00:00:00 Amy

When those people go on a healing journey, then society has a possibility to open doors that it didn’t have before. Need to go back and look at all of that early childhood content in order to liberate them from relying on the survival strategies that made great sense earlier in life that are playing out long past their sell-by date. So this has a policy implication. A dead heart can make terrible choices and not feel the ethical breach or the pull. Open heart is not capable of doing that. Movements where I see very few but meaningfully frontier facing organizations that are going back to address the harm they’ve already caused to society, to natural resources, to indigenous tribes, to various less empowered parts of the world. And I think when an organization turns back towards its ancestral history, not just to celebrate its milestones and its successes, but to take accountability for the ways it’s caused harm, then you really start to rewire the future.

00:01:13 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast, stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry. Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma Podcast. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes and today I’m very excited to be speaking with Amy Elizabeth Fox, who riveted my attention when she spoke about psycho spiritual executive education in a recent online summit. Amy, welcome.

00:01:49 Amy
Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a joy to be with you, Rosemary.

00:01:53 Rosemary
I’m going to introduce you very briefly with just a snippet of your bio. Amy is considered an expert in healing individual, family, and collective trauma and has been a pioneer in introducing trauma-informed development and psychospiritual principles into leadership programs. In addition to her work with Mobius, Amy is a senior student of mystical teacher Thomas Hübl, serving as part of his online faculty team and his lead faculty for his New Year, Timeless Wisdom Training. Together Amy and Thomas are guiding a first-of-its-kind year long certification in trauma-Informed consulting and coaching. Now, Amy, what would you like to add to what I’ve just said to frame up this conversation for our listeners today?

00:02:39 Amy
Actually, with the nuggets that you chose, Rosemary, you really encapsulated the tributaries that I think are most essential to the work that I have the privilege to do with senior leaders. One, that I can offer a kind of psycho-spiritual healing process to people who ordinarily wouldn’t turn, out of their own impetus, to therapy or into a healing path per se. The second, that is informed by mystical principles and mystical understanding of what that restorative process is, not just at the individual level, but at the level, we could say, of corporate architecture or societal cartography. And thirdly, that I feel very strongly that those of us who have the joy of working with senior leaders as coaches, as facilitators, as mediators, team interventionists, really need to start to inform ourselves of the prevalence of trauma and its aftermath in organizational life. And to see our role as bringing a kind of trauma lens, sensitivity and attunement to the work we get to do in human and executive development. Really, you touched on all the things I think are most precious.

00:03:50 Rosemary
Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for those additions. Now, I served for 15 years in the corporate realm from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. So psychospiritual, executive education, or leadership, are concepts that I never witnessed in the corporate world. Your words gave me such hope and, I’m wondering if you can share a bit more about what your work involves.

00:04:15 Amy
I’d be delighted too. One, you’re pointing to the fact that this level of what we might call vertical development, very deep work on people’s early childhood experiences, whether they were adverse incidents, or missing developmental support, or a range of traumatic experiences. Understanding that leaders need to go back and look at all of that early childhood content in order to liberate them from relying on the survival strategies that made great sense earlier in life that are playing out long past their sell-by date. So how an organization starts to feel the pain or the need for this kind of deeper exploratory work is that they try shorter, more behavioral interventions to address whatever is that executive derailer or team dysfunction. And maybe they make a difference or provide some improvement in the very short term, but they have no longitudinal behavioral change.  In a way, an opportunity I received was watching 20 years of organizational interventions that failed or lacked the sustainability and stickiness that organizations need our interventions to have. And in the face of that, people are much more willing to look and say, why are we getting it wrong? Why do so many change efforts fail? Why do so many leadership programs not produce the cultural shifts in mindset and behavior, in success, that we would be wishing for? And in that question, you have an opportunity to define a new terrain of exploration, or at least the possibility, or help people imagine that something more radical and maybe more potent is possible. And I think now, many of the organizational imperatives that clients feel urgent about: “How do I help people to have more collective intelligence? Because the situation is more complex than any one person can see?” So we need to rely on a variety of voices even to diagnose the problem, and then we need multiple interpretations, make meaning of the problem, and then we need a whole bunch of interdisciplinary intelligences to solve the problem. That puts a kind of imperative on building enough psychological safety, enough trust, enough belonging. People can discuss ideas robustly. People can endure productive conflict. People can give each other developmental feedback and be part of an ecosystem of development and growth. So there’s a real business mandate now, I think, for helping people to free their energy up in ways that are more wholesome and more joyous in a way, more alive, more creative.

00:06:55 Rosemary
I’m so happy to hear that and thank you for sharing what you just did because in my last corporate role, I onboarded horrible language, by the way, about the time that they were bringing in corporate change experts. And I had never been involved in one of those experiences before. And there was a lot of grumbling because apparently it was one of many, and people were chatting around the water cooler. Here we go again, we keep doing these and nothing ever changes. So what you’ve just said explains that beautifully. Thank you.

