The Collective Wound of Colonialism with Laura Calderón de la Barca
Release Date: 06/04/2025
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard. Intensely dedicated to a daily spiritual practice, Jaden Ramsey noticed that his search for transcendence seemed to be taking him further away from the world – rather than rooting him more deeply in it. Drawn to the idea of engaging in community, Jaden joined the two-year Timeless Wisdom Training led by Thomas Hübl and team, and began to learn the principles of integrating individual, inter-generational and collective trauma. That process brought Jaden into contact with the many ways in which growing up without his...
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Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard. Despite building a highly successful career as tech start-up entrepreneur, Claude Terosier could sense that something in her life wasn’t working. In this episode, Claude describes how new pathways began to open up when she began to reckon with the previously unacknowledged complexities of her mixed race identity as the daughter of a white French mother and Black father from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Through years of training with Thomas Hübl and his team, Claude worked steadily to integrate the ancestral trauma suffered...
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Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard Solea Anani sees the collective healing work taking place in the world today as the answer to prayers offered long ago by our ancestors. In this powerful dialogue, Solea opens a unique window into ancestral healing work – drawing on her roots as a member of the red-skinned Taino people of the Dominican Republic, who know the island as Quisqueya, or Mother of All Lands. Solea describes how the grief, fear and isolation she experienced as a child when her socialist parents moved their family to the United States as illegal...
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Interview by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard. In her new book of documentary poetry , braids her experiences of medical trauma and sexual violence with the stories of the “Mothers of Gynecology” – enslaved Black women who were subjected to medical experiments by 19th century gynecologist J. Marion Sims, who appears in the book under the pseudonym Father Butcher. In this deeply moving and intimate conversation, Antoinette speaks about the generations of shame that made it so difficult to share her experiences, and the fear that others would not be able to hold the depth of the...
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Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard. Yocheved Sidof traces her ancestry back 2,500 years, to the Babylonian exile from Jerusalem. This pivotal event in Jewish history forced her forebears to seek sanctuary in new lands, and they ultimately established a community in Mashhad, in present-day Iran. In the 1970s, Yocheved’s parents emigrated to the Midwestern United States, where she was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community steeped in Hasidic practice and Jewish mysticism. In this extraordinary dialogue, Yocheved and Matthew explore how collective healing work led...
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What does collective healing have to do with creativity? And what role can poetry play in a world gripped by so much suffering? Lori Shridhare, a writer and director of communications at Harvard Medical School, began studying with teacher and international facilitator Thomas . After years of immersive study of collective and inter-generational trauma, Lori turned to writing poetry. Throughout 2024 as the destruction of Gaza unfolded, she began to experience words and images spontaneously come through her regular writing practice – fragments of sentences that spoke of struggling...
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Witness. Target = Rubble. by Lori Shridhare Published in Merion West, February 2025 I write as both the witness and the experiencer. We appear as two separate individuals. We are not. Witness is now the living trace of this encounter. -Gert-Jan van der Heiden Echoes of seismic blasts penetrate this skin of memory. I am under. Boulders on my back. Polygonals, squares, round. Slabs. We try to hide from what our vision sees, but we can’t. What comes next is a crumpled blank page. Subterranean dust. Wet fragments. I hear “You’re next.” You say, “Come...
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Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard. Laura Calderon de la Barca leads us deeper into discovery and exploration of the concept of collective healing as it relates to entire nations. Laura brings us into her personal pilgrimage that led to her realization that much of the shame she felt was inherited from her ancestors. Through her process of deep inner connection with that pain, she was led to a wider stream that merged her personal trauma to the broader collective trauma of colonialism experienced throughout Mexico. Laura shares stories and insights...
info_outlineWhat is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard. Join Matthew Green and David Young as they dive into the mechanisms of polarization, the significance of grief, and the potential for societal transformation through collective healing. David draws us into his comprehension that collective healing is not just about the sum of individuals but about understanding and attuning to the collective as a single entity. He discusses his approaches to dealing with polarization by giving individuals ways to address social polarization within their own bodies, which in turn can reduce the overall...
info_outlineWhat is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard. In our inaugural episode, we are joined by Manda Johnson, co-founder of the Pocket Project’s Global Social Witnessing Competence Centre. Amanda shares her journey of integrating her personal and ancestral trauma, which led her to the practice of Global Social Witnessing. Together, they explore how this practice connects personal healing with collective healing and how it can transform our response to global crises. Discover the profound impacts and the potential for this practice to reimagine how we conceive of trauma, reshape our...
info_outlineHosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.
Laura Calderon de la Barca leads us deeper into discovery and exploration of the concept of collective healing as it relates to entire nations. Laura brings us into her personal pilgrimage that led to her realization that much of the shame she felt was inherited from her ancestors. Through her process of deep inner connection with that pain, she was led to a wider stream that merged her personal trauma to the broader collective trauma of colonialism experienced throughout Mexico.
Laura shares stories and insights illuminating her journey to integrate and heal from ancestral wounds, emphasizing the importance of self attunement and authenticity. Through her work with indigenous communities and her studies in narrative therapy and fractals, Laura offers a dynamic and expanded view from which we can more comprehensively acknowledge and heal intergenerational and cultural traumas. She describes how collective trauma lives not not only in human bodies, but also geographic ones, and that the best way for us to do this work is together.