In July, as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations for DeSmog, the nonprofit climate investigations platform where I work as an editor, I moderated an event featuring , whose work on the dangers posed by the nexus of fossil fuel companies, tech oligarchs and authoritarian governments forms the core of her new book End Times Fascism, co-authored with .

Klein is obviously an incredible speaker and a huge influence on the climate movement and the Left more broadly. I loved this post Klein published last month on the growing revolt against AI and data centres — a theme my colleagues Edward Donnelly, Rei Takver and others at DeSmog have been covering in depth by revealing how big developers attempt to impose massive new projects on communities before local people have even heard about their plans.

But the reason I wanted to speak with about his new course The Ultimate Resource: Reclaim Your Freedom and Agency in an Age of Overwhelm, which starts next Sunday, is that Daniel starts where conventional progressive discourse stops.

I find Daniel’s analysis of technofascism essential for its own sake. But Daniel goes far beyond a conventional reading to spell out the need for what he’s calling an ‘Esoteric Left’ — a vision for a progressive politics rooted in a recognition that the materialist-reductionist scientific paradigm that’s dominated Western thought for centuries is rapidly giving way to something much weirder, more malleable and exhilarating than the voices who set the terms of debate in legacy media tend to acknowledge.

The bottom line: If we’re going to stand a chance of averting a dystopian descent into AI-powered totalitarianism, then we need to build movements inspired by and woven around direct, authentic and shared experiences of the sacred — and thereby meet the deepest longings of the human heart in a way that centrist policy tweaks or focus group-tested slogans never will.

Metaphysical Compass

I was first drawn to Daniel’s books a decade or so ago when I was deepening my own path of self-inquiry and increasingly waking up to the existential nature of the dangers posed by the climate crisis, devouring Breaking Open the Head, which opened my eyes to the psychedelic renaissance, and How Soon Is Now, a diagnosis of our ecological crisis and a manifesto for addressing it. (I remember buying the latter at Watkins Books — the famous esoteric and antiquarian bookshop in Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road. I’d felt some trepidation about opening it, since I knew how unsparing its account of the realities our planetary predicament would be).

Since then, I’ve found Daniel’s work to integrate his decades-long exploration of the nature of consciousness and reality itself into actionable insights for people working to envision and build an alternative system to be an important source of inspiration and orientation. In some ways, Daniel’s ultra-big picture thinking has provided scaffolding that’s helped me to better contextualise my own inquiry into how I can place the skills I’ve been developing by training as a collective trauma integration facilitator with Thomas Hübl, whose work is profoundly rooted in mystical principles, in service of the climate movement; more conscious forms of masculinity (through ); addressing the crisis in my native UK (via Being White British: Colonised and Colonisers, Exploring our Roots, Conditioning, and Potential as Catalysts for Healing): and the What Is Collective Healing? podcast.

On Thursday, Daniel and I caught up on a Substack Live to talk about The Ultimate Resource, which seeks to distill wisdom for meeting our moment from the works of thinkers and mystics such as Jean Gebser, Marguerite Porete, Sri Aurobindo, Rudolph Steiner, Owen Barfield, and Henry Corbin.

Themes we discussed included:

• How easy it is to feel crushed by the global situation if you’re holding a purely materialist, egocentric paradigm

• What happens if we consider there may be some evolutionary process or telos at work?

• How the “heft and gravity” of the alternative paradigm is intensifying

• How the Right built power by claiming the occult and supernatural

• How the Left, by contrast, denied that the search for meaning, purpose, and redemption are built into the ‘architecture of the human soul’

• How initiation into different states of consciousness can sow the seeds of a new cultural paradigm — and spread rapidly through our global ‘superorganism’

• Daniel’s reservations about Arundhati Roy’s wholesale rejection of AI and invitation to consider French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s (1952-2020) belief that technology should be recognised as what Stiegler called a Pharmakon — inherently, both a poison and a cure

• Models of the evolution of consciousness proposed by English philosopher Owen Barfield (1898–1997) and German-born Swiss philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Gebser (1905–1973)

• How the ‘gender wound’ plays into authoritarian politics

I’ll be joining the seminar (though sadly won’t be able to make the live sessions on Sundays because they fall at the same time as the weekly men’s circle I co-facilitate with in the Resonant Man).

And as always a big thank-you to all those who were able to join the 60-or-so people who tuned in for the Substack Live, including , , , . I very much appreciate your support.

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“A new world is only a new mind.” — William Carlos Williams.

Resonant World#198

Friends,

I’d like to invite you to join and me for a Substack live tomorrow where we’ll preview his new seminar ‘The Ultimate Resource.’

Running throughout November, this course will explore how to lay claim to peace and agency as the global chaos intensifies via the work of thinkers and mystics including Jean Gebser, Marguerite Porete, Sri Aurobindo, Rudolph Steiner, Owen Barfield, and Henry Corbin.

I’ve attended a number of Daniel’s courses in recent years and I’ve found them electrifying — like I’ve stumbled into a liminal salon between the world that’s dying and the world that each of the participants is sincerely attempting to midwife in our various, idiosyncratic ways.

If you want to feel like you’re participating in generating currents of thought that might just give us a chance of navigating our way through the chaoscene, as opposed to cycling through reactive loops without a sense that anything we can do makes any difference, then I’d highly recommend joining us.

I’ve made some great friends during these seminars, as well as broadening my philosophical and spiritual horizons.

We had a great turnout for a Substack live previewing Daniel’s course on AI in May last year, and enriching questions from participants. If you’re intrigued about the new seminar or Daniel’s work more broadly, please do join our conversation!

When: Thursday, October 29

Where: Substack at this link.

Time: 2pm Los Angeles / 5pm New York / 10 pm London / 11pm Berlin

More About The Ultimate Resource:

All sessions held on Sundays from 14:00-17:00 New York. Discussion Groups held on Wednesdays from 14:00-16:00.

Week One: Achieving Time Freedom (Sunday, November 8)

Week Two: Reintegrating with Source (Sunday, November 15)

Week Three: Replenishing the Foundation (Sunday, November 22)

Week Four: Reimagining the Future (Sunday, November 29)

Find Out More and Book

As Daniel Writes:

“The ultimate resource is origin, the spiritual ground of existence. This resource is present within you at every moment. Recovering your relationship with this foundation rewires your sense of possibility. It opens up “time-freedom,” a depth of awareness, beyond what clocks can measure. In this dangerous epoch of history, we can attain clarity and coherence about the basis of reality, gaining authentic peace.”

Thanks for supporting Resonant World: I’m excited to be getting back into writing and podcasting here more regularly.

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

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Back in June, 2024, and I held a dialogue with about the letters he was writing to his absent father. Our exploration deepened the following year, when I hosted Jaden on What Is Collective Healing?

Last week, I had an opportunity to hear about the stunning new developments that have been occurring in Jaden’s years-long process of turning “towards the absence” left by his father, who walked out on his mother before he was born.

You can hear what happened in the above recording of our Substack live, where Jaden and I discuss his forthcoming trip to Trinidad to meet his father’s family — a family he only recently realised he possessed.

Jaden also speaks about his plans to work with his partner Amy Rose Bergstein to create a film documenting his journey to his father’s homeland and the multi-generational story of migration, lost connections and rediscovered roots that will turn full circle with his trip. You can support the film here and see a trailer here:

As Jaden wrote in his account of our conversation for his Awake in the Dream Substack:

“We spoke about how my relationship with this part of my story has changed, what it means to connect more deeply with my Black ancestry, and how my own search for belonging sits within larger histories of family separation and the diaspora.

