Hosted by Kosha Joubert. Produced by J’aime Rothbard.

What is the true meaning of resilience? And how can cultivating our capacity to stay related to life’s challenges help us align with a more authentic future?

In this powerful episode, Pocket Project CEO Kosha Joubert and the teacher and facilitator Thomas Hübl. explore the essence of the kind of resilience work practiced in the Pocket Project’s Global Trauma Relief Projects and the next phase of the Resilience Program training, which starts in July.

Thomas explains how a burden of unprocessed trauma can weigh us down and keep us stuck — much like an overloaded boat marooned in a shallow river. Growing our resilience is like restoring the flow of water — helping us to start moving again despite what happened to us.

The work of resilience-building is not, in that sense, a return to the past, but a form of post-traumatic growth that allows us to orient towards a more emergent future.

“When we integrate the hardship, we are always moving forward. It looks like we are coming back to a more baseline state, but actually we are going to a new form of baseline that is more enriched and a bit wiser than the state before we got hurt,” Thomas says. “We’re not restoring backwards, we’re restoring forwards.”

Kosha and Thomas also explore how trauma shows up in social systems — acting as “sand in the engine” that hinders collaboration and leads to miscommunication, polarisation and fragmentation.

“And as long as we don’t see this because it’s unconscious, we are fighting all the time with the symptoms,” Thomas says. “Collective and intergenerational trauma healing is to turn that into a conscious process, see what we are dealing with, and then from there develop methods and technologies to integrate it.”

With some concerned that collective healing practices could inadvertently serve to strengthen unjust systems by helping people adapt to oppressive circumstances, Thomas explains that the goal is to establish the level of social coherence and maturity needed to change systems “from the inside out.”

“That is where I think social justice work and collective trauma work, and maybe the spiritual and mystical work, need to come together to create the pathway to do that,” Thomas says. “Healing-centered approaches are a way to pay back the mortgages that we took for thousands of years.”

With its lively and fresh take on the nature of resilience, this conversation provides deep insights into a foundational element of collective healing work, and the vision underpinning the Pocket Project’s global mission.

You are invited to join this global movement. This dialogue was recorded during a session in Part 1 of the Pocket Project’s Resilience Program training that ran from May to June. Click here to learn more and register for Phase II of the training which starts in July, or to do the self-study course for Phase 1.

Further Resources:

Pocket Project Resilience Program

Pocket Project Resilience Circles

Pocket Project Global Trauma Relief Projects

Thomas Hübl

About Thomas Hübl

Thomas Hübl, PhD, is a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator who works within the complexity of systems and cultural change, integrating the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science. Since the early 2000s, he has led large-scale events and courses on the healing of collective trauma.

He is the author of Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World and Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. He has served as an advisor and guest faculty for universities and organizations, as a coach for CEOs and organizational leaders, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. He is a co-founder of the Pocket Project.