Thomas Hübl: Hello, and welcome back to the Collective Trauma Summit 2022. My name is Thomas: Hübl. And I have the big honor, and the pleasure, and the great interest in talking to Christiana: Figueres. Christiana:, a warm welcome to you. I’m so happy you joined us.
Christiana Figueres: Thank you, Thomas:. I’m actually quite interested in our conversation. This is the first time that I’m actually going to speak about many things that I have been thinking about, but you know what we do, we think in silence, and then when we speak it, things actually sometimes crystallize. So I’m very excited about our conversation.
Thomas: No, that’s amazing. That’s the same here. I’m always interested in everybody that does meaningful or impactful work in the world, like what’s the internal composition. So for some of us, that’s a very strong calling and that’s simply just unfolding in life. And for others, there’s a calling maybe, and then there are significant events in our life that kind of put us on our track. And I’m curious, how is it with you? How did you become passionate and also motivated enough to do all the things that you did in your life so far and will be doing? What’s the composition for you?
Christiana: I came to climate change, motivated by injustice. Motivated by the fact that what we have done in the past is going to be of such huge consequence, if not existential threat, to those who come after us. And I just think that is the ultimate injustice because we are basically, to a large extent, holding the future in our hands, and most often, not acting accordingly. And furthermore, the other level of the injustice is that those who have been least responsible for having caused climate change are those who are already most affected, and especially those who will be most affected in the future. And you can think about that as generational injustice, or you can think about it as socioeconomic injustice, or you can think about it as a global-north global-south injustice, or a gender injustice. It presents itself in many different ways, but fundamentally, what climate change is, especially unaddressed climate change, it is, I think, the mother of all injustices. And that is what brought me to climate change.
Conversely, I would say that the challenge that is in front of us is the mother of all opportunities. And that is where I actually get very excited. Other than being passionate about justice, I’m also very excited about understanding that climate change is our greatest learning opportunity. It is the greatest learning opportunity, obviously, not just for technologies that are coming into the market, and financial instruments, and all of that, but more than that, and deeper than that, it is the greatest opportunity for us as human beings to step up to our higher selves. And that’s the piece that I just find so exciting and so enticing.
Thomas: That sounds amazing. So I totally agree on the second part also, and the first part that you said. I want to come back to that for a moment. The largest collective trauma fields, if you mention colonialism, gender violence, if you mention racism, inequality in the world, like the north south. And since this is a collective trauma summit, but it’s an interdisciplinary discourse or discussion of how many, many viewpoints contribute to our understanding of systemic traumatization. Because, let’s say, in my understanding, that’s why I’m so passionate about collective trauma, is that often we see like a lot of sand in the engine, delayed responses, it looks like denial. But basically, when we look at it deeper, is there are many trauma symptoms, because trauma is like permafrost. It’s kind of frozen, or it’s very activated, but it doesn’t get informed. Trauma doesn’t lead to care, or motivation, or it doesn’t lead to many things that our natural, healthy parts would contribute to, or feedback loops would be open.
So in your work, now when we zoom in a little bit and we take a systemic traumatization into account with so many of the things you said before, how do you encounter, how do you look at that as a factor in the climate conversation, first of all? And secondly, maybe how did you in your own work encounter these kind of unmovable ice walls that we often bump against? So maybe you can speak a bit to that.
Christiana: If you take a broad definition, which I think is most helpful because it allows for the examination of the different aspects, it allows for a kaleidoscopic examination of trauma. So if you take a very broad definition of collective trauma, then I would say that, in climate change, in the field of climate change, either the understanding of where we are in climate change, or the challenge of what to do about climate change, which, for me, is just one and the same because they’re organically so linked. I would say that I could identify at least three different aspects of collective trauma. One is how my generation, and everyone prior to me, ancestrally, we have been traumatized into set behaviors. And the result of that is that we have collectively and historically denied that we are having the negative impact that science is telling us that we have had because we have forced ourselves, or we have reduced ourselves, to extractive behaviors in all different levels that have produced the damage that we have done.
