Pocket Groups Report

The Pocket Groups are at the heart of the Pocket Project and are supervisioned and guided by senior students of Thomas, Nicholas Janni and Hilorie Baer. To give you an impression into the nature of the Pocket Groups and their ongoing development and a deeper insight in the work, here is what Nicholas Janni wants to share with you.

We have said from the beginning that there are two types of Pocket group:

1. Groups that conduct research into the historical, intergenerational and cultural foundations of a region’s trauma imprints
2. Groups that intend to conduct process work with the energetics of collective trauma in a context of healing and restoration

The two of course sometimes overlap, and the forming of Pocket groups in different parts of the world is naturally a slow and emergent process.

This is in no small part due to the fact that, while many people have a natural desire to work with collective trauma, and indeed may already have significant facilitation experience, we are discovering through the Teaching that Thomas brings, with its unique marriage of timeless mystical wisdom and cutting-edge psychology, that in many respects a whole new paradigm and a whole new set of competencies are unfolding. And that these are exactly what give the Pocket Project its very particular depth and potential.

To date groups have been established and/or are forming in Argentina, Israel, USA, Germany and the UK.

I myself facilitate the Israel and UK groups, as well as a group in a country that at present cannot be named for security reasons. One of the most significant things I can report is that, even in the Israel group which has been meeting for well over a year now, we are edging our way gradually and carefully towards collective trauma work. We have begun, also in the UK group, to engage some intergenerational work, but the key focus is on building the Presencing capacity and coherence of the group. What this means essentially is building the individual and group capacity to feel ourselves, each other, our lineages and more directly through our nervous systems, as opposed to our cognitive or imagination functions.

And here we must have the patience and tenacity go step by step by step, so that as we begin to turn towards the intensity of bigger collective trauma fields we are ready to face and host them in our individual and group ‘body’ as precisely and spaciously as possible. In fact, we discover along the way that all desire to be somewhere else or ‘further ahead’ in the process is itself exactly one of the symptoms of the underlying trauma fields on which our cultures sit.

We are preparing now for the final in person part of our one-year training – six days with Thomas in Israel at the end of April. We are confident that after this meeting the way forward for many of the global Pocket groups will also become clearer.

We all engage this work with great commitment, joy and humility, taking our part in this magnificent healing project, which is in itself a part of the bigger project and challenge that humanity finds itself in at this epochal time in our evolution.

Nicholas Janni
Pocket Project core team member
March 2018