My friendship and collaboration with Alexandra began as a result of two chance events. First, meeting her son Marky while facilitating a workshop which he attended. I remember him mentioning this rather inspiring mother and her work in Lebanon. And secondly a spontaneous email introduction from a mutual friend - Tim Laurence - founder of the Hoffman Institute, UK. The email reminded me I'd heard of her and despite a life-long compulsion to be absurdly busy, I very happily responded by sending Alexandra a greeting by email myself. This led to a long and delicious lunch at her home in London. Alexandra is generous and very hospitable.

Alexandra trusts her intuition. I know this, because it only took her a few moments of conversation before she invited me to participate as a facilitator at the Healing the Wounds of History (HWH) conference in Byblos in 2011. I too played a hunch and accepted. I'm fairly sure neither of us had much certainty of exactly how it would unfold - I know I didn't. Something about her gave me confidence. Over time, I came to see what it was.

Alexandra has vision and very naturally finds the energy to illuminate, inspire, and harness all the necessary resources to make good things happen. It must be said too that George Asseilly, with abundant grace and generosity invariably steps in to lend his support and influence. Between them, they have kept my often wavering sense of hope for my motherland alive.

Alexandra is dauntless. The conference was as ambitious in scale and vision as Alexandra herself. She often confided her vulnerabilities to me over eight years of working together, but at that conference and at events surrounding the Garden of Forgiveness later, she seemed quite fearless. There is, after all, ample questions to be asked of a project predicated on her principle of radical inclusion when, a decade after Lebanon, ably assisted by outside forces, subjected herself to almost twenty years of apocalyptic self-immolation. What a fool's errand, one might easily conclude - to get Lebanon's wounded and fractured kaleidoscope of sects and tribes together to process their experiences. Alexandra has extraordinary faith.

My experience was not exactly rainbows and unicorns. It demanded a lot of preparation and a constant holding to be able to contain the occasional, inevitable, volatility. I distinctly remember a participant aggressively demanding to know "what Lebanon?" I was referring to and reminding me "there are hundreds of Lebanons depending where you are sitting". A fair point of course, but Alexandra's vision, ultimately her love, coming through me, was stronger than any cynicism or bitterness in the room and a strange and beautiful ritual meditation unfolded in its own way regardless. Alexandra is visionary.

Alexandra is enthusiastic. We debriefed and before long another workshop followed the conference in 2012. Looking back, I think I was working on the assumption that this would be a one-off and so I basically crammed as much as we could into a three day process. If exploratory, it was well received and rewarding.

And it clearly wasn't a one off. It developed into a one year training based on three week long modules a year which we ran for about 7 years. It morphed into a community building process based on the principle that while no one of us, or even group of us, would have much impact on building and sustaining peace, that there was some hope to be reasonably invested in the idea that each group (approx 20-30 people) would return to their respective communities fortified with self- love and compassion for the diverse others they'd shared the year with. And that would be shared with their networks.

The groups grew and eventually included not just members of Lebanon's multitude of sectarian diversity, but very pleasingly, also from Lebanon's refugee community (Syria and Palestine in particular). When we factored in the fact that the groups we worked with were made up of change agents of varying kinds - peace workers, NGO workers, community workers and most hearteningly, teachers of all kinds - the potential impact, particularly on the young, felt distinctly promising.

The content of each year was a series of experiential learning processes, with transferable tools that could be incorporated in relation to self, others and ultimately community. My job, as I came to see it, was to resource each group with the choreography and sequencing of my work such that they were able to build capacity for the higher level - more spiritually demanding - work of Alexandra - in particular the My Responsibility for Peace work.

Each module always culminated with an ancestor ritual at the GoF which never failed to touch.

Towards the end of the experience, a training program began which was intended to create a new generation of Arabic speaking facilitators who would pass on the work to future generations and, we hoped, an ever growing community.

While Covid stalled these bold plans, it's fair to say that I have kept in touch with a handful of the HWH community and the work lives on. People confirm what I know to be true for me. Namely, that those years of working alongside Alexandra - especially in the heavenly sanctuary of Bsous - were a privilege beyond description. And the rewards - over and above the generous compensation I received - continue to blossom in me even five years later.