00:07:27 Amy
Yeah. And you’re pointing at a phenomenon of change fatigue that’s very personal. And the dilemma of that is people are burned out on failed change attempts and under tremendous adaptive pressure at the same time. So if we don’t do interventions that will give them change resilience, everyone’s going to get fried. 

00:07:46 Rosemary
Absolutely. And that’s what happened. Now I’m very interested what what you on this path? Was there a tipping point? Did something happen? Is there a story like how did you get into this line of work? Was it always your goal, perhaps?

00:08:00 Amy
I would not say it was always my goal. It’s been very organic in response to starting the work, seeing what doesn’t work, and then having enough courage of my convictions and enough determination to make a difference, that I was just endlessly holding the question, at what depth and with what profundity and with what holding and support can this deeper work be done? I, as many healers, come to healing work because they had their own healing journey. I, of course, had my own trauma journey to go on and I’ve been extremely lucky to have extraordinary therapists and bodyworkers and healers accompany me in that process. It’s been a 45-year journey of self discovery and integration and I think that because I needed to go on that journey, and my life called me to that journey. I understand the gifts that it can bring and the grace that’s possible. I’m really very blessed to be at peace in ways that were unthinkable to me 40 years ago and capable of things that seemed impossible to me 40 years ago. And so I believe in life unleashed and I deeply believe that everything can be healed. And I’ve had that experience that everything can be healed. And I bring that quality of conviction and fire into the classroom when I work with executives who’ve spent most of their life chasing the next reward, the next status symbol, the next prestigious opportunity, the next external benchmark of success. And really, haven’t taken the time or had the self permission and strength to turn backwards towards the more hurt parts of themselves. And to be part of that invitation, that turning, and to watch people go back and reclaim aspects of themselves that they long ago abandoned in their interiority, it always moves me to tears. And I think because I know how grateful they’re going to be on Friday, I’m not so daunted by how walled off and shut down and resistant they show up on Sunday night.

I, as many healers, come to healing work because they had their own healing journey. I, of course, had my own trauma journey to go on. And I’ve been extremely lucky to have extraordinary therapists and body- workers and healers accompany me in that process. It’s been a 45-year journey of self discovery and integration. And I think that because I needed to go on that journey, and my life called me to that journey, I understand the gifts that it can bring and the grace that’s possible. I’m really very blessed to be at peace in ways that were unthinkable to me 40 years ago, and capable of things that seemed impossible to me 40 years ago. And so I believe in life unleashed. And I deeply believe that everything can be healed. And I’ve had the experience that everything can be healed. And I bring that quality of conviction and fire into the classroom, when I work with executives who’ve spent most of their life chasing the next reward, the next status symbol, the next prestigious opportunity, the next external benchmark of success, and really haven’t taken the time or had the self permission and strength, to turn backwards towards the more hurt parts of themselves and to be part of that invitation, that turning. And to watch people go back and reclaim aspects of themselves that they long ago abandoned in their interiority, it always moves me to tears. And I think because I know how grateful they’re gonna be on Friday. I’m not so daunted by how walled off and shut down and resistant they show up on Sunday night.

00:10:02 Rosemary
That makes total sense and I’m very glad that you shared that. So what I wanted to say is, you spoke of a 45 year journey, but given what you’re doing with Thomas and the work, the developmental work you’re doing in the healing realm, it sounds like this is a journey that will continue for as long as you can continue, this learning, growth, healing. Do you see it as just part of your path from here on forward?

00:10:28 Amy
Since you pointed to Thomas and I was telling how this work originated, let me add a footnote to my early story and say that I met Thomas 12 years ago. And it was an extraordinary encounter with someone who was, to my eye, not only a master therapist and a visionary healer, but a prophetic voice for what it might look like to restore the scars in the fabric of humanity. And without a question, he widened my wingspan of what I believed was possible. He refined me, trained me, supervised me and all of our Mobius practitioners. So as a community, we’ve all been studying with him for over a decade and I have great confidence that the cutting edge trauma work that we’re doing inside business is hugely informed by and emboldened by his call to action. So it’s lovely to take a minute to bow to him. So thank you for bringing him up. And yes, I, of course, I think the inner journey is an infinite one and I’m grateful every time I meet another teacher or another practitioner, there’s another piece of the puzzle. I do think that this old adage of when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It’s been my experience that, once you set the intention to go on this inner journey, then higher realms align with that intention very quickly and you get sent messengers, you get sent resources and you get sent…

00:11:50 Rosemary
Yeah, very much just dropped any possible resistance to what life provides for you. You just, you’re open to it. And that’s wonderful to hear. You mentioned how a lot of people who work in the corporate realm have been going from one benchmark to another, one reward to another. Obviously during the recent COVID pandemic, a lot of people had an opportunity to step away from that. How have you seen that opportunity to step back really impact people working in the corporate space, as they have had a chance to turn inward and look at themselves in a deep way when we were in it, an unknown amount of time.