And we continue in that behavior because we’re already traumatized into that behavior, in full denial of the fact that it is having the effects that it is. We also are now, because of science that is beginning to peel back the layers of the onion on those set behaviors, we’re also now beginning to be traumatized by the damage that we have done. And I would say that is characteristic of those in my generation, plus maybe one or two generations after me. Those of us who have realized, all of a sudden, because from a human evolution point of view, it’s basically happened in one second, over one or two generations, we basically just realized the damage that we have done, especially over the past 100 years. And so now we find ourselves completely traumatized by the reality of that damage. And many people react to that by then denying that we have any responsibility in having caused that damage.
And the third piece that is the one that actually worries me the most, Thomas:, is what I call pre-traumatic syndrome. And that is, to a large extent, no longer my generation or one generation next, but rather those who are, today, let’s say, anywhere between 10 or 15, because you already have 10 year old climate leaders, which I think is just so amazing. But let’s say people who are anywhere between 10 and 25, or even 30 years old. It’s not that they are the only ones that are suffering this, but there is an outsized concentration of what I call pre-traumatic syndrome in those young people. And what characterizes pre-traumatic syndrome is that they are apprised of the science. They have fully understood, not just the diagnosis that science has done of the damage that we have incurred, but even more dangerously, they have taken the projections of science, the modeling of science into the future, and assumed that those are immovable. Assumed that it is now completely unavoidable for the human race to be doomed.
That is what I call pre-traumatic syndrome because they’re already living today in a trauma that we might, but not necessarily have to, experience in the future. And some of the evidence of pre-traumatic syndrome is, for example, young people who have decided they don’t want to have children because they don’t want to bring the children into that kind of suffering. And that is the trauma that is most concerning to me, Thomas, because it is seriously affecting mental health of young people, some elders also, but are more concerned about mental health of young people because they’re too young to be under this pressure. And it is affecting decisions that they’re making about their own lives, and about those around them. So that is the piece, that’s not the only, but it is the piece that, for me, holds most concern.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s amazing. It’s a great thought. And it’s a great understanding of what we are growing into at the moment, and how a very determined sense of knowing how it’s going to look like can put us also into a mental framework that predetermines the outcome. That’s very interesting. I would love to circle back to that in a minute because I think that’s also, with stubborn optimism, I think that’s a great pair to talk more about.
But before we go there, I’m curious, because you moved in the climate change world, you moved a lot and you also moved a lot, and you moved a lot around in this world. You had lots of conversations, negotiations. You saw the stagnation of it, and you also saw certain openings. And I’m curious, how deeply is what we two are talking about at the moment, so the trauma and systemic traumatization, plays a role in the root cause of climate change, plays a role in the response to climate change, and plays a role of how we see ourselves in the future? So you spoke to three elements that I think all very, very important, but how much is that, in the mainstream of the climate conversation, that understanding taking place, and that maybe addressing trauma needs something else than climate activism? Because you have a lot of experience. You know how much that is already mainstream understanding, or not. So maybe you can speak a little to that.
Christiana: Because the physical evidence of climate change is, by now, so easy and so painful to see, I don’t mean easy that it’s not painful, I just mean it’s very evident. So because it is so evident, because we already see the human suffering, in addition to infrastructure damage, and biodiversity disappearance, but we also see that physical evidence of climate change. And so it is very natural that those of us who work on climate change will focus on what is evidential from a physical point of view. We focus on the impacts of drought. We focus on the impacts of floods, or forest fires. The Australian fires are a very good example, where they were not caused by climate change, but they were exacerbated by climate change. And then you have these horrendous numbers that come out of millions, and millions, and millions of animals that were burned to death, and the acreage of the forest that was burned.
And so we focus on that because it’s so easily painful to see that destruction and to measure it with our physical metrics. And it takes a little bit more of a pause to be able to both ingest the pain and the suffering of the destruction that is physically available to us and physically present. But also, not to deny that, but also, as I said before, take one level of the onion off and look underneath to understand, why is this happening? Yes, it’s because of concentrations of greenhouse gasses. Fine. What else is there? What else? What is the human factor that has allowed us to this situation without having addressed climate change for decades? Because we’ve known about this for decades. So what is stopping us?
