AlterNatives: Matthew Green on how trauma - personal, collective, ancestral - reverberates through communities, strengthening their powers
Women in Ayacucho. Credit: Dr Vivianna Rodriquez Carreón.
Our great friend Matthew Green (see archive here) is on a writers’ journey which we find fascinating. He has a solid reputation as a serious climate journalist, for Reuters, the FT and DeSmog. At the same time, Matthew is conducting an inner enquiry into how trauma - personal, collective, cross-generational - affects how we see and act in the world.
Below is an example of the two aspects of that inquiry, reporting on his encounter with a transformative figure (Dr Vivanna Rodriquez Carreón) who combines an academic career in peace studies, with a desire to open her understanding to the past traumas of indigenous peoples in Peru.
Matthew’s own exploratory style suggested to us this should run as an Alter Natives piece - a space for personal testimony about how alternative options are explored, and lived. (The original piece is here, and support Matthew here).
Matthew Green: Listening To The Pause In Peru
The work of healing collective trauma is not linear. It does not follow a preordained script.
It concerns fragments of emotion, memory and experience that have been split off and pushed deep into the unconscious, and which call for attention through physical sensations, synchronicities and the symbolic language of dreams.
In embarking upon the quest to integrate these orphaned energies, we leave the domain of logic, and enter the liminal territory of feeling, subtle sensing and the barely perceptible prompts of the soul.
Sooner or later, that transition will inevitably pose a question: How can we learn to pause and give some kind of voice to forms of knowing that words can’t convey?
Building A Bridge
Dr Vivanna Rodriquez Carreón, a lecturer in peace studies at the University of Sydney, has been walking that question ever since writing her PhD on the post-conflict experiences of women in Ayacucho, a mountainous swathe of south-central Peru. More than 40 percent of the region’s population of 69,000 people died or disappeared during Peru’s 1980-2000 armed conflict.
Vivianna and I met last year in Germany as students in Thomas Hübl’s Timeless Wisdom Training, a two-year immersion to learn to work with individual, ancestral and collective trauma. During in-person and online retreats (including the seven-day silent retreat earlier this month), every participant will — in their own way — be challenged to explore forms of knowing that transcend habitual patterns of perception.
I’ve never been to Peru — nor Australia for that matter — and I’ve never studied peace studies. But I wanted to write about Vivianna because she’s doing something that I think is essential at this time: Working hard to build a bridge between a conventional institution (in her case in academia), and leading-edge work to explore how inner transformation can drive change in the outer world.
Alongside her work with Thomas Hübl, Vivanna has spent the past three years co-designing the Spanish hub for Theory U — an awareness-based approach to systems change pioneered by Otto Scharmer, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the Presencing Institute.1
On top of all that, Vivianna is an adviser to the Inner Development Goals, a nonprofit developing the inner capacities required to achieve the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals — again, building a bridge between inner and outer change. 2
Since the writing in this blog always aims to weave fruitful new connections, I hope that somebody reading this may support Vivianna’s vision of making collective trauma integration work available to communities in Ayacucho, perhaps via The Pocket Project, the nonprofit Thomas Hübl founded with his wife Yehudit Sasportas.
“What I want to do is to create a bridge, to help collective healing become mainstream, so we as Peruvians don’t repeat the same thing every generation — the destiny of trauma,” Vivianna told me. “How do we accelerate the process? We’ve evolved a lot in our intellectual understanding. But our inner evolution got stuck somehow. How do I connect with communities that are doing this work?”
But that’s not the only reason Vivianna’s story intrigued me.
To be completely transparent, the liminal zone erupted into our conversation so vividly, and so unexpectedly, that it felt as Life itself was doubly underlining the memo on the importance of embracing other forms of knowing.
This subplot involved Vivianna’s grandfather, Major José Carreón Ortíz, who was a helicopter pilot in the Peruvian military; the legend of the lost Inca city of Paititi (known by Spanish conquistadors as El Dorado); and a fleeting sighting of a pair of Paco-Pacuris — denizens of that lost underworld. More on that in due course.
First: Vivianna’s evolution from traditional academic into voyager of inner space.
