Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docu-series, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, [and] special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org and in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge my guest is Thomas Hübl. Born in Austria, Thomas is a teacher, author, and international facilitator who works within the complexity of systems and culture change, integrating the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science. Thomas has led large-scale events and courses on healing collective trauma with the focus on the shared history of Israelis and Germans. He’s the author of the book Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds and a new book with Sounds True—it’s called Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma and Our World. Thomas, welcome.
Thomas Hübl: Tami, it’s so good to see you. I’m happy to see you again. Yeah, beautiful to be here.
TS: Here at the very beginning. I’m wondering if you can share a bit about this integration of the wisdom traditions, mysticism, and science. I’ve heard you refer to it as “inner science.” How did you come to this notion of inner science?
TH: It came through my own deep—I don’t know—inner journey, first of all. So I had a long-term practice. I was four years in a meditation retreat. I spent a lot of time exploring my inner architecture and of course studying all kinds of wisdom traditions. And I felt that there is some—at the core of the wisdom traditions, there’s kind of an architecture to it. Even if we transcended architecture more and more as we go along, but there is some commonalities in the different traditions.
And then in science, which I love too, we see also that of course there’s a scientific process of how we run experiments to come to similar conclusions. But the neuroscience, the trauma science, social sciences—there is a lot that is actually pretty similar to what we find in the mystical traditions or quantum mechanics.
So I thought, “Why not to have a dialogue? And instead of seeing those two as separate fields, let’s have them come closer, attune to each other, feel each other, and have a dialogue, but where we find commonalities and we’re not.”
And I think that’s a great process and I’m having lots of dialogues with different scientists and different mystical scientists, so to speak. And I think that’s a very fruitful dialogue for our time, especially when we look at trauma. I think trauma, karma, healing, restoration, awakening—these whole things where these two worlds seem to come together more and more in the last decades. And I think your work is also part of that. Yeah, so I’m a fan of having those—not two separate bubbles, but actually have a dialogue and see what arises in the conversation.
TS: Very good. Now on your website, Thomas, there’s this quote right big on the homepage. It says, “Presence is the place where the past is being alchemized into now.” And I thought, “OK, this is very interesting, very profound, and also possibly not obvious to many people what this means.”
And I thought we could start by having you explain a bit what this sentence means. Presence, first of all—what is that? Is it the place where the past is being alchemized into now?
TH: That’s true. It’s a profound sentence. Let’s see how deeply can I get. In my studies and my work of trauma and with trauma in different cultural contexts, individuals, ancestors, collectives, I came to understand that actually our perception of time can be questioned—as when, if we see time as a linear unfoldment from yesterday via today till tomorrow, and we usually call yesterday the past and we call tomorrow the future. And when I studied trauma or study also wisdom traditions and what some of the wisdom traditions call one part of karma, I saw more and more, “Oh, actually history is not behind us. It’s not in the past history. Integrated history has this conversation.”
All your ancestors—all the generations that led up to you and all the generations that led up to me—are having this conversation, having the perspective that many things that we experienced we didn’t invent and we didn’t create. Life created this over a long period of time.
So then I thought, “Wow, when I look at cultural trauma and cultural wounds, the real past is the experience that we couldn’t integrate because it was too painful and we needed to push it aside—freeze it maybe and hold it because we couldn’t survive in the midst of that storm.” And the Holocaust or racism in the US or many colonialism wounds are such strong wounds that a lot of the pain needed to be stopped, but the pain didn’t disappear. And it’s somewhere residing either in our bodies, in our cultural spaces, in our ancestors.
And then I saw, “Oh, when we create spaces where we attune to each other, where we create relational coherence, I feel you and I feel how you feel me, is basically the basic building block of relating or attachment.” And in that felt relationship, we are actually more and more present with each other and more of presence can shine through us. And it’s like an island.
Presence, I often say in my classes—presence is like an island and the past can be onboarded and be integrated and enlarges this island. So when we look at these traumatic residues, compassionate, attuned, loving relationships are basically the best remedy to heal together. And also the togetherness that we experience when somebody really listens, really cares, is really with us. That’s the onboarding—that’s the presence we need in order to deal with the remnants or sometimes the strong residues of the past.
And then something amazing happens. Then I often say that the qualities of space like presence and space are reflection. I can start to reflect about my life, about things that happen. I can digest. It starts a digestion process and then I can integrate the information that needed to be externalized. And when I integrate it, my perspective grows. So we call it post-traumatic learning.
So when we really deal with our wounds or the parts of us where we struggle with being present, then we all grow and we learn from that past the wisdom that we need in order to deal with our challenges today. And maybe the last thing in the presencing work when we want to be, because being more present is something that many people nowadays deal with and want to be. But when we understand trauma deeper, we see not being present is not a mistake. Not being present is a necessity in certain situations in order to protect ourselves. So in the traumatic moment, life says, “Here, in time and space, it’s not good for me.”
