Attunement: Connecting to the Flow of Life

Thomas Hübl: So today we want to look a little bit at what attunement is, and I want to start with maybe a little bit of a different take on life because when we look at life, sometimes it might look like as if you’re looking at kind of more or less fixed objects in a space. And also our body seems to be, oh, our body is kind of a body in this space, but everything we experience, including our body, is flow, is data flowing. Like when you feel your leg or your foot or when you feel how you’re eating or you feel your food, you are always in a way computing data flow, perception. And I want us to look at that a little bit. Everything you know about yourself is movement, and I feel my hand, I feel constant movement.

So the whole experience of my hand, my experience of this room, my experience of temperature, of anything basically, of conversation, is an experience of movement. So my entire perception of the world, including my thoughts that kind of interpret that experience, are movement. And today we want to look a little bit at the magic of working with that movement consciously in life, which we call attunement. Attunement is like I’m sure we all are kind of know how to ride a bike and let’s say you ride your bike along the beach and when you ride beside somebody and whenever you ride at the same speed as the other person, it’s easy to talk to each other. When you ride much faster or much slower than the other person, communication is harder and we all know that or you drive a car. So it’s lovely to play with flow or with movement while we are in movement.

There’s a beauty to driving faster, to driving slower, to be able to regulate the movement. And today we want to talk about something we do all the time, which is attuning, but often we don’t call it that way and maybe we don’t have practices to refine the way we attune to each other because when you’re interested in something, let’s say you hear about a new development or you are interested in a certain subject or you want to study, I don’t know, psychology, medicine or technology, computer science, you studied it because you have an internal resonance with an outer subject. So the world presents you something, you say, wow, that’s interesting. Or a certain sport is interesting because we have a resonance. So let’s talk a little bit about resonance. So when I communicate with you, what you tell me and what you send out while you’re telling me what you’re telling me is something that I can resonate with, not resonate with.

And I think we all know that trauma in a way collapses, resonance. So when there’s trauma in the room, it’s less likely that we are attuned to each other because our nervous systems cannot perform the attunement as we can do it in our open and receptive parts. So we said two things. We said there is movement, there’s resonance. And maybe the third thing is when there is trauma, there is a collapsed or distorted resonance. So we don’t feel life in a way as we do in the parts of ourselves that are connected where we feel ourselves and that’s why we can feel others. And so attunement starts basically with ourselves. I can be attuned to the flow within my own being, within my own self, within my body, in my emotions, with my thoughts, with my inspiration, with my soul, with spirit, with the divine. So there are different levels of attunement, but basically all of them work on the same principle, which means I am in a felt relationship with myself. Where I’m not in a felt relationship with myself, I need to think, overthink about myself.

So what I can’t feel in life or when I don’t feel you, I need to overthink you. Did he really mean this? What did he feel? Why did he say this? Or why did she say this? And why did she do that, is because I am not fully in touch with my sensing of you. And so in the art, what we call the art of transparent communication, which means like a communication technique that includes a lot of attunement capacities, we are saying communication or relating is a data flow because basically there are no relationships. There’s only relating and relating forms relationships. But relating is the constant data flow that’s going on or it’s the absence of relating is the absence of that data flow. So then we are in the same room, but the data between us is not flowing well and misunderstandings, conflicts, arguments, othering polarization are side effects of that impaired data flow. But in transparent communication, when we look at, okay, I have an experience of myself, a felt sense of myself, I feel the space in between us. So there’s an attunement to the space in between us because most of the people might think, oh, between us is only air, but actually between us is a lot of information.

And then when I feel you or when Robin speaks and I feel Robin, then feeling myself, this space in between us and Robin is actually my attunement practice. And since practicing attunement is actually a contemplative practice, it’s like an ongoing meditation and it can be very lively. It can be, it’s not always quiet and silent, but even when it’s very lively, we can be well attuned. So it’s a practice. Attunement basically works on two levels. It’s that I’m receptive. So as Robin spoke before, when Robin speaks, I’m receiving his words. What does it mean? I become space, I become a witness to Robin’s words. I receive Robin’s transmission when he speaks, his body transmission, his emotional transmission, his mental transmission, his inspiration when he speaks.