A Moment In The Mountains
Vivianna’s iconoclastic approach did not emerge overnight.
Embarking on her PhD research 15 years ago, she started by focusing on the more tangible, visible and measurable impacts of conflict — as her training dictated. Yet she was always intrigued by the role consciousness played in creating conditions tending towards war or peace.
Vivianna conducting research in Ayacucho.
Having grown up in Quillabamba, a valley in a forested part of the Andean region, about 40 kilometres from Machu Picchu, Vivianna was familiar with rural life. But when she spent her first night in a village in Ayacucho as a researcher, she experienced a visceral sense of fear. She imagined what it must have been like when the Shining Path guerrillas, or government-backed paramilitaries, came knocking.
“What I was experiencing was not really attuned with the literature, which as an academic I had to use to support my research,” Vivianna told me. “I realised then that I was interested in how conflict disrupted a community’s collective inner state. I wanted to understand the internal dynamics of war and peace — not just their outer manifestations.”
Vivianna learned to deeply empathise with the experiences of rural women, whose struggles to seek justice for disappeared relatives she recounts in her thesis.3
The women faced enormous obstacles when engaging with the Peruvian state: Most of them did not have formal identification; they did not speak Spanish, but the Indigenous languages Quecha and Aymara; and they experienced structural poverty, racism and discrimination.
Despite these challenges, Vivianna did not find that the women experienced themselves as powerless, or as second-class citizens, and she devoted herself to understanding their inner experience of agency.
The biggest breakthrough in her understanding, however, did not arrive through interviews. Nor even by perusing files in Lima, containing more than 17,000 testimonies gathered by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Vivianna had been reading about the importance of introspection and self-inquiry in works by the mystic-philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and the physicist David Bohm.4
But the essence of the experience they were describing had eluded her. That is, until a moment of realisation she experienced while accompanying campesinos —peasant farmers — as they grazed their animals on a hillside.
Landscape in Ayacucho. Credit: Dr Vivianna Rodriguez Carreón.
“In Jiddu Krishnamurti’s words, I was freeing myself from what I knew by looking at it without the fragmentation that my mind had created. I realised it was the inner space where the answers were lying for my work,” Vivianna writes in a forthcoming article on liminality. “A sense of totality, I felt it, yet no one could see it. I had an ‘aha’ moment. This is how the campesinos built resilience!”
That moment of expanded awareness was filled with knowledge of a very different quality than cognitive understanding. This altered state was simultaneously so spacious and so nourishing that Vivianna instantly recognised it as a spiritual resource sustaining the women she had spent so many hours interviewing.
Later, the experience would help her reframe the meaning of a Quechuan word from her native city of Cusco: Iñiy. The word is difficult to translate directly into English, but Vivianna chose a pop culture analogy to convey its meaning: The sense of knowing that enabled communication with the octopus in the film My Octopus Teacher.
Likewise, Iñiy could refer to the sensation we experience when we tap into knowledge that’s already possessed by a more evolved version of ourselves.
“One of our biggest traumas is that we don’t believe in anything that we can’t see with our eyes. Unless I can measure something, I can’t prove it,” Vivianna told me. “But if we’re only going by the evidence of our eyes, we’re only ever seeing partial truth. We’ve become so disconnected from the unseen forces shaping our reality. So the question I’m interested in is: ‘How do we bring this awareness back into the mainstream?’”
Indigenous Cosmovision
Ever since her moment of expanded awareness in the mountains, Vivianna has been seeking opportunities to bridge the gap between her academic work and the deeper calling she felt towards healing — both for herself, and the communities still suffering from the legacy of Peru’s conflict.
“What is healing? What does it mean? How do we integrate the collective trauma experienced by whole societies? I was always in my head, always writing. But these were the kinds of questions that meant I had to go into my heart,” Vivianna said.
A few years ago, Vivianna found her way to Thomas Hübl’s collective trauma work, and Otto Scharmer’s Presencing Institute.
“I became part of different communities that really enabled me to explore my own being, my own practice. I started to re-evaluate everything.”
The changes filtered through into the way she taught.
