Thomas Hübl: Maybe we just take a moment to see, when I ask myself, “How much space do I have right now in myself, so how spacious do I feel because everything feel a bit tight, everything seems a bit too much, I’m on the edge, I’m stressed?” or we feel more relaxed, more open, more curious to engage in the conversation around space. So we can get immediately a sense when we ask ourselves that question. When the more stressed and the more escalated and activated our stress level is, so the tighter things can become. And the more relaxed we are, we have more space, which means space is when you sit with a cup of tea or a cup of coffee or you sit on the beach and you reflect on your life. You take a walk.
Space enables you to look at your life. Space enables you to digest. Sometimes we experience a lot and life is fast and the speed of data makes our life faster and faster. So there’s more and more stuff happening in a shorter time. And our psyche, same as our body, needs time to digest food. We’re not all the time eating. We’re eating, digesting and digestion leads to integration. So we’re experiencing. Sometimes we need time to reflect on our experience to make deeper sense of it. And as we do that, we digest our experience. And when we digest, it gets integrated as learning into our overall self or our overall perspective.
So space is actually a very important aspect of our life because it enables so many other functions. Space enables us to sleep well. Space enables us to digest our life experiences as we said well, which means it refreshes our nervous system. It empties the storage of data. So when we can digest something immediately, we store it somewhere. And we need to empty those storages to keep our nervous system lively, vibrant, open, responsive when we get too jammed up with stuff. So we actually cannot really experience new things because the older experiences don’t allow us because we don’t have space.
So on the one hand, space is a way of living. Space is not something we have. Space is something we practice. And especially in the Western modern world, we get very trained to be in the activity or to look at objects in our awareness. It’s like, when you read a book and as you read that book, how often when you’re really into the book? How often do you remember that you’re looking at the paper? But the paper is what allows for the letters and the letters give words, sentences. When we read them, it animates a meaning. It animates an experience and understanding. It transmits data. But all of it is grounded in space. And that’s why space is actually a very important aspect to embrace complexity. Because if the book hadn’t all that paper, all those letters couldn’t be composing storyline or the content of the book.
And that’s true for our lives too. When our inner space is too tight, we cannot really embrace and be in the experience. And that gives me another, I think, important aspect, that because of the increase of data, life becomes faster as we go through this hour here. And that means also the planet’s shrinking on the one hand because we become more a global village because of all that data circulating with the speed of light around the planet. And so we are more and more challenged to let the flow of that data go through us, which means we can ground the movement. But if there’s trauma in my system, then the heightened speed of data, the heightened speed of light and of experience cannot ground itself, so it starts to create a pressure. And many people nowadays feel that pressure.
We feel that’s why there’s such a need for mindfulness. There’s such a need for slowing down. There’s a need to go on retreat. There’s a need for meditation. And there’s a real need because we need to develop a skill to embrace that speed of data with the new inner capacity. And the capacity is not new. That exists thousands of years in Western traditions, but now we need it mainstream because life is getting faster and it hits inner tension stagnations. And where the speed of data hits stagnations, we produce heat, we produce inflammations, autoimmune disease. It creates a lot of side effects or symptoms, mental health issues.
So when we cultivate space, we actually are saying that we, on a deeper level in our being, we say, “Oh, I understand that that which is aware that I feel my body is as important as feeling my body, is as important as my body.” I’ll say this again, “That which is aware right now that I feel my body. When I feel my body, something in me is aware that I feel my body.” Awareness when I look at what’s actually aware is space, inner space awareness. There are different levels of awareness. One level of awareness is that I’m aware of what I’m feeling. When I examine that awareness, then I see, “Oh, actually data is arising in space. So data, when I feel my leg, when I feel my belly, when I feel my emotions, when I’m aware of my thoughts, all of that happens in an inner space of awareness, so it’s arising and my body sensations, my motions, my thoughts are all movements.”
So there’s awareness of movement all the time. We call it my internal or external sense perception. So when I’m aware of you, I’m also aware that I’m feeling you. When I’m aware of my body or what’s happening in me, I’m aware that I feel myself. So space is equally important. We call it a conscious experience. That space is as important as the data is as important as the body. So in an increasingly fast and complex world, there’s a higher demand on the inner capacity to be aware of that world. And I’m sure many of us know when we get triggered, we have arguments, when somebody says something, it stresses us.
When we see worse situations in the world, when we see the impact of climate disasters, when we feel maybe climate anxiety or when we feel that there is no hope for the next generations, these are all a lot of inner movements that need an awareness to be, first of all, a conscious movement. Because as long as it’s unconscious, it runs me. That’s why I often say unconscious information or process is destiny. Because as long as it’s unconscious, it’s happening without me knowing, so it’s running me. Conscious process has a choice. Unconscious process has no choice. The choice is in the past.
And so when we generate more space in ourselves through an internal practice, because space is as important as the information is as important as the physical reality, the body situations, then there is more conscious awareness of one’s own inner process. And if we as a community understand how important space is because it’s so simple that it can easily be undervalued, but if we undervalue space, we undervalue consciousness. We don’t give consciousness the space it needs for us to have a choice in life, for us to be aware of the process that’s happening.
And so when we look into our world, we see when we are facing what some people call a polycrisis, like a collection of different crisis that accumulate and create more and more stress and more and more impact, we actually need communities that are cultivating space. Because as we cultivate space, as also Otto Scharmer puts it beautifully, when in the Theory U in space or presence, the future is being born. So we become actually responsive and responsible towards the future because we start listening to the future. And the future is not a later point in time, but a new level of consciousness, it’s a new insight that can become a scientific breakthrough, that can become a startup, that can become a social innovation, that can become a creative process.
So space is actually the hub where the past undigested information. I said before, space is the capacity to digest our experience. Trauma healing needs space. If you go to a trauma therapist, if you go to a group, if you go to a healing space, there’s space that enables the past undigested information to be integrated into now. That’s why we could say history is not the past. History is sitting here speaking, is sitting here listening, is sitting here having this group experience. Integrated history is present. Unintegrated history shows up between us as fears, aggression, shame as all kinds of processes, insecurities, doubts, numbness that affect the way we are together in presence. So unintegrated history is the past. Integrated history is the present capacity to live this life.
And so space again is the hub where we can allow the past to catch up, where we can allow the movements, the stagnations, the unlived experiences, the suppressed experiences to come back and find a loving space that can embrace it, can digest it, can integrate that data and grow in perspective. That’s what we call posttraumatic learning. But cultivating space is also our responsibility towards the future because presence is the place where the future appears. Future never appears tomorrow. It always appears as a good insight when we have that good insight, not later.
So there’s a moment when the future takes place, when an insight comes in, when a great creative idea comes in, when suddenly understand something deeper. Understand, alignment, grounding. And through our capacity to ground insights, we transform the world. And so cultivating space is I think a necessity in a faster and faster paced world. I think many people, many of us feel the need sometimes to slow down to decompress and regulate our stress levels better, to find more practices that can help us to cultivate space, to consciously participate in a fast-paced world.
But then there’s, first of all, one thing that we need to discern. There’s a difference between being able to look at what’s happening, but to be a bit dissociated or numb. Then I have the feeling, “Oh, I can witness what’s happening, but I’m actually a bit separate from it,” or, “I feel that space saturates my experience. Space saturating my experience is being truly spacious.” That’s a conscious experience. Sometimes being dissociated also looks like, “I can witness something, but I’m actually not witnessing. I’m witnessing. I’m looking at something that is already overwhelming for me, but I manage to keep it at the distance.”
And I believe our world is full of distancing. And distancing creates polarization or distancing is a function of fragmentation of the trauma response. And that’s why we feel a lot of distance in the world, others somewhere, and we feel less global intimacy. And every violence, every polarization, every other ring, every racism, every antisemitism, every violence against different genders or different populations in our communities just increase the societal distance and do not support societal intimacy. And intimacy means that the society is close to me, that it happens in the same space and spacious.
So in my internal experience, I can check immediately, “What are the parts of society that are distant from me? What are the parts of society that are close to me?” And if I don’t just stay, that’s given, but I keep examining distance and closeness. I begin to grow. I begin to less polarize and fragment and more include and transcend. So I begin to include polarities. I become a bigger space. When this is my space, whatever is bigger than my space, I’m part of the polarization. When my space is bigger, when the internal space is bigger than the tension of a conflict, I actually begin to host a conflict.
A friend of mine, William Ury, great mediator, says, “The power of this third side to a conflict is the power to embrace that conflict.” Often the world’s getting fragmented when there are conflicts, which means that power to be a space is getting lost. So global polarization is not an embrace of the conflict, it’s the extension of the conflict. And being able to host the polarization is actually the beginning of the healing movement. That’s why, since we are living in a, we are calling it the polycrisis, there is another element that I think is very important for our time and that often, especially in the West, we are hypnotized by individuals, but often what we say is that’s a separate person.
