A 9-day online gathering to share ideas and inspire action to heal individual, ancestral and collective trauma.
FREE ENCORE EVENT extended THROUGH OCT. 9, 2023
Sept 26 – OCT 4, 2023
If you have not yet registered for the free 9-day Summit, click here to register now.
If you have not yet registered for the free Summit Highlights, click here to register now.
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Poetry Readings and Interviews
The Summit has ended, but you can still enjoy these Highlights.
These poet conversations are available for a limited time Encore. Additionally, you can watch select Speaker Talks, Event Replays, and Musical Performances during the Encore.
If you’d like to get lifetime downloadable access to the Summit recordings, you may purchase the Collective Trauma Healing Upgrade Package here ➤
We are honored to have acclaimed poets joining us for this Summit! Each poet conversation will be available to watch for free from the day it is released until the end of the Summit.
These talks will be available to watch for free until: October 8, 11:59pm New York time
Time left to watch the Poet Conversations:
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Day 1
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Warning: this important conversation includes the topics of death and terminal cancer. Please consider whether this conversation may be disturbing to you. If you anticipate this topic to be too triggering for you to hear about and effectively process on your own, we recommend you choose not to listen.
Highlights from this session:
- The benefit of welcoming feelings of grief and how that leads to acceptance
- How lovely the world can become when you stop fighting the circumstances of life
- The deep spiritual value in understanding that everyone is a mystery
Watch a Short Preview of this Session“We don’t have to learn how to love ourselves. We just have to learn to shuck off everything that’s in the way of us knowing that we love ourselves.”
Bonus: Writing Prompts
Writing prompts on gender, self-love, and the infinite will, to open you up to wonder and exploration.
Click here to access ➤ Andrea Gibson
Andrea Gibson is one of the most celebrated and influential spoken word poets of our time. Best known for their live performances, Gibson has changed the landscape of what it means to attend a “poetry show.” Gibson’s poems center around LGBTQ issues, spirituality, feminism, mental health, and social justice. The winner of the first Women’s World Poetry Slam, Gibson is the author of seven award-winning books and seven full-length albums. Their live shows have become loving and supportive ecosystems for audiences to feel seen, heard, and held through Gibson’s art.
Day 2
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Highlights from this session:
- Our deep need for play and artistry, and the cathartic release of creating
- Using fury as a skill that can generate innovation
- Trusting that our art can encompass hurt as well as healing, trauma as well as joy
Watch a Short Preview of this Session“Trust the safe places. Trust the safe people.”
Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes and teaches remotely. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States. As the poet laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world.
Day 3
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Highlights from this session:
- Poets as scouts for the future, observing and witnessing to benefit their communities
- The role of hope in the Diné worldview, and how it arises from being in the present moment
- How othering land and nature has made it easier to justify the extraction of resources
Watch a Short Preview of this Session“I am connected to this larger cosmological phenomenon, that a sun rises and a sun sets and it will rise again. I think that also gives me the sense of hope, that even if we’re not here, the physics of the universe will continue.”
Bonus: Memory, Language, and the End of the World: An Annotated Bibliography
A brief annotated bibliography of media resources that helped Jake understand the the role of poetry, language, and memory through the lens of the Anthropocene and climate crisis and guided so much of the art he put into the world.
Click here to access ➤ Jake Skeets
Jake Skeets (he/him) is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award. His poetry and prose have appeared widely in journals and magazines such as Poetry, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. He holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Arts Projects, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, and the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at the University of Oklahoma.
Day 4
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Poetry of Witness
Carolyn Forché
Award Winning Poet of Witness, Human Rights Advocate, and National Book Award Finalist
Read BioHighlights from this session:
- Poetry as a way of articulating and exteriorizing trauma
- Feeling into our suffering and allowing it to guide us toward wisdom
- How poetry has become more attuned to social justice
Watch a Short Preview of this Session“Whatever absorbs your psyche, whatever consumes you, whatever your inner obsessions are, they will inevitably come to the page when you write. This is why writing can be so therapeutic.”
Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent collection is In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.
Day 5
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Highlights from this session:
- Going beyond the limitations we set for ourselves and our creative work
- The collective emotional weight that words carry
- Poems as language dances that make us feel alive in every way
Watch a Short Preview of this Session“A poem is a gesture toward home.”
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.