Christiana: It’s not necessarily just the absence of the technologies. It’s not just the absence of the financial instruments. It’s basically what is happening up here and here, what we think we are capable of and what we feel we are capable of. And above all, it’s about aligning mind and heart to understand that we humans are actually very, very powerful agents. And we have seen the power of our agency in destruction, and we ought to be moving toward evidencing the power of our agency in regeneration, but we haven’t done that yet because we’re so stuck in a power of agency of destruction. And we have to unstuck ourselves because the power of agency is actually neutral. That’s the piece that we have to understand. It is neutral. What gives it the impact, what gives it the consequence is how we apply the power of our agency. Do we apply it to our destruction? We’ve done that pretty well. We’re pretty good at that. Now, can we also exercise and flex that muscle, the power of agency toward regeneration of both the planet, but also ourselves, starting with ourselves.
And so, to me, that’s the center of the possibility that we have right now to be challenged by climate change from the outside, and take an inside look to understand how can we reapply and redirect the power of our agency.
Thomas: Yeah, that sounds very powerful. Because there’s such an urgency, that running seems to be the only option. When actually, in fact, we need to take a breath for a moment, look inside, and look why is the biofeedback, the whole in collective intelligence stuck, and then to find the right measures because putting more pressure on stagnation, often reinforces this stagnation. If you take somebody who is traumatized and you were to put a lot of pressure on the person, the person will hold even more. And that’s true for our societies, too.
Climate activism, I think is great to change habits, to bring education, to bring activation energy, and that works great to reconstruct structures that are not iced over, but it doesn’t work well for structures that are iced over and frozen in the permafrost of our societal traumatization. And so here we need something else. And I loved what you said, and oh we need to take a breath and actually look inside and see how can we de-ice or liquefy that.
So now when we are in the middle of the conversation, what actually helps us when you say to look inside or take a moment to see that the crisis has delayed evolution, but also, it needs a look inside, how we are delaying, what’s the process of delaying? Otherwise, that looks just dysfunctional. Because, Christiana:, when we look at trauma, we can say… because we can look at this society and can say, not responding is dysfunctional, but we can also say, like when somebody gets traumatized through adversity, or groups of people, or racism, here it’s not good for me. So being present, being in the body, being related, being in this very moment is not good for me. So there’s an intelligence that helps me to move out of the adversity, or the pain, or the torture, or the war to protect myself. And then later on, we make that intelligence dysfunctional, which, of course, it’s not adaptive to the new situation, but it’s also intelligent as a protection mechanism.
And if we apply that now to society and look at what we sometimes see as our enemy in changing faster, maybe we can find a way, systemically, to turn that into an intelligence that we make our friend. And I would love to hear a little bit from you. What comes up in you when you hear me say that, or how you see that already happening?
Christiana: Well, to me, when I hear you saying that where I immediately go is that intelligence that you’re speaking about goes way beyond our brain, because if we only search for this intelligence in our brain, in our mind, in numbers and facts, then we just repeat the exercise constantly. We’re just in a self-producing, little circle there. And so that intelligence starts by connecting mind and heart. And that, for me, is the longest journey that any human will ever undertake, is the journey from the mind to the heart. It’s not an easy journey. And yet, it’s so necessary because, otherwise, we just keep on being repeating puppets, just repeating, and repeating, and repeating what we have been traumatized into setting as our behavior patterns.
And it is only when we undertake that journey, which is, admittedly, a life journey. It’s not like we touch our heart and then, aha, done. And it’s not like climbing a mountain, and you get to the top of the mountain, and you see this amazing landscape, and done, you plant the flag, and then you climb down. No. Actually, the journey to the heart is a life process. And I think that’s the beauty of it, because you can touch the heart at one level, but as you continue that journey, you just touch the heart deeper and deeper. And so in that sense, it’s very different from any other journey that we do outside of ourselves.
