People must heal to open themselves to Transforming Power, especially from personal and ancestral trauma. Today, the media brings tragic stories into our lives daily, people show symptoms of secondary trauma. Tools for resilience and trauma recovery lift a burden and give us a new lease on life.

Approaches to Healing

To recover from trauma and to become resilient we are learning skills and tools to:

• Stay aware of Transforming Power, calling on resources beyond our human needs and capabilities.
• Stay in touch with the goodness and capabilities of one’s whole, authentic core self.
• Release emotion from the body, listen to and learn from emotions, and see if this clears the mind.
• Reprocess memories on paper in drawings and words to reintegrate memory into the whole mind.
• Accept good attention from a companion to contradict the isolation of trauma.
• Create a life timeline to see events in context of life before and after.

Somatic Powers of Softness, Kindness, and Radiate

Let us then try what Love will do: for if men did once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains… ~ William Penn, 1693

When we feel rigid, we soften. We know rigidity is always about old wounds. So we soften our bodies, relax the back of our tongue, and relax the bottom of the abdomen between the hip and sit bones as we exhale. We ask ourselves the first time we ever felt that way or a pivotal time and we reprocess that memory or find a companion and discharge the emotions and see what insights come from that.

When we feel angry, we express as many kind words or thoughts as we can to bring our whole minds and Spirit to the work of justice. We explore grief over any losses and fear over any dangers to address them, mourn or lament as needed, and prioritise people’s safety. From the strength of love and kindness in our hearts, we invite everyone into the joyous work of justice and call for just societies.

We strive to radiate the power, insight, and love of Spirit in all we do – to be a channel for all that is good and holy.

We started with the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) basic workshop. It grew out of the U.S. peace and civil rights movements working with alternative educators and people incarcerated in prison who were reaching out to prevent youth from choosing violent paths. Volunteers spread it around the world.

Friends began drawing on emerging knowledge of trauma and recovery (Herman, 1992). By 1999, Cecilia Yocum and Carolyn Keyes drew on this emerging knowledge to support the victims of the genocide in Burundi and Rwanda and Nadine Hoover with the victims of the “reign of terror” in Aceh, following the thirty-year war. Nadine Hoover worked with trauma specialists Cecilia Yocum and Lee Norton and RC Counselor Pamela Haines (first clerk of FPT-AWP) to document an Trauma Healing Manual (2010), an AVP Advanced special topic workshop.

In Africa, Friends documented a three-day Healing and Rebuilding our Communities (HROC, 2003), using the activities to bring together people from both sides of a conflict to help heal and restore communities. Peacebuilding en Las Américas (PLA) Founder Val Liveoak worked with Cecilia Yocum, Alba Arrieta and HROC facilitators to bring the AVP Trauma Resiliency workshop to Colombia in 2008 and to Central America in 2010.

Then we created an AVP Advanced workshop series on interrupting cycles of oppression and organizing based on discerning a consensus of conscience. This work has now been tested and refined in a dozen countries facing war and extreme violence. In 2011, Asian facilitators integrated these activities into an AVP for Justice and Peace workshop series:: Part I Personal Transformation, a trauma-informed AVP Basic Workshop plus one day of trauma resiliency activities (published 2018) and Part II: Social Transformation, that challenges prejudice and privilege for liberation from oppression, and practices techniques for discerning a consensus of conscience.