Wounds & Openings
Ours is a journey into humanity's wounds around dependency, money, power, and colonial belief systems. We work with these wounds as openings — living realities we already inhabit.
One year together
Season 1 — Metabolising Interdependencies
Season 2 — Decolonising Money
Season 3 — Unlearning Power
Season 4 — Unsettling Colonial Belief Systems
Season 5 — Co-creating Solidarity
The program includes monthly community calls, one-on-one coaching sessions, co-created solidarity projects, and in-person gatherings where appropriate and beneficial.
Unsettling Coloniality's Belief Systems
We practice loosening our grip on how we learned to survive alone — founded upon control, dominance, certainty, and efficiency. Through kinship and solidarity economies, we unsettle these colonial belief systems and patterns of functioning, and notice what sediments get stirred.
1. Metabolising Interdependencies
Many of us have learned to believe that the individual is the primary unit of power—that to be dependent is to be weak, unfinished, not yet sovereign.
But what if “individual” is only a story we learned to survive alone?
Something in us might already know otherwise. That we are much more than individual. We are water passing through water, bacteria in conversation with bacteria, air inhaling itself. We are constantly inter-being, even when we forget. Even when we insist on separateness. Even when we try to stand alone.
Questions we sit with
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What are we afraid to need?
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What does dependence ask us to feel?
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What do we consume so we don't have to relate?
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Whose edge are we, while we guard our centre?
"We can think as individuals, feel as individuals, but we cannot be individuals. We are knots in nets of relations."
- Karen Barad
2. Decolonising Money
"What money has done is create permission for one set of relationships to be erased and replaced by abstract monetary transactions." — Nora Bateson
When we pay for something, we often distance ourselves from the relational and ethical dimensions behind it. Buying a banana is license to ignore how it was produced, who cultivated it, and under what conditions. Money is often not only the license to hoard but also a mechanism for distancing ourselves from responsibility, care, and connection.
What if currency didn't erase relationships but generated them instead? What if currencies could reflect connection, curiosity, empathy, unity and flourishing.
Questions we sit with
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What relationships does money erase?
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What do we believe about abundance and scarcity?
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How do we entangle money, value, and hierarchy?
3. Unlearning Power
We all suffer from systemic hierarchies, even as some of us might benefit from them — to dominate is also to suppress something in ourselves, some capacity for relating, in order to stand above. Colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy organise society through power-over relations. These structures shape what is valued and what is not. They determine whose knowledge counts, whose lives are protected, and who is centred or pushed to the margins. What we perceive as "normal" or "worthy" is deeply shaped by this logic.
What if we could learn to participate in a different logic?
Patterns of co-flourishing — life not arranged above or below itself, but entangled in mutual support.
Questions we sit with
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Where do I benefit from power-over, even as I try to unlearn it?
What do I suppress as I benefit from the power-over?
Whose knowledge have I learned to trust, and whose have I learned to doubt?
What would it feel like, in my own relations, for power to be shared rather than held?
4. Unsettling coloniality's belief systems
What if unsettling our belief systems is not about replacing one set of beliefs with another, but about loosening our grip on the ways we have learned to survive alone— founded upon control, dominance, individualism, certainty, efficiency?
Kinship practices—listening across difference, repairing relationships, staying with conflict rather than rushing past it—might be ways we gently unlearn what has been sedimented in us.
And when we try to build solidarity economies together, something in the logic begins to shift. Less about merit, less about isolated selves, less about certainty. More about relation. More about what becomes possible when we are not held apart but instead allowed to loosen, to shift, like sediment stirred back into movement.
“Healing happens in relationship — when pain is shared, it can begin to move.” — Sobonfu Somé
Questions we sit with
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Where does my privilege still serve only me?
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Where do I rush past conflict instead of staying with it?
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What might I co-create if I stopped needing to earn my place first?
The weight we carry
By Peter Kidi — poet, writer, and refugee activist and edge-dweller at the School of Kinship
They said,
"Line up.
Bring your body.
Bring your breath.
Bring your proof of life."
But they never asked
how many of us
are already dead
inside.
We stood beneath a sun that mocks thirst.
A wind too dry to carry prayer.
Waiting
as if survival needs confirmation
from the same hands that forgot us.
Deng stood in front of me.
Slender shadow of a boy who once dreamt
He laughed
the kind of laugh you only hear
from people hiding something
unbearable.
“Maybe I don’t exist,” he whispered.
“Maybe I should hang my body by the gate
with a note that says:
Is this enough proof for you?”
We chuckled.
Because in Kakuma,
laughter is the language of the condemned.
Three days later,
they found him swinging
from the tree behind the latrines.
The flies knew first.
The birds sang nothing.
No one screamed.
We’ve all run out of noise.
Just another name
crossed off a food list.
Another fingerprint
that will no longer warm the scanner.
No funeral.
No press release.
No UN statement.
Only silence,
and a mother too tired to cry.
So I write this
with hands that tremble,
with a voice full of ghosts,
for those who left
without saying goodbye.
I write this for
those still breathing,
but barely.
I write this because
you should know:
when they ask for proof of life,
what they’re really asking is:
"Have you broken yet?”