Politics, trauma and empathy shares our learnings since this article, one of the catalysts for the Reworlding gathering, was written.
We explore our collective and individual colonial histories and how they show up in our emotions, our bodies and in our political systems. We ask: are there better ways of making our collective decisions which stem from and tap into our health, rather than our trauma?
We look at the traumatic roots of our current political system and ask: if personal and cultural healing are key to changing our predicament, but our cultures have effectively excluded trauma as an acceptable area to raise in public - can we find ways to approach it which don’t scare people off or make them so reactive they can’t engage?
Drawing from our own histories as much as from our work and study, we explore ways in which what we so often don't acknowledge—our traumas, biology, our own ecology—can hijack even our best-intentioned efforts. Inviting a first-hand experiential dip into the possibilities of using a range of physical and mental functions that goes beyond linear thinking. Inquiring about what processes can help us integrate the advances in the fields of collective psychology and community processes into our political and economic systems.
Eva Schonveld is a climate activist, process designer and facilitator, supporting sociocratic system development, decision-making and facilitation in a range of contexts including XR Scotland. She has an arts background and worked for many years on empowerment and personal growth with very vulnerable people. She went on to co-found Scotland’s first Transition town and city, networked to inspire the Transition movement across Scotland, and was commissioned by the Scottish Government to establish and manage Transition Scotland Support. More recently she has co-founded Starter Culture, which is developing a range of projects to tackle the marginalisation of the inner dimension at different levels of scale including working on supporting more relational ways of doing politics in Scotland. She is also co-founder of Heartpolitics which exists to address the interconnected social and environmental threats that arise from dividing humans from the wider ecology, and from dividing our minds from our hearts, which is currently working on a fractal Grassroots to Global process which aims to connect open-hearted listening and creative culture re-design processes with a global citizens assembly. She is also convening an Inner Enquiry process for the International Transition Hubs Network as well as co-convening the international summit on Transformative Conflict for Transition Network.
Dita Vizoso is a rewilder of self, of land and of people. A forager, farmer, fermenter, facilitator... She is in the long process of shedding years of scientific and academic knowledge in the hope of inviting a wisdom that can only come from a direct conversation with nature. Of which we're inextricable part. Dita worked on the evolutionary ecology of conflict for a couple of decades until the need to break free from the Story of Business as Usual and actively take part in land regeneration opened up space for her passion of working for the soil. And of living simply. She's since been a nomad and a gift-economy activist. She experiments with and teaches about integral regenerative processes for land and communities. Practicing and studying somatic approaches to trauma and interrelational dynamics for the last two decades, she is currently deepening her work on whole-nervous-system coherence and its applications in communication and conflict transformation. She's a co-convener and host in the Now What?! collective, an Apprentice to the art of Tending Grief, and passionate about the different modalities of Council. Happiest with a wheelbarrow and a story, and eager to deepen her dancing with the scythe.
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