Thomas Hübl: When we look at childhood, childhood is like a party. And if it’s a good party, it’s pleasant to stay. If it’s a bad party, it’s unpleasant to stay. And if it’s a good party, it means that I grow up in an ecosystem where relational regulation is possible. If relational regulation is possible, I can bring my interior experience into the relationship and learn to regulate, of course my inner space. But my inner space is regulated within a relational regulation. So I can negotiate reality here in a fluid way, which I bring my inner experience, my intelligence, my agency into the space.
If that’s not possible, we all learn to hyper-regulate to over-regulate, either to shut down or to amplify parts of our inner experience. And since we got very trained at that, because it’s for many years because we couldn’t leave the party, it fixates itself as a thing. And even if we go out of that system, it’s like we are carrying that kind of inner formation into other spaces and we reproduce the ecosystemic impact. Because every defense mechanism inner process that is a compensation to our authentic self is always ecosystemically relevant and it’s ecosystemically impactful. So our patterns co-create something else again.
And when we look at boundaries, boundaries are a fluid negotiation. It’s like a full energy field and the full energy field can feel and meet another energy field. So boundaries are a dance, not a wall. And that’s why when we say, oh, boundaries and I don’t want to close somebody out, closing somebody out is not what yes and no is about. But often we might have the experience. If I say no, it’s like closing somebody out. These are two different processes, but they might appear to some of us as the same.
And that’s very important because—So that’s one thing. So that for me, yes and no doesn’t have the same optionality that yes and no… So majority, if every function in me goes into dependence. So I’m dependent at first I develop my autonomy, I become more independent, and then interdependent. Interdependence means I have a choice, I can say yes or no freely. So I can say yes or no in relationship. But for some of us, no, seems like a bit of a shutdown in the relationship that comes with the pain. But the pain is not connected to yes or no, the pain is connected to my past. So that’s one option.
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And then it seems like for some of us, it was much easier because that was harder… It’s easier to go to a spiritual part of myself and then spiritual teachings teach me about unity, teach me about interconnectedness of everything. But that might be a trap because actually my issue isn’t saying yes and no, it’s a deeply embodied function, but I’m trying to compensate on it through my spiritual practice. And so I will go out instead of in because in is more difficult. And then now a spiritual practice is to go in. If in is difficult, I need to open it in. And then it looks like that’s not my spiritual practice, but in that case, it is deeply my spiritual practice.
That’s also what we’re going to discuss today is seen from—Because non-duality is not different than duality. The non-dual state is not another state, that’s very important. I’m not going from a dual state into a non-dual state. The non-dual state contains duality, it’s not other. And that’s why for the mystical science, science is not other. There’s nothing other. It’s part of life. Everything is part of life. And so embodying myself seems like at the beginning might seem like, oh, that’s a more psychotherapeutic process to learn that and to deal with my attachment trauma or my wounding within my family system. And boundaries are, oh, I need to be done with that and that opposes a little bit my spiritual practice. But seen from the mystical science, me dealing with my boundaries is my spiritual practice because that’s where my energy is in a stagnation. That’s where my energy can flow. That’s where creation cannot manifest itself properly through me.
And so the light of consciousness that flows through us gets stuck in a certain place. And then we have tension, and then we have fears, and then we have issues in the interpersonal dimension. And then it’s easier to go out versus to go in. That’s why when people say, oh, it’s so much easier to be with conscious people than with unconscious people, that’s exactly the issue of embodiment. That’s the shadow side of spiritual communities. So then the embodiment, I’m not going in fully into the embodiment because in our world there are painful situations, and spirituality is not the stay clean, which means stay out, but to bring the light in.
And so for us to practice boundaries is the beginning to develop fluidity and to bring in more conscious awareness into the moments when it seems harder for me. But to open that up and to open that up with the help sometimes of other people communities is important because that gives me more fluidity in the embodiment. And my body is the vessel and the light is the energy, and I need both for us to manifest our spiritual potential in the world, that changes the world, that has an impact in the world is where spiritual practice and the understanding of trauma and karma come together.
