I've always been deeply passionate about the transformative power of collective or tribal healing. It's in the gathering of resonant hearts, minds and souls that we make the biggest shifts in our personal, relational and collective growth.
I hosted a panel discussion with three facilitators, Rachel Rickards, Sylvie Fröhlicher and Paulina Bolek, each of whom brings a distinct lens to how tribe supports healing. What follows draws on that conversation and on the teaching I shared within it.
What I mean by healing
For me, healing isn't primarily about revisiting the past to work out who did what to us and when. That work matters and it's part of the picture, but it isn't the whole of it. Healing, as I understand it, is deeply connecting to our wholeness and arriving back in touch with our intrinsic goodness, meeting life from that place. When hearts open, we get to feel all of who we are without diminishing, exiling or overriding any part of ourselves. Through being seen, witnessed and felt in our full emotional and energetic range, there can be room to meet shame, unworthiness and fear differently. That's the work: not just repair, but evolution, growth and expansion into more of who we can be.
Learning through the group
None of that happens alone. Others were involved in our disconnection and separation, so others are needed for the repair and the coming back into connection. This is why I've become so committed to circle work rather than purely individual practice. In a circle, other people end up holding the parts of us that we haven't yet fully integrated or opened to. One reflection I use in group work is: what I love in you, I love in me, and what I don't love in you, I don't love in me. The group becomes a mirror, showing us clearly the aspects of self we want to look at more deeply, and it also offers people who have already developed a connection to those parts the chance to model and show us how to access that ourselves.
Different spaces for practice
One distinction I have explored is separating men’s and women’s work before bringing participants back into a mixed group. Some men describe finding it easier to express parts of themselves with other men. I value bringing that experience back into a wider setting, where people can discover how it affects their relationships. Different participants will need different kinds of support and group settings.
The panel explored what the equivalent might look like for women, though I was clear that isn't mine to define. What came through in the conversation was a strong sense of self-acceptance and a mirroring effect: recognising that you're not alone with a particular struggle when you see it reflected in the circle, and feeling accepted in a way that turns concepts like self-love from an idea into a lived imprint. There was also discussion of the specific woundings carried from being socialised as women, and the practice of learning to bring fire and force into a space rather than staying soft and small out of fear of being judged or excluded by other women.
When groups have felt unsafe
A contributor named the difficulty of entering a group when earlier harm happened in a group, at school or within a family. The panel explored the possibility of a different experience of belonging. That possibility does not make group participation a requirement for healing. Pace, trust and a real choice about taking part are essential.
Self-love, relational love and tribal love
There's also something I think of as tribal love, distinct from self-love and from relational love. Self-love is the capacity to be at ease and at peace with ourselves. Relational love is our capacity to love a partner, friend or pet. Tribal love is a transpersonal experience that opens when the heart meets a wider circle, and it meets a need many people don't know they have until they feel it, a need they've been trying, without success, to meet through personal relationships or solitary spiritual practice alone. When that need is met through tribe, there's a particular kind of rest and relaxation that follows, one that's hard to describe in words until it's been directly experienced.
The conversation closed with each facilitator naming what tribal work has given them personally: a place to practise leaning into connection even for those who consider themselves more solitary by nature, a place to keep meeting programmes of disempowerment as they surface in the body, and a reminder that many older and indigenous cultures understood something about coming together, dancing, and feeling one another's hearts that a lot of us have lost touch with. None of it requires perfection to take part. It only asks for a willingness to be met in the imperfection of being human.
Three forms of love Christian distinguishes
Self-love
The capacity to be at ease, at peace and in friendship with oneself.
Relational love
The capacity to love and be loved by a partner, friend or pet.
Tribal love
A transpersonal experience that opens when the heart meets a wider circle, meeting a need that personal relationships and solitary practice alone cannot fully satisfy.