00:12:31 Amy

I think there’s a way in which I would affirm that’s true in a way in which I would say it’s disappointingly untrue. So what I do think people revisited were some of the prioritizations of their life. I think being home more and being able to be engaged in their family life and their community life and seeing how rich and meaningful it is to feel I’m in a place-based universe that has connections and deep roots to my community and I am showing up and able to be available to the day-to-day movements and unfoldings of my children. I think people came back to the workplace unwilling to make the sacrifices that they made pre COVID in those domains, what’s really precious in their personal lives. And I also think people found a different sense of community with the people they were working with because it became impossible to fully privatize the challenge. It was such a collective challenge and it was such a significant threatening occasion that I think all of us got more used to bringing our vulnerability and our emotional heart to one another at a different level. What I don’t think it did was to give people at the senior most level of organization enough of a wake up call that they would stop the frenetic nature and pace of the way they do their lives, to really ask the more profound questions of who am I? What’s my life in service to? How can I best contribute to the fabric of life? I don’t think people stopped and asked those questions. And I think actually you need to have a really direct forcing mechanism to interrupt the pattern and pace at which people are living, information saturation and constant exertion and endless movement. And that intervention can be a leadership program, can be a coaching relationship, can of course be a therapeutic conversation. But somebody really needs to put all of that on halt, more than even they did in COVID, to excavate the content of their unconscious mind that’s holding memory, that’s holding sensation, that’s holding emotion that’s been frozen since early in life. To do that unfreezing requires a cradle. It really requires a container.

00:14:37 Rosemary
Yeah, I’ve been watching some documentaries on what’s happening in the US right now from a workplace perspective. And that really supports what you just said. Because what seems to be happening post COVID is that there is a burgeoning of service level jobs which are requiring people to work at two or three jobs just to make ends meet because the pay is so low. But there’s perhaps a letting go of middle level positions. Obviously those are coming from the top, so that really affirms that the wake up call of senior management has not been heard.

00:15:15 Amy
You’re pointing at a 2nd dimension of the wake up call, which is really worth highlighting Rosemary, and I’m glad you brought it in. There’s a wake up call that’s very individual or family, which is, I had experiences early in my life that profoundly impacted me. And many of the ways I got through those early experiences I’m still doing, even though now they’ve just become my personality. They just appear to be the way I am. But really I’m reenacting trauma responses in unthreatening contexts. So that’s the personal worker, that’s the personal turning inward. But there’s also, as you said, a wake up call to the world of business, which says, where are we out of alignment with life? Where are we not paying people a livable wage? Where are we hoarding wealth at the top that isn’t in any way sustainable? Those deeper moral questions or questions of ecopsychology or collective health, there are leaders turning to those questions, but they’re few and far between, as we can see in the way that the world is unfolding right now. And there is, in my mind, very much a dovetail between helping senior leaders inside an organization make the personal journey to unfreeze because, as Thomas says, you can’t hurt what you love, you can’t hurt what you can feel. So the numbness that everybody’s walking in around as a way to dissociate and repress their own emotions, that numbness walks with them when they make choices on policy, and they make choices on compensation, and they make choices on the organizational design, and they make choices on their sustainability policy, and their ESG policy. So part of the unlock for societal health is to start to turn our attention towards generations of unhealed trauma and collective numbness. So that we can feel each other, so that we can feel the planet, so that we can feel the river, so that we can feel the sky, so we can feel our own hearts, so that we can feel the person next to us who’s hurting and make gestures of care. In the absence of the heart being an open instrument of information and guidance and diagnostic capacity, we don’t even really know what the problems are.

00:17:28 Rosemary
Thank you for sharing that perspective and that lens, and I’m going to ask you to continue to use that lens because I’m very interested in your perspectives on what’s happening on our planet right now. When you…like since January, as you observe current events unfolding, what do you see?

00:17:49 Amy
At the sort of pattern level, fear and greed are the driving states of consciousness, and that fearing and greed shows up as structural polarization where we’ve lost the ability to live in a plurality of viewpoints, to mediate the grey terrain between my opinion and your opinion, to find common ground. We’ve lost the ability to be open to persuasion and deeply listen to each other. These are fundamental competencies that democracy requires. We’ve lost the ability to care about the way in which the people around us are in harm’s way, or in threat. We’ve gotten so self oriented and myopic in that fear and in that greed that we don’t care for each other and we don’t care for the implicate order. And so that’s the sort of state of consciousness that is, I would say the core problem. It shows up as political divisions or reactive totalitarianism or increased conflict has many… or ecological disaster. It has many symptoms, but at the root cause it’s an inability to live as one. It’s an inability to function within the implicate order. It’s a non- unitive, unharmonious way to listen to ourselves, to each other, and to the ecosystem. And so that’s why I don’t think you can separate politics from healing anymore, because what is really needed is a shift in consciousness.

00:19:17 Rosemary
Yeah, absolutely. And as you mentioned before, the people who are leading us politically, and in many realms are dissociated and bringing their trauma responses with them. Wow. Take that in for a second.

