Healing in the Circle of Life Conference

Healing in the Circle of Life brings together African-centred psychology, scholarship, ceremony and communal practice in a shared four-day experience. Across Birth, Life, Death and Rebirth, we explore wellbeing through African worldviews, lived experience, research and collective practice.

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Healing in the Circle of Life" sits squarely in the territory MCB has been working in for years, which is exactly why founding it as a partner and organiser makes sense. As a four-day gathering grounded in the Kongo cosmogram — moving delegates through Birth, Life, Death and Rebirth rather than a conventional keynote-and-panel structure — the conference treats African and Caribbean ancestral knowledge not as a cultural add-on to clinical psychology but as a framework in its own right, sitting alongside it.

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That's the same premise underpinning MCB's own practice: a psychodynamic approach that takes seriously how structural inequality, race, and intergenerational trauma shape both distress and the systems meant to respond to it, and a refusal to treat Western clinical models as the default against which everything else is measured.

 

Sessions like "Reclaiming African Worldviews in Healing," the panel on ancestral wisdom and modern psychology, and the workshop on intergenerational trauma are doing, at conference scale, the same decolonial work MCB does session by session in statutory mental health practice — asking whose knowledge counts as evidence, and building genuine partnership (rather than performance) with communities, as the Kalinago collaboration on Day 2 makes explicit. It's a natural extension of MCB's mission, not a departure from it.our own text and edit me. It's easy.​