And as I said before, the most important journey that we will ever undertake, and just to use the word that we all shy away from, for some reason that is inexplicable to me, it’s basically all about discovering our capacity to love. If we are able to discover our capacity to love, in the broadest terms, it’s not just, “I love my children. I love my parents. I love my best friends.” No. I mean that’s, yes, I hope that that’s true, but that’s certainly not where this can start or stop, rather. It truly is our capacity to love the web of life, to love life, to love where we’ve come from on this planet, our evolution. And above all, it is to love the effect, the positive regenerative effect that we can have on future evolution on this planet.
So my love of, I don’t know, people in Sub-Saharan Africa who I will never know, I will never meet them, but my capacity to love has to include all of those people, including people who will be born decades after I’m way gone. And so that capacity to be able to love what… I don’t know how else to explain it, other than the web of life on this planet. That is, I think, where there is a huge capacity to turn our behaviors. And once we touch that, then everything we do has a very different meaning, and everything we think has a very different meaning. And unfortunately, we’re so programmed and so trained not to go into that depth, not to touch that, that even if we do, we then forget about it. And then, we’re walking down the street and someone does something, whatever, that we don’t approve of, and you feel the non love for the web of life come up in you.
And so it is such a constant, constant awareness that we have to seed and cultivate in ourselves because we have been programmed not to do it. And so we have to reprogram ourselves to be able to be in the here and now, present, very, very present with that connection.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s very beautiful. It speaks from and to my heart, what you’re saying. And also, because I believe that, when we look at systemic traumatization, it means also that that’s the trauma field that we all have been born into, and we have normalized because we grew up in it, and then we say, “Oh, that’s how-
Christiana: And we think it’s fine.
Thomas: Yeah. We think that’s the world. And then I would say, “No, that’s not the world. Part of it is the world. And part of it is the world when it’s hurt.” And we need to call it hurt because otherwise we don’t take care of the wound. And I think one symptom, collective trauma symptom, is that we can talk about things that we cannot live, that we cannot walk out… Is exactly what you said, that we can write a PhD about childhood trauma, but it will not take care of my childhood trauma because I need more than my cognition to heal it. And the sense making, cognition and sensing together, is actually what an integrated nervous system is doing. It’s thinking and sensing at the same time. It’s one process, not two. And so you spoke-
Christiana: We’re the only ones that think that those are separated.
Thomas: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We think that those are separate. And that’s the collective trauma syndrome also. That’s how we speak. And so we reinforce that separation. And so I love because, also, even… Because you talk about the web of life, and I hear often people say, “Yeah, but we are on the planet and Mother Earth will shake us off.” And then I say, “Yeah, but my body is also Earth. I’m not just on the Earth. We are all living Earth. I’m not just a guest that fell on the planet. My body, the water in my body, all of this is the substance of the planet. So we are not just separate from, and we are destroying it. We are part of a consciousness that we call planet.”
And I think that these kind of separations are part of the collective trauma syndrome, that we feel disembodied through trauma because here it wasn’t good for us for many generations, for many generations, slavery, or racism, or antisemitism, and the Holocaust, or colonialism, wasn’t good for many people. And so that’s why I love also that you emphasize that it’s a lifelong journey. It’s not just a fast promise or a quick fix. That’s beautiful.
And so when you take that and you see, like if you reapply that now, so we went into the process that there is some healing process needed in all of us in the face of the urgency. Because, often, we say, “Oh, it’s so urgent. We don’t have time for that.” But we also need that in order to respond to the urgency with more resonance and connectedness to the living system. And so how would you see… Can we combine the call for urgency that we don’t have any time? But in a way, we can heal only if we make space for it because we cannot heal when we are super stressed and running. And I think there is a clash between activism and the healing arts, if we were to say like that. How do you combine this in yourself?
Christiana: Well, I think of myself as sitting on two chairs, the chair of patience and the chair of impatience. And we have to accept the reality of both. It does no good to only accept one reality and deny the other. And so I’m not sure that I have a good answer or even a bad answer for you, Thomas:, but I know that both are upon us. I know the urgency of science. Heavens, I certainly know. And every day that goes with climate change unaddressed or climbing greenhouse gasses, I know that there’s a ticking clock. I know that we’ve all swallowed an alarm clock here with respect to climate change. I know that. But I also know that just continuing the path that we’ve had in the past is not going to get us to the deadline by the deadline. It’s just not going to be.