00:19:35 Amy
Yeah, I said it in a speech a couple of years ago. There are two big secrets in corporate life. For the purpose of this conversation, let’s widen it and say there are two big secrets in society. One is the level of regression and dissociation that many senior people are working from. So we’re shaping our choices collectively as a society and in every institution, medical, educational, governmental, business, through the lens of untreated traumas. So that regression is the first big problem. And until we can help people to have a kind of cultivation of maturity and a refinement of their moral capacities, we’re not going to make wise choices. And the second secret, which we’ve also been a bit alluding to, is I called spirituality the gold mine under the conference table. What do I mean by that? I mean by that, that the split between the sacred and pragmatic, or the secular and scientific, and the numinous and the spiritual has a huge cost that splits that desacralization means we don’t know how to cherish what’s holy. And in the absence of that sanctity and the absence of that reverence and the absence of that devotion, abuse happens. And my teacher, Patrick Connor talks about the importance of bringing those two worlds together, the sacred and the imminence, the transcendent and the imminent. And I think too much of our spiritual practice has had such a focus on going up the transpersonal dimension that we haven’t spent as much time thinking, how do we bring the light down into the very fabric of life and use it to rewire social agreements and social construction so that we can have thriving, living human systems? I happen to do mind ministry inside of the world of business, but that exact same repair process is needed everywhere.

00:21:26 Rosemary
Beautifully said. Thank you, Amy. Now, given the nature of the change you bring to organizations, how do you prepare the ground for seeding that sort of change, the sustainable change that’s needed today?

00:21:43 Amy
I think a few things… I think I have a wonderful energy teacher named Linda Cesar I’ve studied with for years and years, and the first week that I spent with her, she said the following sentence. She said, “if someone’s in a group that you’re guiding for healing, they’re there for a sole purpose. You have a contract with them and you belong to them forever.”

And honestly, Rosemary, I had goosebumps through my whole body because I knew it was true. I knew that you can’t ask someone to grant you the authority to guide them to their most broken places, and see it as a short term relationship. That has to be something that endures as a safety, if at least energetically. So one of the ways you prepare the ground for people to trust you to be the custodian of deep healing therapeutic work, is you give your heart forever. And that invitation, I believe, transfers immediately, etherically and in a very powerful way. 

The second thing is you have to have a deep faith, both in someone’s resistance so that I don’t have an ego, in how quickly they melt or how far they go, or how visibly cathartic it looks. If I’m making my definition of success, ‘can I see that I’m impacting this person?’ I’ve already lost the possibility to be trustworthy to their unfolding. I have to be willing to let them, their psyche, drive the pace, their psyche drive the depth, and to know that I may be planting seeds that won’t come ripe for two decades. I may never see the flowering of the conversation that we’re in. So there’s also reverence for the resistance, and a deep faith that profound shifts can happen. It’s not a matter of time. It’s a matter of intention and context and prayer. And so there’s also just a sense of trusting the human heart to unfold itself naturally, organically, back into wholeness. And in some ways, our job is to just be the witnessing cradle in which their psyche can do that unfolding..

00:23:56 Rosemary
Yeah. Thank you for that glimpse, that experience of your ministry. I’m so moved. I could feel the emotions arising just listening to you speak. I was thinking we’d get a description, but we actually got a demonstration of how you prepare the ground. Thank you so much.

00:24:13 Amy
That’s very beautiful. I will say a couple more things since you want more stories. We interview everybody before they come for two reasons. One, it’s wonderful to hear what people have walked and to begin to glimpse the courage and resilience and all the different tones and tenors and subtle notes that are in the life story. So you start to receive them before they even come, and you start to hold them in your heart and in your awareness and to relate to their highest possibility, before they even walk in. The other reason you do the interview is to make sure that nobody’s in such a delicate moment in their life journey that it wouldn’t be appropriate to attend the program. So it’s also a trauma screening, ensuring that people have informed consent and that they’re in a shape to undertake the kind of inner work we’re inviting them to. 

The second thing is that the group of faculty within Mobius that lead the program have all been doing their own healing work with one another for several decades. So Thomas runs six-month supervision groups for our practitioners and we do our own trauma work in front of each other, as a way to create the sort of raw intimacy we then want to invite participants to. So they’re walking into a field that’s already fertile with that quality of compassion and that quality of unguardedness, of nakedness, which I think makes it much more possible for them to move quickly into a mode of authentic self-disclosure and self-exploration, vulnerable receiving of one another’s tenderness.

00:25:44 Rosemary
Thank you. Yeah, you really create a lot of safety in the corporate space, which is beautiful. Now it’s pretty clear, I think, to most people that our organizational systems are broken. And you admit that too. In one of your quotes, you paint a really inspiring picture of the future. And I’m just going to quote a snippet of that and then ask you to expand on it. You said “…organizations are becoming more honoring organizations that are more honoring of human rhythm, human relationship, human diversity, and the proper place of humanity in the family of things.” That is incredibly inspiring, and my question is, how do we get there from where we are now?

