The Matthew Green Podcast

Joining us from Boise, Idaho, Dallas Gudgell has spent 40 years campaigning for racial justice, nuclear disarmament and to overturn oppression in all its guises. With parallel careers as an environmental scientist, life coach and teacher of energy medicine, Dallas brings a Dakota perspective to the two biggest questions confronting America today: how individuals and society can heal from the trauma of white supremacy, and respond to the climate and ecological crisis. 

Dallas says that in the Dakota tradition, “healing takes place in the dark” – a reference to the power of sweat lodge ceremonies to metabolise the energetic imprints trauma leaves on individuals and communities. Matthew and Dallas explore how the protests over racial oppression in the United States and Britain could be an opportunity for healing – both for oppressed and oppressor. Dallas argues that a global resurgence in indigenous activism is teaching us that the human race is in crisis precisely because it has turned against its mother, the Earth. With Covid underscoring the potential for forging new global connections online, Dallas and Matthew conclude by exploring opportunities for taking trauma work at the personal and community level to a global scale.

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From her farm in West Sussex, Sun Meyer has emerged as one of the world's leading pioneers of equine therapy — a form of inner work based on the power of the horse-human bond.  Sun explores how her own experience with grief informs her work, while Matthew describes how an equine therapy session with Sun some years ago cast a broken relationship in a new light. 

What if we are all suffering from "Climate Trauma"? Zhiwa Woodbury thinks that this is the great undiagnosed disorder of the modern age, and that facing up to it could be the biggest step towards meeting the existential threat posed by climate change.

Drawing on his decades as a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, eco-attorney, researcher, writer and climate pyschologist, Zhiwa is among the most original thinkers writing today on the connections between the ecological crisis and the human psyche.

Matthew got to know Zhiwa following the publication of his influential "Climate Trauma" paper in the journal Ecopsychology in February, 2019 — an article which has since been downloaded more than 25,000 times. The paper posed a direct challenge to the wider psychology community, which Zhiwa argues has largely confined itself to examining the emotional reactions stirred up by the climate crisis, coining new terms such as "eco-anxiety" or "eco-grief" to describe them, while ignoring the larger implications. This focus on symptoms, Zhiwa argues, misses the point: global climate change is not just inducing trauma from extreme weather events — it is instead a unique and unprecedented form of trauma itself, and one that is continually triggering all our unresolved traumas — personal, cultural, and intergenerational. As with all traumas, it is only by acknowledging climate trauma that we can empower ourselves to embark on the path of recovery. By facing this collective, biospheric trauma, we not only gain insights into our dysfunctional responses, both individually and collectively, we also begin to see how it is a relational problem that demands relational solutions.

In this episode, Matthew and Zhiwa dive deeply into the connections between climate change and trauma, exploring the emerging field of quantum ecopsychology — a worldview rooted in Zhiwa's lived experience of the Earth as a sentient, living organism — and the radical interconnectedness of all beings. It is this perspective, Zhiwa maintains, that offers us the best chance of navigating the climate and ecological emergency, and finding our way back into right relationship with ourselves and the natural world.

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How is our difficulty in facing our own personal traumas reflected in the problems we see playing out in society? In this deeply moving exchange, Matthew hears how Dr Anita Sanchez, an author, consultant and executive coach, learned to draw on the wisdom of her ancestors to transmute the trauma caused by the terrible abuse she suffered as a child and the race-related murder of her father .

The author of the internationally award-winning book, The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times, published by Simon & Schuster, Anita has spent 40 years building a bridge between indigenous traditions and corporate culture. Her mission: to help top executives in companies around the world to create truly diverse and inclusive organisations, and drive wider change by confronting racial injustice and oppression. Anita and Matthew discuss how repressed suffering and unexpressed emotion may be a big part of the reason why the world is struggling to find adequate responses to the multiple crises societies face, and how rekindling our connection to Earth and Spirit can empower us to face our fears and create a more regenerative future.