So I can’t explain this, Thomas:, but way, way, way deep down, I have the, maybe it’s a suspicion, maybe it’s a hope, maybe it’s a trust, I don’t even know what noun to use for it, but I have this gut feeling that if we’re able to make the kind of changes that you and I have been talking about, that then the factor of time plays a very different role. Because the factor of time, linear time, plays a role in one reality, the reality that we have been living out, but the factor of time could play a very different role in the reality that we need to create. And so, for lack of a better word, we have been living in linear time, and we could live in exponential time, if we’re able to make the inside, the inward changes that we’re talking about. So that’s the best way that I can, I guess, give myself some peace of mind, because I do. I’m both patient and impatient at the same time. And I don’t deny the reality of either. I just have this gut feeling that we will be able to squeeze through.
Thomas: That’s so amazing. I share your gut feeling. So we’re two. And I feel also that, like you said it, and just exponential time also means, look at the data flow that you and I, in our lifetime, saw how data, the speed of data went up and it transformed the world into a village, almost, when it, before, was everything very far apart. So that the speed of consciousness and data, both, and the human relation, like collective intelligence, I think is the more intelligent we unleash, the more gets done in a shorter time. So that’s why time is, I think, relative, as you said. That’s beautiful. And I deeply believe that that’s true. I think I would definitely underline it.
And so when we look at… So there are two things, there is always – we look at the world as we can see it from now. Then, I think, we are looking often at the world through the filter of our trauma. So we see a lot of the past replay, as you said. Sigmund Freud, in Vienna, talked about the repetition compulsion of trauma. And you spoke to that beautifully already. So we are actually in societal processes that are non-emergent and disrelated, so they are repetitive. They’re repeating themselves all the time. So I often say, when people have the same argument in an intimate relationship or in the workplace, that’s not the future. That’s tomorrow, the past, because we are repeating something that was already here. And then there is emergence, there’s creativity, there’s innovation, and there are relational processes that are present. And I think we put those two into the same bucket and call it society, which I think is something to look at.
But you speak and write also about emergence. So there’s what we can see as of today. There’s what gets limited by the perspective of the past when we look through our trauma lenses. So we project that past forward, and that seems always more gray, or doomed, or more stressed than it actually is. But then there’s also the new factor that we could call emergence or the future that downloads itself through us. And that’s the part of the world that maybe we can intuit or envision, but we don’t see it. It becomes manifest through us as we have this conversation, or as we are doing the climate change work. So maybe you can speak to that principle bit, how you look at the factor of emergence and the influx of possibilities or creativity that we don’t even see yet as a part of the game changer that we need.
Christiana: Thomas:, although I warned you, before we started this conversation, that we didn’t have to go into the pre-history of the Paris Agreement, but your question actually leads me to think of the emergence of the Paris Agreement as a very good example. Because when I was given the responsibility of taking up the international climate negotiations in 2010, that was just six months after the collapse of the negotiations in Copenhagen. And there was absolute agreement, global consensus, without any doubt, among all stakeholders, among all countries, all leaders, private and public, etc, absolute consensus that there would never be the possibility of a global agreement on climate change. Why? Including myself. Because we were all traumatized from having worked toward that for years, and years, and years, and then seeing it collapse so painfully in front of us in Copenhagen, or rather, not seeing it collapse in front of us, contributed it to the collapse to assume our own responsibility, contributed to the collapse of it.
And so we were all completely devastated, and literally in the garbage can, but the consequences of never being able to have a global agreement about how economy and society needs to shift over time in order to address climate change, but also in order to protect the web of life, that, all of a sudden, I realized what consequences that had.
I famously tell the story of my first press conference when some journalist said, “So Ms. Figueres…” because I was the new newly minted executive secretary, he says, “So Ms. Figueres, do you think that we’ll ever be able to have a global climate agreement?” And I said, “No, not in my lifetime.” Because that is what we all felt. We had all agreed to that. Unconsciously, we had agreed never in our human experience will we able to have a global agreement. And what came out of my mouth was not what I truly, truly was holding to. It was, I was expressing global sentiment. And then when I heard it expressed by my own voice, I went, “Whoa, whoa. That is untenable. That is something that I cannot accept. Yes, it’s the global sentiment now, but that needs to change.”