“Something I wanted to share is how much remains unknown. I don’t know what I’ll learn, what might be difficult to encounter, or how being there will change my understanding of where I come from. Part of why we’re making this film is to share that process as it happens.

“We also talked about the care this asks of us: bringing a camera into intimate moments, taking time to be with people, and keeping our relationships with family and community at the center of how we make the film.”

One of the core intentions behind Resonant World is to support the emergence of a new trauma-restoring media culture dedicated to making the principles of integrating individual, inter-generational and collective trauma more visible through many forms of storytelling and via a global multiplicity of voices.

I feel privileged to have gained glimpses into Jaden’s courageous process of working through the impact of his father’s absence ever since we first met in 2022 as fellow students on Thomas Hübl’s two-year Timeless Wisdom Training. Back then, we could have hardly imagined that — within a matter of a few short years — he’d be flying to Trinidad to make a film about meeting his extended family for the first time.

I believe Jaden and Amy will make just the kind of film that can help make collective and inter-generational healing more accessible. I deeply appreciate any support you may be able to offer to empower them to produce the best version they can of this important work.

Support the Film

Feldenkrais-informed Coaching with Seth Dellinger

My friend is offering a free taster session of his Embodied Dialogue​ one-to-one somatic coaching practice for anyone who wants to explore working with him on a life transition or who is trying to break through on a relational issue, or simply wants to feel more deeply grounded in their body.

You can find out more and contact Seth here.

I’ve come to know Seth through his dedicated participation in the Resonant Man, the men’s initiative I co-founded with Jacob. I can attest that Seth brings both a deeply grounded expertise in bodywork and a quality of presence and integrity that would be a boon to anyone looking for support to navigate almost any kind of challenge. Drop Seth a line if you want to find out more.

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

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Resonant World #196

Hello everyone,

Today at 9pm London time the Resonant Man will host a 30-minue discussion live on Substack where Jacob and I will be exploring how we’re supporting men to cultivate the capacity for greater attunement and spaciousness during challenging moments in relationships. This will give a flavour of the work we’re offering during our Month of Clarified Relating in October, which men are invited to join on a free-trial basis to experience the Resonant Man. Hope to see you later!

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If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

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Resonant World #194

Hello everyone,

Thank you for your patience with the lack of Resonant World posts over the past few months and for your continued support. I’m planning to write more regularly now that summer’s over. Meanwhile, I wanted to share a couple of exciting updates from , What Is Collective Healing? and DeSmog.

The Month of Clarified Relating

I’d like to extend an invitation to any man who’s been intrigued by the Resonant Man men’s initiative that and I co-founded a couple of years ago, but who hasn’t yet had a chance to experience our weekly online men’s circles or our annual Soulstice retreat at Pitchcott Farm in Buckinghamshire. (Check out our short highlights film from this year’s retreat here).

This October, I will lead a process over four weekly online sessions to help us cultivate our capacity to stay present and related in moments of challenge in our intimate relationships.

I’ll be sharing from my own process of working to integrate triggers that I’ve met during my journey as a husband and father that previously pushed me into eruptions of anger, shame spirals and withdrawal. (Into the Lost City of Rage and Shame: Resonant World #123). That’s not to say I never get triggered these days: Far from it. But I do have access to at least a little more spaciousness, and the intensity and frequency of these moments of disconnection have certainly lessened.

I’ll also be draw on my years of training with Thomas Hübl and his team, both as a student in the Timeless Wisdom Training and the Collective Trauma Facilitator Training. (My practice has continued via the process of co-facilitating one of more than 40 Integration Labs the Pocket Project has staged this year to support people to integrate different aspects of individual, ancestral and collective trauma. The Lab I am co-leading with Manda Johnson is called Being White British: Colonised and Colonisers, Exploring our roots, conditioning, and potential as catalysts for healing).

In the Resonant Man, we’ll spend October supporting one another to explore the specific triggers that arise for each of us and practice noticing our patterns of shutting down, zoning out, or going into fight-flight-fawn responses.

We’ll explore the dynamics of rupture and repair — and learn to recognise the many ways in which shadow patterns sneak underneath our awareness and cause us to act out in ways we later regret. We’ll also develop more awareness of how we can lose contact with our capacity to see another person clearly and instead replace them with a two-dimensional projection from our own mind. Ultimately, mine and Jacob’s intention is to equip participants with practical skills that will empower us to navigate the tricky and triggering aspects of relationships in a way that makes us better partners, lovers, fathers, husbands, and colleagues.

We’re offering a month-long free trial for men who are interested in finding out more about our work. So if the Month of Clarified Relating speaks to you and you’d like to jump in at no cost, please message me directly or comment below. (Monthly membership after the free trial costs £125).

Date: The four Sundays in October (4, 11, 18, 24)

Time: 7pm-8:30pm UK time.

Location: Zoom (write to me for details)

And if you know a man who might be interested in this work, we deeply appreciate your help in spreading the word!

(With thanks to Jacob for writing the Resonant Man post Attunement Where It Matters Most, on which the above text is based).

What is Collective Healing?

I’m very excited about the evolution of the What Is Collective Healing? podcast I co-host on behalf of the Pocket Project, alongside Kosha Joubert and Sonita Mbah. Each episode is imbued with the fantastic production talents of J’aime Rothbard at Full Body Yes Creative, whose affinity for creating bespoke audio landscapes lends each episode a unique character.

Since I shared my dialogue with Dr Rola Hallam in the previous edition of Resonant World published late July, we’ve featured Carolina Herbet, Thomas Hübl, May Pundak, Markus Hirzig, Andrea Livingston and Andrea Boshuzyen, Pamela von Sabljar and Sean Talbeaux, Connirae Andreas and Rick Hanson. Each of these conversations is literally bursting with insights and inspiration. Do have a listen! Following the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or leaving comments is a great way to support this work.

I would love to write more about each of these episodes, and I’m hoping I’ll have an opportunity to explore at least some of them in more depth in future posts.

Recognition for DeSmog

I’ve written and talked a lot about the dilemmas associated with my decision to go into self-imposed exile from corporate media in favour of nonprofit climate journalism, including in this conversation with of the Golden Hour published on Resonant World earlier this year.

It’s therefore always great to receive reminders of how frequently DeSmog, the climate accountability news organisation where I work as an editor, punches above its weight.

I was delighted that three DeSmog contributors received Covering Climate Now Awards this month, for various investigations exposing corporate climate denial and delay. You can read all about the stories by Geoff Dembicki, Juliana Aguilera and TJ Jordan the judges cited here.

It was also a privilege to have had an opportunity to interview my some-time collaborator and long-time hero Amy Westervelt at Drilled Media about her essential new book Brought To You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy. You can find our conversation here.

Thank you for your support — it means a huge amount to me. And I always love to hear any resonance in the comments!

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If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

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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?

Resonant World #193

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.”

Wounded Visionaries

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!

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Further Resources:

Dr Rola Hallam

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.

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you.

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Resonant World #192

When I joined DeSmog back in April 2022, ​I felt a wash of relief.

My previous role as a journalist working for a global news organisation awash in fossil fuel sponsorship money had left me feeling like I was part of the climate problem — rather than contributing to a solution.

While I’m not under any illusions about the desperate straits the world is now entering, or the size of the obstacles to tackling the climate crisis, I now feel like I’ll at least have something to tell my eight-year-old daughter when she one day asks me what I was doing at this critical time.

With its unflinching focus on illuminating the ever-metastasizing networks of power and money seeking to thwart the desire of the vast majority of people to take meaningful action, DeSmog is making a far greater contribution than many news organisations with hundreds of times more resources.

