Lessons for change For three days, Marchelle Abrahams found herself in the company of influential speakers from around the globe at the Wellbeing Summit for Social Change SELF-AWARENESS. Intergenerational trauma. Interconnected truths. I’ve heard these words many times before, thinking they were terms made up by boujee millennials. I had no business being in a world so far removed from mine, and I felt it the most when on the first day of the Wellbeing Summit for Social Change, I sat among an audience of thousands in a darkened auditorium, thinking to myself, “what are you doing here?” It was the first global event bringing together social change, governmental, arts and business leaders working towards the common goal of social change and inner wellbeing. I had been invited by the Wellbeing Project to cover the three-day event in Bilbao, Spain.
PARTICIPANTS from across the globe gathered for the Wellbeing Summit for Social Change in Bilbao, Spain. | THE WELLBEING PROJECT
All I had to do was report from the sidelines and observe. Observing. That sounded easy enough. It wasn’t, as I would soon find out. After the summit, there were many things I had learnt about myself but also about our collective humanity. Humour me for a few minutes, will you? Change is inevitable That soon changed when I conducted my first interview with Mallika Dutt. Her website bio says Dutt “wakes leaders up to our interconnected truth and inspires us to question our current paradigms.” Oh sh*t. I was in deep trouble. Even after listening to her podcasts, I was still in a confused state.
She’s acquired a global following – that much I know. She’s used her years of experience to teach others to be more connected to nature. She’s a human rights activist. But other than that, she was like a mythical unicorn with a massive influence. But the more I listened to her podcasts, the more I was drawn to her teachings on how we can take pleasure in the simple things. We chatted for a few minutes without me going off script. I asked her a question about intergenerational trauma in a South African context. We may be free from the shackles of apartheid, but the trauma our parents suffered has been passed on to most of us. It’s a chip on our shoulders that most non-white people live with.