And so opening the parts in us that feel more difficult for us is actually a deeply devotional practice. And it’s step by step. We are not in a hurry. The hurry is already part of the trauma symptom. We are not in a hurry to get there. We are walking in an appropriate way. As much as our system can take it, we go deeper. And that’s not, oh, I need to be done with this in order to get somewhere. No, it’s like I’m integrating and transcending the parts that I’ve got through my life and my lifetime and the family system, where I was born, that this is my challenge. And if the more I own it as my spiritual journey, the more I will devote myself to it. And I see it’s not the obstacle when it’s harder for me to set boundaries. This is not an obstacle, this is the challenge through which I mature my soul. This is the challenge that helps me to grow. And the more I grow, as we said in the course earlier, everything we integrate becomes a psychoactive remedy.
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So if I integrate saying yes and no clearly and see that yes and no is both in relationship, even if it causes sometimes disappointment and all kinds of things, then that’s part of being in relationship. Sometimes we need to stay related to disappointment, but that’s being in relationship with the world. It’s not always going to be harmonious and nice. But that’s the power of staying… It’s not protected because that shuts people out. I say something, but I need to say it in a protected way. Or, I can stay related and I feel you while I’m saying yes or no or while I’m with my healthy boundaries. And that gives me freedom in relation, not freedom out of relation. I don’t need to go out of the relation to be free. I can be free in the relationship.
Boundaries are actually a very important negotiation moment to moment to moment with life. And so when we needed to hyper-regulate our inner world that was needed in my families, that’s my family system, that’s not a problem. That was the highest intelligence in the given ecosystem. And the more I honor that, I’ll step by step bring that back from hyper-regulating my inner world into regulating myself in relationship. That’s maturity. So then there’s regulation inside and there’s regulation in relationship, and that’s a more fluid way of moving in the world and that gives me more freedom, more freedom to say yes and no, to have a choice. Otherwise, I feel compelled to or feel codependent in certain relationships.
So that’s an important question and its also, it’s not, oh, I have to deal with boundaries. It’s like, yes, I’m learning something important. And in everything that we learned, it seems like developmental, there is a spiritual principle that is maturing in us too. It’s never just one or the other. It’s always a continuum. The continuum of spirit into manifestation. That’s how energy becomes substance through us. That’s how agency becomes manifest as something in the world. That’s how life gets created through us, everybody who is alive, and impacts the world of this generations, this age.
There’s a beauty to that process, and I think as we said already often that what seems like the difficulties, challenges that we meet, if I deal with an issue, it’s not that without that it would be better. It’s not an obstacle, it’s a path. It’s not a shortcoming, it’s me discovering part of my intelligence that I open up into something new and it has its pacing. It’s important that we are not in a hurry, trauma is in a hurry. That’s very important. We are not in a hurry to heal. Healing, we give our best and we get the support that we need and of course we want to heal certain things, but the better version is not without it. The better version is me consciously walking the path. There is power in that.
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H2 Healing Fields
One of the trauma symptoms I believe, is that we are more in love with our ideal version, how we want to be than that we can be here where we are. Like Laozi in the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching says, “A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath our feet.” It doesn’t start 10 feet ahead of us, it starts underneath our feet. I cannot start walking three or 10 meters in front of me. I always start to walk where I am. But as we said, trauma says here in space and time, life is not good for me. In adverse situations, in violent situations, in abusive situations, here in the body, in coherent time space, is not good. So not here, not now is the better option. And I think the deeper we see the intelligence in that principle and we become aware of how much of our world is built on not here, not now, how many agreements in society have been built or not here, not now? And how many attempts for self-development are more with who I’m becoming than with the awareness of who I am?
And so slowly creating, and this leads us to fields, healing fields, like fields have different… It’s like when more of us create intersubjectivity, so when we create spaces together, the space between us will have a certain quality. But we also need to know that trauma is stored in the memory of places. So if traumatic events happen, or we see this in places where there were wars and there are many people died in different places, when you go there, you can feel it. So the collective memory body has a memory of it. So some places are naturally more open because they’re more integrated, some places are more stuck. And stuck is not good or bad.