So not being present—leaving the moment and the intensity of the moment—is intelligent. When we want to become more present in our lives, sometimes we pathologize ourselves for not being present. “So something is wrong with me because I can’t do it. Other people are much more present than I am.” And that’s actually not true because not being present is something that helped me to go through certain hardships in my life. And if I approach it differently or pathologize that intelligence in me, then actually it helps me much more to become more present. And there is a learning that comes with it. There’s something growing through me when I do that. I don’t know what that’s going to become, but there is an added value to me integrating that past. And I think that’s a very beautiful process.
TS: Now, Thomas, let’s directly address that person who says, “OK, we’re going into some deep material here that relates to personal trauma, ancestral trauma, collective trauma, and I’m noticing myself absenting. I can already feel it. I can feel these gaps in my ability to stay really connected and really immediately embodied in this conversation.” How can I increase my—if I can use the word presencing—how can I increase my ability to be really right here with this conversation?
TH: First of all, I did practice a more loving response to the things that seem not to work in my life, that I don’t pathologize this. Often we look with harsh eyes at the things that don’t work or they’re limited or seem reduced or seem dysfunctional.
So there’s on the one hand the practice and also I think a collective reframing that we need to do, but we can talk about this later of how we pathologize things that don’t work so well or our weaknesses as some people call it. And then the other thing is that I get to know myself in the parts that I can feel because when we feel connected with what I was saying, we are feeling the experience that we are in right now. That’s why I feel myself. And if I feel myself, I can feel you. But sometimes—as you use this beautiful word, “absenting”—sometimes we notice that we are actually not fully here.
And the part that is not fully here is not just fully here now. That usually happened already a while ago.
So I come in touch with a part that is numb. So there’s a physical numbness that comes with it. There’s an emotional numbness that comes with it. There’s a relational distance or numbness that comes with it. So we begin to pay attention and not try to not be numb, but to be consciously numb because then I come in touch with the part of my nervous system that managed to turn intensity off, the more I come in touch with the part of myself that knows how to turn it off. It was intelligent at that time. Then the recognition of that process usually helps me to turn it back on, not because I try to turn it on because it happens by itself when I am really in touch with the numbing itself.
And I think also for us in the work with ourselves, but also in relationships when I tune in with myself, I’m more attuned to myself. I notice sometimes I’m simply numb. I don’t know what I feel or I feel that parts of me are numb. And if I can relax into that and bring loving attention to it, then I’m not trying to pull myself into presence. I’m bringing presence to the part that is absent. And I honor myself for needing to be absent because also, in our childhood, that was often not the case. And then we push each other into a kind of development and then the numbing gets even stronger because we don’t respect ourselves.
And sometimes we feel it also from other people—that there’s this push-pull where we are numb .and it starts with myself to say, “Wow, I’m overwhelmed and I honor myself for being overwhelmed. And because I respect myself, my processor can start to digest whatever was overwhelming better and come back into presence.”
And I think that’s a very important process because often also in interpersonal relationships, we see that we often are not attuned to the numbness of other people. And if we feel the other person is numb, so we can give a space, we can take a breath, we can slow down for a moment so that we give more space to an overloaded processor. But if we don’t notice that, we keep on talking and putting information into a system that actually is saying, “I’m overloaded.” And I think that interpersonal sensitivity can change a lot.
And also, as I wrote in Attuned, I think especially for people who are therapists or coaches or work with people or teachers, noticing these kind of things is having a huge impact. To know how to work with numbness has a huge impact. And then if we take it to a bigger stage, like to our society, I think there are lots of patches of numbness where lots of symptoms happen in our society that we call difficult.
TS: Now, Thomas, there are a couple aspects of your work that I think are very visionary and that I don’t hear many people talk about. I want to emphasize those aspects in our conversation. And I got to this place in reading Attuned where you introduced this “IAC fluidity”—individual healing, ancestral healing, and collective healing. The I and individual; A and ancestral; C and collective. And that we’re being called to this new era of healing work where we’re actually healing and we can experience it at the individual, ancestral, and collective level. And we’re being called to do the work on all three levels.
And I think a lot of people are feeling that call and they may have some inkling about the individual healing of trauma and maybe even an inkling about their own family lineage and ancestral trauma. But when it gets to collective trauma, there’s like, “What? No way, no way, no way. It’s too big, it’s too much. I can barely witness and touch it, let alone engage in some process like digestion and integration.” So help me understand more how we possibly digest and integrate trauma at the collective level.