As and I discussed in our dialogue published in April, it’s not easy for journalists to escape the golden cage of corporate media to carve niches more aligned with our personal value structures. But as DeSmog celebrates its 20th anniversary tonight, I can say that I feel enormously grateful to have been admitted to a team of some of the most talented, committed and empathic reporters and editors I’ve ever encountered.

I’d also like to thank my DeSmog colleagues for being so supportive of my commitment to collective and inter-generational trauma integration work — and for partnering with the Pocket Project on the annual Climate Consciousness Summit. It feels like we are already sowing the seeds of the trauma-restoring media culture of the future.

I would love for readers of Resonant World to join us at 20:00-21:00 UK time today to speak with giants of the climate world including Naomi Klein, Michael E. Mann and DeSmog’s founder Jim Hoggan about how DeSmog can make even an bigger impact in the years ahead (more details below).

I’m excited to be moderating and I invite you to register here.

Please do join us!

Register for Free

​Featuring:

• ​Best-selling author, activist and University of British Columbia Professor of Climate Justice Naomi Klein in conversation with DeSmog Canada Editor Mary Stuart on what the rise of the AI-fossil fuel axis and the resurgence of fascism means for climate accountability.

• ​World-leading climate scientist Michael E. Mann and DeSmog U.S. editor Ashley Braun discuss the evolving climate denier playbook and the tactics that have helped the climate movement to successfully fight back.

• ​Public relations guru Jim Hoggan speaks with DeSmog’s Executive Director Brendan DeMelle on his inspiration for founding DeSmog and its critical role in exposing the advertising and public relations industry’s role in fuelling the climate crisis.

• ​Brendan DeMelle, DeSmog UK Editor-in-Chief Hazel Healy and DeSmog Global Managing Editor Geoff Dembicki reflect on what’s next for DeSmog as we move into the next 20 years louder and more impactful than ever.

  ---

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Calling Men Into Presence: A clip from my conversation with Kevin Young for the June 9 episode of What Is Collective Healing?

“If we don’t recognize and have some degree of intimacy with whatever in us can dehumanize or abuse others, however ‘civilized’ or ‘rational’ its demeanor, we pose a danger not only to ourselves but to others, no matter how nicely we generally behave. What really matters here is not so much the presence of this inner darkness, but the kind of relationship we choose to have with it.” — Robert Augustus Masters in To Be A Man, as quoted by .

Resonant World#191

When I launched Resonant World four years ago, I never imagined I’d end up writing and speaking so much about the relational fracturing that divides men and women, and exploring pathways towards reconciliation and repair.

As it turns out, the “gender wound” has emerged as a central concern of Resonant World and , and I’m very happy to share an invitation to a free online event I'm taking part in tomorrow (Wednesday, July 1) that will open a space to explore this territory together.

From the Epstein Files to Inside the Manosphere: Tending to Fractured Gender Relations is a Global Social Witnessing call staged by the Pocket Project at 19:00 London time / 14:00 in New York / 20:00 in Berlin). (The call lasts 90 minutes and you can register and read more details here).

In Global Social Witnessing calls, a facilitator supports participants to come together in community to attend to events in the news. I like to the think of the practice as the exact opposite of doomscrolling — instead of feeling overwhelmed, numbed out and isolated, we form a collective nervous system that allows us to relate to what we’re seeing and hearing with greater depth and nuance than we’re likely to manage alone.

The field of shared awareness we form supports each participant to digest any fragments of the collective trauma theme being witnessed that may be lodged in their individual nervous system. By intentionally turning towards what we may reflexively turn away from, we liberate new energy we didn’t know we possessed. It’s not uncommon to walk away from these calls feeling powerfully energised and refreshed.

In tomorrow’s call, led by Kosha Joubert, I’ll be speaking alongside and Pamela von Sabljar, both friends of Resonant World, who are each deeply engaged in supporting people to cultivate the kinds of capacities we need to engage in conversations on highly charged topics — particularly in relation to gender.

I highly recommend this powerful essay that Sean published a few hours ago, which speaks vividly to our theme (and is the source of the Robert Augustus Masters quote above).

I also had an opportunity to preview the event with J’aime Rothbard in the latest episode of What Is Collective Healing? I hope our dialogue will provide a sense of what to expect in a Global Social Witnessing call for those who may be new to the practice. We also built on some of the themes that surfaced in a previous episode of the podcast with Kevin Young, where we discussed the challenges facing men, and explored new models of masculinity beyond separation and struggle.

I believe that Global Social Witnessing is the kind of social technology that could allow large numbers of people to begin to thaw the frozen collective and inter-generational trauma layers that keep us stuck in the dysfunctional loops we observe operating within and around us, from the personal to the global.

That’s why I have a feeling that this will be a powerful call. Join us!

Register for the Call

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you.

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Resonant World #190

The forecast is sunny.

The meadow is pulsing with life.

And your place at the campfire awaits.

Our annual Resonant Man Soulstice retreat is very close now, and we have a few spots left for men who’d like to join the fantastic group of about 20 of us that will be gathering at Pitchcott Farm next weekend. (Details and bookings here. Please feel free to write to me direct or drop a comment below with any questions).

This will be a unique opportunity to experience the spirit of the Resonant Man, where we support each other to cultivate our capacity to speak from the heart, listen more deeply, and reconnect with who we are at our core.

At the same time, Soulstice is also a place to forget devices, immerse yourself in nature, try new things, and allow the kind of laughter, sense of adventure and camaraderie that naturally arise when men intentionally co-create a culture of brotherhood, spontaneity and ease together.

This can be a deeply healing experience. Even more importantly, it’s guaranteed to be a lot of fun.

and myself will be leading the retreat with the support of a wonderful line-up of facilitators and contributors, including , , Alan Friday and Stephen Winter, with incredible music from Quetzal, a musician and sound healer visiting from Mexico.

We also recognise that it’s often the conversations and moments of resonance that occur in the in-between spaces — around the fire, preparing meals, collecting water — that can have the most profound impact.

The invitation is for you to engage with the programme at your own pace, and savour the opportunity to ground yourself in the breathtaking surroundings of the farm, which owner Tony Langford is transforming into a hub for community, amazing food and reconnection with the land.

Some of the participants have been attending our weekly men’s circles at the Resonant Man for well over a year. Others are entirely new to our work. Whether this is the first time you’re encountering the Resonant Man, or you’re a seasoned men’s work veteran, you would be very welcome to join us.

If you’re feeling the call, please do get in touch.

And if you know any man who you think might be interested in taking part, we really appreciate your help in spreading the word.

Yours in resonance,

Matthew & Jacob

Buy a Ticket

When: Retreat starts at 15:00 UK time on Friday, June 19 and closes at 16:00 on Sunday June 21.

Where: Pitchcott Hill Farm, Pitchcott, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, HP22 4HT.

Cost: £325, including camping spot and meals throughout. (We need to cover costs but do not want the ticket price to be an obstacle to committed men attending. Message me if you want to discuss further). You can buy a ticket here.

Accommodation: Please bring your own tent or camper van. If you don’t have a tent but wish to attend, drop me a line as we may be able to arrange a spot in one of the two-man bell tents at the farm.

Food: Ticket price includes delicious meals throughout.

What: Activities include:

🔥 Nightly campfires

🥣 Cacao ceremony

🌬️ Breathwork — reset your nervous system and drop into the body, with Alan Friday

🎵 Sound Journey — dynamic frequencies, with Mexican sound healer Quetzal

💬 Resonant Dialogue — deep listening and authentic presence

🥊 The Wisdom of Combat — a martial arts workshop with Mahon McCann

📖 Lord of the Rings by the Fire — the fellowship as a map for courageous living, with Stephen Winter

⚡ Connecting with Your Power — Jordan Bates

🕯️ Honouring the Ancestors: Father’s Day — a ceremony with Matthew Green

🌍 Meeting the Land — grounding practices with Hamish Renton & Tony Langford

🕺 Ecstatic Dance Rave — Josh Silver

🎤 Rap Freestyle — Jordan Bates & Jacob Kishere

🧠 Awakening to Meaning — a dialogue with philosopher podcasters Mahon McCann & Jacob Kishere

🎯 Surprise Games

🍽️ Fresh-cooked meals throughout

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you.