More personally, like so many others, my relationship with Lebanon became ruptured by the war of 1975-1991. I was 15 in '76 when my family and I left for the safety of England. And over time, my Lebanese and Palestinian roots became buried under a thick veneer of Englishness. Working with Alexandra and finding my place in the HWH community was a profound homecoming. So without any hesitation I can truthfully say that this extraordinary woman helped me heal my own wounds of history.

My sense is, that like the Garden of Forgiveness, the HWH project can best be described as dormant rather than extinct. I know it still stirs in me and can see the same flowering in others. I have every confidence it's subtle alchemy still unfolds. Events in Palestine since October '23, call me to awaken in myself Alexandra's most profound question - namely "What's my responsibility for Peace?" And in the face of such overwhelm, trauma, injustice, threat and loss, that surely is the most pressing question.

The notion of ‘healing the wounds of history’ came to Alexandra Asseily in 1997 as a spiritual ‘receiving’. It was an understanding that mass atrocities can ‘lock’ the living and the dead in a ‘bond’. This ‘bond’ may prolong the grievances of the hurt and perpetuate transgenerationally transmitted trauma. Unheard grievances and unhealed trauma can become, in part, the impetus for continued cycles of violence. By unpacking and deconstructing these psychological roots through listening, story sharing and other experiences, people and groups will have an opportunity to understand where many prejudices and impulses of aggression against the other (and sometimes judgemental attitude towards oneself) are held. To release these often require forgiveness and compassion, including self-forgiveness and self-compassion.

As a psychotherapist, Alexandra has, over time, developed healing the wounds of history workshops, which are facilitated processes for people to come together in safe and caring spaces to explore how we continue to live the legacies of the past. The healing the wounds of history workshops involve practices, such as listening to the voices of our ancestors, and mutually attuning to our humanity. In such humanising processes, the past becomes integrated in the present struggles, and hopes. Accordingly, acknowledging the past brutality, recognising its traumatic effect, and taking steps to relieve the guilt can serve to release the ‘hold’ of the dead. It opens up the space to address the roots of violence, and inspire our shared responsibility for healing and for co-creating a better future.

In early 2000s, Alexandra introduced this understanding and the imperative of healing the wounds of history to the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP) when she joined the Foundation’s Board. The GHFP’s trustees were immediately enthused by Alexandra’s passion and decided to initiate and support similar projects in different parts of the world.

Throughout 2000s, the GHFP collaborated with Centre for Lebanese Studies and other grassroots organisations in Lebanon to encourage the development of the Garden of Forgiveness in the centre of Beirut. The vision of a Garden of Forgiveness conceived by Alexandra, is a place of calm reflection, sheltered from the bustle of the city, and expresses themes of understanding, forgiveness and unity. A Garden of Forgiveness is a place of healing.

In 2011, the GHFP, Centre for Lebanese Studies, and American University Beirut coconvened an international conference on Healing the Wounds of History. In the following year, the GHFP and Rwanda National Commission for Reconciliation co-convened a second international conference on same theme. These events attracted participants and contributors from around the globe. The dialogue, discussion and experiential workshops during the events touched the hearts and souls of those who took part. In the conclusion, the local and international partners proposed to bring forward ‘Healing the Wounds of History’ workshops in the local communities that have been torn by past violence and continued strife.

Since 2014, the GHFP has supported Alexandra in offering Healing the Wounds of History (HWH) programmes in Lebanon. The HWH workshops consist of innovative approaches to healing, including storytelling, empathetic listening, deep dialogue, spiritual reflection, expressive arts and so forth. These workshops have been extremely impactful for those who took part. The participants reflected on their experiences as transformative, and healing.

To enrich local capacities to embark on collective action and strengthen the community’s peace‐building efforts, under the guidance of Alexandra, the GHFP, in collaboration with local partners, supported a series of HWH facilitators workshops in Lebanon, Rwanda, and Colombia.

In 2017, UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples (then Slave Route Project) invited the GHFP to co-create a UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative, now being implemented in global communities, especially those impacted by the legacies of transatlantic slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonialism.