So all of that lands in me and that’s how I experience Robin. But at the same time as I’m space that receives Robin, I’m also attuned to Robin. I often say it’s like when you sit in a very noisy restaurant and you really want to hear what the other person’s saying. So you’re more single pointed with your senses to really receive and resonate with what the other person’s saying. And I believe attunement is a mix of becoming space and being very single pointed and present with what somebody is sharing. So it’s two seemingly contradicting qualities. And that’s exactly what meditation teaches us. Meditation teaches us to become spacious, to become quiet, to receive, to rest, to let go, to be space.

And at the same time, it teaches us single pointedness and the gentle concentration. It’s not the heart concentration, it’s a gentle fluid concentration. And that’s what relating is about, I believe. It’s both. It’s being able to receive and we all feel how it feels when we are defended or when somebody says something that we don’t agree with. And then we are already a bit tight and we are already thinking about the answer before the other person finish their words. So then I’m not receiving. Then I am kind of defended against what the person is saying. But receiving means openness, means being in resonance. And so that’s attunement on the personal dimension. Attunement is when you put your hand into a river and you follow exactly the flow of the water.

I’ll say this again. When there’s a river and you put your hand in the river and you follow the water at the speed of the river, you don’t feel any pressure. I believe that’s what The Tao Te Ching calls “Wu Wei.” Non-action. Non-action doesn’t mean that I don’t do anything, it means that I’m immersed in the river. And because when I move my hands slower than the water flow, I feel pressure on one side of my hand. When I push the water flow, I feel pressure on the other side. So not being attuned means pressure. And I think many of us know a certain kind of pressure in life, but pressure means that the river of life, the flow of life can’t really flow through us. Why? Because we are holding a certain amount of past in our bodies, in our emotions, in our minds, in our relationships. We are holding onto the past and not because we can do it better, because that’s personal, ancestral and collective trauma that we inherited when, or we experienced throughout our life. So holding on and carrying stagnations in the body is not a personal shortcoming, it’s an accumulation of overwhelming experiences throughout thousands of years. But another thing is also true that I believe we all are in our bodies really old. However young we are, our bodies carry the information of hundreds of thousands or millions of years of life.

So our bodies actually carry the concentrated liquid of life. And so where there’s flow in our body, when you sit down and you say, okay, when I sit in myself, where do I enjoy sitting in myself? Where do I feel flow through my body? Maybe I feel flow in my hands or in my legs or in my chest or I feel indifferent or in my belly. I feel flow throughout my body. And when I become a bit more quiet and a bit more spacious, either I feel that I’m stressed, but when I’m regulated, I feel flow.

I feel my body is tingling, flowing, streaming, and maybe there are other parts in my body where I feel stress or tension where I feel locked experience. Tension in the body is locked experience. And so for all of us, it’s most probably a mix of both. But the parts of me in my nervous system that are open and flowing, that’s what I use to feel you. Where my body is open, it’s millions of years of life flowing or being integrated. That’s the antenna that works. Imagine your nervous system has millions of fine antennas. And where we hold trauma or pain, these antennas are entangled and where we feel open and flowing, these antennas are open like small fibers. And so our nervous system has an amazing capacity to attune. And attunement doesn’t mean only to myself or to Robin in that sense or to somebody that I relate to. Attunement is a capacity I use when I run groups. I’m attuned to the field of a group. I’m tuning into the issues in our society. I feel community society, I can feel situations in my life. And because I tune in with those situations, it gives me kind of a GPS how to navigate these situations to tune in with projects.