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“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?

Resonant World #189

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, 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 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 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 ’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:

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Resonant Reading:

No Longer Burying The Lead: A New Media Culture for the Metacrisis, an essay for Emerge commissioned by .

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you.

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Resonant World #188

One of my core intentions in launching Resonant World four years ago was to sow seeds of what I’m calling a trauma-restoring media culture.

So I’m excited to be in live dialogue on this theme with on June 4, 2026 at 4pm London time (BST) as part of her Ground Your Resistance Summit.

The online gathering features a wealth of speakers offering guidance on how we can shift from a sense of overwhelm or paralysis over the state of the world and move into soul-aligned action. You can register for the summit for free here:

Join the Summit

Alice and I will be exploring the vision I outlined in August in No Longer Burying The Lead: A New Media Culture for the Metacrisis, an essay for Emerge commissioned by , whose work on climate trauma was another major source of inspiration for creating Resonant World.

Among questions we’ll consider:

• What might it look like to develop a media platform capable of reflecting the global trauma healing movement back to itself, in such a way that both amplifies good work and weaves new connections, while also illuminating dilemmas and distortions in the field?

• What differentiates a trauma-restoring ‘quantum newsroom’ from its legacy media cousins? What practices can journalists and editors use to establish the level of coherence needed for the media to serve as a vector of healing — rather than retraumatisation? How can we make such practices more widely available?

• What signs are there of this new system starting to emerge — and how can people help?

My exploration of these questions draws on the work of teachers, colleagues and collaborators including Thomas Hübl, , , James Scurry, Manda Johnson, Indra Adnan, Patrick Chalmers and many others.

If you’re also engaged in the question of how we can update the media in the light of our growing understanding of the role of individual, inter-generational and collective trauma in fuelling the dysfunctional cycles we see on the news, then I hope you’ll join us!

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If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you.

On Thursday, May 28, I’ll be co-hosting Masculinity and the Metacrisis, an online event featuring climate journalist Amy Westervelt, philosopher , Resonant Man co-founder , and Indra Adnan, a psychosocial therapist, author and founder of The Alternative Global.

Staged in partnership with climate investigations platform DeSmog, where I work as an editor, ’s Centre for Climate Psychology and the Resonant Man, the panel will explore how the climate crisis is also a crisis of modern men — and ask how we can give rise to new forms of masculinity oriented towards planetary health. There will be plenty of room for questions and discussion. For details and bookings click here.

Resonant World#187

The following interview with Indra Adnan was published in partnership with Dr Britt Wray’s Unthinkable newsletter and DeSmog.

Abuses of power by men have rarely been more visible: We need only consider the Epstein Files; Inside the Manospshere; attacks on women’s rights under Trump; and CNN’s report on an ‘online rape academy’, to name a few examples.

In parallel, many men are questioning inherited patriarchal models of masculinity and seeing clearly how tightly braided these are with the climate crisis and a host of other environmental and social ills. We’re asking what it would take to integrate nobler qualities of service, stewardship and protection of the vulnerable into what it means to be man — questions at the core of the Resonant Man, the men’s initiative I co-founded with . summed up the dichotomy succinctly in an excellent new essay for Unthinkable: ‘Petro-masculinity’ is destroying the planet — Can ecomasculinity save it?

With these countervailing forces in mind, I spoke with my friend Indra Adnan about the historical roots of familiar forms of masculinity rooted in competition, accumulation and dominance. Indra argues that these models suppressed male relationality and emotions, cauterising many men’s ability to engage wholistically with community and nature.

The advent of the fossil fuel era supercharged this dynamic — turning men into cogs in an industrial machine and setting the stage for the climate crisis and a host of other problems caused by excessive dependence on what has described as a ‘left brain’ logic focused on control, exploitation and endless economic growth.

As Indra documents in her book The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age, the advent of the digital era has allowed many more people — including men — to begin to interrogate what happened to them and recognise both internal and external structures of oppression, which when acknowledged and released, offer new capacities for collective agency.

That means the interlocking crises facing young men today could allow many more people to experience the benefits of cosmolocalism: connecting their personal struggles to build meaningful lives with the needs of their communities and the planet.

At this febrile moment, it will be essential, Indra argues, to create many more spaces where men can come together to explore their emotions, relationships and vulnerability and allow healthier models of masculinity to emerge.

Matthew: What’s the connection between the climate crisis and masculinity?

Indra: For me, the core connection is the loss of relationship to nature. We know that the result of that is that we became very extractive, we see nature not as a thing we are part of, but as a thing to exploit — that is the deepest disconnection you can have. Then you might say, why are we blaming men? We have to go back to our history of leaving women in the home, while men went out to build the world.

When we were living as hunter-gatherers, it was much easier for us to be connected to nature. Then came agriculture, settlement, enclosure, nation-states, and empire. Men wanted to protect women and children by building homes, while they went out to conquer nature and each other.

Because of their relationship to home and the task of raising children, women continued to be able to express and explore emotional relationship. Men were often sent away and became more alienated from family and community. They became more competitive and accumulative — faculties of a very left hemisphere-dominant brain, which acts upon the world rather than being in the world.

How did fossil fuels play into this?

The advent of the industrial revolution made these dynamics so much more extreme: Men were reduced to being cogs in a machine, sent out to mines, sent out to war and later, sent out to factories and offices where they served someone else’s wealth for little reward. Their bodies were sacrificed as tools for the growth of a patriarchal male culture built on dominance.

As the mother of a boy, it breaks my heart to think of these eras when men were sent out to work for 10 hours a day, depriving them of the opportunity to be in relationship with their children, with each other, and build community in an environment of care. Instead, men have mostly had to shut down their emotions, which means their whole-brain access has been narrowed.

The impact of patriarchy on women has rightfully been foregrounded in modern society. But if we are going to have a hope of change, we need to also understand the impact on men, who make up 94 percent of the prison population and have the highest rates of suicide.

How did this lead to differences in the way men and women approach the climate crisis?

It’s not entirely a male and female issue because our experience of gender has developed so much in recent years. I would call it an ontological issue — the way that the masculine is being and feeling in the world is different from the way that the feminine is being and feeling. A feminine sense of connectedness makes it much easier for us to prioritise nature or community. The wounded masculine style of thinking and being is destroying our planet and also makes it so hard for men to be happy.

Is something changing?

Yes: A lot of young men are searching for a different kind of masculinity.

Before the Internet, we only received information from the system: newspapers, academics, our bosses. The past 30 or 40 years has been an era of waking up: Groups of people waking up to injustice or seeing inequality that they hadn’t previously been able to put into words. But it’s very uneven, because we can’t reorganise ourselves within a society that is mostly built on disconnection. The true value of us waking up has yet to be realised.

We’re now in an era of backlash against feminisation. The manosphere wants to pull us back to an era of male-dominance and arrest the revolution of the past 30 years.

Will the backlash succeed?

I don’t think so, because there are so many signs of how men are beginning to fundamentally question what’s happened to them and their role. Survey data suggests that only 11 percent of Gen Z in the UK would fight for their country. There are anti-war movements led by young men anticipating conscription in Germany and Japan.

