EPISODE 98

October 22, 2024

Ancestral Healing

Thomas discusses the importance of ancestral healing and explores how to develop a felt sense of connection with our ancestors. Connection is essential to healing, and connecting with both the wisdom and the unintegrated traumas of our ancestors helps us to be more present and grounded in our own lives, and accelerates our personal and collective healing.

Our ancestors have handed us a wealth of resources, and also a whole lot of unfinished business. Thomas explores how we can connect to the sacred spark of life that we’ve inherited, and feel into frozen areas of wounding and trauma so that we can heal them before they’re passed on to our descendants.

He explains how developing an ancestral awareness not only helps us to integrate the trauma that our ancestors could not, but also connects us more deeply with Mother Earth, allows us to be better stewards of our biosphere, and creates a healthier world for future generations to inhabit.

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Through our ancestry, we reconnect to a very precious awareness of the pulse of mother Earth.”

- Thomas Hübl

Guest Information

Thomas Hübl

Thomas Hübl is a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator whose work integrates the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science. Since the early 2000s, he has been facilitating large-scale events and courses that focus on meditation and mindfulness-based awareness practices, as well as the healing and integration of trauma.

His non-profit organization, The Pocket Project, works to support the healing of collective trauma throughout the world. He is the author of the book Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds.

His new book Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World is available now wherever books are sold. Visit attunedbook.com for links to order it online.

For more information, visit thomashuebl.com

Notes & Resources

Key points from this episode include:

  • The need to process all of the data transmitted by our ancestors, including resilience, resources, and unintegrated trauma
  • How integrating the past helps us move away from hyper-individualization and toward an interconnected relationship with nature
  • Understanding awareness as a resource-building function that helps us connect to our ancestors
  • How we can learn to be individually, ancestrally, and collectively grounded

Episode Transcript

Thomas Hübl: Why are we looking into ancestral healing? Why is that important? I can say on the one hand it’s important because we all have a context. And in the modern of postmodern time, especially in more western oriented cultures, we might have lost a bit the importance and the connection to our ancestral lineages. But when we look at it closer than we can see, wow,

My ancestry is also my root system. My ancestry is not just the past. The lives of my ancestors are also encoding or living in me today because I’m a culmination of many, many lifetimes that lead to the fact that we can have this kind of conversations, that we can build this kind of societies, that we can hold, this kind of scientific complexity, that we can do so many things that many, many people developed over thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And that’s why every one of us has a context. And the context is not just intellectually graspable. It’s something that we can learn either. We naturally feel like in also many indigenous wisdom traditions, ancestry is often a part of daily life and it’s part of the subtle perception, the sensing capacity that we have. And so today we want to on the one end, say yes, intellectually we all know of course that we have a context and we have ancestors. But when we want to work on the ancestral healing, healing is an embodied kind of art. Healing works through our bodies, healing works through increasing our awareness. Healing works through being able to connect to, for example, traumatizations in our own biography, in our parents, grandparents, great grandparents biography, and to create a felt connection. And that’s why I love the image of when our ancestors are able to look at each other. So when we can look at our parents, when our parents can look at their parents and looking is not just looking is when

We can see each other and seeing is clarity and seeing is clarity is

Presence. So when the relationships are healthy and when the relationships are open, then there is a transgenerational data flow that is open. When there was a lot of trauma or the hurt relations people turned away from each other, then the data connection is reduced, limited shut down, and the ancestral data flow is compromised. And one could say, yes, that just happened in the past. Now I’m here, I’m living my life and it’s fine. I would say, yes, it’s true. We are here and we’re living our life now. But that ancestral compromised relationship also has an effect in us, also has an effect in our bodies, also has an effect in our lives.

And so today, during this exploration today, we want to look at, when we look at the individualization, especially in our western culture, then the individual has a lot of attention and there’s a lot of focus on the individual. And often freedom is seen how an individual can decide. But the question is what am I free of when I’m deciding? And is that decision making? Is the choice that we have a conscious choice or is it driven by other factors that I think my choices are free of, but they’re actually deeply influenced by our unintegrated past. And so opening that hyper individualized focus up saying, okay, we reopen ourselves to a wider context that we are part of also means that as human beings we have deep roots and we are part of the planet, we are part of nature. In that separate sense of self, we might actually be disrespectful to nature. Why? Because the feedback loops and the information flow is not that great. So I need moral rules versus sensing and feeling and sensing and feeling and compassion creates care, creates attunement, creates being in tune with the environments that I’m part of. And so that creates freedom because that creates inclusion of information in our choices.

And the other part is so opening up the hyper-individualized lens or the separate sense to a more breathing open awareness hub that every one of us is a hub of awareness where a lot of data flows come together. And that is how we of course individually live our lives. But that’s not separate from collective dimension, ancestral and collective dimension. That’s why also in our work we call this the IAC fluidity, the individual ancestral and collective either fluidity, data flow or traumatization, which means rigidity or frozen data flow. And where data is not flowing, we can’t feel and sense. So our sense-making is compromised and our aliveness, our resonance capacity is reduced.

