It has been some months since we last shared a blog post. What can we say? Life has been lifeing! Our main author has been working and caring for her young children through an interruption in childcare – something had to give. And it was this blog! We believe in family care and self-care!
We are now back in action, and in this blog, we are excited to share with you our reflections on the Collective Trauma Summit 2022 impactful facilitated discussions and presentations.
Check back in November for more reflections and in December for tips on navigating the duality, joy and stress, of the holiday season.
The Collective Trauma Summit is an online gathering to share ideas and inspire action for healing individual, ancestral and collective trauma. This is particularly important for us as the practitioners at Kaafi Counseling because we are committed to participating in global efforts to create awareness and address healing from the impact of trauma. We continue to offer services that are designed to be both therapeutic and psycho-educational, fostering and supporting change and growth by healing the wounds of trauma and assisting in the building of resilience to manage stress and cope with life’s many surprises.
With that commitment in mind, some of our practitioners attended the Summit – where more than 50 speakers shared their experiences and knowledge. As the Summit website details – the speakers shared impactful stories of healing and hope. There were facilitated deep-dives into difficult conversations on some of the most pressing issues of our time including war and conflict, the refugee crisis, climate change, racism, and intergenerational trauma. The Summit also shed a light on the root causes of collective trauma and shared strategies for addressing unhealed wounds from the past. We at Kaafi Counseling found the discussions relating to moving from individualistic trauma work to including ancestral and collective trauma in therapeutic settings and focusing on the need for healthy and connected communities to be enlightening and inspiring.
One of the most poignant talks was with Prentis Hemphill, a writer, embodiment facilitator, political organizer, and therapist. They are the Founder and Director of The Embodiment Institute and The Black Embodiment Initiative, and the host of the acclaimed podcast, Finding Our Way. They have taught embodied leadership and generative somatics with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, and served as the Healing Justice Director of Black Lives Matter Global Network from 2016 to 2019. Their work and writing have appeared in the New York Times, and the Huffington Post and is a must read! They discuss how trauma interrupts relationships in our own body and with other beings. We all recognize that relationships are the core of our human experience. We are wired for relationship – relationship to each other, to the land, the past and future. So, what happens when we consider, then, the capacity for relating as a measure of wellbeing? How can we increase this capacity through therapeutic intervention and through somatic intervention? How can we rediscover the relationship between arm and chest, between foot and leg, between mother and child, between body and water?
As our community knows, we, at Kaafi Counseling, are committed to individual and community transformations. So, we are asking everyone to join together in reflecting on the above questions and on what Prentis describes as the potential of ritual to sync our nervous systems for collective resilience building. We will leave you with these questions and this one from Prentis for our collective reflection, healing, and action; “How can we expand our field of knowledge and increase our involvement in the healing of trauma?”
Resource:
https://www.theembodimentinstitute.org
