We are very excited to announce a new addition to our team! ✨ Pauli will join the Team as Community and Events Manager!
SUPERRR: A good way to get to know someone is via their side projects and hobbies. What are some of your current side projects, Pauli?
Pauli: Last year I finished training in communal grief counselling, so at the moment I’m trying out different formats and ways to bring this into the world. It is a work that is incredibly dear to me and teaches me a lot about what it means to live a human life on this earth. When we can feel and express our grief in safe spaces, being witnessed and held, it can help us metabolise our pain into something meaningful for us and the systems we are part of. It is also closely tied to futures work and activism for me, because in order to imagine a better there and then, we first need to face what we are missing – often painfully – in the here and now. Grief work is a powerful tool for our activism and I would love to see more spaces where we can move through our sorrow together!
Apart from this, I practice Kung Fu with a really sweet group of people and I love plants and collaborating with them for making medicine.
SUPERRR: With Superrr Lab we are thinking a lot about the future(s). What is an object/or application that does not yet exist – but something that you would like to have at your disposal in a preferable digital future? Something you would use every day and cannot imagine living without?
Pauli: Ui, many things! A protective aura around my bike that keeps me softly cushioned from potential car accidents, road bumps, and bad traffic vibes? A non-invasive conflict de-escalator both for home use and for public gatherings like demonstrations? Or a little robot that helps me not only watering the strawberries in my backyard but also analyses deficiencies and imbalances in the ecosystem and helps regenerate the soil? Hard to decide!
SUPERRR: What's your biggest energy sucker these days?
Pauli: Definitely the state of the world; like the silence and complicity in Germany around the genocide in Gaza while witnessing it online, the many other conflicts, the growing police violence and shift to the right in Germany,.... And not enough flourishing uncontrolled nature around me to just sit in the grass and watch the clouds and marvel at the beauty of a tiny blossom or bug or a drop of dew in the sunlight.
SUPERRR: What is a small humble change you would like to see in the world? How can we work towards it?
Pauli: Actually I think we do need very big and very bold changes. But a powerful start would be if people can learn to be less afraid of uncomfortable feelings and better able to hold their own and those of others with compassion. For me it was really empowering to learn some tools for how I can support a person in grief for example. Often all it takes is to witness them lovingly, just to be present without trying to fix it or make the person be different. It’s so simple, and yet if I imagine we as a society learn to compost that what pains us, this would be a powerful step against the numbness and suppressed anger and overwhelm many of us are feeling regarding the injustices of the world. Modernity’s promises didn’t come true, and we need to mourn this to be able to let it go I think.
SUPERRR: Things we should all read/know about! Please share some of your favorite projects, texts, links, inspirations with us:
Pauli:
I’m really interested in trauma research, because it is a way that helps me make sense of all the violence in this world through a compassionate approach, and it helps me understand my own entanglements and complicity on a deeper level of nervous systems and embodiments. I can really recommend the books The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem, Embodied Activism by Rae Johnson, or What it Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill to name a few.
A big source of inspiration and a dear friend is also Dana Reina Tellez (lenta-menta.info), whose work I am very grateful for and can warmly recommend.
I’m really grateful to the work of Elke and Aaron, where I did my training in grief work, who founded Circlewise: an institute for cultures of connection that works towards peaceful, sustainable, life-promoting, and regenerative ways of living together.
The People’s Medicine School is a Canada based and PoC-run Herbal Medicine School which centers BIPoC, Queer, and Trans lives in their offerings around decolonising and reclaiming plant medicine.
And totally the Podcast Tarot for the End of Times by Sarah G. Cargill, which explores how we can collaborate with metaphysical archetypes as “ancestors of the collective” during times of deep change. I love it!
SUPERRR: Last but not least, what's your favourite Meme?
Pauli: I have a one year older sister who introduced me to meme culture. I’ve always looked up to her for her meme-game. So two memes in dedication to her:
