Written by Louise Marra, Programme Director – The New Zealand Leadership Programme
As the world grapples with COVID-19, LOUISE MARRA shares her experience in coping with collective trauma to offer deep wisdom for leaders, businesses and communities in this transforming time.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way, on a quiet day I can hear her breathing. - Arundhati Roy
Here we are humanity – collectively in this time – beyond artificial barriers and inside something that makes us all vulnerable together.
COVID-19 affects all of us and, like many things, will hit the most vulnerable the hardest.
Having studied collective and intergenerational trauma, now it the time for us to come together to grow a collective body and a collective response.
We have been physically close, but emotionally and socially distant. Many have felt isolated and most, on many levels, don’t feel truly seen, welcomed and loved. What if we use this time of physical isolation to become more emotionally literate and intimate – with ourselves, each other and the living planet?
We all have self-protective responses and barriers that have kept us from being connected. This is the time for vulnerability to be aired, received and loved. It’s a time when we can all share that and be in the energy of reciprocity. This is the energy that can become intelligent and creative for our new future.
There is such an evolutionary opportunity to reset ourselves and create a new world that emerges from a place of connection - TOGETHER. This time needs to be run by the heart, by love and by restoring the connective tissue between ourselves, each other and the Planet Earth.
In Aotearoa we also have another opportunity – to integrate the trauma of the past and to co-create a new future based on tangata tiriti – People of the Treaty, where we all meet in a true partnership.
It is potential time of great intelligence where we all bring the gifts of ourselves, our whakapapa and cultures to create a society in which we can all thrive.
So much that has been in the collective and individual unconscious is now becoming conscious – how do we not shove it all back but work together to help heal, integrate and ground these energies from the past? Let us use it as a time to turn ourselves on, not numb to the past, ignore it or drown in the fear.
All the beautiful science on the nervous system over the past decades have added much to this time – humans are built to co-regulate. Our nervous systems can help each other – we are meant to do individual work, but not individually. How do we, in this time, work with each other to help co-regulate what comes through each person from the whole?
We all have a role in helping to transmute the past energies that arise into free energy and vitality. We can transmute fear, into love.
It requires some “knew” capacities – presence is one of the holy grails. How do we grow enough presence, awareness and space to allow this time to change us, to update us, to evolve us?
Uncertainty creates fear and if we can regulate that fear, ground it, feel it, heal it together, we are not left on our own to drown in it: We can turn this fear into love and connection. The more we do this, the less fragmentation and the more coherence in me, in you, in the community, in our organisations, and in society.
We need these fields of stability, we need to create these stable fields so we digest the past together, the present overwhelm and can come back into something essential to recreate our lives and relationships from.
Just as we have an individual nervous system we also have a collective one. Most of the collective is a little fried. The busier the system, the less coherence as there is no time for digesting and processing life and we try to keep ahead of it. These are trauma responses, and it is time that we didn’t keep creating life from these responses, but from something more essential and whole. Fear will affect our solutions and our resilience. We don’t want to wrong it - we want to presence it, feel it, ground it, transmute it. we just don’t want to create from it.
How do we support those most vulnerable and all the essential services and health workers? They need our collective immune system and presence to help them digest and process what they are in every day.
We can learn how to work with presence, co-presencing, coherence, heart energy and our nervous systems to return soul and depth to our lives. We can do this together. This is a time of huge soul retrieval.
What is our true leadership in this time of COVID-19? How do we reach into ourselves to find our essential place, presence and connection to the whole? How do we weave ourselves with softness and vulnerability into our collective spaces to share our fears, frustrations and joy, together creating spaces that will hold the creativity for our evolution?
It is time for a national and global reset. Let’s lead that reset from our finest and deepest connected humanity.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE Louise’s: COVID-19: EIGHT STEPS TO EMPOWERMENT