The notion of healing wounds of history resonates with the many traditional and indigenous peoples’ understanding of our relationship with ancestors, and with the 'spirit'. To create a better future, it requires the present generation to acknowledge past atrocities, recognise the legacies of the harm, identify wisdom and resources of resilience, and reconnect with our sacred dignity.

Inspired by Alexandra writings and HWH practices, the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative offers four kinds of activities in local communities:

1. Intergenerational dialogue and inquiry (IDI)

2. Collective Healing Circles (CHC) programmes

3. Young Changemakers programme for facilitating healing, justice and well-being

4. Developing policy proposals on creating structural conditions for human flourishing.

In 2022-2023, the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace and UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples co-launched IDI pilot in five communities on four continents. The pilot demonstrated the power of remembering, sharing, listening and deep dialogue. Communities that took part in the pilot realised that without examining the wounds of the past, they may continue transmitting the hurt and the hate through silence.

In 2024, UNESCO launched Collective Healing Circle Capacity-Building Programme for facilitators from 12 countries. The programme’s handbook has integrated some practices that Alexandra has applied to the Healing the Wounds of History workshops.

We are grateful for Alexandra who planted the seeds of healing.

With love Scherto

THE TRANSFORMATIONAL WORK OF ALEXANDRA ASSEILLY

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”

Our ancestors had a much stronger sense of the circle of life, the passing of the seasons and years. It was hardwired into the social calendar, the rituals and the rites of passage, and was often the glue that held together communities. The stories were preserved, embellished, cherished, shared, oral traditions passed on by the fire. My father once said to me that one of the hardest things about losing parents is the realisation that you are now the story bearer. Perhaps this is why so many in the second half of their lives become so obsessed with tracing family history? We find ourselves wanting to walk where they walked, to handle objects that they handled.

It is becoming easier to pick up these trails, the fragments of memory, the indestructible links. What is harder, beyond the apocryphal tales of distant relatives, is to preserve what these characters stood for, their values. We form a sense in our family narratives about the recent ancestors who have done most to shape us. But despite all the search engine propelled research, we know less about our great grandparents than they did about theirs. Our sense of community and calendar has been bent into a different shape by several centuries of urbanisation and several decades of globalisation. Netflix and decent central heating have replaced the campfire.

Yet part of honouring and remembering our ancestors is to protect and pass on the best of what they left us, including the best of those values. Somewhere along the way, did we forget what it meant to be a good ancestor?

While in Lebanon and since, I became fascinated by the work of Alexandra Asseily. At its core, her outlook is based on a simple idea: that the role of our ancestors in conflicts affects us psychologically, influences our relationships with family and friends, and contributes to our propensity to participate in the next wave of strife, and (or sometimes not) to pass it on to the next generation.

If she is right, we bear a huge responsibility for whether, through our beliefs and behaviour, we transmit these traumas and grievances to our children, an inheritance that has far more potential to shape their lives than the contents of a will. Similarly, we can see ourselves as receivers of inherited patterns and traumas, echoed from conflicts rooted before our time. Alexandra believes that it is possible, as individuals and at group level, to address these deep set traumas and intolerances, and make it easier for communities to reconcile.

For Alexandra, the key questions to ask ourselves are therefore “how do we become good ancestors and refrain from passing on trauma or negative beliefs to future generations? How do we stop being the prisoners and the puppets of the stinging memories of strife that we can still feel today as though we ourselves were present at that first event? How do we clean up what I call our “ancestral arteries” so that our children are free to act in the now, free from the blocks which echo from the past, and clog up our todays and our tomorrows and be able to receive the collective talents and gifts instead? My purpose as a psychotherapist, friend, wife, mother of five and grandmother of 13, is to do my best to become author of my own narratives, and to help others become true storytellers, free to tell their own authentic stories and to step fearlessly into their true purpose in this life.”

Practically the process can also involve probing our family memories and stories, what Alexandra calls a “great architectural dig. As with archaeology, we find things buried, which require our knowing, acknowledging and understanding, as well as a ‘carbon dating’ in order to reveal how, and why, they were hidden and buried. All families have ghost stories: the difficult or troubled individual, the moment when someone was rejected or driven away. As we bring these old elements to the light, they can be appraised with love and trust, rather than by judgement or fear. It becomes possible to release old and ancient grievances.”

By doing this, we can find ways to ensure that our personal, family or community’s history informs but does not control us. We can discover the points in our family’s past where the scars never properly healed. By doing so we can give our descendants a better chance of moving beyond them.

And so, in the answers to those two questions about inheritance and legacy, lie real secrets to survival, and the key to being a good ancestor ourselves.

This is where the science meets the politics of building a better society. In peace making or rebuilding post conflict communities we are often trying to deal with the legacy of previous conflicts. These conflicts might have taken place long before those involved in the peace process were born. So there is a space in diplomacy for understanding the collective psychology of a nation and trying to be a therapist. The words you're trying to use, the tone of connection, the people you're bringing together sometimes feels like an act of collective therapy.

So I believe that in Alexandra’s work lies not just the key to living well, and being good ancestors ourselves. But the key to the future of diplomacy, peacemaking and - ultimately - human survival. Her ideas are truly transformational.

Tom Fletcher, 28th March 2024

SOME OF THE WORKING IDEAS OF ALEXANDRA ASSEILLY

Alexandra has been a trustee of the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP) since 2001. In gratitude, and on behalf of all the other trustees of, I would like to summarize Alexandra’s understandings of peace in human life, especially insofar these pertain to the work of the GHFP and the exercise of the latihan of Subud.

Alexandra has a very distinctive way of perceiving the human world, and this is an integral part of the GHFP and also to the human meanings of the latihan of Subud. I will describe six concepts that seem to me to be central.

1) The first is that positive peace is a spiritual state of love and compassion. Peace isn’t just the absence of violence: it is also positive. As such, it is best conceived as a spiritual state in which one has a direct compassionate and loving connection to other people. Such a state is not possible when one is living in one’s ego. It requires transcending the ego. This state is one of peace because one is not capable of dehumanizing others or oneself. In this sense, positive peace is spiritual because it is fully human. Alexandra’s understanding of positive peace is deeply shaped by the latihan of Subud. This practice is one of a direct connection to the divine which results in a personal process of purification and in one of wordless worship.

2) The second of Alexandra’s important ideas is that processes of peace are therapeutic and they tend to bring one to a place of forgiveness. Alexandra brings to the GHFP the understanding that processes of peace need to be liberating and healing. To attain a state of positive peace requires that one goes through a process of purification, of freeing oneself from the recriminations and anxieties that feed the ego and that perpetuate feelings of victimhood or the arrogance that arises from being an oppressor. Peace processes must be therapeutic because they liberate us from the bitter effects of suffering, from trauma and from hate. Consequently, such processes lead us towards forgiveness. Thus, when governmental or political processes of peace are based solely upon truth and reconciliation, they will remain incomplete. Even those that strive for justice are often lacking in regard to human feeling. Such incomplete processes focus on the external symptoms of the lack of positive peace.

The focus on positive peace requires courage. It is not at all easy to talk about forgiveness within any post-conflict context, and even more so while a conflicting is unfolding. Why should those who have been harmed and violently dehumanized by a conflict be open to forgive, especially if the perpetrators seem defiantly closed? Why should the victims gift forgiveness to perpetrators? Forgiveness seems to sometimes place the onus on the victims in ways that are not fair. Alexandra’s reply is that forgiveness is a necessary part of the liberation of the victims. It doesn’t constitute an excuse for or an exoneration of perpetrators, who, in processes of healing, themselves can be moved to ask for forgiveness for their responsibility for past or on-going conflicts.

In the end, forgiveness is the path towards transcending the victim/oppressor divide. Victimhood on the one hand and arrogance on the other will remain part of the political culture of divided groups, when the underlying historical and contemporary causes of the conflict have not been addressed. While there is still injustice and dehumanization, and while there is still blame and recrimination, those who were victims will still feel that they are victims. Those who were or have been perpetrators will be racked by their own sense of being victims and by arrogance. Forgiveness is a process of ascension from hurt and hate towards a space of being human together.

Given this, the healing aspect of peace processes necessarily has two sides. First, people need to come to terms with the tremendous suffering that they have endured. But such a process is incomplete when this coming to terms is not in relationship to the former enemy. Release from trauma must transcend the duality oppressor/victim. This is why all peace processes must also include processes of forgiveness for deep healing to become possible without which the cycle of violence continues.