00:26:32 Amy
So there’s a theory in organizational change work that you create a mini transformation, or a microcosm within the organization, that operates by different norms, different expectations, different practices and you incubate a sort of disruption to the mega culture of the whole organization by creating a visible outlier that is a beacon or a harbinger of the future possibility. I’m trying to do that exact same thing through my leadership program. So I pull people out of the workplace and I create a five day residential program. Mobius, all of our facilitators do this, not just, just me. And we try to create a microclimate that operates by a very different set of expectations. 

So the standard workplace, as the quote you generously shared alludes to, is disembodied. It’s anti emotion, it’s anti relation, puts a huge emphasis on autonomy and resilience and self sufficiency, which basically means we value leaders who don’t need us. But actually it takes a village. So this idea that I can privatize my interior life and my relational life and leave it outside the workplace is a dysfunction that makes no sense and is hugely exhausting to people. It makes people lonely. So anti-body, anti-emotion, anti- relation and anti-spirit. And therefore people overwork and overextend and over give and they are constantly plugged into the churn of new information, and the demands of day to day work. And what I’m suggesting and what I see with thousands of leaders when we slow them down, and they give themselves permission to reinhabit their bodies, and to open their hearts and to tap into their intuition and to feel part of a larger whole, is that the restoration process only takes a few days. Because it’s actually a more natural human condition to be in a rhythm of embodiment and a rhythm of relation and a rhythm of being part of something wider. We’re tapped into the implicate order by definition. So when you remove the barriers that are built into a technical industrial model of the workplace, the alternative flourishing happens quite spontaneously. So that’s why I feel very hopeful about what I’m describing. It’s very far away from how we’re doing it now, but it’s not all that far away from the frontier of each individual leader’s possibility.

00:28:54 Rosemary
So the metaphor of seeding change truly is that you are seeding a new and vigorous form of culture within a broken culture and trusting that it will spread and grow and transform over time, the entire system. Is that correct?

00:29:13 Amy
And I wouldn’t say just trusting. I’ve been at it for a while. So I have the wonderful good fortune of hearing from people that took the program eight years later, 10 years later, 20 years later, and they will describe it as the moment where something life changing happened for them. And I think you’re pointing exactly, Rosemary, at what the ah ha of the experience is. Each person’s individual developmental journey is, of course, bespoke to their life circumstances and what it is they need to integrate and metabolize. But as a collective, everybody’s getting that same glimpse of, oh, the way we’re working isn’t working, and, oh, there’s a very different way we could be working. And it’s right here at hand. And I think there’s no turning back. Once you’ve seen that and you’ve lived that and you felt the benefit of that, the vitalization of that unlock, by definition, it will flow out of you as an invitation to other people. As a series of very different responses. One of the executives that took my program a couple years ago wrote how after the program, he felt like his performative self went to sleep. He said, “I feel like I started running when I was three years old, and I never stopped running until the program. Now I give myself space. Now I take rest. Now I ask deeper questions of my life. Now I have intimate conversations with my spouse. Now I show up for my kids.” We’re talking about realigning our choices to the appropriate rhythm of healthy life. 

And since you brought in the world circumstance, I could say for myself, I don’t think there’s ever been a more urgent moment to humanize the workplace than this period of such extraordinary adaptive demand and the time of AI and a time of economic insecurity and political instability. All of that chaos and ambiguity creates such anxiety for people, that our workplaces have to become places of soothing and places of mutual support.

00:31:07 Rosemary
Thank you. Thank you. I’m glad that my question evoked that, because what I heard, and I’ll reflect it back to you, is that, yes, it’s corporate change, but you’re not changing the corporate structure so much as the people within the corporate structure. It will emanate, it will trickle down, it will trickle up. Executives who have personally been in the program will walk in the building, encounter the receptionist, they’ll encounter the janitorial staff, they’ll encounter middle management. And it seems from your experience, that it will be impossible for people not to notice the transformation.

00:31:48 Amy
I mean, that’s certainly my aspiration, and I just want to make sure that we’re not disentangling the personal healing from the societal restoration. So not only do I think they will appear differently to the range of people they interact with on a daily basis, but when they go into the boardroom and the executive team room, they will make more noble and aligned decisions. So this has a policy implication. 

A dead heart can make terrible choices and not feel the ethical breach or the pull. An open heart is not capable of doing that. So I actually think it’s a very political and economically radical thing to do. When you give people whose power means that their choices influence the architecture of society, when those people go on a healing journey, then society has a possibility to open doors that it didn’t have before.

00:32:35 Rosemary
Thus creating soulful workplaces. Yes, I love it.

00:32:40 Amy
I believe the workplace is meant to be a soulful place.

00:32:43 Rosemary
I shared your quote earlier about how future organizations will honor human aspects, our rhythms, our relationships, our diversity. I’m curious about how the change you have initiated and continue to initiate, will relate, or could relate to our environment. I’m thinking about mining organizations, logging, farming, fishing and various manufacturing processes, how we impact nature and natural resources. Do you have a sense, given that we’ve spoken about the soulful business, of how that will transform how our business world works?