It relates to the climate crisis because once men start to open up to their own vulnerability and begin to look for new forms of relationship and meaning, they feel their environment more directly and begin to care about it more. That’s when they can start to stand for the ecocivilisation of the future.

How does this play into relations between the genders?

There has to be a conscious decision between men and women and all genders to care for each other in a wider field of relational possibility where emotions are acknowledged as vital messengers for survival. Because so many men are still in the cultural patterning of patriarchy, repeating structures of dominance rather than partnership, women and more feminine genders more broadly have to take the initiative to develop more reciprocal structures for all of us.

There’s a self-defeating aspect of patriarchy which always creates zero-sum games and nobody can win. Whether you’re talking about politics or the climate crisis, you can start by stepping outside of that construct and imagine yourself in the wider field in which it would be natural to care for everything. It’s not survival of the fittest: It’s being coherent with the wholism of nature itself.

What’s your vision for the future of masculinity?

Instead of recruiting young men for the army, why not recruit them for the protection of the planet? Learning how to grow food, capture wind and wave power, and sunlight — these are all things which would connect our needs for status and belonging to the needs of the community and the planet. Men could find ways to switch from control to protection — it would still give them a role for their masculinity, but it would be a more heroic role, rather than winner-takes-all.

How can we support this process?

What we’re trying to do at The Alternative Global and Spring, our initiative to build a new political system in Scotland, is to develop a narrative to help people in communities be better connected to the planet — and there’s a clear role for both men and women in partnership there.

But the waking up-ness of this moment is going to be very tricky for men in particular, because they don’t easily find spaces in which they’re allowed to open up to their vulnerability.

As a woman working in sociopolitics, I think it’s an urgent task to create safe landing spaces for young men where they can shrug off the patriarchy and come back to their fuller selves.

For details and to reserve your spot at Masculinity and the Metacrisis click here.

If you liked this post, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters. Thank you!

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Hello everyone,

I wanted to share the above video on two-day Soulstice retreat taking place on June 19-21. (More details below). I’m super excited about what’s shaping up to be an incredible few days. We have room for some more men so please do book a spot or drop me a line if you’re interested to find out more.

Meanwhile, here’s a round-up of other exciting events connected with Resonant World coming up soon — including Ecstatic Dance in southwest London this Friday and details of special discounted places at the Highly Sensitive Person Retreat in Devon next month.

• Monday, May 11: Beyond the Labels: A Lab for Parents of Neurodivergent & Sensitive Children. (20:00-21:30 BST). Zoom. Join and as they create a space for parents to breathe, share and feel less alone in the complexity of raising neurodivergent and super-sensitive kids. Details and bookings here. Watch Dr Genevieve and Louis in conversation about the Lab here.

  

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• Friday, May 15: Ecstatic Dance Twickenham. (19:00-21:30 BST). ETNA Community Centre, Twickenham, UK. invites you to start your weekend by shaking off the week with a warm, optional cacao followed by an immersive Ecstatic Dance journey led by Josh Silver. Ecstatic Dance is an embodied practice inviting you to connect with yourself, explore your individuality, and express your energy through free movement. Details and bookings here.

• Thursday, May 28: Masculinity and the Metacrisis: In What Ways is the Climate Crisis a Crisis of Modern Men? (19:00-21:00 BST). Zoom. This online event will bring together guests including climate journalist Amy Westervelt, philosopher Cadell Last, men’s work facilitator Jacob Kishere, Indra Adnan, a psychosocial therapist, author and founder of The Alternative Global, and myself to explore how the climate crisis is also a crisis of modern men — and to ask how we can give rise to new forms of masculinity oriented towards planetary health. The event will have opportunities for dialogue and small-group sharing and is a collaboration between the Centre for Climate Psychology, DeSmog, and the Resonant Man. To reserve your spot, click here.

Thursday, 11 June to Sunday, 14 June: Highly Sensitive Person Retreat: Unmask and Come Home to Yourself. Selgars Mill, Devon. A four-day retreat at Selgars Mill in Devon, UK, for Highly Sensitive People and deep feelers who are ready to finally switch off, feel like themselves again and experience real belonging. With and . Details and bookings here. Details of a special two-for-one offer here. Details of supported places at 50 percent off here.

Friday, 19 June to Sunday, 21 June: The Resonant Man Soulstice annual retreat. Pitchcott Farm, Buckinghamshire. We welcome men to our second annual Summer Retreat: Soulstice. Building on 2025, we’ll be holding an even bigger retreat. Deeper ritual, rambunctious fun, wisdom carriers, philosophers, storytellers, delicious food, and opportunities to step in together as men and connect with the land. We look forward to welcoming you to a regenerative oasis: Pitchcott Farm in Buckinghamshire, easily accessible from London. Details and bookings here.

Please message me or drop a comment below if you have any questions about any of these events. Very much hope to see you at one or more of them!

Yours in resonance,

Matthew

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If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

Resonant World #185

I’ve felt electrified by ’s viral essays What Happens When the World Is Motherless and her Fatherless follow-up since reading them on Friday. (If you haven’t read them both already, I implore you to do so right now).

Kalila wrote the pieces in response to a CNN investigation that exposed a global online ‘rape academy’ where men swapped tips on how to sedate and assault their wives and partners, shared videos of these attacks, and discussed how to avoid getting caught.

I’d first heard about the story a week or so earlier via ’s essential essay THESE ARE NOT EXCEPTIONAL MEN in his newsletter .

After sharing some of the details — including how men had been “livestreaming the assault of unconscious women for $20 a viewer, cryptocurrency preferred” — Sean wrote:

“The question isn’t whether you would do what those men did. The question is, what have you not looked at yet? What lives in you, conditioned by the same culture that produced them, that you’ve managed not to see because you haven’t needed to.

“I’ve noticed something in the men’s work world this week. Silence. The facilitators and teachers and coaches who position their work as the answer to toxic masculinity — myself included in some ways — haven’t said much. I found almost nothing from the major voices in this space addressing the story directly.”

Reading Sean’s words, I’d felt an impulse to respond publicly myself in some way (as I’d done with a video speaking to the Epstein Files a few months earlier). But I hesitated — confining myself to reposting Sean’s piece.

If I look more deeply, I can sense an echo of the same hesitation I’d felt for a long time about posting about the genocide in Gaza. I was hearing that same internal whisper telling me “it’s too big” — that anything I wrote would risk sounding performative, or could be better said by others. I told myself that I didn’t have time to marshal my thoughts adequately to take a public stand. I didn’t have the bandwidth to figure out something to say that would be both true and safe at the same time.

What’s that hesitation really about?

I want to leave that question hanging as I invite you to consider the following excerpt from Kalila’s introduction to What Happens When the World Is Fatherless, where she explains why she felt the need to address men directly after writing the first Motherless essay primarily for her audience of mostly women:

“I am writing it because the Mother cannot come home to a world that has not also called the noble masculine home. She will not be safe. She will not be revered. She will not be held in the dignity that is hers. She will be, exactly as she has been for the last few thousand years, met by a masculine that does not know how to honor her, because it has never been taught. And we will find ourselves in the same endless story we have been trying to break for generations.

This is the cycle we keep running inside.

We call the Mother home. We rise. We find our voices. We reclaim our bodies. We gather in circle. We become more ourselves than we have been in thousands of years.

And then we meet the men. And many of the men have not done their work, to heal from the ravages of patriarchy, and what it has robbed them of. And so the Mother in us, newly risen, is met by the same unconscious, unreckoned, untutored masculine that has never known what to do with her. And she is wounded again. And we go back into hiding. And the whole thing resets.

This has been the shape of it for thousands of years. I am writing Fatherless because I do not want to run this loop one more time.”

I felt Kalila’s demand that men gather together to do their healing work so they can meet women from a place of integrity, respect and maturity touch me at my core.