So that’s why individual healing, individual therapy, individual trauma work is of course very important, but that’s embedded in bigger nested systems that are equally important for that individual work. And sometimes we see that our individual work progresses when we include a wider radius of information to help unstuck the pipes that lead to those individual issues, patterns, behaviors, difficulties, and so on. And so today we want to focus on a part on the ancestral part, something individual, ancestral and collective ification. Because every trauma work is not just dealing with the past, is actually creating a relationship to the part of life that is unintegrated not integrated yet. And integrating past means we increase presence and we increase the richness and the abundance in the present moment. Trauma creates a sense of scarcity. Healing trauma creates post-traumatic learning. So the one who integrates something grows, the perspective grows more information can be included, it’s way more integrated and less separate. So that’s how we also kind of liquefy a sense of separation into a sense of resonance, interconnectedness, openness, data flow. And when we look back, we are not looking back literally, but let’s, when we look at our ancestors and we see three elements that we want to focus on today, also in the practical part after which we will go into a deeper contemplation in a journey. And then we have some reflection time for everybody to see what we find during that journey.

And so when I look at my ancestral root system, what do I see? What do I feel? I feel in our central channel that’s true for our body, but it’s also true for our ancestors. We see conception after conception, after conception of the conception. There’s life. The central channel is the transmission of the sacredness of life. That’s life wanting to live for millions and millions of years it affected. We are here means somehow life made it until today. So when all of us look into our ancestral root connection, we see an unbroken line of life. There’s a sacred stream that’s being passed on every generation. And so there is that the essential part of living life, the spark of life, and around that spark of life is information millions of years worth of information.

So there’s the sacred spark of life and that information that creates the composition or the design of our reality. And that information has two types of information. One stream is the integrated part of life that our ancestors handed over to us. Integration means flow. These are all the parts in our lives that are flowing anyway, so they’re streaming through us. Organs, emotions, thoughts, parts of our lives. Flow means that’s integrated living or integrated life. So the resources of our ancestors, the resilience, the lessons learned, the trauma that we had and was integrated over many generations, that’s integrated life. Why does our body have a self-healing mechanism? Because thousands of generations got hurt and healed, got hurt and healed, got hurt and healed. And that excellence is alive in our body when our body heals. It’s a concentrated liquid. So we could say in a separate version of what the world, we could say I’m here and that’s me, that’s my personal property.

Or we could say, yes, we are here, but we are here as a whole orchestra of lives that led up to this moment and this intelligence and also all the functions in our bodies, emotions, minds, societies that we developed over that period of time. So there’s the integrated part of life that we often call resilience, strength, resources that life handed over to us. And then there is the entire unfinished business. There’s the trauma history or the unintegrated life that our ancestors also handed over to us. So we have integrated life. So we have the central channel, sacredness of life, we have integrated life and we have unintegrated life. Unintegrated life is the past, integrated life is presence.

And today we want to open a bit of space to tune in with all of that, that there is the sacredness, the central channel, also the central, the energy that runs through our central channel. Now in our central nervous system, the fact that we are alive, being alive, living the spark of life, and then the information that’s integrated the information, most of the time integrated life won’t call our attention. It’s flowing through us. It’s anyway happening. What calls our attention is the emergence that happens through integrated life where we become, where we are creative, where we develop new things, where we are innovative and unintegrated life shows up in our lives as issues, triggers, difficulties, challenges, all kinds of stuff. And that’s true individually of course, but that’s true collectively. The war at the moment in Europe is a result of a lot of unintegrated energy of the second world war, the first World war, many things, the Cold War, a lot of unintegrated information that creates effects.

But today we want to stay more with our individual and ancestral integration or non integration and see that our individual symptoms of course arise often out of attachment wounds, biographical traumatizations. But that’s only one set of information. The biggest fear around that is the ancestral information. Primes the first one, the primes, the individual biographical information affected. My parents carried a certain amount of trauma, my grandparents carried a certain amount of trauma. And of course intelligence layed the foundation for my attachment process. So it’s a bigger system and it’s beautiful to think of that not as separate but as a fluid, systemic data flow. And the more we create a society and communities and capabilities individually to be aware of that larger map, the more resourced we’re going to be. Awareness is a resource building function. If I’m aware of my individual life, that’s a certain amount. If I’m aware of a certain compartment of my individual life, then I grow it. I become more resourced if I become aware of my ancestral life. And awareness means not just knowing, sensing. So knowing and sensing makes sense, making suddenly things make sense.

Why? Because I can think, feel them, think, feel is one function and I can feel that through my body and I can create a felt relationship to my ancestors. And sometimes that’s hard at the beginning because I don’t feel a felt relationships or ship to certain ancestors. And so I want to take us today onto a bit of a contemplative journey to tune in with it, to fill into that, to get some experience and then write some of the insights down and contemplate. And that we together as a community open up the map of our ancestral exploration.

And again, we want to also see that the body, our body is a very important tool. It’s a very important resonance tool. And sometimes when we do this kind of work, like with any individual issue too, when we connect to our inner experience and we tune in with certain aspects of our personal life or ancestral life, sometimes we do feel and sometimes we feel pleasant things, they’re more connected to flow and resource and integration. Sometimes we do feel tension, stress, painful emotions, but we do feel, but for our exploration today, it’ll also be important that I think the excellence of doing process work is coming with an awareness and the capacity to be with that which we can’t feel.