3) Alexandra understands that this applies to the violence and blame that comes from the sufferings and feelings in one’s personal and family relationships. Those whom we love most are those who can hurt us most easily. Healing involves coming to a deeper understanding of each other that restores trust and the space of compassion and love. In a similar vein, sometimes, the one who can hurt one most is oneself. Coming to self-forgiveness is also a healing process.

4) Alexander teaches us how the cycles of violence are a continuation of patterns from the past. Our parochial identities divide us, and the lack of peace caused by the resulting violence stretches across many generations. The history stays with us. Present violent conflict results from the failure to transcend those of the past. Violence recycles itself. Likewise, so does the trauma, which is passed down from generation to generation. Trauma is inter-generational. Its transmission is not only cultural and psychological; it is also epigenetic and physical. We live with the past in our consciousness, even when we’re not aware of it.

This is why all healing processes include a proper understanding of how the failure to heal the suffering of the past has manifested itself as present conflict. To heal, peace processes address historical wounds. This understanding is encapsulated in Alexandra’s phrase ‘healing the wounds of history’. When we met in Byblos in 2006, the design of the HWH meeting encapsulated these points: we can only move towards spiritual positive peace through collective healing directed towards forgiveness that cleans the conflicts of and traumas from the past and of the present.

5) Even if we are not aware of it, the spirits of the dead are still present with us. The purification and healing that we (the living) need to attain peace also applies to our dead ancestors, who need us to be more peaceful for their own after-life processes. In this way, Alexandra understands the importance of healing for our ancestors. Historically, billions of people have died in conditions of great suffering and incomprehension. For many people, death is a traumatic experience and this means that many of the dead are still in need of healing. They are not able to receive divine grace. Through the experiences of the latihan, Alexandra has felt this condition as the voice of the dead calling for help: the dead need to work through their suffering as much as the living. To this end, Alexandra brilliantly reverses this by reminding us to take our responsibility towards the future by becoming good ancestors.

6) For Alexandra, these understandings don’t constitute moral demands or imperatives that we must follow from a sense of duty. The spiritual path is one of release and greater liberation. The sense of compulsory duty, the sense that we have obligations imposed on us, is contrary to this path.

Thank you, dear Alexandra, from all of us at the GHFP.

When I founded The Forgiveness Project in 2004 many people directed me to the work and vision of Alexandra Asseily as a pioneer in this field. Her words and writing have been a great inspiration to me, and most particularly when she shared with me once the premise that “it was the responsibility of the living to heal the dead.”

I learnt from Alexandra that if we don’t lay to rest old resentments, the past will always haunt us. She said that this could relate to people’s personal lives as well as to the state of nations. She would talk about the repetitive nature of conflict; about how conscious and unconscious grievances are received by each new generation through what she called an “ancestral bond”. Such enduring grievance stories she believed would be passed down from teachers to pupils, from parents to children, through the media or politicians and this could only ever be transcended with understanding, compassion and forgiveness.

This resonated strongly with me as I had seen first hand from the many forgiveness stories I’d collected, that not allowing the pain of the past to dictate the path of the future was key to forgiveness and to creating healthy, forward-look relationships and societies. Her theory fitted in too with what I had read from the German philosopher and political theorist, Hannah Arendt, who hinted at something similar when she said the only possible ‘redemption from the predicament of irreversibility’ is our capacity to forgive.

Alexandra was talking about the power of forgiveness to change the narrative, move the story along, to turn the page when nothing else can, because when the original perpetrators are long dead, or when justice is not possible, forgiveness, mercy and pardoning may be the only strategy we have to help us reconcile with the past and prevent old wounds and historical resentments festering across generations.

The full quote that Alexandra shared says it all really. It came from the Jungian psychoanalyst Roger Woolger and she kept a piece of paper with this quote printed on it close at hand. Woolger said: “It is the responsibility of the living to heal the dead. Otherwise their unfinished business will continue to play out in our fears, phobias and illnesses.”

Alexandra believed responsibility rests with all of us, not just in the stories we choose to tell, or the language or labelling we use, but also in a commitment to look internally at that which is unreconciled.

Marina Cantacuzino MBE Founder, The Forgiveness Project