Project Overview

System Surgery is a collective practice for people navigating the impacts of systemic harm.

We ask: How are our bodies affected in the struggle for a more livable and just world? And, how can attending to those impacts together open new pathways for change?

→ Why We Started

In our work as psychotherapists and facilitators, we noticed how struggles like burnout, fatigue, or feeling stuck are often framed as individual failings. But what if these challenges are not just personal, but systemic? And what supports us to feel this in our bodies, not only understand it in our minds?

System Surgery creates spaces where people can come together to explore this connection. Turning the lens outward - towards the systems that shape us - helps us see how individual experiences and collective dynamics are deeply interconnected.

→ How We Work

Our approach is rooted in processwork, which sees seeds and resources for transformation inside the very issues we struggle with. By paying close, embodied attention to lived experience, we can discover new insights. Collective exploration deepens this: it reduces isolation, creates connection, and turns personal struggles into shared resources for resilience.

→ What We’ve Learned

Through one-to-one sessions, group work, and research in practice, some key learnings have emerged:

• Naming clarifies. Taking time to feel and articulate what troubles us, and what we hope for, already creates clarity and direction.

• We need each other. Both being heard and hearing lessens the weight of carrying struggles alone.

• Burnout and stuckness matter. These challenges recur widely, are deeply painful, and offer rich ground for collective exploration when held with care and interest.

→ Discoveries from Collective Sessions

• Making the invisible visible. When unconscious pressures and judgments become embodied and named, new choices open up.

• The power of collective process. Sharing and sensing together transforms isolation into insight.

• Small signals hold big patterns. Bodily sensations, gestures, and momentary feelings can reveal the dynamics of the wider system.