 watching the media footage. They wouldn’t stop showing the footage, but what it created was fear and isolation, as you’ve just suggested. So rather than coming together in community to support our colleague in Georgia, it was, put up the walls, circle the wagons. The world out there is dangerous and if we’re not careful we could be in that situation, where we end up as a statistic.

00:46:46 Kosha
And even the people who are in the midst of the deepest grief are not met. There is no restorative movement in that level of news. And I’m not saying that there were not restorative movements around 9/11. Of course there are. And there is an acknowledgement, but it’s been, it’s deeply touching to see the effect that Global Social Witnessing events have on the people sharing, and the sense of being seen. And for instance, we’re in a conversation with a wonderful woman called Oleksandra Matviichuk. Her organization in Ukraine received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on recording all the war transgressions, the transgressions of international law during the invasion of Ukraine. They’re wanting to bring these cases to a court, but they have recorded 80,000 cases by now. And there is no way that as a human community, therapists are able to address the therapeutic needs of the world, or the courts of the world are able to address the transgressions of human rights and law that are being committed all the time. And there is an ancient and always present capacity of human beings to bring healing through witnessing. And I know that you’re deeply aware of this, in the Compassionate Inquiry community, that feeling deeply seen in the places where we were not seen is the medicine, and out of the world’s deepest places of pain being deeply seen, healing naturally arises. So Global Social Witnessing has an incredible power, naturally. It will be what also arises in Compassionate Inquiry Circles naturally, it is already present there. We are just naming it and giving it a framework where it can be lifted on the world stage and make it visible. But of course it’s already happening.

Yeah, I think that is exactly what we’re speaking to. We’re speaking to that level of nervous system relatedness, whether it’s with other human beings or elements of nature, whether it’s animals or trees or it doesn’t really matter, but where we are able to attune. You know. It’s like a figure of eight where I keep coming back to liner to system because while he’s speaking about that, certain parts in your nervous system will start lighting up because you also, in your ancestry carry a history that includes wars and includes sudden bombs falling, includes innocent people losing their lives, and the grief and the loss includes people having to leave their homes. So there’s parts in you that start lighting up. while your friend from Georgia is sharing about his experiences. So you’re visiting him deeply, but you’re also visiting hidden parts of yourself more deeply. And you are getting to know yourself more and more deeply and bringing home parts of yourself while you are bringing home the world. And the beautiful effect that has, is that we’re stopping a mode of connection with each other that stays purely on the mental level, which is like cold data. And cold data has a cutting aspect to it. It doesn’t build relatedness and connection. It builds separation and to transform cold data and into warn data, in Nora Bateson’s words. So to create warm data between us and the world, I believe is an entrance door into creating healing systems. And I mentioned before, that I believe that the ingredient that our human uniqueness brings is very important. Some of us might be touched by a very specific global social witnessing event which meets us in our purpose to become active in the world and actually respond and start building a response to something that we have seen, and others might experience that in another context. At the moment, we have too many solutions that are being brought to the world which do not grow from embodied deep relatedness. And I believe that another aspect of this methodology is that it can help to practice and bring each other home to related responses and to the unique responses that we are meant to bring to the world.

00:52:24 Rosemary
We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in the Compassionate Inquiry community. Stay with us, we’ll be right back.

00:52:33 Kevin
If you’re not a therapist or a healer, but you heard our guest described the personal transformations they experienced during their compassionate inquiry journeys and wonder what might that be like for me, there is a program that is offered to anyone who wants to experience the power of Gabor Matei’s approach to trauma healing. I’m Kevin Young and I’ve been facilitating CI circles since 2022. I’ve seen people transform in many ways. I’ve seen people change beliefs, relationships. I’ve seen people change how they show up in the world. I have seen people literally change how they look in front of my very eyes. There are many, many ways that people change during competitive inquiry. Circles. Circles is a 10 week small group experience. Tap the link in the show notes. That’ll bring you to a web page that gives you all you’ll need to figure out if this is for you.

00:53:42 Rosemary
Very well said, thank you. It couldn’t be more clear, and it also explains it preanswers, in part, my next question, which is it seems from the outside looking in to have moved very quickly from offering training in Global Social Witnessing to training facilitators in Global Social Witnessing. So what you’ve explained just underscores the need for a mass amount of people around the world to learn these skills so that people who are feeling unseen or unheard, can be seen and heard in a way that they haven’t before.