00:33:22 Amy
Well, I think there are two things that need to happen, and both of them are waves already well underway, I would say, towards more conscious business. The first is not thinking purely in terms of short term profit, but starting to think in terms of the triple bottom line and organizations becoming more aware of their economic and ecological impact on the communities that they serve, the indigenous lands that they sometimes work within, and the needs of the ecosphere or the biosphere. So I think there is a natural movement towards calibrating the pressure that organizations, companies have from the stock market to create short term shareholder value, to thinking about the value for society writ large. 

I think the second thing is movements where I see very few but meaningfully frontier facing organizations, that are going back to address the harm they’ve already caused to society, to natural resources, to indigenous tribes, to various less empowered parts of the world. And I think when an organization turns back towards its ancestral history, not just to celebrate its milestones and its successes, but to take accountability for the ways it’s caused harm, then you really start to rewire the future. And Thomas and I are working with several organizations that have that level. Not just courage, but integrity and depth of understanding that there’s a karmic process when you’ve caused harm that will continue to bounce back at you. Not just in terms of public perceptions or advocacy boycotts, but in terms of energetic aftermath. And when you go back and tend to that and clean up the energetic and etheric field of your institution, through reparative processes and rituals, and through really taking account relationally, to what and who you’ve hurt, then we have really put certain things to rest that then I think creates white space for the fresh wind of the future to download.

00:35:33 Rosemary
My whole being is smiling as I listen to you.

00:35:36 Amy
It’s very inspiring. I really bow to the leaders and boards that have chosen, rather than looking away, to systematically inventory where the harm has happened.

00:35:48 Rosemary
Absolutely, Now, something I did not cover in your bio. You’re on the faculty of the African Leadership Institute’s Desmond Tutu Fellows Program at Oxford, so I’m sure you’re very familiar with the African Ubuntu philosophy, which is innately collective and highly collaborative. I’m wondering what sort of resistance you encounter given the Western focus on independence and competition, when… if you… or when you, introduce this concept.

00:36:21 Amy
I mean, I think that the level of self orientation and self protection that we see in many people, is directly tied to the shakiness of people’s childhood experiences in which they couldn’t do anything to protect themselves. Consider strategies for how to make themselves more secure and safe, which translated to, working really hard in school, taking care of the other kids. Often executives have this sort of hero role in their early childhood families to create order, and to keep everybody safe and connected. And this process or habit of overdriving and over giving and focusing almost exclusively on my own personal ambition, sets in motion a career path in which people are not cultivating community and belonging on their teams, and not creating workplaces of mutual generosity and love and nourishment. And at the same time, it’s been my experience that when you invite executives to build intimacy with each other, to share their life stories, to take honest account of what’s working and not working in their personal lives, in their family lives, to ask honest questions about what’s theirs to heal in their ancestral story, and what secrets do they need to liberate by speaking them? When you create a container in which people can invest in one another’s journey home, it’s just a natural and inevitable thing. So I feel very hopeful that workplaces can become places where people feel, I can bring my pain here, I can ask for help here, I can struggle here, I can fail here, I can learn here. And once you have permission to be entwined with each other in a relational fabric that has that kindness at its core, then I think everything’s possible.

00:38:15 Rosemary
And you mentioned earlier, respect for indigenous land. Something wonderful I’ve noticed is happening, that after centuries of dismissing and demeaning indigenous cultures, a new reverence is emerging for the wisdom of Indigenous philosophies and teachings. And I wonder if you foresee significant involvement of Indigenous leaders in this change process.

00:38:44 Amy
Well, there certainly are Indigenous coaches and facilitators and practitioners who already bring the rich resource of their history and their spiritual practice and their ways of engaging community into their work with clients. I don’t think that’s a future state, I think that’s already happening. But what I would also say is that thankfully, many indigenous tribal practices have preserved the health of their commons, the health of their family, by practices that now, when you import them into a Western context, are the antidote to the dysfunctions we’ve all been operating with. So I think that it’s absolutely inevitable, as the west hits the wall of our own dysfunction, that we will more and more seek that wisdom, that counsel. I think the question is, how does that turning towards Indigenous wisdom not come with an exploitive, extractive orientation to which we’ve been doing everything, but come in supplication, come in humility, come in at a frontier of what you don’t understand yet and ask for help. That’s very different. So I think it will happen. But how it happens, I think the jury’s still out. 

00:39:56 Rosemary
Fair enough. Thank you. Now I’d like to turn back to healing work. You explain that the healing process, and again to quote you, is refining us to be even pure instruments of the qualities of kindness, of patience, of compassion. Those are the diamonds we are polishing in ourselves so we can be agents of those qualities in society. You also speak of a natural rising of a new intelligence. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that.

00:40:31 Amy
I think what I’m pointing at there, is that we are so used to relying on purely our cognitive ability to think and to make meaning in a data driven kind of problem-solving paradigm. And we’re under-resourcing in the domains of imagination and intuition and psychic knowledge and telepathy and non-direct knowing. My experience, at least in my spiritual and mystical practice, is that we are plugged into an implicate order that’s information rich in the same way that AI can now access seamlessly endless archives of human intelligence or knowledge. Our intuition can access endless amounts of non local information if we get quiet enough and cultivate a quality of receptivity. It’s almost like honing an antenna by hollowing yourself out through practices of body work or tantric work, breath work, or even just contemplative practice, stillness, prayer, chanting, movement. All of those practices create an inner space that’s just deeply listening. Thomas talks about listening as if you have eyes all over your body. So one of the things I’m encouraging leaders to do is to slow down enough, and be intentional about the cultivation of that inner calmness, that inner equanimity that taps you into the hall of possibilities where everything is imaginable. 

