Harnessing Collective Intelligence for Social Change
Experiential Workshop: The Body, Trauma, and Transforming Our Organizing.
Terrible things are happening.
What if the trauma in our bodies undermines our ability to take action to fight for justice?
What if the exhausting cycle of trying to "figure it all out" with our minds is what stops us from working together effectively?
What if wisdom from people who have survived colonization and extermination could support us to come together in solidarity? What if somatic practices could help us release trauma from our bodies so we have the capacity to take action? What if the vast intelligences we are nested within—the same intelligence that coordinates our cells, weather systems, and interconnected webs of life—could guide us toward collective intelligence for system change?
Join us to find out.
A workshop where the latest understandings of complex systems and Eastern spiritual traditions meet. An evening that explores how tantric practices can move us beyond trauma response and mental analysis toward accessing collective intelligence for wise action toward social change.
We'll learn how somatic approaches can help us release trauma from the body, explore the difference between felt-sense (our trauma-informed pattern recognition) and true intuition (information arriving from the intelligent systems we are part of)—and discover a radically new approach to working together for social change.
What We'll Experience
Witnessing Together. Radical Listening.
Increasing our capacity to feel is one of the most important political acts of our times—without this, we go numb, turn away, and repeat destructive, traumatic patterns. We will begin with a somatic practice of Radical Listening as we watch a short Palestinian documentary. This will begin to allow us to move past our projections, denial, and prejudices to truly listen to the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Somatic Trauma Processing:
Using tantric somatic trauma techniques, we'll work with the activation that arises from witnessing injustice. Rather than being overwhelmed by our trauma response to witness cruelty (overwhelm, distress, numbing, suppressing, denying), we will:
Release stored trauma, repressed emotions, and physical tension that block energy circulation.
Move our nervous systems into the down-regulated states where intuition can arrive.
Access expanded states of consciousness where we can receive guidance from collective intelligence rather than individual analysis.
This will empower us to begin to learn how to harness the body's intelligence to release trauma and transform these emotional responses into potency that can be directed toward constructive, wise action.
Accessing Collective Intelligence
We will allow our nervous systems to co-regulate and connect like mycelium, and by doing so, create a group 'field' that holds a collective intelligence greater than the mind of an individual. We will begin to learn how to tell the difference between a 'felt sense' and an 'intuition' and how to listen to information arriving from the group's collective intelligence rather than our individual minds.
Collective Inquiry
We will learn techniques to support us to enter an expanded state where we can more easily listen to a collective intelligence, and using the skills we have previously practiced, we will explore the question: Given what is here, what action is wise to take? We will do this not with our analytical minds or trauma-informed felt-sense, but by listening with our bodies to the collective intelligence that emerges when we experience ourselves as both separate and part of the vast web of life.
This practice recognizes that the same creative life force energy flowing through our bodies can guide us toward right action when we know how to listen from expanded awareness rather than mental analysis.
Integration: Organizing from Interconnectedness
We'll explore how these approaches can support us beyond this evening, introducing the "Organizing from Elsewhere Framework.” Our current ways of organizing are underpinned by the same embodied notion of separation as our extractive socio-economic system—they recreate the very dynamics we're trying to change.
Drawing on our latest understandings of complex systems and how they change, we'll explore how non-Western practices can support us to create 'feedback loops' from which bespoke forms of organizing can emerge that are underpinned by a fundamentally different assumption: that of interconnectedness.
We'll answer practical questions: How might this framework be applied to the work we are already doing so we make decisions from collective intelligence rather than competitive debate? How can we organize in ways that don't exhaust us through the same separation-based patterns we're trying to transform?
A Note on Approach
This work honors its roots in non-Western traditions while avoiding cultural appropriation. We focus on the core tantric principle that teaching happens through direct body experience rather than elaborate spiritual language.
This is not therapy, personal development, or conscious sexuality work—it's an exploration of how ancient wisdom traditions can inform radically new approaches to collective action in our current moment.
Practical Details
When: Thursday, 26 June, 6:30pm - 10:30pm
Where: OT301 301 Overtoom 1054 JL Amsterdam
What to Bring: Comfortable clothes for gentle movement, water, journal
Cost: Donation-based (please pay what you can afford so we can make enough to have the time to keep offering)
Free Ticket Link (Spaces are limited): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1398282393279?aff=oddtdtcreator
Content Note: We'll be engaging with footage of current conflicts and using practices that may bring up strong emotions
This event is part of an ongoing exploration into how indigenous wisdom and complexity science can support both individual healing and fundamental systemic change—taking these powerful traditions out of the Western box of self-improvement and into the realm of collective transformation. Find out more @organisingfromelsewhere or email wave@wavedavis.me