When and I began creating a men’s circle back in the spring of 2024, we did it because it just seemed like something that wanted to happen. I certainly wasn’t thinking in terms of the “ravages of patriarchy” or the “unconscious, unreckoned, untutored masculine”. I just knew enough from previous experiences of men’s work (including running courses with ) and my studies with Thomas Hübl that something remarkable can happen when men gather together in intentional ways to put down their masks, speak from the heart, and witnesses one another in both our pain and our gifts. If I’d had to sum up my philosophy of men’s work in a sentence, it would simply have been: “By meeting one another as brothers, we can give each other what we didn’t receive from our fathers.” That was about it.

Now, two years on, it feels almost as if that initial impulse to co-found the Resonant Man had been sent backwards in time by our future selves — who are now living in a moment where the necessity of men healing together couldn’t be on more florid display.

The revelations of the Epstein Files, the Inside the Manosphere documentary, and now the ‘rape academy,’ are the clearest possible wake-up call to men that it’s time for us all to participate in the evolutionary shift into the ‘noble masculine’ that Kalila writes about.

It’s time to build places of brotherhood where we can tend to our wounds, together.

It’s time to dissolve the old conditioning that mires us in competition and comparison.

It’s time to reckon with our transgressions — personal and collective — and make repair.

It’s time to remember that we’re all connected — and so however remote the extremes of abuse revealed this year may seem to our personal experience, we can nevertheless recognise that we each have a unique role to play in helping to remediate the kinds of toxic cultures that make these violations possible.

And it’s time to remember that we’ve been conditioned out of the irrepressible aliveness, vibrant creativity, audacious passion, spiritual connection, and call to protect, preserve and honour all that is sacred on this earth — especially women — that are among the core “noble masculine” virtues.

Even as I write this, I feel perilously far from the journalistic principles that governed my former life as a foreign correspondent.1 I can already sense myself anticipating being pulled up in the comments for saying the “wrong” thing — or not saying the “right” thing. (A salutary experience from my Epstein video and the dialogue Sean, Jacob and myself held in response to the Inside the Manosphere documentary was the pushback we received from some women).

But I’m less worried about that these days. I have “grown my cup” enough — as Thomas Hübl would say — to host the initial contraction I may feel in response to criticism and look for the grain of truth it may contain. (Many of the initially caustic responses we received softened into deeper relatedness when we showed we were willing to listen, allowing us to learn and update our understanding in real-time). I appreciate more clearly that what I really care about is less about how I am perceived, and more about becoming a clear enough channel to convey to as many men as possible why this work can change our individual and collective destinies.

If you feel even a flicker of resonance in any of the above, please do drop me a line or comment below. (You can read more about mine and Jacob’s work at ).

We would love to see you at an event on Masculinity in the Metacrisis on May 28 that the Resonant Man is staging in partnership with ’s Centre for Climate Psychology and DeSmog, the climate investigations platform where I work as an editor.

And, if you want to explore further, come and join us at the Resonant Man Soulstice summer retreat on June 19-21 at the beautiful Pitchcott Farm in Buckinghamshire. We have an excellent group of men gathering — probably about 20 of us — and incredible guest facilitators, including and Stephen Winter. (You can see us speaking about what we have planned here).

Details and bookings here. Please get in touch with me directly if you’re interested and want to find out more. (I say a bit more about the retreat in the below video).

Because maybe it’s been a long time since you’ve heard men laughing around a campfire in a way that’s only possible once we’ve confronted our darkness together — and remembered what it means to reconnect with our light.

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If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

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Bookings are now open for the Soulstice Summer Activation on June 19-21 at Pitchcott Farm, the annual retreat staged by the Resonant Man international men’s initiative I co-founded with Jacob Kishere. We have a stellar line-up of men’s work leaders co-creating what is sure to be a phenomenal weekend. To find out more and grab a ticket click here. Do drop me a line with any questions!

Details and Bookings

“We shouldn’t see interventions like these as being outside-in. And what I mean by that is recognising the capacity for resilience within individuals and the capacity for resilience within communities: That is where the magic is; that’s where the medicine is. It’s there and we’re just partnering with organisations to bring it out.” — Maria Leister

Resonant World #184

In my five years of training in collective healing work, I’ve experienced first-hand the incredible power of group processes designed to help us integrate our individual, ancestral and collective trauma. In many respects, I feel like a different person to the one I was when I embarked on this path, and I’m deeply grateful for all that it’s opened up.

At the same time, I believe we’re only just beginning to appreciate the true potential this work holds. I was drawn to this field because I wanted to know how the kind of transformations we experience on a personal level might be precipitated at larger fractal scales. What would it take to heal the traumatised systems rapidly unravelling our world? And how could this kind of collective approach work in practice?

That’s why I was so glad to have an opportunity to speak with Maria Leister, who walks these questions every day in her role as consultancy director at the Pocket Project, for the latest episode of What Is Collective Healing?

I see Maria working at the cutting-edge of the cutting-edge, in the sense that she’s not only deeply immersed in collective trauma integration practices, but continually working to figure out how to put this emerging field at the service of nonprofits, educational establishments and communities fighting for justice around the world.

I’ve certainly had my own painful experiences of trying to catalyse change in the corporate world — only to trip over invisible barriers reflecting the trauma loops operating both within the company and my own psyche. (See Resonant World’s sister publication for some of the lessons I learned).

Thankfully, Maria takes a more skillful approach by working with leaders to build the kinds of “healing architectures” that can infuse a partner organisation with more grace, generosity, empathy and compassion.

Rather than imposing some preconceived idea of how an institution should change, Maria’s goal is to work with leadership to identify and unlock the latent capacities that already exist within teams.

“We shouldn’t see interventions like these as being outside-in,” Maria told me. “And what I mean by that is recognising the capacity for resilience within individuals and the capacity for resilience within communities: That is where the magic is; that’s where the medicine is. It’s there and we’re just partnering with them to bring it out.”

Maria also serves in a leadership role at the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Global Psychiatry, where her work focuses on the ethical, legal, and health dimensions of forced displacement and the needs of displaced populations.

It was only towards the end of our conversation that I realised how deeply Maria’s commitment to advocating on behalf of refugee and other marginalised populations runs as I learned more about the extraordinary dislocations she experienced during her own childhood.

I loved this conversation and I hope it will serve as inspiration to anyone attempting to build more empathic and coherent workplace cultures — as well as all of us working to understand how collective healing can lead to systemic change.

(For more on healing systems, see Resonant World#69: Forward This When Words Fail).

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Further Resources:

Pocket Project Coaching and Consultancy Services

Maria Leister on LinkedIn

About Maria Leister:

Maria Leister is a dynamic leader committed to ethical responsibility, human dignity, and the cultivation of collective care and regenerative futures. She designed and leads the Pocket Project’s consultancy and coaching initiatives, developing frameworks that support organizations and leaders in building resilient, care-centered systems. She also brings experience from management consulting, where she created and delivered leadership development programming focused on organizational change and executive capacity building. Maria serves in a leadership role at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Global Psychiatry’s Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, where her work focuses on the ethical, legal, and health dimensions of forced displacement and the needs of displaced and marginalized populations. With a background in law, including directing one of Harvard Law School’s student practice organizations, she has extensive experience in legal advocacy and U.S. immigration law. Across her work, Maria is driven by a commitment to ethically grounded impact that centers care, accountability, and the lived realities of those most affected by displacement and trauma.

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

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Bookings are now open for the Soulstice Summer Activation on June 19-21 at Pitchcott Farm, the annual retreat staged by the Resonant Man international men’s initiative I co-founded with Jacob Kishere. We have a stellar line-up of men’s work leaders co-creating what is sure to be a phenomenal weekend. To find out more and grab a ticket click here. Do drop me a line with any questions!

