It takes a Village to hold a life. It takes an Ecosystem to hold a practice

About

I grew up between worlds. Indian heritage, South African soil. Corporate career in management consulting and people & change, then a slow unravelling toward something truer. The kind of unravelling that doesn’t look dramatic from the outside but rearranges everything on the inside.

What I discovered in my journey is that most of the tools we’re given for “development” — whether personal or organisational — are designed to patch the surface while leaving the roots untouched. They help you perform better without asking whether the performance is yours. They fix the team without questioning the system the team exists within. They speak a language that does not allow for dissent or lacks cultural humility

I wanted to build something different. Not a practice that gives people answers, but one that sits with them in the questions long enough for something real to emerge. Something that honours the knowledge carried in bodies, in cultures, in the spaces between people — not just in frameworks and models.

Samuha Safar is what that looks like.

Integrative Therapist | Group Analyst trainee

Community Art Counsellor | Researcher

Integral Coach | PCC Coach

Faculty member Ububele WWG

Social Dreaming Host

Yahya Mayet - Founder

UCT- GSB Centre for Coaching - Associate

My training has always followed the work — each qualification arrived not because I planned it, but because the people and systems I was sitting with asked something of me I couldn't yet offer. It started in management consulting — strategy, operations, people and change at Monitor Deloitte and KPMG — where I kept noticing that the real obstacles were never in the spreadsheet. They were in the room. That observation changed everything.

The Journey

The Formation

Corporate to Human

Business Science, strategy consulting, and people & change work gave me rigour, systems thinking, and an early understanding of how organisations resist what they most need. The analytical foundation never left. It just got a lot more interesting.

Inner World

Integral Coaching, Jungian analysis, Internal Family Systems, and trauma-informed care taught me to work with what lives beneath behaviour — the patterns, defences, and inner conflicts that no action plan can reach. Change that doesn't touch this layer doesn't last.

Body & Story

Strategic embodiment, narrative therapy, Tree of Life (Levels 1 & 2), and community art counselling opened routes into material that thinking alone cannot access. Some truths only surface through the body, the image, or the story that surprises you.

Collective & Cultural

Group psychoanalysis , social dreaming, and a sustained grounding in decolonial and indigenous knowledge frameworks — Ubuntu, Sankofa, Fanon, Biko. The room is never just the people in it. It carries history, power, and the wider social world. I learned to work with all of it.

The Ecosystem

Samuha Safar is a carefully woven network of practitioners, associates, and collaborators who share a common orientation: that the work of change — real change — requires more than one set of hands.

Depending on what’s needed, we draw from a collective that includes:

• psychologists,

• coaches,

• facilitators,

• embodiment practitioners,

• art therapists,

• holistic health workers,

• organisational development specialists,

• and supervision professionals.

Each brings their own craft. What unites us is a shared commitment to depth over speed, and to the principle that the people in the room always know more than any framework could.

We don’t believe in the heroic consultant who arrives with all the answers. We believe in the relational field — the intelligence that emerges when people are held well enough to be honest.

Every engagement begins with Yahya or an associate. From there, we assemble the right combination of people and approaches for what’s actually needed — not what looks good in a proposal.

Sometimes that’s a single practitioner working one-on-one. Sometimes it’s a team of facilitators across multiple sites. Sometimes it’s a long, slow conversation over many months.

The shape follows the need. Always.

Where we work

We work across sectors because the human dynamics beneath every organisation are more alike than they are different. Power, belonging, identity, fear, creativity — these don’t change with the industry.

That said, we bring particular depth of experience in financial services, mining and energy, NGOs and humanitarian organisations, education, technology, government, healthcare, and retail and logistics. We’ve worked with teams democratising human rights in Angola, coached women in mining, facilitated culture change in multinational banks, run support groups at children’s homes, designed leadership development for graduate programs and run ubuntu rooted wellbeing and DEIBJ strategies and programs.

We have run multimodal interventions for those experiencing trauma in communities, run train the trainer sessions for trauma informed psychological first aid and used expressive methods for teams to truly listen.

We work in boardrooms and on floors. In English, in translation, and in silence. In Johannesburg, across Africa, and internationally both online and in person