“Contemporary mysticism is a mysticism that is continually being revealed. It’s not something that is fixed in time. It’s not something that is thousands of years old. It has a contemporary updating aspect to it. And embodied mysticism also means that it’s a mysticism that isn’t just a philosophy, it’s something that lives in the cells of my being.” — Robin Alfred, on the latest episode of What Is Collective Healing?
In this week’s episode of What Is Collective Healing? I speak with Robin Alfred about ‘applied mysticism’ — his memorable term for the way we can tap into timeless wisdom principles to help leaders, organisations and teams embrace new futures.
As we explore in our dialogue, Robin, who’s been facilitating transformational processes for 35 years, has noticed a growing receptivity to more soul-infused language in many of the diverse range of groups he works with as the planetary crisis lays the limits of our existing paradigms bare.
I’ll confess that even as visionary facilitators such as Robin, Amy Elizabeth Fox, Thomas Hübl, Angel Acosta and many others demonstrate the new possibilities that open up when organisations take a healing-centred turn, I suspect that we still have a way to go before the phrase ‘applied mysticism’ becomes common parlance in the kind of global media organisations where I spent much of my career.
And yet — privately, and conforming to no predetermined path — there are people in these corporations engaged in deep work on themselves, who recognise the limits of the system they serve, and who are looking for opportunities to catalyse the kind of systemic shift that many of us can sense is needed, but have not yet rendered in a resolution high enough to confidently map and share.
In my own case, my exit from the corporate media just over four years ago has not been without its challenges, as Anya Kamenetz and I discussed in Resonant World #182. It also marked the start of a new and richly rewarding phase of my own long-standing exploration of the psychological, relational, neurobiological — and indeed mystical — principles of healing trauma.
I’m offering this context in part to explain why I’m so excited to have an opportunity to weave these strands together in a live conversation with Alice Leibowitz for her Ground Your Resistance Summit this Thursday, June 4th at 16:00 London time (BST).
Alice and I will be exploring my vision of a ‘quantum newsroom’ — a term inspired by Karen O'Brien’s work on quantum social change, and rooted in the principles of integrating individual, ancestral and collective trauma I’ve been studying with Thomas Hübl and team. We’ll also be asking how a wealth of practices developed in the collective healing field can transform both how we produce and absorb the news.
This is such an emergent field for me that I find each dialogue on this topic yields a new element of an architecture that already exists in scattered form, and which I sense will — some day in the not too far future — assume a much more concrete and coherent pattern. If you’d like to participate in co-creating this evolutionary update to our media system, then please do join us on Thursday. I’d love to see you there!
The summit starts today and features speakers offering guidance on how we can shift from a sense of overwhelm or paralysis over the state of the world and move into inspired action.
Live interviews run daily from today Tuesday, June 2nd to Thursday, June 4th, from 15:00-22:00 London time (10:00-17:00 EST).
You can register for the summit for free here:
No Longer Burying The Lead: A New Media Culture for the Metacrisis, an essay for Emerge commissioned by Tham Zhiwa.
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