From 2019-2020, Vivianna had an opportunity to redesign the postgraduate unit of a course called Peace of Mind: The Psychology of Peace, a core unit of the masters in peace and conflict studies at the University of Sydney.
It was a chance to build on her moment of realisation in the mountains of Peru by exploring forms of teaching that didn’t rely purely on cognitive, intellectual knowledge — but recognised the value of experiential, embodied experience.
One skill she harnessed: Listening to the pause. Scharmer considers listening our most underrated skill.
In a paper in the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change describing the experiment, Vivianna explained that in Theory U, there are four levels of listening: 6
Downloading: Reconfirming what we know.
Factual: What is different than what we know.
Empathic: Allows us to connect with the experience of the other.
Generative: Connects us with who we are and whom we want to be.
Bringing this simple relational practice of pausing for a minute after somebody had spoken transformed the dynamic in the classroom. Students began to notice the level at which they had been listening — and access new insights they would never have discovered if they had followed their habitual responses.
Vivianna also wanted to use the course to explore the nonlinear forms of knowledge encoded in Indigenous cultures — where art, weaving, poetry, music and many other forms of expression transmit meaning that couldn’t be easily expressed in print-based writing.
In a modern twist, one student designed an elaborate experiment to record her emotions throughout the day, assign them numbered scores and musical notes, and capture the resulting multi-dimensional composition in sound and video.
For Vivianna, the goal of all this experimentation was nothing less than to begin to heal a split in consciousness dating at least to the time of Descartes, whose privileging of reason above lived experience yielded a distinctly lopsided worldview:
“Reasoning and the concrete were attributed a higher value in the construction of knowledge,” Vivianna wrote.7 “At the same time, nurturing, emotional, and abstract responses were hierarchically conceptualized and embodied as weak.”
By approaching the classroom as a laboratory for experimenting with our own transformation, Vivianna argues, we can find ways to integrate this sense of separateness — and become one with the self, the other and Earth again.
The Guardians
Of course, Vivianna’s story wouldn’t be complete without returning to her grandfather, Major José Carreón Ortíz, who died when she was four.
José Carreón burst into our conversation out of leftfield. Vivianna and I were talking about our experiences in the Timeless Wisdom Training, and she mentioned how she had felt a renewed sense of connection with her grandfather since starting the course.
In working with inter-generational trauma, it’s always worth remembering that our ancestors didn’t just pass down their unresolved wounds. We also inherit resources of resilience, creativity and spiritual connection. This seemed to be what was coming alive for Vivianna.
As a child, Vivianna remembers José Carreón visiting her in a vision and delivering a message — and she’d felt close to him ever since.
As she was growing up, her mother had told her about José Carreón’s exploits in expeditions to search for the legendary Inca city of Paititi.
It was on one of his forays to explore the ruins at Vilcabamba, in the forested plains of La Convención province, north-west of Machu Picchu, that José Carreón had encountered a pair of Paco-Pacuris — the guardians of an underground Inca civilisation.
The following account from José Carreón was quoted in the book Paititi: In The Mist of History, by Carlos Neuenschwander Landa, Peru’s greatest explorer:
“At dawn, looking through the door of the hut, in the diffuse light with which the day began, I observed, with disbelief, a gigantic silhouette of a woman. At first, I thought it was the effect of my still sleepy state and for that reason, I got up and walked to the door, verifying that it was not an illusion.
I left the hut and approached the woman, who, from her height of about six feet, was looking at me through her large slanting eyes. She had an aquiline nose and fine features. She was wrapped in a long light brown robe. I stared at her for a moment without managing to say anything, when, coming out of a nearby bush, the figure of a man appeared, even taller, who apparently called to her in a language that was not Quecha. Both met and immediately disappeared into the bushes.
Only then did the owner come out of one of the other cabins, explaining to me that the strange visitors were Paco-Pacuris and that, from time to time, they came to his hut to ask him for salt. “They are very fierce and you have to please them,” he pointed out. They assured him — he added — that they are the caretakers of the ruins of Vilcabamba.”
What to make of the tale?
Perhaps it’s a reminder to listen to the pause.