Individuation is not separation. Individuation is a process of forming an individual viewpoint in life. But when any one of us walks through the forest, where is nature? When I walk through the forest, nature is not just around me. Nature … This is also Thomas is also nature. You are also nature. All of us are nature. But we might say, “Oh, nature is around me,” versus, “Nature is through me.” When I look at society, it’s not all the other people. Society is through me. I’m also society. When I feel separate, then I look at society from that separate viewpoint, but that’s not individuation. Individuation is a fluid relationship that goes through us, not stops here. So all the other people as society.
Then we say, “I’m also part of the society.” Like if I take a cup or a glass and I put it in the cupboard, it’s also there in the cupboard, but that’s not how life worked. Life is all of it. So I am an individual viewpoint and I am the ecosystem, not I’m part of the ecosystem. I’m nature too. You are nature. We are nature. But it’s important, when we look at, for example, climate change, and we look at a lot of anxieties, climate anxieties that are coming up, we can say, “Oh, these are merely individual fears,” or we could say, what happens in a crisis that the evolutionary impulse, the impulse of a system to change, I’d say for a marriage, once there’s a crisis in the marriage, many impulses to change have been suppressed by the trauma in the marriage. So the frozenness doesn’t allow the new movement and there’s more and more pressure, more and more pressure until one day the pressure breaks open.
A war, the same. A war is a crisis where the evolution cannot take place and it breaks open and then all that energy gets discharged and becomes a new level of trauma. Because where does it go? It gets absorbed by the biosphere. All the pressure that gets discharged blends as violence or whatever in us as trauma. So it’s actually a repetitive cycle from one generation to the next. And also when we look at climate change, so when stuff comes up in us, we could say, “Oh, that’s a problem. How can I get rid of my climate fears or my climate anxiety or any other stuff that comes up in me?” or I can say, “Wow, something wants to detox itself to come into our and my awareness to be digested, to be transformed and to be part of evolution.”
So whatever is held down, a lot of collective trauma, layers of hundreds of years of human life actually want to detox themselves because they need to be digested and integrated for us to grow. But what we grow is the capacity to embrace complexity. Otherwise, complexity without development is overwhelming, but complexity in an evolving world is actually the creative challenge we need to express our evolution. And cultivating space is an integral part of having enough awareness and having enough space to allow the detox to happen and not try to suppress it as a mistake. It’s not a mistake. It’s the ability of the biosphere to detox stuff that couldn’t be detoxed before for the entire system to grow.
So challenges, problems, difficulties we go through are actually signposts to growth, but often we think, “Oh, when I have a challenge or a problem, something is wrong,” versus, “Oh, when I have a challenge or a problem, there’s something in me that needs to grow. So how can I engage it versus try to not have it and work with it and see also what’s my internal process that makes it hard for me to stay related to the challenge?” And like that, we could say resilience is the capacity to stay related to challenging moments. What I said before that maturity or resilience both are the capacity to stay related to the process of life, challenging moments, tensions, paradox, conflicts and have the power to actually not fragment into polarization, but post the tension of the contradiction and turn this into growth.
And that’s why I believe that something as simple as space because our complex minds might disregard space as something too simple. It looks like, “Oh, the meaning of the book has not so much to do with the paper, but it does.” The paper is as important or your iPad is as important as the letters, is as important as the writing of the book. They’re all important. Space is as important as my perception of my body or my mind or the world, is as important as the world or my physical body. So they’re inherently interwoven and together it creates a conscious experience of my body, a conscious experience of you, conscious experience of the world.
And that’s why I believe that as communities and as individuals cultivating space because relating building a healthy relational ecosystem with family, with friends, colleagues, people in our society. If we create healthy relational spaces, and healthy doesn’t mean that they’re only harmonious, healthy means that there is a mutual commitment to stay related in the beautiful moments and in the challenging moments, and that relational ecosystem is an extension of space and we all can feel it when somebody really listens to us, when we are distressed and somebody is really relating, attuned with us, honestly listening, then that’s an extension of our own inner space.
Sometimes when we are distressed, we feel a lack of space. By sharing and communicating that with somebody else, it opens the space again, “I can feel that my stress level is dropping, that I start to digest my experience as I share, become maybe more aware of my inner process and space is expanding.” And that’s why in families, in organizations and now society at large, and of course in ourselves, cultivating space is an important aspect for wellbeing and health. And I think had we more capacities to cultivate space in our life, we would have less mental and physical illnesses. We would have a more functional societal process. And most probably, we would have more capacity to innovate and turn the difficulties of the past into presence and become able to respond to the future or be responsive to how the future, the next generations are calling us.
And that at first sounds a bit strange because how can the next generations call us? But in the understanding of vertical development, we see that not only does the past inform me, also the future informs me and that I’m actually the interplay of the past and the future in this present moment.