Resonant World #183

When I started a new job as climate correspondent at Reuters almost exactly seven years ago, I couldn’t have been more motivated. “Crucial job at a crucial time,” came the one-line congratulatory note from one veteran of global climate negotiations. Although I’d started out in journalism at Reuters, I’d never had much opportunity to write about the climate and nature crises — which, since childhood, had always been the closest themes to my heart, albeit occluded in my earlier career by an impulse to cover war (which, years later, I can now trace to unresolved cycles in my ancestry). This unexpected opportunity to bring my adult journalistic persona into alignment with my younger self by writing about climate politics on behalf of such a globally significant news organisation felt like destiny calling.

Suffice to say, it didn’t quite work out in the way I’d imagined.

I’ve written before about my reasons for quitting Reuters (and contributed this video to TraumaAwareJournalism.org on moral injury and climate coverage). It was a jarring period, but also one of the most formative of my career — initiating me into some of my own shadow material, and the ethical and relational complexity that arises when personal and organisational values clash (a topic and I discuss in last week’s edition of Resonant World).

Leaving Reuters liberated me to pursue the kind of inquiry into the deeper roots of the climate crisis that still lies far outside the scope of conventional news coverage; embrace my calling to put my media skills into the service of the global trauma healing movement; and train as a collective trauma facilitator.

Four years on, I now like to play with the idea that some deeper creative current may have been flowing behind the surface-level challenges, and operating far below the level of my conscious awareness, all along. Like a mycorrhizal web, this hidden source of aliveness has increasingly produced fruiting bodies in the form of various projects and initiatives that I’ve tended to imagine as largely unrelated and even in tension with one another, but which — when viewed from a certain perspective — perhaps betray signs of some degree of conscious design, albeit not my own.1

I’m therefore delighted to present an offering that brings together several of these key themes: an online event on May 28 investigating the relationship between masculinity and the metacrisis, hosted by the in collaboration with and DeSmog, the nonprofit climate newsroom where I work as an editor. (For details and to book your spot, click on this event page and scroll down to the green button that says ‘Secure Your Ticket — Free or by Donation’).

Myself and Resonant Man co-founder will be in dialogue with three guests who have been deep sources of inspiration to me throughout this period:

• Indra Adnan: a psycho-social therapist, political thinker, and co-initiator of The Alternative Global, a platform dedicated to democratic innovation and the emergence of new forms of citizen power. Indra is also the author of The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility In The Fractal Age. (I wrote a profile of Indra some years back here).

• Amy Westervelt: is an investigative journalist with over 20 years of experience focused on climate, land, and environmental reporting. As the founder of Critical Frequency, she uses the power of storytelling to amplify the voices fighting for climate justice, with her award-winning podcast, Drilled, shining a light on corporate accountability and environmental truth.

• is the founder of Philosophy Portal, and author of Global Brain Singularity; Systems and Subjects; and Real Speculations. His background includes undergraduate training in anthropology and history, a master’s in evolutionary anthropology, and a doctorate in complexity/interdisciplinary studies.

With traditional conceptions of what it means to be a man so closely entwined with the roots of the metacrisis, we’ll be exploring:

• What role have existing models of masculinity played in creating the systems pushing us to the brink?

• How can men and women come together to tend to their collective wounds and learn to relate in new ways?

• What new visions of sacred masculinity are capable of integrating, the masculine, the feminine, and ancestral wisdom in service of the whole?

Join us to address these questions and more at a warm, welcoming, and lively event with ample opportunities for audience participation and small-group sharing.

Date and Pricing:

• Thursday, May 28, 7:00pm-9:00pm BST (check your local timezone)

• This event is free to attend with a recommended minimum donation of £5.

To book your spot, click on this event page and scroll down to the green button.

Call for Submissions

We’re also inviting your written contributions, essays, and poems under the umbrella of Masculinity in the Metacrisis to be published as part of a special series on Substack. For details, please click here.

Thank to everyone who is supporting these initiatives, the What Is Collective Healing? podcast, and the global healing movement more broadly. I very much hope to see you at Masculinity and the Metacrisis on May 28!

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

Subscribe now

“I certainly knew that I couldn’t stay where I was and I’m feeling my way through this new landscape. But there’s something very exciting about creating something new.” — Anya Kamenetz.

Bookings are now open for the Soulstice Summer Activation on June 19-21 at Pitchcott Farm, a keystone of the Resonant Man international men’s initiative I co-founded with . To find out more and grab a ticket click here.

Resonant World #182

As many readers will know, writes The Golden Hour — an essential Substack newsletter for anyone committed to staying engaged in this era of news overload but who wants to read stories filtered through the heart, not just the head.

I love how Anya has been providing a curated weekly news roundup and essays reflecting on how we can respond to the crises we’re facing, which strikes me as a great model that could be tailored to suit many different audiences. (The roundup is on pause until the autumn as Anya works on a podcast series about students with disabilities).

Since Resonant World’s core mission is to help seed a trauma-restoring media culture capable of responding to the times we’re living, I was delighted to have an opportunity to be in dialogue with Anya and hear how she escaped the confines of legacy media to build an independent platform aligned with her values.

“Part of this ability to step back and work independently has been reflecting on the practices of journalism that are designed to produce more anguish and more distress in the name of engagement,” Anya told me. “I certainly knew that I couldn’t stay where I was and I’m feeling my way through this new landscape. But there’s something very exciting about creating something new.”

Anya, a journalist and author who served as a national education reporter at NPR for eight years, has found her move has allowed her to speak more freely and focus on the themes that matter to her most: climate justice, democracy, mental health, social movements, education, technology, media, youth and children. These spheres form a tight Venn Diagram with Resonant World, and its sister publications The Resonant Parenting Project and The Resonant Man, the What Is Collective Healing? podcast, and of course DeSmog, the nonprofit climate news service where I work.

Having myself quit a legacy media organisation in large part due to my frustrations at the company’s attitude to the climate crisis, I felt doubly privileged to have had an opportunity to compare notes with a fellow journalist who’d experienced a similar clash between personal and organisational values. Anya is intimate with both the joys and fears that arise when you step out of the structure that once sustained you to obey your inner directives — and living proof that there’s life outside institutional walls.

Our paths have also converged in our mutual commitment to exploring how the grief, trauma and anxiety triggered by climate breakdown and other symptoms of our planetary crisis are resculpting our inner worlds — both on the individual and collective level.

My sense is that both the Golden Hour and Resonant World have grown from the recognition that the media has as yet barely begun to explore the relationships between the events unfolding in our news feeds and the trauma loops playing out on microcosmic scales in our emotional and relational lives. I suspect that Anya and I share an intuition that — by making these fractal patterns more visible — journalists can illuminate new responses to the metacrisis that may otherwise remain hidden.

Among the topics we explored:

• Early inspiration from dissidents and poets driving Anya’s journalism

• The limitations we confronted in legacy media platforms

• Covering education during the pandemic

• Experiences reporting from Ukraine prompt Anya to leave NPR

• Awakening to the severity of the climate crisis as journalists

• Talking to children about the climate crisis

• How Anya’s Substack supports people suffering from news fatigue

• Turning a newsletter from a “cottage industry” to a “small business”

• Collaborations with Panu Pihkala and Joanna Macy

• Anya’s new book Falling In Love With The World Again.

Although we recorded this conversation last spring, our exploration of how we can develop new platforms rooted in an appreciation that what’s happening “out there” is always a reflection of what’s already alive inside of us feels more timely than ever.