Because when I can’t feel something, it’s not that I’m not able to, it means that not feeling in that place is more important than feeling that place in myself. And that’s why often we can get stuck in our inner exploration because we think when there is not feeling, I need to effort more to feel something. And what I’m saying is no. When I touch into a place in myself where I can’t feel myself, I want to create some respect for the overwhelm that I’m touching, absence is overwhelm.

So if it doesn’t make sense to effort more because then I just overwhelm myself more, it’s not going to lead to anything meaningful. It just creates more effort and stress. But saying, oh yeah, I feel that. I don’t feel, I’m aware. It’s a conscious process now because I became aware of that fact and because it’s conscious, I can consciously be with myself in an overwhelmed place. And that’s a skillful attention to absenting, also to dissociation that I respect the fact that I was overwhelmed and I needed to shut that down when I was three, when I was 10, when I was whatever. And that kind of compassionate versus I’m not able to do it. I’m doing it wrong. I cannot do it. I don’t know how to do it. All these things are not the point. The point is only I’m touching a part of myself that I needed to reduce because something was too much.

And I, in the moment, I’m aware of it, I say yes now I consciously am with myself in a place where I don’t feel because I overwhelmed. And the reason why I’m saying that, because for some of us, when we tune in with our ancestors, it’ll be easy to feel into our parents, grandparents, great grandparents. But for some of us, when we try to do it, we feel first nothing. And that nothing is not a mistake, that nothing is part of the process. And that’s why making a space for I don’t feel much instead of, as I said, efforting more or thinking I’m doing it wrong, making a space and say yes, my first sense that I get is that I don’t sense something, I don’t feel something. And that’s the beginning because that’s where we often exit into thinking. That’s where I come back.

And then I start thinking about the process. And of course then I am, I can’t feel much because I followed the unconscious exit. And so if that happened throughout our journey, that’s totally fine because that’s part of the process. Sometimes we needed to shut things down because that was better for us than to stay in the discomfort of whatever that content was. And that we developed a loving, compassionate relationship to that too. And often by making a space for overwhelm, we provide the attention that was missing. And then things open up in their own way and their own pace often anyway. But that’s just an important factor for our work. And I believe that opening our awareness, we will do it. We will look into the, as I said, the sacred flow of life and then we will move to the resources and then we will move to potential traumatization.

Because the fact is we are alive. Many of our ancestors are not alive anymore, most probably, or maybe. So that means that we are the ones that are living, that still have the power to expand our awareness, to include the fractures and fragmentations in our ancestry. And that brings healing awareness into those places because they’re not living separate from us. They’re maybe different in time and space, but they’re still living in us. And I believe that every one of us has an individual ancestral and collective nervous system. When I feel myself as an individual, I use a certain part of my nervous system. When I tune in with my ancestors, my ancestry, I change a bit parts in my nervous system that I use. And when I tune in with the collective field, then I use my collective nervous system. And so in all three, it’s like different parts of our different parts for drawing. And we use different parts for mathematical equations and different parts for emotions. And so also the expansion of consciousness uses different parts. And so we will do it slowly that there’s enough time to tune in and follow. And afterwards you can write down your explorations and maybe make some new connections. Well, I think that’s it. I think we will start,

And I maybe one more thing. I think especially in our time when we often see that hyper individualized, so capitalism driven self that without the context of our ancestors and our roots, we often feel a bit disconnected from the pulse of our planet. But we are all the planet, we’re not on the planet like aliens running around on the planet. We are, we arose and are rising out of the planet, the substance of our bodies, the substance of the planet, the water, the carbon, the minerals, the metals. And I believe we through our ancestry, we reconnect to a very precious awareness of the pulse of mother Earth. Same as there’s the spiritual power that resources us and runs through us. It’s also that we can feel how the planet is pulsing and in a way through that pulse communicating. And that helps us to be in sync and that helps us to restore feedback loops in the biosphere. And that helps us to find another relationship and another relationship to the biosphere that we know is endangered.

And that’s why ancestral healing is important for our individual lives, obviously because it can heal parts in our individual lives, but it’s also important to activate that long line of groundedness, same as there is an individual groundedness grounded individually in my body, but I’m deeper grounded in my body when I am ancestrally grounded and I’m even deeper grounded when I’m collectively grounded. So grounding is not just a personal thing. Grounding means I am sitting and resting in the deep wisdom of life as this ancientness is wise. And wisdom is the amount of life that I can include in the way I live. So being grounded in the ancientness of life makes us wise.

And so that ancestral healing, of course, is also repairing feedback loops and connecting us deeper to the biosphere that nourishes us that we are part of. are nature, we are not going into nature when we go into the forest. We are part of that nature when we walk through the forest or through the landscape. So we are an integral part of life. And I believe ancestral healing work makes it from an intellectual idea, like a felt sense, same as the cultural wounding, the ancest, our ancestors, that we’re fighting each other, that we’re hurting each other. We are the ones that can restore it today and find another way of relationships in our cultural field.