00:54:22 Kosha
Yeah. And maybe just to say one more thing about that is that somehow in the way that we are developing our work, we feel that we are developing learning communities or learning networks. So you will also know that we are doing a lot of work in the area of Collective Trauma Integration work. And we have a community of Collective Trauma Facilitators who have gone through deep training with Thomas. This is a 5 year training and still we know that the actual work of Collective Trauma Integration is such a growing edge in human awareness. And every time we run an, what we call an integration lab, which goes on a one year journey to work on the specific area of collective trauma, we add to the growing field of knowledge. And we would say that the same is true for a Global Social Witnessing Facilitator. So people who start into that journey now are not coming out as Global Social Witnessing Facilitators, they’re coming out as Global Social Witnessing Facilitators in training, because we are growing a learning community and we understand coming back to loneliness and coming back to relatedness that we learn best as an unfolding learning field, and not as individuals. So it will be an ongoing learning field with mentoring, with supervision, with pure learning systems that will grow over years to come.

00:56:13 Rosemary
I think you’ve just answered this question I was going to ask you, what’s on the horizon of trauma healing, where we’re headed, but I think you’ve just answered that question unless you’d like to add anything else.

00:56:25 Kosha
Within The Pocket Project, we’re starting from the small size of the pocket and what each of us can carry within our pockets and can bring out of the hidden pockets that we have in our beings, and our nervous systems. We do feel that large networks can grow, but especially in partnership with other movements towards healing, like the Compassionate Inquiry community, which feels so, so close to us. And I know how many people live in both, and move freely between both. Yeah, but we’re seeing that there is a layering of skill sets that we’re developing, which is the practice groups as a foundational training, practice group leaders where we grow skills in transparent communication and mindfulness practices. And we’re going to be developing a second layer, which has grown from our trauma-relief work with especially Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, which is called Resilience Circles. So to gain the skill sets of grounding, of processing, of self regulation, of co-regulation that allows us to provide small circles of mutual support in crisis settings. And as we’re moving into a time where it seems that the whole world is touching on crisis, we feel that these skills are becoming so important. So that is something that we’re opening at the moment in Ukraine, and we will be moving into in the coming years. We have the trauma informed approaches that we’ve been training in the past years, the Global Social Witnessing skill sets and facilitators, and then we have the Collective Trauma Facilitators. And these are like 5 tiers that are building upon each other and really deepen a possibility for many practitioners to engage on the level that is right for them, and that they would like to engage in. But also opens up the acknowledgement that each of us can be an acupuncture point in our communities and our families and our systems and open up spaces to help others around us to come home from separation to connection. So it brings that practice out on different levels and invites more and more people to engage.

00:59:14 Rosemary
There are many, many different approaches, many different options, and I love what you said about the collaboration of different groups who are all moved to help with the healing of trauma in the world. Like absolutely, we are complementary, and we share the same goals, so yes. 

00:59:32 Kosha
And let’s bring curiosity to the amazing new seeds that are starting to sprout in the spaces in between our movements or organizations or fields. Because as always, it’s the spaces in between that are super juicy. And all of us here, and all of you out there who are wandering and traveling the in-between spaces, maybe you belong fully to one community or maybe you visit the other now and then. I think we’re all kind of bridge builders and yeah, really watering the seeds of co-creation.

01:00:12  Rosemary
That was a beautiful metaphor. Thank you so much. Now we’re just about out of time and I wonder, is there anything that I haven’t asked you, Kosha, that you’d like to address?

01:00:23 Kosha
Yeah. I just want to take a moment to thank you, Rosemary, for being here with your nervous system as a place to relate to, for me and yeah, also for bringing in all of you who are listening early on so that you have been with us. And yeah, I just want to take a moment to feel, just for a moment, the space that has created between all of us here. And also thank all of those who are hosting this podcast, all of those that are key pillars in the Compassionate Inquiry community, Gabor and all of those that are holding space in the larger field of Thomas Hubl and The Pocket Project. And just for a moment, also witness the dance between our communities and that field between all of us. Thank you.

01:01:33 Rosemary
What a beautiful invocation. Thank you. And I have one final question, something that’s become a bit of a tradition on The Gifts of Trauma podcast. And that is what final few words would you like to leave with our audience? It could be a thought, a quote, a verse from a poem. Now that we’ve had this deep, rich, expansive conversation where we’ve explored collapsing separation into community collective inter-connection, what would you like to say as we wrap this Kosha?

01:02:13  Kosha
Yeah, just returning to the sand in the system. I want to thank each and everyone for our work to address the sand in our systems, to love ourselves for the sand that we carry and the sand that we are willing to love and embrace and allow to settle so that our waters can clear themselves and more light can stream in. And I feel that we’re all doing that work together and sitting in the same ocean.

01:02:52 Rosemary

Thank you! Goodness! Kosha Joubert, thank you so much for being with us today on The Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. It’s been such a delight. Thank you for sharing all of you, all of your journey, all of your experience, your perspectives, your connections. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you here.

01:03:22 Kosha
Thank you, Rosemary. Thank you everyone.

01:03:32 Rosemary
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. 

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