TH: Yeah, you said it beautiful—that in a way individual healing work, many people are already engaging. That sets the foundation for us to open up to the ancestral healing work. So we become more grounded in ourselves, more integrated in ourselves. That helps us usually to open up to the ancestral level. We can feel through ourselves more the ancestral relationships, the flow or the stagnation. And that already opens us up to the collective dimension.
At least as I have seen it over 20-plus years in my groups. I believe that our nervous system is not just an individual nervous system. My nervous system encodes from an individual experience. It encodes from my ancestral experience, and there’s a part of my nervous system that is collective. It’s not just that I need to get to the collective, it’s that if I open up deeper, there is a part of me that lives collective all the time.
So I have a sensor for the collective dimension because I believe we as human beings are super social beings and our nervous system has that built in. But sometimes that’s kind of held and we often don’t get taught about all the capacities. Often we didn’t read the full manual of our nervous system. So that’s why certain functions haven’t been activated sometimes. So when we do that healing work, I think …
And I also feel it that many people—and we see it in our summits, we see it in our work—that many people recognize, “OK, we need some collective feeling.” It’s open. Many people feel that. The beginning of it is that motivation—that many people feel something needs to bring us together. Collective healing work is also something we do in collective spaces.
And I believe we actually need to work up until our governments to be able to create social healing spaces that societies like the US society or the—I don’t know—the European societies or Asian societies will see social healing as a necessity for public health.
So coming together in these collective spaces, which we—and even you were once at the festival—we [are] this creating big spaces where people can come together [to] practice interpersonal coherence work, attunement work—to create a container. But within that container, when we feel safe enough with each other, collective memories or collective wounds actually come up by themselves.
I have seen many, many of those group processes and every time we come together and we just create the environment. The ecosystem needs to be prepared. But when the ecosystem is ready, collective stuff surfaces by itself. And that’s why the question is more, “OK, how can we come together and create those spaces and what are the spices that we need to put into that space so that it creates coherence?”
And that’s usually a shared motivation that we feel that we want to do this together. Then to come together and have some facilitated processes to create safety, that we have some shared values. How we do that? And what we don’t do together in this space—it’s a more nonjudgmental space.
It’s a space where we feel each other. When we talk to each other, we use our whole bodies. It’s an embodied space. So we practice a few things and then when it’s safe, then naturally the nervous system wants to detox the past. And then we work with what comes up. And the more we honor what comes up and we let it arise, we pay attention to it. Then I have seen spaces like with hundreds of people or a thousand people, and you could hear a pin drop because it was so present. We are so with each other.
And then the individual stories that people have with the ancestral experiences that people have, of course a part of the collective healing process tool. So it’s not that they’re separate. These three, they’re all together and they’re constantly in a fluid way dancing with each other.
And the reason why I called it IAC fluidity is because I think when we do collective trauma work, we liquefy our world because trauma creates frozenness and holding and stagnation and holding of experience. And safety, attunement, relationality, presencing creates the capacity of life to heal itself.
So it activates the self-healing mechanism of the biosphere and allows life to liquefy itself, digest experience, and then grow and grow its perspective. Plus I believe, very importantly in our time, also grows the ethical line of our development—that our ethics and how we live with each other grows too. Because when the de-icing mechanism works, relationality grows, respect grows. Respecting our dignity and our human rights is actually a natural consequence of feeling related. It’s only violated when we feel separate. But when we are related, we don’t hurt each other. And I think that’s all in the collective space that we described.
TS: OK, so two things I’d love to have you clarify that I don’t fully understand. One is: I don’t understand this word coherence. A group is achieving coherence. What does that mean?
TH: So coherence is in the individual is a sense of flow—is when I feel in a flow with my environment; in a flow, in a relationship, in a conversation. When I feel in a flow in my own body—when I feel it’s pleasant in my body, it’s flowing. And we all know the difference between how it feels when it flows and how it feels when there are stagnations inside. But the coherence in my body is also my own internal capacity to host my fragmentation or to host my stagnation.
So the more in the trauma work we call is sometimes resources. I love the word coherence because it’s more connected to the flow and the relationality between things or people or in groups.
So it includes another factor. In the relationship, it’s also when I see you, Tami, right now. Then you exist in me. So the Tami I see is my energy perception that I see. And moment-to-moment my attunement updates Tami—that you sit somewhere in Canada or so I’m sitting here in the Netherlands. But because I feel you, I update you moment to moment to moment in me. And—
TS: I just want to make a comment too, Thomas: that as you did that, I noticed melting inside of me as you did that. As you intentionally focused on me being part of your internal experience, I felt like a kind of… I mean almost felt tears. On the verge of tears inside of me. I could feel that. So I just wanted to comment on that—
TH: That’s beautiful.
TS: —that it was meaningful. Yeah.
TH: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Exactly. And it’s beautiful that you’re sharing that because through that honesty, we can see that paying attention to that moment-to-moment, attuned quality that has a physical dimension and emotional, relational—of course an intellectual—dimension. We feel closer. So this “I feel you and I feel how you feel me” creates closeness or intimacy. And that intimacy immediately creates a sense of safety. In that intimacy we can relax deeper. And of course sometimes when we relax deeper, more stuff comes up. But it’s the basis for any kind of healing relationship, I believe.
That’s the establishing of coherence. When we do this in bigger groups, when there are hundreds of people in the room or more, or we do it also in our big large online classes. So then we consciously begin to include that everybody tunes in with everybody else or with the group, and we make some space to create that “I feel you feeling me” or “We are feeling each other.” We consciously do that every time we start a session. Every time there’s the online participants and offline participants, we do that. And that creates an enormous group presence. And once we induce that as a practice, it just grows the level of coherence, which means that we exist in each other’s perception. Attunement is the constant update.
That’s why I love the word “relating” and not “relationship,” because relating is an active process. And that’s I think what relating is an active updating process. We update each other all the time. That’s very powerful. And I believe that’s the basis of building coherence.
So it’s as if the cultural space is like a cloud, and now we are storing all kinds of data in the cloud. So we are sitting here in our bodies, but our bodies have the capacity to include that subtle information that is in the space that we will see similarly as like a cloud. All that cultural information sits here with us and then we can zoom into different aspects of it. And I believe that creates group presence, group coherence, and the more of it we have, the more resources we have to deal with the fragmentation that we also bring into the room together.
TS: So when it comes to this notion of healing collective trauma, I’m with you in terms of the possibility of being coherent, at least for periods of time within myself and with another, and even with a group that has a high level of intentionality and shared focus. But when I think of the incoherent collective that we’re a part of—our world today, the human species today—and I think of how the interconnectedness I feel with that greater whole could achieve coherence, I’m like, “What?”
Because I’m bringing this up, Thomas—you talked about how our nervous system is connected not only potentially to other people when we’re attuning and relating to them like you and I are now, our nervous systems are connected. That feels great. I feel good. When I tune in at a nervous system level to greater and greater aspects of our incoherent human population, I’m like, “What? What? How does that nervous system connectivity get me anywhere?” Gets me all screwed up.
TH: Exactly. So that’s a wonderful question or a statement.
So yeah, let’s unpack this a bit. So first of all, I would say step by step, it’s not going to work now. It’s a step-by-step learning process because I think also collectively we are in a great change process. And I will say a few things about that and I think we need to see this as a step-by-step learning process as a collective nervous system.
But when we unpack this a bit, there are a few elements that I think are important. And I think your Sounds True is a great example for one part of it, because we are coming out of power over hierarchies, at least in democratic systems. We come out of power over and now we are living more in competent, relational-based systems that we established already that have a certain level of coherence, but still carry a lot of wounds from all the time before and still what’s happening right now in our society.
So the collective nervous system, I believe, is much more hurt than it sometimes looks like. And now we see also phases where we see how big that hurt is and why it makes so much sense to have collective healing spaces because we need something else that’s not going to be solved in one-on-one therapy sessions. We need a new form for that and we need to create that new form.
And I believe when a democracy has, for example, free speech and has more freedom to express on an individual level and on a collective level, it creates more safety. I think every skilled group facilitator knows that when you establish a certain level of safety, usually a new level of disruption happens. And I think many spiritual practitioners know the same.
You upgrade, you tap into a new state, and then something happens that looks like, oh, you fell back and now you need to come back again, which I think is not the right interpretation. We didn’t fall back. It’s just that the new level of coherence allows a new level of incoherence to show up. Our systems want to detox that karma or that trauma or that past. That’s what we see in our societies too. Massive disruptions, like the massive power of the anti-racism work that is happening, [bring up] a lot of the pain that has been created over hundreds and hundreds of years. Or the Me Too movement—that so much pain has been created through gender violence and now a lot of it is coming to the surface and that looks like a disruption, but it’s actually only possible because there’s a certain amount of safety that allows it to surface.
And that makes democracies, in my opinion, very vulnerable at the moment in the face of what seems like autocratic systems, and new wars are growing in the world and the right wing movements are growing that more based on holding on to some more conservative values, which are also important, but can lead to a lot of pain.
And I think that when we—especially everybody that is blessed, and I say always to everybody that comes to our groups. We are so privileged that we have the time, the means, the resources, the possibilities to come together and sit in a meditation retreat or heal ourselves from the wounds of our traumas. That’s also a privilege, and that privilege comes with responsibility. This means also that it enables me to serve more, also to engage more in the world because it’s not just for me, my healing. It’s for me to pass on.
And I think especially for people that we work with, there are many people that have the privilege and have been blessed with the capacity to do that inner work. And I think it’s also the people that have that privilege that are being called to serve that collective growth. And that means it’s not going to be always easy. And for some people, we need to heal our own trauma first—obviously, to a certain extent—because otherwise the collective is too disruptive and triggering for us.
So it needs a certain level of integration. Otherwise, it’s too much for me to engage in this collective dimension as, you said. And because there’s so much pain. So you [are] constantly triggered and just feel bad, that’s not helpful. But from a certain level of integration, I think the collective healing is actually our responsibility—our ability to respond to our collective body’s need. And that responsiveness to our collective need that we have, I think is a spiritual practice. It’s part of our giving. It’s part of our service.
If we can do it. If not, then it’s an overload; then it’s not helpful. But if we can engage as far as we can engage, it’s important. And I think it teaches us also the humility and the bowing to the greater suffering. And that my spirituality doesn’t mean that I go to a more sterile space—that I actually have more capacity to be in the world that is.
And in a way, all the great mystic of the great traditions—that’s actually what they said. It’s not that healing is to get away from the suffering. Healing is the embracing the suffering, and so that it can be part of our awakening. And sometimes we see in spiritual communities that you want to get away from the pain of the world because it’s too disturbing, which sometimes is important to create healing spaces that we can heal ourselves first to a certain degree. But it’s also a trip because it keeps a certain duality going that doesn’t create the bigger engagement—that my maturity is actually to be able to engage in this world in a deeper level.
TS: One of the questions I had for you is sometimes people say, “I’m a highly sensitive person, or I’m an empath, and for that reason I can’t expose myself too much to this collective pain because it’ll overwhelm me.” And one of the points you make in Attuned is perhaps maybe more grounding is required—that there’s actual inner work that could be done that would increase someone’s capacity to be with collective pain. And I wanted to hear more about that from you. What kind of inner work increases someone’s grounding and capacity?
TH: Yeah, I think it’s true that for some of us, our nervous systems are highly sensitive and we were born with a highly sensitive nervous system. And that in itself I think is a blessing that life gave us. If we grow up in circumstances where our parents, our teachers, our environment doesn’t get that and it is too much overload on a child’s highly sensitive nervous system, then we feel that not as a blessing. But we feel this as a constant threat or as a constant overwhelm. So it becomes like a burden and then we isolate ourselves because that’s the only way to reduce the noise. For some people, that was their life story. But for some people it was also that it has been met, seen, strengthened, and then it became the blessing of a therapist. It became the blessing of a doctor, it became the blessing of a parent to hold the next generation—or a teacher.
So it can be both. Of course, we need to always differentiate that early childhood wounding can create some kind of opening that it feels that it’s hard for me to discern my own experience and one of the collective or the outside. So we need to take that into account too. But I think often it’s the part where it hasn’t been appropriately met, that quality in someone, and that’s why the overwhelm is what became more dominant. We need spaces, first of all, where we feel met, where somebody feels our sensitivity and helps us to de-ice in a way our own protection and then ground the …
Because usually when we are stressed or overwhelmed, our whole energy goes up. We go out of the ground. We go up and we hold it. That’s the stress response in the body. When we feel met and when somebody can match our sensitivity, our nervous system immediately recognizes that and it feels like, “Oh.”
We need holding spaces or environments where we create a necessary awareness for people that feel more sensitive—not to dismiss that, but actually honor that, and then in the relationship help it to ground and ground and relax. And then it’s like a tree with a big crown but with short roots. So we need to grow the roots deeper. And then the sensitivity is much more regulated in the nervous system. And then we feel more ground strength to be able to navigate, but also to be able to regulate ourselves differently in relationships. Because what often happens is that our regulation in relationships didn’t work.
So we over-regulated our inner world and now we need to turn this back so that I can say yes and no when it’s needed, so that I can stay in an equilibrium inside and not take in too much. And I think that’s what many people refer to when they say, “Oh, the world is just overloading for me.” And other people dismiss that as it’s just that you’re too weak. And we have this kind of a bit in the macho culture in our society. But I think if we are more mindful, we honor the higher sensitivity, we bring it into relationships. People feel seen. It can ground itself, grow the roots together.
TS: Tell me about that. How do you grow the roots?
TH: Yeah. As I said in the moment when we feel met and we feel felt something can relax. When our nervous system relaxes, it takes the stress response that goes out of the ground slowly into the ground. And then we need to work on the parts that we maybe shut down—that we numbed, where we don’t feel grounded—and we open it together and create the safe space so that I can open up my nervous system a bit more, feel you. You’re still here, you’re still with me. I can open it up a bit more. And we go deeper and we digest the stuff that comes up as we do that.
And we can do this of course with somebody like with a therapist that knows how to do that and/or we can also practice this kind of thing in spaces—in communities—that have a high level of relational attunement. And maybe at the same time with a therapist if it’s needed.
So that we create environments that have the capacities like ecosystems—like relational-attuned ecosystems. And in those ecosystems, we step by step ground ourselves. Of course, it’s not just a one-time thing, but there is a path. And I think we don’t have to continue that suffering. And the more I feel the lower part of my body, the more I feel grounded, the more I again feel supported by the earth. That I feel it—that the earth is not just a planet underneath my feet. It’s actually I’m part of that earth. I feel myself as part of that earth that gives a lot of power, that gives me a lot of stability inside.
And then my sensitivity is being balanced by that kind of earthing, grounding aspect because my nervous system can let the electricity flow down into the ground like a lightning rod. When the lightning hits the lightning rod, the electricity goes into the ground.
When my nervous system is open in the base, what I usually felt as overload can ground itself and flow through me, and it creates a circuit. And that circular movement is being experienced more as a flow.
And then it doesn’t mean that I won’t have some challenging moments, but everybody will have challenging moments. That’s part of life. But I will not feel constantly overloaded. And then I more and more experience my gift of being sensitive really as a gift. It’s a blessing. And usually when I’m more sensitive, life wants me to be more sensitive. So there’s a reason for it on my path—why life gave me that capacity.
TS: Now, Thomas, I want to bring forward a concrete example that we can talk about that relates to individual, ancestral, and collective trauma healing and the fluidity. And I’m just going to draw on my own experience because it’s very real for me, but it’s really a placeholder for whatever people’s experience might be that’s similar to this. Which is for me, I have experienced a lot of individual healing in relationship with land. I love beautiful wild places, and being alone in such places is incredibly nourishing for me. But one of the things that’s come up is I can feel, as I attune to the land, ancestral presences. And those ancestral presences are at times people who have been violently raped and tortured, killed, and had their land stolen from them.
So suddenly now ancestral healing work is asking to be done, and there is an attuning to the collective trauma that occurred on this land that I am loving and appreciating so much, and I’m at a bit of loss as to how I relate to the ancestral and collective trauma that I’m encountering. So I wonder if you could take that as an example of applying some of the principles and insights of your work.
TH: First of all, it’s beautiful. I think you said it also beautifully—that ancestral healing work wants to be done, which also means that the ancestral kind of stagnation found in you a resonance that is able to consciously perceive it, which is also a result of your own personal healing work that you did—that it opened you up to be able to perceive that and that that energy can come to you means your channels are open to receive it, and there is a certain capacity already in place. Otherwise that couldn’t happen.
And at the same time, you’re also meeting the legacy of white people’s actions, all of us a part of what you described. And I think it’s very important that—and I’m not saying this not for you personally, but I think it’s very important that we re-own even if we personally weren’t part of it. But we say yes, we are part of that system that is responsible—this white privileged system that is responsible for these kinds of massacres and tortures and pain, and we have a responsibility here. We need to do something.
And I think your openness makes that possible. And then the question is, I would ask …
My next question is how alone or in a part of a resourced ecosystem are you, to be able to digest the strong experiences that you’re touching when you’re open to that. What you touch needs a digestion process. And I’m wondering: I think what needs to be maybe strengthened is how you digest it personally and/or how much community you have that helps you to digest it so that it doesn’t stay just stuck in you now—the pain—but it can flow through you into a bigger ecosystem and the ecosystem can process it and help release it. And then together it’s going to upgrade itself and integrate that information into a more open land. That will be—I think my question, how much do you have an ecosystem that supports you and do you feel that you can process whatever is heavy on your heart with somebody so that it can flow through you into kind of an ecosystem digestion process?
TS: Can you share with me an example of a digestion process that you’ve been a part of and that would be illustrative—how that worked?
TH: Yeah. For example, when you speak about the ancestral healing, immediately when I feel you, I can feel the effect that it has on you. When I am becoming part of it and I’m attuned to your process and I can feel through you a bit the pain of what you are speaking about, then we begin to share that pain. So it’s not only yours anymore—that’s now in you—it becomes also part of me and the space in between us. So the space becomes a bit bigger.
When we have more people in the space that are interested in these kind of things and in this kind of healing work—then when you speak and 10 people listen to you—we become actually your resonance body, like a guitar and the string. So you’re the string and we are the resonance body. And then when I feel you and I really want to, I don’t protect myself from what you feel, but I really want to participate in it, then the information that came to you starts to come to us.
And then together we are multiple nervous systems digesting that experience, which I think takes off the load or the heaviness and allows it to move. And that movement I think is part of the healing—that it can move is the healing. When I feel you and I’m feeling the pain that you experience on the land with you, it’s already happening—the digestion. And then if more people do that, it gets just stronger and it shortens the time that it takes in order to go through that process, and it’ll discharge the energy that is the information that is stored in the land.