Stuck means energy is being held in the system, in the living system. And so when we release energy that’s being held in systems, systems open up and they get more integrated, they become more vital. It feels lighter, it feels more open, it feels more flowing. And then when we want to create healing spaces, we need to bring some qualities that we embody. So whatever we embody, and it is not just an idea, it can hold an idea about healing, that doesn’t help me to create the strong field, but whatever is embodied, creates a field, creates an ecosystemic atmosphere. And if we create collective healing containers, they become, it’s not just the people, it’s also the atmosphere between people, the energy field, the information field between people that becomes an asset. And when new people come into that field, they can benefit from that intelligence.
And I think we all felt this. And when we go to places where, for example, there’s a strong spiritual practice, when you go into certain monasteries with a certain meditation practice, you can feel the depth of meditation. You go there, you sit and it’s quiet. It’s a field. In certain places where a lot of deep practice happen, just going there is so supportive because the field accumulated that depth.
And so if you want to create healing communities, or what I often speak about, if you want to create more mainstream holding spaces for collective trauma integration or the integration of the legacies, like the unintegrated aspect of cultures, then the healing field, what we create is very important. And the qualities that we charge that field with become manifest between us. And then sometimes people leave and new people come, but the new people that come can benefit from what has been cultivated and created. So practice creates energy fields, and these energy fields create a certain power. Of course, if you stop practicing, then slowly this power will also subside after some time, but it has an afterglow. And in some sacred places, we can feel that afterglow. And so that’s very powerful.
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H2 Specificity
That leads us to the last question about specificity. So to remind us relationship, one person, another person, a trauma that happened at a certain time or over a period of time is specific and is encoded in the nervous system. When let’s say a therapist or a coach feels that place more specifically, it’s a specific relation. And the ancestors, the grandparents went through wars or traumatic situations. So there is a specific location that encoded trauma, and we can adjust our ancestral nervous system to feel that. And then we create specific connection. And that is more clear.
But specificity, I believe is love because if it’s hard for me to feel ancestors, then I cannot be specifically attuned. Then ancestors are a bit blurry, which is okay because it’s a practice. And it’s also not that everybody learns this in school. So we need to practice. Like when we’re the first time ride a bike, it’s also most powerful. Most of the people not that easy. But then we manage. And the same is here, when we begin to explore our ancestral nervous system and open it up, we get more access to our own information. And then it begins to become a relational capacity, relational sensitivity. And so that’s easier to, because it’s more specific already, it’s about the persons about their ancestors, the collective seems like big, but the collective is only big when the cup is small.
That’s why when we say collective, it looks like big. But when we attune to the collective through our collective nervous system, through our collective sensing, and if we for example, come together as groups, so every person has a cup, but thousand people are a big cup together. So as groups, when we attune to a certain cultural past, it’s like an archeological layer, like a dictatorship in a country over a period of 30 years or a genocide that happened over the period of a few months in the country. That is a specific, let’s say that happened 30 years ago, that’s a specific information field that we can tune in with. The more attuned we are, the less general it is, but the more specific it becomes. Attunement creates specificity and attunement creates more intimacy with the information that we want to bring back into conscious awareness.
And if we are not well-attuned, so then we are thinking about the past. But if I think about the past, I’m partly separate from it. I can’t fully feel an experience it. So I’m thinking about that past, the dictatorship in the country, but I’m not connected to the pain that it created for tens of thousands of people. When we begin to be more attuned, we get more access to the suppressed data that disowned, dissociated, fragmented history that resides in the collective unconscious. And that attention helps us to surface that and to induce slowly an integration process so that fragmented data can integrate itself as post-traumatic learning. And of course that sounds now simpler than it is, but that’s a bit the principle behind it. And so it’s a mix between building the right architecture, like collectives that deal with collective archeology and attunement, practicing attunement so that things can surface through us in a more specific way.
