12 Sep Moving Towards a Healthy Human Culture
This is not the truth! I notice I feel more confident when Sophy Banks offers this caveat when she talks about her synthesis of insights known as ‘Healthy Human Culture’. In Episode 198 of the ‘Accidental Gods’ podcast, Manda Scott talks to Sophy about why and how systems become dysfunctional, and the possibility of change.
Encouraging us to take a wide view, Sophy looks at systems of harm that put profit over people, and the inter-generational and collective issues that proliferate without some of the vital ingredients needed for healthy communities.
I have been very lucky to study and work alongside Sophy Banks as the ideas that make up ‘Healthy Human Culture’ evolve. As I come to know the concepts better, my understanding deepens. Her proposals include maps that identify the dynamics of change, that could be applied to any group – small or large. One starting point is to identify the components needed for health in a system. “What does a healthy human culture look like?” she asks.
To understand why even good people with good intentions often fail to create healthy patterns of behaviour, another key question is “What do we do with our pain?” Cutting it off, avoiding it, numbing it or dumping it onto someone else with less power are some normal and problematic defence strategies. Acknowledging and integrating the shadow that is always present is necessary.
In this interview, Manda Scott teases out some of the underpinning factors of unhealthy systems, as well as pointing to routes back from this towards health. Sophy Banks brings her eclectic life-experience to identify the embodied practices that may help. This includes many ways to repair ruptures, redress balance in the body and process traumatic impacts, from simple micro interventions like taking a breath to more collective ways to digest trauma such as Grief Tending and sweat lodges.
The meta-frame offered by Healthy Human Culture includes a lens that sees what happens when systems are operating from a bass-line of collective trauma. In societies where individualism is dominant, we often fail to see the collective issues and an absence of communal restoration processes. A ‘self-help’ culture of personal healing can distract from the absence of wider community support. Self-judgement, self-blame and self-hate all seem very prevalent. We are often doing our best with little support, and deserve more kindness – both from ourselves and others.
Learning more about Healthy Human Culture can help us to identify what is going wrong, but also encourages us to find some of the many ‘return paths’ that can help us back to more balanced and whole ways of living. It is possible to reclaim our birth-right of being held by people who care about us, as well as for the wellbeing of people and planet. I recommend listening to the podcast as an introduction. And if you are interested in digging deeper, I will be one of the facilitators supporting the Learning Journeys with Sophy Banks this autumn.
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