Thomas Hübl: Welcome to the point of relation. My name is Thomas Hübl and I’m very happy to be sitting here with Diane Musho Hamilton. Diane, warm, welcome. Long time I didn’t see and hear you.
Diane Musho Hamilton: Yeah, it’s very good to see you too, Thomas.
Thomas: Yeah, I remember the times that some years ago you were part of our training programs and we had a fun then and then period where we didn’t see each other. And I’m happy to see you again.
Diane: Yes, I’m very happy to see you and explore what we’ve been up to.
Thomas: Yes. Let’s explore. I’m curious what happened. It’s sometime a pandemic passed, like a bit of upheaval in the world passed, and let’s see where we are. And so let’s see how, just to catch up a little bit, how did your growing and waking up help you in the last years?
Diane: Oh, yeah. Well, if we just go back to the beginning of the pandemic, what I recall is that it was, the initial experience was one of tremendous rest. I was very happy to experience the world kind of slowing down a little bit, and my obligations started to lessen. And I felt myself spending a little more time outside and some time in nature. And so I would say for four or five months it was like retreat for me. It was really a very, of course, I was concerned about the wellbeing of everyone. And I recall that there was a lot of deaths happening in Italy and in certain parts of the US and whatnot. So there’s always that concern about everyone’s wellbeing, but just for my own system, not just having so much to do on a daily basis was really, and in a certain way be able to respond to my own contemplative nature, you might say.
So being alone, being with myself, having time to think and to feel and being a lot outside was really a welcome thing. And then the texture of it changed for me because my mother was in assisted living. She developed Covid and then she developed long covid, and then eventually she had a cardiac arrest from Covid. So I lost my mom during the pandemic due to Covid. And then I also lost a nephew who had been struggling with addiction, who overdosed during the pandemic. And then my son developed psychosis. So it went from very restful to very challenging.
And so then the question of how does practice, how does our spiritual intention and our fundamental desire to be wakeful and contribute to the world, how did that come about? How was I served by practice at the time? And it made it an enormous difference. And in a way, Thomas, I think having that three four or five months right at the beginning I got very settled in myself. So I think that encountering the fear that I would feel in my own body or in the bodies of others, I spent some time in a hazmat suit taking care of my mother when she was ill because the vaccine hadn’t been developed yet and I had to be in relationship to her. So mindfulness, of course, was a huge part of that. And then being in relationship to the pain, if you will, just the challenge of everyone in a certain way, being put in touch, if you will, with their own mortality, I think including me.
Thomas: Yeah. First of all, I’m sorry about your losses.
Diane: Yeah. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Thomas: But I think that’s exactly, I think it’s good for us to hear also, and I know you have a long-term practice, how our practice really makes a difference in times that are challenging. And so I think it’s a good entry gate to our conversation. Why to bother at all about waking up and growing up. