Thomas Hübl explores how trauma changes our experience of time, and how integration and acceptance can help us create a better future. When traumatic events occur in the present moment, we become overwhelmed, and our experience of “presence” is split, pushing the trauma into the subconscious realm. He explains that our compartmentalized trauma is like a data package that becomes stuck in the past, interrupting the flow of time like a rock in a river. As we go through life, we experience tension, numbness, and absence– repetitive difficulties influenced by the trauma embedded in our past. Thomas provides insight into how we can embrace and integrate our pain and our defense mechanisms, and how that is a more healing and effective way to create change than trying to get rid of them.

Thomas is joined by restorative justice facilitator and public speaker sujatha baliga. They discuss Restorative Justice – a term coined by Howard Zehr that represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about harm and wrongdoing. It calls us to eschew the extreme and ineffective punitiveness of the criminal justice system in favor of community-based processes that align with our interdependent nature. Sujatha explains how her methods were inspired by three groups – the Mennonites, the Navajo tribe, and the Buddhist Nalanda tradition. She reveals that her work is not only more effective in addressing the root causes of crime, and reducing repeated incidents of harm, but is also planting seeds for a radically more just future.

Author and negotiation expert William Ury joins Thomas for their third conversation in a three-part series. They discuss the deep feelings of humiliation that underlie most historic and ongoing conflicts, and how the antidote to that is the power derived from humility. William elaborates on the concept of the “third side” – the sum of all parts in a conflict from which we can observe and understand the whole. He explains that empathy is our most powerful tool in negotiation, as it enables us to understand our “opponents” and communicate with them effectively.

Please note: This episode was recorded during the first months of the war in Ukraine, and William and Thomas’ commentary is relevant to that time. Since then, circumstances may have changed.