Okay, this project is something that I want to invest in, this other one, I don’t. We have a sense when we feel and what we do when we feel is we use the coherence of our nervous system. In the eastern traditions we call this maybe chakras or energy centers or we call it more modern, like a coherent flow through our nervous system. But the more integrated and open is my nervous system, it’s an antenna, it’s an instrument. And so that combines my cognition, my thinking and my emotional experience and my physical sensing. So cognition and sensing is sense making.

And that’s what we also say is a feeling. When you feel that somebody’s authentic, you are attuned. It’s not just a cognitive process to say somebody’s authentic. It’s a felt experience plus cognition. So we all attune to life anyway because we operate a lot on resonance anyway. We just talk about attunement or resonance because the hurt parts of us can’t do it. In the hurt parts in my body, I don’t feel my body well. In the open parts of my body, I feel my body well. In the hurt parts of my emotional life, I can’t feel other people’s emotions well, but in the part when my emotions are integrated, I feel other people’s emotions. That’s why emotional intelligence is not writing a PhD about emotions. That’s not an emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to resonate with and directly feel the emotional state of another human being. That’s attunement.

I know somebody is scared because I feel that the person is scared now or I feel that the person is happy or sad or angry or ashamed, not because I read their body language. Because my emotional experience tells me that, moment to moment to moment to moment to moment. And that’s why in a world where I believe trauma is a pandemic function or a pandemic issue that we have in the world, that the fact that we live in sometimes more or less, these related environments where the disconnect in ourselves, between our cognition, our emotions and our bodies, we see this often around us so that it normalizes it so it becomes normalized. But that actually attunement is the main language. Attunement is the resonance that we have with people from around the world, from different cultures and with different cultural experiences. We need to tune in and we need to specifically tune in to different people in cultures. And it’s actually a moment to moment process. That’s its beauty. When we, a present life I believe is an attuned life. To be present means to be attuned.

And because when we talk about trauma, we say here and now is not good for us in an overwhelming situation. So not being present is not a mistake. It’s actually a function. When we learn to work with the intelligence of not being here, we can more and more be here because we don’t try to overpower ourselves to be present, but we actually integrate that which was too much into presence and that also gives us more and more connection to another level of attunement. We have spoken so far about, or I’ve spoken so far about worldly attunement, but the spiritual attunement, the whole spiritual work is basically learning to attune to maybe first our soul and then to the divine or to life as such. To feel the interdependence of life that everything actually is in resonance with everything and that we can tune in with any place around the world, with any person, with any circumstance because that information is kind of omnipresent. It’s all over.

And so in the spiritual dimension of attunement, we actually refine the worldly attunement that we spoke of. And even in relationships, we refine and refine and refine the way we feel each other. I feel you feeling me, is also the basic building block of relationships or relating. And so being in touch with our higher spiritual resources or with the potentiality of our life, the updates, the inspiration, the higher intelligence, the context that we are part of is a process of attunement. We can write a lot of philosophy about the soul, but only in the experience in the attunement to our soul we feel the quality of our soul, we feel the intelligence of our soul and we get access to higher information.

So there’s a whole dimension of spiritual work that is based on refined attunement. And that means as when I pursue a spiritual practice, I have kind of two dimensions. One is practice and practice is training. We all know everybody who train some sport so we know we can improve our skills through training. Everybody who is excellent in a certain professional discipline, we didn’t fall from the sky excellent. We had maybe gifts, and through our life journey and into an investment of energy and ongoing commitment, we actually refined our intelligence into excellence. And so I can refine myself through practice, but where I’m hurt or wounded or traumatized, I can’t refine myself because trauma is meant to hold.

And so for that part of myself, I need integration. I need to include again, what needed to be excluded in very painful moments. So the inclusion of what needed to be excluded. And so when we have both training and integration, integration is post-traumatic learning or is learning in general. So I integrate what I couldn’t digest and I practice and I refine my nervous system. And that’s true for attunement too. And we hear it also when music instruments are tuned, music sounds great and that’s our being. Our being, our spiritual practice is often to refine the attunement, refine the attunement so that the more we listen to the subtle dimension of life, life tells us all the time information.

