Join us for Inspiring Minds on 2/23!
Join Academy Founder and President Aaron Stern and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela for a transformational conversation on healing intergenerational trauma in Mind & Life’s Inspiring Minds, an online conversation series.
Dear Friends,
In two weeks, I’ll have the opportunity to join my dear friend Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela in an Inspiring Minds video podcast. The Mind & Life Institute has organized this series of live conversations exploring wisdom for our time, and Pumla and I will join together again, to speak about Healing Intergenerational Trauma. We’ll share our own experiences of nurturing meaningful dialogue, bridging divides, and facilitating personal transformation aimed at healing the harmful legacies of the past. We’ll be joined in this conversation by the extraordinary poet and human being, Hawah Kasat.
I’m excited to be part of this conversation, and to invite you to watch it live, in large part because of my deep admiration and respect for Pumla. She is a psychologist, professor, and National Research Foundation Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma at Stellenbosch University in South Africa – and above all, a most remarkable human being. Her research focuses on trauma in the aftermath of gross human rights violations, and on the remorse and forgiveness that can emerge in victim-perpetrator dialogues. She served as a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, which was formed at the end of apartheid in South Africa and chaired by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu in an effort to repair the enormous harms that apartheid brought to South African society.
Through her experience living under apartheid, and as a member of the commission created to bear witness to the atrocities committed under that system, Pumla has deep understanding of trauma. Within that context, she has found ways to do the profound work of repair, inherent to ubuntu – the spirit of “I am because you are” that is indigenous to her culture.
Pumla and I met first briefly in Botswana in 2018 and then again in more depth over 2019, first via a series of preparatory Skype calls and then live, when I served as the moderator of a conversation between Pumla and the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, India. We became instant and dear friends and have continued our friendship since. I’m truly looking forward to our dialogue and learning anew from her generous, compassionate spirit. Please join us live February 23rd at 11am Mountain Time, or watch the recorded conversation later, by registering for this free event here.
For those interested in learning more about Pumla and her work – I recommend highly her book A Human Being Died That Night and her recent article, a reflection at the loss of her dear friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Best wishes,
Aaron Stern
Founder and President
Academy for the Love of Learning