And the ancestral information can discharge itself through the ones that are living in a body. Because in the mystical traditions we say the time that we are alive is blessed and sacred, because that’s the time where we can digest the karma of our ancestors and turn it into presence and light so that we leave the world that is bigger than the one that we found—that we were born into. Because you’re embodied and the ancestors are not embodied, the ancestors need us in a body to transform and transmute the information that couldn’t be experienced at that time. And that’s sacred work and that’s what opens the land and makes it again more fertile. When we have these ecosystems where we participate in each other’s experiences, I think it accelerates that process very much.
TS: One of the things Thomas, I was really interested in reading Attuned was the new global witnessing groups that you’re putting together as a way for people to come together and bear witness to different kinds of traumatic events when they happen. Can you talk some about that and how it works?
TH: Yeah. Like a friend of mine, William Ury, a world-class mediator and Getting to Yes—I think it’s the book that he wrote besides other things—says it beautifully. He says, “Every conflict needs the third side—the bigger collective—to be part of the conflict, to own the conflict.”
So it’s not only the conflict of the people, it’s actually the bigger collective that has a conflict through this people that are involved in it. So there’s a much bigger collective responsibility. And in a way, in the global social witnessing work, we say individual ancestral and collective trauma reduces the capacity to perceive the world. We could say wisdom is how much of the world can land in us. So it’s not being othered, but is being perceived from within and everywhere where trauma resides. We need to externalize a part of the world. So we begin to other a part of the world and that part of the world cannot land in me, so I don’t feel intimacy. I feel distance.
In global social witnessing we say—because it seems like we are living in a world of tons of data. Everybody seems to have access, or many people seem to have access, to almost anything that’s happening in the world in minutes. But there can also be an illusion because the question is how much of the data we hear about or read about can actually land in our bodies so that we are contemporary witnesses of the processes in our societies that are happening. And I believe we often are not contemporary witnesses. We often are intellectual witnesses. I can read the CNN feed, but I can’t feel what I read all the time. And it’s also not that I have to, I just want us to become more aware. Where’s the edge? The edge where we stop feeling the world, where my conscious experience of this planet ends?
And global social witnessing is in a way the practice that we as groups come together, we take something that’s happening in the society, we stay with it, and we just notice how much can I experience that specific situation. And where is the limit where I feel I’m reaching the edge and I’m actually numb in that place? I can’t relate to that. And because we slow it down a bit, it’s not just happening in a fraction of a second; it becomes a more conscious process. And the more we become aware of the edge, we see that’s where distancing happens, that’s where absenting happens. That’s why we don’t get up billions of people and say, “No way we’re going to have a war in Ukraine and Russia, that’s not going to happen.”
But that’s not happening and it has a reason why it’s not happening. And there’s also—with other things, we are not as an immune system globally being so attuned to the global process that we really care. And I think it starts where our capacity to perceive processes in our society are actually hitting our numbness.
And then we intellectually—where we have great conversations about things, but we don’t have an emotional and physical resonance anymore. And that’s the missing motivation to act. The more we become aware and we don’t say, “Oh, you should be able to feel everything,” no, no, no, no—because it has a reason why we can’t.
And the practice is not to overload myself. The practice is to be gentle and to go to the edge and be at that edge and turn the end of my conscious universe a little bit more into an expansion. And it’s lovely because your—what I call Insights at the Edge. And I think that’s perfect because every time we can expand that edge a bit, when my conscious universe ends, insights start to happen. And I have seen processes when we worked on this massive collective trauma fields like the Holocaust, for example—that when we were in the process, we could literally feel as a group here in the room was the end of what we could feel.
It was very palpable that here we stop feeling the world because it’s too much or it was too much. And when we can just honor that limitation and say, “Wow, it was important for millions of people to turn off their pain.” And we begin to become aware of it, we bring love to the edge of a conscious universe. And I think that’s where love has its strongest capacity to heal. Not to go too far where [inaudible] nothing’s happening, it’s just overloaded. But at the edge is where we grow as collectives and we include, again, more of what needed to be excluded. And I think that’s a fantastic work. It’s really beautiful to see when it melts a bit.
TS: Let me just see if I understand correctly by asking this question, which is: if you were to put your own experience under a magnifying glass and you are feeling into some global catastrophe of some kind yourself, and you’re seeing images and whatever’s coming up for you—you’re hearing screams, whatever it might be—the horror of it. And you hit the place where you’re like, “OK, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t.” What do you do at that moment to bring more awareness and love, right to that place where you say, “Stop, I’m done,”?