But often we are too busy with parts of ourselves to listen to the richness of information that is there. So on the spiritual dimension, attunement is the refinement to listen to the subtle information that is more whispering. Higher inspiration is not screaming, usually. Higher inspiration comes to us in moments when we are either open to it or when we are very much engaged in something and we open up to something new to come or when we are in inspirational conversations or when we’re taking a walk in the park so that the more subtle dimension can touch us, reach us. And this [inaudible 00:26:45] said beautifully recently in a conversation. He said, the future is that which depends on you to become manifest.

The future is not tomorrow. The future is the part of life that wants to become manifest through us. It’s a beautiful description. And he also said, leadership, and I very much agree with this, leadership is being able to listen to the future that wants to be born through us. Leadership has nothing to do with power over. It means that we can listen to the future that wants to be born through us and everybody has a certain amount of future that wants to be born through us. And I think that’s also a beautiful part. How can I make space in myself through a contemplative practice? How can I regulate first my nervous system, become more spacious through an ongoing practice to be able to listen? And when we are able to listen inside, things will emerge. That’s the beauty of emergence. When there is space for emergence, something will emerge. And so attunement is actually a very holistic practice.

It means that we feel each other more when we relate to each other. It means that we can hold deeper spaces for each other. It means that I can clarify stuff in myself through attunement and not just through overthinking, but through feeling and cognition, which means sense making. I can clarify my own life when I go through difficult situations. I can feel others more in my relationships are becoming more nourishing. And also I nourish other people more when I am more present and more attuned. I can tune in with situations in my life. I can feel the potential of project situations and decision making. Attunement is a great tool for decision making and I think it’s, great attunement is the power that we have to listen to mother earth, to listen to nature, to listen to the ecosystem that we are part of. And often we might feel a bit disconnected from nature, a human on the planet versus a part of the planet.

That’s also a different sense of attunement. Either I’m on the planet running around on the planet or I’m part of the planet. My body is the planet. I’m attuned to the planet. I feel as an integral part of this world. So attunement is in a way a practice that helps us to slowly or quickly, however, it’s not in our hands, transcend the degrees of separation that I experience and enrich my life and I’ve become an enrichment in other people’s life. And then there is the dimension of spirit that the spiritual dimension is a subtle dimension. And so it needs me to listen to more subtle details in order to hear the music, the celestial music that informs me.

And maybe finally, and then I hand it back to you, Robin, that when we, or two more things. For me, the soul is a river and we are swimming in that river anyway. The soul is that which creates the movement in our life. So we all are in movement and since we’re alive, a lot of stuff is moving in us, through us, and feeling in a flow. Whenever we had flow moments or creative moments, we feel how it feels when life channels itself through us. That we are not separate from life trying to make something happen. We are swimming in the river, adding to the movement through our swimming, but we are already in a movement. And when we look back, they’re in a movement for thousands of generations.

The fact that we are here means thousands of generations passed the spark of life on. So we are in a movement that is, it’s a big river. And so when we are, the soul is a movement and we’re in a way swimming in that movement and we are being informed. And that’s a beautiful way. We are being informed. So we are becoming a form. Information is in forming life. Information means life is coming into a form. And I think the beauty of attunement is that we can listen, that we can awaken in the process. We can make the process of information conscious.

The more consciously I participate in coming into a form, that means that I’m attuned to the future, to the present moment and to everything that led up until today. And that means in the Jewish prayer, God is, was and will be. So that all of it is part of presence. And that’s why I believe attunement is an amazing practice, especially since most probably when we are listening to this now, we are all living in culture, in society, living in what I call the marketplace of life. And attunement is an incredible opportunity to use every moment of our life as a spiritual practice.