Day 6
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Wounds Into Writing
Natasha Trethewey
United States Poet Laureate (2012-2014), Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet
Read BioWarning: this important conversation includes the topic of gun violence, murder, and racially motivated violence against Black people. Please consider whether this conversation may be disturbing to you. If you anticipate this topic to be too triggering for you to hear about and effectively process on your own, we recommend you choose not to listen.
Highlights from this session:
- Bringing grief and trauma to the container of poetry for healing
- The power of poetry to uncover the wounds in our personal and shared histories and help us imagine a better future
- Poetry’s power to re-animate that which is frozen in us
Watch a Short Preview of this Session“Poetry has a way of speaking not only to the intellect but also the heart.”
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014.) She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award, Thrall (2012,) Native Guard (2006,) for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002,) and Domestic Work (2000,) which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020.) Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was published in 2010.
She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Day 7
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Highlights from this session:
- An invitation to deeper intimacy and honesty in conversations about racism and privilege
- Understanding the historical and social context of words beyond just their apparent meaning
- The healing potential in admitting what we cannot hold and letting our grief be expressed
Watch a Short Preview of this Session“Why are we here if not for each other?”
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII).
Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York.
Collective Trauma Summit Hosts
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Thomas Hübl
Host, Teacher, Author of Attuned and Healing Collective Trauma, and Founder, Academy of Inner Science
Read BioThomas 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, with a special focus on the shared history of Israelis and Germans, and facilitated healing and dialogue around racism, oppression, colonialism, and genocide.He is the author of the books, 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 and is currently a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.
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Dr. Laura Calderón de la Barca
Host, Psychotherapist, Cultural Analyst, and Collective Healing Researcher
Read BioDr. Laura Calderón de la Barca
Dr. Laura Calderón de la Barca is a psychotherapist, cultural analyst, author and educator. She has a passion for supporting people, individually and as part of a community, to live life to the fullest, and does so through her psychotherapeutic and counselling work with individuals, couples and groups over the last 14 years. She also provides professional training, educational material, research and has offered presentations on various national media in Mexico and Canada. Besides degrees in Literature and Linguistics (BAHons), Discourse Analysis (MA) and Social, Community and Organizational Studies, (PhD, Chaos and complexity theories applied to social healing) Laura holds diplomas as Narrative Therapist (from the Latin American Institute of Family Studies, Mexico City), Anger Management Specialist (with Moose Anger Management in Vancouver, Canada) and Intuitive Integral Psychotherapist and Trainer from the Masters Center for Transformation (Ashland, Oregon). She studies with Thomas Hübl since 2016, graduated from the first Pocket Project training, has participated in the last three Collective Trauma Summits as a panelist and then a host, facilitated the Latin-American, Mexican and Colombia Collective Trauma Exploration Labs, and hosts BIPOC spaces in courses offered by Thomas. Beside her PhD thesis, a written psychotherapeutic prototype session for Mexico, she edited a pioneering book on Collective healing with Maurizio Andolfi (The Oaxaca Book, Accademia di Psicoterapia della Famiglia, Roma: 2008), and has been active in the field of collective healing since 2004.
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Pádraig Ó Tuama
Distinguished Irish Poet, Theologian and Mediator, and Podcast Host: Poetry Unbound
Read BioPádraig Ó Tuama
Pádraig Ó Tuama is the host of On Being’s Poetry Unbound — a podcast that has gained over 10 million downloads since its start in 2020 — and also the author of Poetry Unbound; 50 Poems to Open Your Life. Profiled by The New Yorker, and published in Poetry Ireland, the Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, and many others, he brings interests in conflict, language, religion, and power to his work. His most recent collection is Feed the Beast (Broken Sleep Books, 2022).
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Kosha Joubert
Kosha Anja Joubert serves as CEO of the Pocket Project, dedicated to restoring a fragmented world by addressing and integrating ancestral and collective trauma. She holds an MSc in Organisational Development, is an international facilitator, author, coach and consultant, and has worked extensively in the fields of sustainable development, community engagement and intercultural collaboration. Kosha grew up in South Africa under Apartheid and has been dedicated to the healing of divides and transformational edge-work ever since. She has authored several books and received the Dadi Janki Award (2017) for engaging spirituality in life and work and the One World Award (2018) for her work in building the Global Ecovillage Network to a worldwide movement reaching out to over 6000 communities on all continents. Learn more here.
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Matthew Green
Host, Climate Journalist, and Author of the Resonant World newsletter on Healing Collective Trauma.
