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“I was desperately trying to pull us forward and into a better future because the present seemed so unbearable. And I think that crash that I had was really this almighty sort of cataclysmic rupture that in some ways forced me to sit in the cracks,” — Dr Rola Hallam, speaking on the July 14 episode of What Is Collective Healing?
In many respects, I can trace my current path to a bifurcation point in April, 2011, when I experienced a combination of personal and professional crises that left me with no choice but to face life’s root question: How can we transmute our suffering into wisdom?
This was the driving question behind Aftershock, the book I began writing a couple of years later exploring how British military veterans and their families were finding new ways to heal from psychological injury in war. It’s also the question what led me to train as a collective trauma integration facilitator with Thomas Hübl and his global team of practitioners, so that I could explore this alchemical process at the inter-generational and collective scales. (I’m currently mid-way through co-leading an Integration Lab called Being White British: Colonised and Colonisers, as the next phase of my training).
I’ve had countless conversations on these themes over the years, including on the What Is Collective Healing? podcast I co-host on behalf of the Pocket Project. (I also highly recommend Steve Taylor’s book Out of the Darkness: From Turmoil to Transformation for inspiring stories of how “rock-bottom” experiences can spur awakening).
Even after absorbing so many of these archetypal narratives, I found my conversation with Dr Rola Hallam had a powerful psychoactive effect on me.
Dr Rola is an award-winning humanitarian who played an extraordinary role in building hospitals and bringing medical aid to Syria during a decade of mass killings unleashed by the country’s now-toppled dictatorship.
For a recent episode of What Is Collective Healing?, we spoke about the transformation Dr Rola experienced after trauma and exhaustion she accumulated via her humanitarian work led to a ‘dark night of the soul’ that radically changed her understanding of herself and her service in the world.
“I was desperately trying to pull us forward and into a better future because the present seemed so unbearable. And I think that crash that I had was really this almighty sort of cataclysmic rupture that in some ways forced me to sit in the cracks,” Dr Rola told me.
“The pain, the grief, the rage, the powerlessness — everything that I had suppressed in all those years, I had to feel them, I had to learn to be with them. I had to integrate them and transmute them so that I could also reconnect to more of that unconditional love, more to joy, more to beauty, more to my right responsibility.”
Called to the role of doctor from childhood, Dr Rola also felt a strong sense of warriorship from a young age — a combination of energies that would propel her later relief work in her Syrian homeland, where women and children bore the brunt of the former regime’s atrocities.
Dr Rola’s burnout experience helped her to unravel how some of her own early traumas had shaped her path as a “wounded healer”. But it also reflected her experience as a “wounded visionary” — struggling with the pain of the mismatch between the world she could imagine and the world as it is.
With the support of her Sufi practice, various trauma modalities, and psychedelic-assisted therapies, Dr Rola began to harvest the gold hidden in her dark night experience and now offers programmes to support people to build resilience and navigate the collapse-rebirth cycle, including a new nine-month journey called Wise Warriors.
“I would say that is the home of this transformation from clever to wise so that we can all become this healing impulse, this healing presence…for collective liberation, for collective awakening,” Dr Rola told me.
This conversation reignited my own commitment to doing whatever I can to create spaces where our most vulnerable moments can become portals for growth and awakening — including via the Resonant Man and the Being White British Lab.
Dr Rola also reminded me of how this kind of work can help us tap into a living stream of inspiration to meet personal and global challenges in audacious new ways.
“It’s so easy to look at the scale of everything and feel too small and too insignificant,” Dr Rola said. “But I hope that if nothing else, our conversation today is a reminder of not just our responsibility, but of the agency, of the potency in each one of us to really be a positive contribution. And that is all that is asked of us.”
Please do have a listen and let me know how our dialogue lands with you in the comments below!
Further Resources:
The Resilient Leadership Workshop
About Dr Rola Hallam:
Dr Rola Hallam is an award-winning Syrian-British doctor, humanitarian, trauma-informed coach, speaker and spiritual teacher whose work sits at the meeting place of healing, leadership and sacred service.
As founder of CanDo, Rola helped build seven hospitals in Syria and supported care for more than four million people in conflict-affected communities. She has witnessed the devastating impact of war, burnout, moral injury and trauma, not only in the world’s hardest places, but also in the bodies and hearts of those who serve.
Honoured as the first Syrian TED Fellow, Rola has spoken on global stages alongside presidents, celebrities, grassroots activists and changemakers. Her talks have been viewed more than 11 million times, inspiring people around the world to reimagine what healing, leadership and social change can look like.
After her own experience of burnout and PTSD, Rola’s work evolved beyond emergency medicine and humanitarian action into a deeper exploration of nervous system repair, embodied resilience and spiritual transformation. Today, she guides sensitive leaders, healers, frontline workers and changemakers to move from survival, self-abandonment and depletion into wholeness, truth and sacred responsibility.
Her approach brings together Western medicine, trauma healing, somatic work, Sufi wisdom, embodied resilience and expanded states of consciousness. At the heart of her work is a simple but radical invitation: that our presence is medicine, and that when we heal what lives within us, our service becomes less about sacrifice and more about devotion, aliveness and right relationship with the world.
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