So then I dedicated the rest of my time at the climate negotiations to actually allow for the emergence of something very different, and to begin to lay the groundwork, seed the possibilities that could be there without knowing what it was going to be. Let us just fertilize the ground first and remove this self limiting decision, collective decision, that had been made, that we’re never going to be able to agree on anything. So let’s begin to peel that back, and let’s begin to fertilize the ground of possibility without having the need to know exactly what is going to come. Let’s just step back and allow for emergence, or as the Gestalt theorists called it – the emergence of a figure without knowing what that figure is going to be.
And that was definitely a personal exercise first. I had to do it first me because, otherwise, how could I invite anyone else to do it and join me? And then slowly move through different levels, concentric circles, I would say, of influence, first with my intimate team at the secretariat, then with the whole team at the secretariat, then with governments, with stakeholders, without being able to say to them, “No, but this is what the agreement will look like” because nobody knew. But very, very slowly. And that’s where this factor of time comes in because, of course, everybody was worried about time, but it had to be done slowly to begin to peel away the crust of impossibility and allow for the emergence of possibilities that we didn’t know what they were going to be.
And that was a very intentional exercise that took several years. And eventually, that emergence took shape. And then, it was a question of continuing to nourish the shape that was beginning to form, and ensure that the shape would include the needs and interests of all countries without leaving anyone out. But it didn’t start like that. It started as a complete no, and a complete impossible. And so moving from impossible to maybe probable, and then to likely, and then to possible, and then delivered, that arc of transformation was a five-year long arc and a global arc.
Thomas: That’s amazing. First of all, congratulations, even if it was a long time ago, but you also gave us a cutout of noticing. So there is a moment that I hear, when I listen to you, when I want to look at the cutout of turning an impossible situation into a possible situation. So it started with you recognizing in your own words that something is not okay, right, cannot stay like that. So there was a, kind of an awakening, that you opened up a new space. And I think a new potential space that is bigger than the one that we are in right now, is always the beginning of a new awareness. You said, “Yes, we’re all saying, no, there’s some unconscious component. Even if I don’t know the solution, we need to move.” And that’s beginning of a new possibility. And then I hear another factor that I think is super important in how the new Gestalt could emerge is by you saying, “But we don’t know how it works, but we feel called enough to walk.” That’s another very important aspect of any kind of impossibility turning into a possibility that we are in a face of not knowing-
Christiana: Yeah because you have to walk through unknown territory. There’s no way you can go from the tried and true, the known, into a new known that is different. That is just completely impossible. You have to go from the known, which you have decided is unacceptable, or too painful, or too unjust, or whatever you decide. And then you have to have the courage and the depth of spirit to walk onto the unknown before you can get to something that is recognized as known by a critical mass. But there’s no shortcut that avoids going through the unknown.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. And you said it, you need to have the courage and the depth of spirit. Something carries us over. In this landscape of the unknown, we are following something. You followed something. Even if you couldn’t say it’s exactly this, or this, or that, it didn’t have a controlled space or structure, but it had a movement. And that movement… And that’s very interesting because it needs, also, the courage to follow that. And often, in our traumatization, we are too scared or too absent, like shut down, to either feel that calling or to follow it through. That’s why many innovations…
I spoke to somebody that is a high innovation manager in a global organization. And he said that only 6% of the CEOs of our organization are happy with the innovation outcome, not with the ideas and all this, but how we follow that through to really step into the future, so to speak. But you gave us a beautiful cutout that you followed something into the land of the unknown, because you didn’t need to control the outcome. And I think that that, because knowing, tries often to control the outcome. I make a step only when I know where we are going. But in those moments, we can do that. And that’s so beautiful. And that’s why I thought you speaking about your experience can give me and many other listeners some taste of what it means to go through an innovative period in order to become a new development. So all of you became a new development, and the outcome of it was like a new climate conference, and it delivered success. But I think the process is equally-
Christiana: And the other piece that I think is important about that, Thomas:, about going into that unknown, is to have deep trust in collective efforts, in collective wisdom, because if we assume, radically wrongly, that we know, or that we will know by tomorrow, or by the day after tomorrow, that we will have the answer, we’re just absolutely dead wrong. And I use dead very explicitly because it leads nowhere. It is a dead end street. And so, not only do you have to have this courage and depth spirit to walk onto unknown territory, but you have to do it with full trust in collective efforts, in collective wisdom, and be able to see beyond individual missteps because we all take missteps constantly.
