From The Harvard Gazette: “Nobody was prepared for 2020, but a public talk on collective trauma in December 2019 was prescient. At Harvard Medical School’s live-streamed ‘Talk@12,’ Bala Subramaniam . . . engaged in a conversation with Thomas Hübl, author and founder of the nonprofit The Pocket Project, which educates the public on the impact of collective traumas and trains professionals to facilitate events focused on healing. For the past 18 years, Hübl has helped hundreds of thousands of people spark dialogue and work toward restoring some of humanity’s worst transgressions. Since April, Hübl has been offering workshops to Harvard faculty and staff to help them meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The next three-part series, ‘Mindfulness in Action: Leading & Communicating During Challenging Times,’ offered through the Harvard Longwood Campus Office of Employee Development & Wellness, will begin on Jan. 26, 2021.
HÜBL: At first, the topic of collective trauma appears heavy, and this is because we are dealing with the major ethical catastrophes on this planet. But underneath trauma there’s always healing, which means an ethical restoration and ethical upgrade. Post-traumatic growth is an ethical realignment.
There have been uncountable genocides and wars, and all kinds of transgressions. When we come to the place of restoration, there’s a kind of illumination, a self-healing mechanism that heals the tissue of life. And I believe that collective healing will support individual healing and help us learn even more about individual health. We will see these two systems as unified, as they are. The collective and individual are not separate. They work as an interdependent system.”