Read BioMatthew Green
Matthew is a climate journalist and author of the Resonant World newsletter serving the global movement to heal collective trauma. His book Aftershock: Fighting War, Surviving Trauma, and Finding Peace documents how military veterans and their families are exploring new ways to heal from psychological injuries. He is a student in Thomas Hübl’s Timeless Wisdom Training and an active participant in the Pocket Project.
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Ruby Mendenhall
Host, Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Associate Dean for Diversity and Democratization of Health Innovation
Read BioRuby Mendenhall
Ruby Mendenhall is the Lee Dallenbauch Professor of Sociology, African American Studies, Urban and Regional Planning, Gender and Women’s Studies and Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ruby is an Associate Dean for Diversity and Democratization of Health Innovation at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. She is the founder of the Designing Resiliency and Well-being Maker Lab Node at the college of medicine. She is the co-developer of Designing Spaces of Hope: Interiors and Exteriors and the Community Healing and Resistance through Storytelling frameworks. Her research examines Black mothers’ resiliency and spirituality, and how living in racially segregated neighborhoods with high levels of violence affects their mental and physical health. She is currently directing the STEM Illinois Nobel Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, which provides unprecedented access to computer science and the training of Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Citizen/Community Scientists (CSs). Recent grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will also support work around training CHWs and CSs. She is the co-creator of the Wellness Store, which seeks to create a culture of health. Ruby discusses her vision for healing in her TEDxUIUC talk entitled DREAMing and Designing Spaces of Hope in a “Hidden America”.
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Robin Alfred
Host, Executive Coach, Facilitator of Transformation Fields, and Purpose Consultant
Read BioRobin Alfred
Robin Alfred has been studying with Thomas for over 15 years. He is a Senior Student and has had the honour and delight of serving as a mentor on many of Thomas’s online courses and of being one of the co-hosts of each of the four previous Online Trauma Summits. Robin’s passion is to support individual and collective awakening through the embodiment of the timeless, and yet contemporary, mystical teachings that Thomas offers. He practices this in his work as an executive coach, leadership trainer, event facilitator and organisational consultant, all of which have a global reach. He describes his purpose as ‘the facilitation of transformational and healing fields’ – be this in individuals, groups or organisations. Born into a Jewish family, with refugee grandparents who suffered the trauma of persecution in Russia and Poland, Robin has now lived for 28 years in the Findhorn ecovillage and spiritual community in Scotland and studied with a Sufi master for 6 years before meeting Thomas. Robin is a lover of silence, poetry, nature and all things sustainable.
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Dr. Angel Acosta
For the last decade, Dr. Angel Acosta has worked to bridge the fields of leadership, social justice, and mindfulness. With a doctorate degree in curriculum and teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University, Dr. Acosta has supported educational leaders and their students by facilitating leadership trainings, creating pathways to higher education, and designing dynamic learning experiences. His dissertation explored healing-centered education as a promising framework for educational leadership development.
After participating in the Mind and Life Institute’s Academy for Contemplative Leadership, Dr. Acosta began consulting and developing learning experiences that weave leadership development with conversations about inequality and healing, to support educational leaders through contemplative and restorative practices. As a former trustee for the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, he participated as a speaker and discussant at the Asia Pacific Forum on Holistic Education in Kyoto, Japan. He continues to consult for organizations like the NYC Department of Education, UNICEF, Columbia University and others. Over the last couple of years, he has designed the Contemplating 400 Years of Inequality Experience–a contemplative journey to understand structural inequality. He’s a proud member of the 400 Years of Inequality Project, based at the New School.
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Anna Molitor
Anna is a somatic healing practitioner, group facilitator, and a lover of poetry and movement arts that open a path toward what is most essential. She has a deep passion for the mystery and precision of individual and collective trauma healing and restoration. Anna’s work is deeply informed by 10 years of study and work with Thomas Hübl, her immersion as an assistant facilitator in Bloodline Healing (an ancestral healing modality), and her study of Somatic Experiencing Trauma Healing. She bows to the poets, myth-tellers, musicians, healers, teachers, dancers, artists and wild creatures who have blessed her path and woven their magic into who she has become. Anna is a senior student of Thomas Hübl and an assistant and mentor for the current Timeless Wisdom Training. She is delighted to serve for the fifth year as the Collective Trauma Summit Poetry Curator.
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