And you have to be able… To me, the visual, because I never graduated from kindergarten, so everything I think I see is very visual. And to me, the visual that I use for that is the ability to differentiate between waves that come and go and tides that rise and fall. And those are always there. And that’s fine. That’s one reality, but the more important reality is the underwater current, and what is the direction of the underwater current. So if you assume that change is happening with the tides, you basically reduce the capacity of change to the maximum of tides and the minimum of tides, and you have very, very reduced space for change or for possibility. Whereas, if you understand that change takes place, yes, because of the tides or the waves, but much more importantly because of the underwater currents, that are much more difficult to see, now you have the capacity, now you have much more space for the emergence of something that you never knew was possible.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s amazing. I love this conversation. I think it’s such a beautiful description of a deep passage from impossibility to possibility. And I think that’s what many of the ancient books are full, and all the big movies, how we go through that passage. And I think you described this so beautifully. That’s why I wanted to highlight it because I think can be a great inspiration for anybody in any field of change that you described as a cutout, archetypal cutout. So that’s beautiful. But you also mentioned the depth of spirit wisdom, and maybe, as one of the last questions, maybe you can let us participate in your experience, thinking, feeling, about how modern science and the wisdom traditions of our world, because I deeply believe we need both in order to be creative in this moment, and maybe you can speak about your experience, how you see these two fields in dialogue in collaboration? Because sometimes there are splits, the ones don’t talk to the other, but how does this alchemize in you?
Christiana: Well, I must say, my alchemy has a lot of to do with Buddhism. That’s where I found my alchemy. I was personally in deep, deep personal trauma when I was working for the United Nations on this evolving treaty. And I became so traumatized because of my personal experience, that I became dysfunctional. There was just no way that I could continue forward with my responsibilities. And that was a huge awakening for me because I thought, “Wow. If I can be so traumatized at an individual level, what is the effect of that on the work that I’m doing at the global level?” So the relationship between individual and systemic was very visceral for me. And that is where, frankly, in my desperation to come out of my personal trauma, that’s where I am truly grateful to have discovered the practice of Thích Nhất Hạnh, who is a Zen master, that takes the teachings of Buddhism and dereligisizes them, if that’s a word, and takes it out of the religious practice.
I mean, you can. You can study his teachings. He just passed on at the beginning of this year. You can take his teachings and become a monastic, obviously. And we have hundreds of monastics trained by Thích Nhất Hạnh around the world. But more than that, we have millions of practitioners who have understood that what he did was to take the principles of Buddhism and take them to our practical world. And that, to me, was my alchemy because that allowed me to dig into my own self, dig into the depth of me, and be able to construct the art between who I understood myself to be and what my role in life was, how do I turn up in life, and how do I see everyone else turning up?
And many years later, many years later, Thomas:, I discovered that neuroscience actually supports that transformation, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was so engrossed in my own trauma and the work that I had to do, that I didn’t know that. So it was many years later that I discovered that actually neuroscience shows us how we have programmed ourselves for X, Y reaction. And because that has been fired together, then it’s wired together, right, as we have been taught in neuro programming. Whatever gets fired together, gets wired together. And very often, our challenge is to see that those two realities that we have fired at the same time, or at the same level, or at the same conditions, under the certain same situations, that they don’t necessarily have to be wired together forever, that we can actually soften that connection, and reprogram, and rewire for something that we intentionally choose. And that that is not something that we do overnight, but that that is the work of life. That is our life’s work is to reprogram ourselves.
