July 14, 2026
Rebirthing the Wise Warrior: Burnout as a Portal to Collective Liberation, with Dr Rola Hallam
<p dir="ltr">Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard. </p> <p dir="ltr">How can the apparently catastrophic collapse of the person we thought we were clear the path for who we are meant to become? What might change when we dwell less on what we're doing to serve others, and focus more on the quality of consciousness from which our action arises?</p> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.drrolacoaching.com/">Dr Rola Hallam</a> is an award-winning humanitarian recognised for her extraordinary role in building hospitals and bringing medical aid to Syria during a decade of mass killings of civilians unleashed by the country's now-toppled dictatorship.</p> <p dir="ltr">In this episode, Dr Rola speaks about the transformation she experienced after trauma and exhaustion she accumulated via her humanitarian work led to a 'dark night of the soul' that radically changed her understanding of herself and her service in the world. </p> <p dir="ltr">"I was desperately trying to pull us forward and into a better future because the present seemed so unbearable. And I think that crash that I had was really this almighty sort of cataclysmic rupture that in some ways forced me to sit in the cracks," Dr Rola says. </p> <p dir="ltr">"The pain, the grief, the rage, the powerlessness — everything that I had suppressed in all those years, I had to feel them, I had to learn to be with them, I had to integrate them and transmute them so that I could also reconnect to more of that unconditional love, more to joy, more to beauty, more to my right responsibility."</p> <p dir="ltr">Called to the role of doctor from childhood, Dr Rola also felt a strong sense of warriorship from a young age — a combination of archetypal energies that would propel her later relief work in her Syrian homeland, where women and children bore the brunt of the former regime's atrocities.</p> <p dir="ltr">Dr Rola's burnout experience helped her to unravel how some of her own early traumas had shaped her path as a "wounded healer". But it also reflected her experience as a "wounded visionary" — struggling with the pain of the mismatch between the world she could imagine and present reality.</p> <p dir="ltr">With the support of her Sufi practice, various trauma modalities, and psychedelic-assisted therapies, Dr Rola began to harvest the gold hidden in her dark night experience and now offers programmes to support people to build resilience and navigate the collapse-rebirth cycle. </p> <p dir="ltr">These include her new nine-month journey called Wise Warriors. "I would say that is the home of this transformation from clever to wise so that we can all become this healing impulse, this healing presence…for collective liberation, for collective awakening," Dr Rola says.</p> <p dir="ltr">This dialogue provides a vivid illustration of the power of grace to transform our most vulnerable moments into portals for growth and awakening. It also reminds us of our innate capacity to tap into a living stream of inspiration to meet personal and global challenges. </p> <p dir="ltr">"It's so easy to look at the scale of everything and feel too small and too insignificant," Dr Rola says. "But I hope that if nothing else, our conversation today is a reminder of not just our responsibility, but of the agency, of the potency in each one of us to really be a positive contribution. And that is all that is asked of us." </p> <p dir="ltr">Further Resources:</p> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.drrolacoaching.com/">Dr Rola Hallam</a> (website)</p> <p dir="ltr">Wise Warriors </p> <p dir="ltr"><a href= "https://www.gobeyondburnout.com/resilient-leadership">The Resilient Leadership Workshop</a> </p> <p dir="ltr"><a href= "https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03c7m8s">Saving Syria's Children</a> (BBC Documentary)</p> <p dir="ltr">Related Pocket Project Programmes:</p> <p dir="ltr"><a href= "https://pocketproject.org/resilience-program-phase-2/">Resilience Programme, Phase II</a> (A standalone facilitation training starting in July). </p> <p dir="ltr">About Rola Hallam:</p> <p dir="ltr">Dr Rola Hallam is an award-winning Syrian-British doctor, humanitarian, trauma-informed coach, speaker and spiritual teacher whose work sits at the meeting place of healing, leadership and sacred service.</p> <p dir="ltr">As founder of CanDo, Rola helped build seven hospitals in Syria and supported care for more than four million people in conflict-affected communities. She has witnessed the devastating impact of war, burnout, moral injury and trauma, not only in the world's hardest places, but also in the bodies and hearts of those who serve.</p> <p dir="ltr">Honoured as the first Syrian TED Fellow, Rola has spoken on global stages alongside presidents, celebrities, grassroots activists and changemakers. Her talks have been viewed more than 11 million times, inspiring people around the world to reimagine what healing, leadership and social change can look like.</p> <p dir="ltr">After her own experience of burnout and PTSD, Rola's work evolved beyond emergency medicine and humanitarian action into a deeper exploration of nervous system repair, embodied resilience and spiritual transformation. Today, she guides sensitive leaders, healers, frontline workers and changemakers to move from survival, self-abandonment and depletion into wholeness, truth and sacred responsibility.</p> <p dir="ltr">Her approach brings together Western medicine, trauma healing, somatic work, Sufi wisdom, embodied resilience and expanded states of consciousness. At the heart of her work is a simple but radical invitation: that our presence is medicine, and that when we heal what lives within us, our service becomes less about sacrifice and more about devotion, aliveness and right relationship with the world.</p>