00:42:08 Rosemary
Thank you. I’d like to focus a little bit now, if we can, on collective trauma. And there may be a couple ways to look at this. I’m very interested in how you bring the collective trauma healing work into corporate settings. And perhaps that would be better answered by asking you to speak about the new trauma informed consulting and coaching program that you and Thomas have pioneered. You could slice that question any way that fits for you.

00:42:38 Amy
Let me take the first one, and then I’m delighted to talk a little about the program. 

You open the door to people talking about collective trauma by asking questions that go back a few generations. So the fabric of collective trauma lives in the story of my grandparents and my great grandparents and the hardships that then trickle down as contractions of emotion, contractions of fear, contractions of scarcity, contractions of hopelessness several generations later. One of the things I do on the opening night of the program is a guided visualization in which I take people through a process of imagining their ancestors standing behind them. And I asked them to inventory what are the blessings and gifts and strength that you’ve taken from your lineage, and what has been the pain that your ancestors lived through in their country, in their culture, in their religious and faith life, in their family life that walks with you as innate scars. And once you open that lens, you start to hear stories of the aftermath of the world wars. You start to hear stories of poverty and stories of migration, stories of violence and genocide, stories of racism and colonialism, stories of alcoholism and addiction. Collective trauma lives in the fabric of our family, I guess is a way to say it. And so that’s always a doorway to making what is usually considered not the domain of leadership development, become something that has an urgency to speak and an urgency to look at. And when people understand that they’re walking in a long line of pain, I think it humanizes and de-shames whatever is my particular dimension of that pain and also makes it obvious that I am responsible for, and responsible to, your experience of that waterfall of pain, and you are responsible for mine. All of our stories, generations back, they’re entwined. It’s one human family. And that sense of really understanding the gravity of the level of violence that has happened for thousands of years and disconnection. When a society has the maturity to turn towards all of it’s deep work, it’s long work, but it’s holy work. I really do believe that we can start to create pockets of safety, as you said earlier, Rosemary, where that work can happen. And of course, it’s happening also in villages, it’s happening in indigenous communities, it’s happening in churches and synagogues, it’s happening in hospitals and hospices, it’s happening in family mediations, it’s happening in schools, it’s happening in community hall, civic town meetings. Those dialogues have lots of settings where they can be hosted and held well, if we just start to recognize that’s the work of our time.

00:45:43 Rosemary
I’m getting the sense that there’s a wave building that’s already begun, perhaps hasn’t quite crested, that’s going to cause a huge demand for healers, body workers, breath workers, all manner of healing people. Is there anything that you can say that would help the healing community prepare for this work?

00:46:07 Amy
Beautiful question. I just want to reinforce what you said to start and then I’ll try to answer your question. We’ve been teaching for a long time the Cynefin model in our programs which talks about the move from a sort of predictable world to an unpredictable world, or from the domains of simple and complicated problems to the world of complex and chaotic problems. And I think in the last three months we’ve really moved from a world that’s complex to the universality of chaos. And then I heard a term the other day that I really liked, which kind of double clicks on what’s the dynamic experience? What’s the phenomenology of living in chaos? And it was called BANI. So Brittle all the things we rely on could break quickly and unexpectedly. Anxious, we’re all scared because it’s moving so fast and it’s Non linear, meaning things are happening in exponential ways and the causality is hard to track because so many different, like the polycrisis, they’re all interacting at the same time, making something much larger happen. And incomprehensive, and that’s the one that I was really touched by. I know people are anxious and we have to lower the level of fear. I know that we’re in a time of brittleness and we can’t rely on the existing structures. But incomprehensible means, I have to start to befriend the mystery. I have to learn to be comfortable and in my seat with not knowing. I have to have an intrinsic faith in the goodness of life. So if you ask me the kind of healing that’s going to be needed, any practice that can give me a kinesthetic felt sense of that communion and that resting. And so I completely agree with you. Body work, tantric work, breath work, all of that is going to become very urgent. 

In terms of how healers prepare, I think two things. I think healers need to be on the path of doing their own trauma work, actively, so that the fear of our clients or the anxiety of our organizations doesn’t reverberate with my own historic fear. But I can bring to it a quality of centeredness and containment and engagement that is really strong enough to help people when they’re shaking. That’s number one. 

And number two, I think people are going to have to go on the spiritual development path because we have to be able to see past the immediately obvious societal polarization, into the unitive field, in order to be the part that isn’t caught in the left wrong dance. Rumi talks about, “I’ll meet you beyond the field of rightdoing and wrongdoing.” Healers need to get ourselves to that field where we can see the universality of love everywhere and be in that pulse of universal love everywhere. And then I think it can be an alchemical resource to the society as it shakes.