This episode aims to:

• Explore Anya Kamenetz’s evolution from legacy media to independence

• Discuss the dilemmas journalists face when their values clash with their employer

• Provide inspiration for forging new media platforms and cultures

Ideas that intrigued me:

• Titrating the flood of bad news in a way that can land with audiences

• Recognising and naming unspoken values encoded into legacy media structures

• More journalists turning their focus to the “invisible landscapes” within

Questions I was left with:

• How could I better serve people in these kinds of inquiries via Resonant World?

• What short-term project could I embrace to advance the bigger vision?

• What new constellations of collaborators could build the trauma-restoring media structures of the future?

Transcript:

Read the Transcript

Further Resources:

The Golden Hour: climate, children, mental health

Climate Journalism and Trauma (video)

Climate Mental Health Network

(’s newsletter)

’s

Panu Pihkala

We Are The Great Turning Podcast

Celebrating Joanna Macy

About Anya Kamenetz:

“I am a journalist and author with a solid track record of being prescient about changes in technology, institutions, and society in general. I’m a popular keynote speaker; you can book me with Keppler Speakers.

I’ve been covering tech & climate change, social movements, mental health, education and parenting for almost two decades. I started at 25 with the book Generation Debt about young people’s economic struggles. I’ve published four more books, most recently The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, And Where We Go Now. I spent eight years covering education for NPR, where I launched Life Kit: Parenting, a successful podcast series about difficult conversations, and got to co-star with Cookie Monster in a video, which was a career and life highlight.”

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

Subscribe now

Buy Me A Coffee

Resonant World#181

On June 19-21, the Resonant Man gathers for our annual Soulstice retreat on the gently rolling hills of Pitchcott Farm in Buckinghamshire, an idyllic spot within easy reach of London. (For retreat details and bookings, click here).

As , co-founder of the Resonant Man, writes:

“This, our second annual gathering, is better described as an activation than a retreat. We see it as a gathering of the tribe to deeply witness each other, connect with the land, and awaken the resonant heartbeat that animates our purpose.

“Every man who goes on this weekend journey with us will find himself in the company of great men and discover new ways to renew his sense of sacred aliveness, purpose, relatedness, and presence.”

If you’re curious about the gathering, or have already bought your tickets (early birds are now sold out) we warmly invite you to join us and our guest facilitators for a taste of what we’ll be bringing to the UK this summer at a joint information session:

Date: Thursday, April 2

Time: 8-9:30pm UK

Location: Zoom

Register for Info Session

We’ll offer an overview of the retreat as well as words from our guests on their unique contribution to Soulstice:

• — Retreat co-leader Co-Founder of the Resonant Man, a senior student of Thomas Hübl and co-host of the podcast What Is Collective Healing?, Matthew facilitates workshops rooted in deep principles of healing and delivers an oracular touch around the fire with the archetypes of the Tarot.

• — Retreat co-leader Co-Founder of the Resonant Man. Jacob brings a deep sensibility for the ritual of gathering together as men, supporting Soulstice to go beyond everyday consciousness and into a space of initiation and deep remembering.

• Prof. — Thinking Masculinity Today Cadell Last is the Founder of Philosophy Portal and our inaugural philosopher from last year’s retreat. This year he returns with Philosophy Under the Tree — helping us think through what it means to be a man in the world as it is.

• Stephen Winter — The Wisdom of The Lord of The Rings Stephen Winter has authored The Wisdom of The Lord of The Rings for over 13 years. A former clergyman in the Church of England, He is a passionate voice for the wisdom of Tolkien’s fellowship as guidance for living courageously in the world today.

• — Martial Arts Expert & Philosopher Podcaster, PhD candidate, playwright and advanced martial arts practitioner, Mahon will be bringing the Wisdom of Combat to bear in a powerful new workshop.

• — Men’s Work Leader, Author, Coach, Founder of Council of Kings. He’s a father, husband, co-founder of Apotheosis, men’s leadership coach, and the author of six books. Jordan has been immersed in transformational work for 15 years and in men’s work for the past six years, training with respected leaders and organisations in the space.

We’re delighted to be offering such a unique and incredible line-up — please do join us on Thursday to hear about our vision for the weekend. We hope to see you there!

Register for Info Session

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Resonant Man, we’re offering men a chance to participate in four consecutive men’s circles (on Thursdays or Sundays) for free to see if our work is a fit for you. Drop me a line direct or write a note in the comments to set up an introductory call. In April, we’ll be focused on exploring AI in the context of the metacrisis — read more about what we’re planning here.

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Resonant World #180

Hello everyone,

I deeply appreciated the opportunity to be in dialogue with and on the issues raised by Inside the Manosphere, and we’re very grateful to all those who tuned in to join us live.

In the spirit of the Resonant Dialogue practice we’re developing in the Resonant Man, we approached our exploration without much of a preconceived idea of what we were going to say. I work closely with Jacob as a co-facilitator of the Resonant Man, but I’m newer to Sean’s work leading men’s circles — and I loved how richly the compassion and integrity he brings to this work infused our conversation.

We explored what it might look like to build the kind of “healing architecture” needed to respond to the collective, inter-generational and individual trauma layers at the root of the crises affecting so many men and boys — and address the impact of the misogyny and other forms of hatred spread by influencers.

I’m not going to try and summarise all that came through, but I’ll add that we didn’t approach this topic with the intention of reaching some kind of final conclusion or “answer.” Rather, we wanted to explore what new perspectives the film and the discussion it’s sparked might bring to questions we’ve been walking for a long time already, and will continue to walk.

We welcome any resonance in the comments. I’m also keen to hear about elements that anyone feels we could have included, but didn’t, or where we may have revealed our blind spots. We’re committed to listen and learn as we do what we can to contribute to addressing the collective wounds the documentary laid so bare — and we’ll no doubt be revisiting all these themes in future conversations.

Thank you for listening!

Leave a comment

If you’re keen to find out more about the Resonant Man, we’re offering men a chance to join our weekly Sunday or Thursday men’s circle for a month without charge. In April, the focus in these circles will be our Month of the Metacrisis (AI edition), which will feature amazing guest speakers and a chance to explore what AI means for each of our lives. Please message us direct or comment below to book an introductory call. See our new website to learn more about our vision, membership and the Soulstice retreat in June.

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!

Subscribe now

Resonant World #179

Last night, Genevieve and I watched Louis Theroux’s new documentary Inside the Manosphere.

The film features influencers promoting a brand of get-rich-quick lifestyle advice steeped in misogyny, racism, antisemitism and homophobia. Business models rest on funneling young men onto dodgy financial platforms and Only Fans pages.

The documentary is already generating a lot of discussion.

It’s also created an opportunity for men working actively to develop new visions of masculinity, restore gender relations, integrate collective and inter-generational trauma, and build healing communities to bring forward perspectives rooted in their work. (These are of course core concerns of Resonant World and the Resonant Man, the men’s initiative I co-founded with ).

For that reason, Jacob and I reached out to , a fellow men’s work leader, whose writing at we’ve long admired, to engage in dialogue on these themes tonight at 21:00 UK time (17:00 New York / 14:00 Los Angeles / 22:00 Berlin). You can join by clicking this button:

Join the Livestream at 2100 UK

We’re excited to hold an emergent dialogue on the questions raised by the documentary and very much welcome your participation via the chat.

We hope to see you there!

For more on the , including details of how to experience a month of our weekly men’s circles for free, our upcoming Month of the Metacrisis (AI edition), and our Soulstice summer retreat in the UK, please visit our newsletter and our new website.

If you found this post valuable, I’d be very grateful if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber, which confers membership of the Resonance Council of core supporters, and helps Resonant World to thrive. Thank you!