And so that’s another way of explaining the same thing, Thomas:. And I am always bowled over by realizing that, whether you approach this through neuroscience, through understanding collective trauma, through Buddhism or many other of the other spiritual realities, through many different parts of psychology – many paths, one truth. That, to me, is the power of this. Because we all use different lingo, different language, different approaches, but ultimately, we’re all looking at the same human truth, the same human reality, and the human experience.
And so I think it’s so unnecessary to have a fight about, well, do we use this word for that? Or do we use the other word? It doesn’t matter. Everybody chooses their own word. The point is, we’re all on the same path. And we’re all in pursuit of a common purpose. That, to me, is a realization that I made many years later that I’m so grateful for because it just happens that my entry point was through my Zen master. That doesn’t have to be your entry point. It doesn’t have to be anybody else’s. We’re all in common pursuit of a common purpose. And whatever your entry point is, bless you.
Thomas: That’s so beautiful. Wow. I love it. I love it. It’s great. Fantastic. So thank you for speaking to this one path and the many ways to the many perspectives that look at this path, but actually, we are working in one path, and it’s one tradition of living. So that’s beautiful. So there are many people listening here that have a basic understanding of trauma, a very sophisticated understanding of trauma. And there are many people listening here that have some sort of understanding, or are very passionate about climate change. And so maybe you can leave us, especially for everybody that feels, wow, on the one hand, it looks dark, but it seems like that many people also feel that there is possibility. Maybe you can leave us with some final or summarizing words, and then we will take this all into our version of the path.
Christiana: Yeah. I guess, just to come full circle where we started this conversation, Thomas:, I very deeply sense that we are not standing at the precipice of the doom of human species, but rather that we are standing in front of a portal that we are beginning to walk through, and that is going to take us to understand and experience a much higher version of ourselves. And sometimes we have to descend into very, very painful depths in order to come out. And I just speak from my experience, but I think it’s a pretty common experience that when we descend on a personal level into a very painful life situation, whatever that is, the death of someone, or a personal deep sickness, or a horrible divorce, or whatever, that when we touch that pain, the touching of that pain is precisely what allows us to move beyond the pain into a very different intention of living.
And if it’s true for us, how many people have discovered their spiritual path because they were traumatized or fallen into a very, very difficult moment in their life? That is a very common human experience. So if it is a common human experience at the individual level, how can it not be the same at the collective level? How can it not be true that this collective pain and this doom and gloom that so many people speak of, how can that not be the portal toward an elevated existence of humankind on this planet?
So I hold on to that, I’m happy to be wrong. Well, I’m not happy. I’m willing to be wrong, but I hope I’m not because it has been proven to be so, so true at the human level. And I am so committed to systems understanding that I firmly believe that whatever is present at one level of the system is present at all levels of the system. So if this is the reality at the individual human level of the system, it’s got to be true at the global macro level of the system.
So every morning, I wake up and I read the news, and I’m despondent about so many things because this world has gone completely crazy in the past 12 months, but also, I just have this firm, unmovable, unshakeable sense that these are some of the hits that we are receiving in order to begin to walk through that portal toward a higher sense of ourselves in pursuit of our common purpose.
Thomas: Amen.
Christiana: A-women, as my daughters say. Whenever I say, Amen, they go, “No, no, no, a-women.”
Thomas: And a-women. That’s also true. Yeah, that sounds very lovely. I deeply share your conviction about the interdependence of individuals and collectives. And I think, the more we get to this systemic sensing and presencing together, I think it will have a lot of change that’s the consequence of it.
Christiana: This was amazing. I feel a lot of resonance with your words. It deeply lands in me, and I love that that’s what you carry into the world. It’s a deep contribution to our world. And I simply enjoy the resonance between us. So thank you very much for your contribution.
Christiana: Thank you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak about this because, as I said in the beginning, I’ve been thinking a lot about it, but it crystallizes when you’re forced to put a word to it. So thank you for that opportunity.
Thomas: That’s true. You did it beautifully. So thank you, Christiana:. This was really an amazing ride. Thank you.
Christiana: Thank you very much.