00:48:59 Rosemary
Yes. I love it. So we, if I summarize this correctly, we can be so grounded in our self, our faith, our trust in spirit, that we can regulate and radiate that, in such a way that the people we work with pick it up.

00:49:20 Amy
And they will pick it up. Yeah. And people are looking energetically all the time. They’re sending out little feelers. Are you trustworthy? Are you somewhere I can rest? Are you someone who can really hear me? And when you’re really sending a meaningful and congruent invitation, the veils part.

00:49:41 Rosemary
Wonderful. Thank you. You’re making my first question all make so much sense. Psycho-spiritual work. That’s what you’re describing. Thank you. Would you like to speak a little bit about the new trauma informed consulting and coaching program that you and Thomas Hübel pioneered? Are you finished the pioneering?

00:49:58 Amy
We just finished the first cohort. We did a year-long journey with 200 facilitators, coaches and top team interventionists. And it was marvelous. We learned a lot. I think the group got extremely connected as a community and we really started to define, what does it mean to be a trauma informed practitioner? And most of all, I think we created a moment in the field of organizational healing in which it will no longer be legitimate or appropriate to operate as an interventionist with corporate clients, without at least some trauma literacy. And so I’m hoping, having raised the threshold of ,what does it mean to be trauma informed as a gold standard of our professional expertise and certifications, I feel very strongly that we can’t ignore the hurt that’s in front of us anymore.

00:50:48 Rosemary
I’m curious, what are the criteria for accepting students into this program? It’s coaches and consultants. Sounds very general. Can anyone who does this sort of work apply?

00:51:00 Amy
Yeah, we had about 300 applicants. We took two thirds of them into the program and hopefully we’ll do another round in the next year or so. And it was a huge variety, they were from all over the world, 45 countries, I think, and, and very wide ranging experiences. We had social workers, we had nurses, we had school teachers. We had a lot of people that were working in the world of business. We had a few religious leaders, we had some indigenous leaders, who are leading their own processes. So it was beautiful. And I believe that not just our program, but that more and more there are opportunities to train. Dick Schwartz at Internal Family Systems is now doing an IFS training for coaches. There’s lots of ways for people who are doing business consulting to get more confident in their ability to at least understand and perceive trauma symptoms in the work that they’re doing, even if they don’t yet have the skills to address it all.

00:51:53 Rosemary
Wonderful. And that all speaks to the army of healers that the world is needing, or going to be needing very soon. Thank you. Is there anything else you’d like to address? Is there a question I haven’t asked you that you’d like to say something about, or something we’ve skipped over?

00:52:10 Amy
Yeah, maybe just to say, I really do think it’s our collective job as practitioners, to pay disproportionate attention to our self care, and to the things that inspire us, and give us hope and joy for the future. Because as you’re coming into, as we are all coming into, a darker and darker time, making sure that we stay resourced and inspired and strong and caring for one another in our shaky places, I think is going to become even more important. So if we’re thinking about an army of healers, I want it to be an army of healers that dances together and makes art together and sings together and goes on quiet deep walks together. Let’s build friendships and a kind of interdependent commons that can role model what’s missing in society. And I’m very touched and honored that Mobius is such a community and that other leadership firms have chosen to come and be part of our extended family. 

00:53:07 Rosemary
Thank you. I was so impressed when I jumped onto the Mobius website. I love your vision and I was so impressed with the various individuals that you have involved in the Mobius work. So I will be listing that website in the show notes as well as your own Amy Elizabeth Fox website. So thank you for that.

00:53:25 Amy
Wonderful. I’d love to hear from people and how they found our conversation. Yeah.

00:53:29 Rosemary
As we close up, I’d like to invite you to offer our listeners some words they can take away and contemplate or meditate upon. What would you like to whisper into the listening ear of so many healing professionals and people who, perhaps, might wish to become that.

00:53:51 Amy
I would say, ask yourself these three questions. What is life asking me to serve, in this moment? How do I need to prepare myself, to make, to serve? And what resources of love and teaching and guidance and self cultivation do I need to draw on and draw near in order to support myself as I make that gesture offering 

00:54:23 Rosemary
Amy Elizabeth Fox. Thank you so much for spending the last hour with us today. It’s been uplifting, inspiring and absolutely delightful. I really appreciate your presence here on the Gifts of Trauma.

00:54:38 Amy
Thank you so much for having me, Rosemary.

00:54:43 Kevin
If you are, or have, participated in the Compassionate Inquiry^® Professional Training program, please join us from June 17 to 19 at Renewal: a CI Summer Solstice Retreat, hosted by Sat Dharam Kaur and 18 CI Facilitators from around the globe. In this immersive journey into renewal and transformation, you’ll experience guided practices, nature immersions, creative activities, small group workshops, connection circles, meaningful conversations and much more, all designed to support your journey inward, as we celebrate the solstice in community.  Tap the link in the show notes to learn more and secure your place.