Collective Healing Initiative’s Facilitators Learning Circle Sept. 2025

By Scherto R. Gill, Director, Global Humanity for Peace Institute

Every other month, on the second Tuesday, a constellation of facilitators gathers online — a learning circle stretching across 16 countries, 4 continents, and 4 languages: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. With the gentle help of AI translation, each voice is received in our own tongue, weaving a luminous tapestry of shared understanding.

On 16th September, 25 facilitators formed our circle. We came together to explore how the Collective Healing Circle (CHC) programme can be tailored to the diverse lived realities of our communities.

The gathering opened with drums from Richmond, Virginia, followed by a short poem carrying the breath from the Amazon — grounding us in rhythm, verses and spirit.

I offered the three inquiries that guide tailoring — investigative, appreciative, and evaluative. These aren’t academic theories. They’re invitations to listen into context before inviting people into the circle — to understand the particular music of each community before attempting to add harmony. Collective Healing practices can’t be copy-and-pasted. They must grow from the soil where they’re planted, shaped by the stories and metaphors already living in that place, responsive to the specific ways that community holds both pain and possibility.

To illustrate how these inquiries unfold in practice, our colleagues from Mexico shared how they wove Indigenous prophecies and ancestral wisdom into the CHC framework. Their presentation was colourful and inviting — words dancing with images, feelings moving through liminal spaces. Not as decoration, but as foundation. Not as addition, but as recognition of what was already there, waiting to be honored. Their approach was as much art as methodology: honouring both the common CHC framework and the particular practice of their land, letting each inform the other until something new is born and emerged.

From there, we dissolved into six small breakout rooms — in four different languages — where 2-4 facilitators gathered in intimate dialogue. These conversations deepened our reflections: What resonated? What requires more care? How might we all be co-creators of the circle? For thirty minutes, these questions evoked and breathed in eight different conversations. Connections spark across impossible distances. Challenges find company. Dormant ideas are awaken through the alchemy of shared reflection.

When the learning circle reforms, something has shifted. Insights pour back into the shared space—through voices and images, stories and the vibrant river of the chat feed. Each offering another thread in the tapestry they’re weaving together.

We closed with an ancestral African chant, together across the screen, a reminder of the deep wisdom carried through song that requires no translation. Listen here.

The circle completes itself not by ending, but by beginning again. Each facilitator carries seeds of inspiration back to their local communities, back to the particular soil where the healing work takes root.