TH: Yeah. First of all, to see that I can go to a certain level. I don’t need to expose myself so much that I feel just overloaded and stuck. But when I feel something is too much, I say, “OK, I don’t need to look any longer at that. I can let go of it for now.” But then I can go inside and see, “OK, when I go through my … ” what we call the Three Sync practice. When I go and look, “OK, what happens in my body? Well, I got really stressed. I feel that I got a bit tense and stressed.”
So I notice this. I respect it. I even maybe name it in myself that that’s what I find. And then I look at my emotional experience and I say, “Boy, I’m numb.” And then when I stay a little bit with the numbness and say, “Oh yeah, OK, I feel numb.” And I consciously feel numb, then maybe I will feel that my numbness turns into fear. I saw that, and actually I got existentially scared, but I turned off in a fraction of a second my fear.
I noticed it and I said, “Well, it really scares me to see that.” And that honesty to say, “Yes, it’s scary to see certain things.” And then I can see how my mind frames it. And I can also feel what happens to my relational experience, because we often talk about emotions, but emotions happen in relational spaces. And a healed world is a world where emotions are not just mine or yours, they’re actually the connective tissue.
So when somebody is afraid and the other person feels that the person is afraid, the fear becomes a shared property. It’s a shared land; it’s an emotional land. And when we feel it together, it much faster loosens up and the fear turns into grounding and into curiosity. When we learn to hold our fear, then every time we get afraid, we feel withdrawn.
So I can look at my emotion and I can look at what’s my relational state, and then I will maybe see I saw these images and immediately I feel a bit withdrawn, which is OK. And now it’s conscious and I begin to make that my practice—that those inner states are more and more in my awareness, as you said, because we slow down a bit. We put it under the magnifying glass, and that’s how we can learn to notice, “Oh, this is how I react or get triggered. And that’s what happens when I see these things.” And most probably if it happens to me, many other people when they see these images might feel the same. So the trauma that we are all looking at creates a reaction in us where we pull away from the trauma. We actually don’t have so many people that are with it because many of us pull away.
If we pull out that’s being left alone, even if many people heard about it, doesn’t mean that we are with the trauma itself. We might be because some people say, “Yeah, but I’m very emotional.” Of course, I might be very scared, but this is still my emotions that I experience. It’s my existential fear that I feel.
And then when I feel withdrawn, when I feel more open, then I can say, “Wow, I’m actually really beginning to feel the incident itself.” And I think the more people come to a certain level of integration and practice that we can feel what’s happening, then we begin to participate in the trauma event in the society with more compassion and care. And I think this has or will have a tremendous impact on how things are evolving or how things are going. And that’s why I think that practicing our collective awareness is actually a very important practice for our collective health, for the ecosystem health.
TS: You call it practicing interdependence. Now, Thomas, we’re coming to an end of our conversation, but before we get there, I just want to make sure people understand. You referred to this Three Sync process, and I don’t want to leave any of our listeners out. What do you mean by that?
TH: Yeah, Three Sync. We say, “OK, in a coherent or flowing nervous system, the part of my nervous system that feels my body is open.” So one part of the practice—one of the three—is I’m aware of my body and I just notice I can do this as a meditation in the morning or the evening, or I can do this in one minute in my office. Then I say, “From time to time, I take a breath, I exhale, I feel my body feel the state of tension, the state of relaxation, whatever is happening. Where is my aliveness right now? Where do I feel myself? Well, do I feel numb?” Once I notice my body, I go to my emotions. Can I say what emotion is present? Or if I cannot say, it’s not a mistake. I just noticed that I’m a bit numb or overwhelmed, and I can say it.
And then I noticed my mental activity. So is my mind quiet? Is my mind spacious, tight, rattling? I noticed the three elements of my experience.
And then if I want to, I can also say, “OK, what’s actually aware of that information?” So I feel my body, my emotions, my mind, and what is aware that I feel myself. That’s a beautiful practice. If I do it, I can do this within a minute and I can do it for 10 minutes in the morning or in the evening. And if I practice it regularly, I strengthen a lot of my internal awareness. And then when I run into more difficult situations—difficult conversations—I’m more grounded in that experience, which helps me to maybe respond sometimes differently.
TS: Thomas, I have so enjoyed this conversation with you. I feel that each time we meet my appreciation of your work and your life and the risks you’ve taken and the way you’ve brought groups together to go into deep spaces and explore—I have a greater appreciation of it each time. Thank you so very, very much.
TH: That’s so beautiful. Thank you for saying that. That’s beautiful. And I love our flow and I found it very deep—the conversation. Thank you for letting me be part of your ancestral experience.
TS: Thomas Hübl, he’s the author of the new book Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma and Our World. And I love the way that you described it really as our responsibility to practice interdependence in this way. What a beautiful note for our listeners. Thank you, Thomas.
TH: And thank you, Tami.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
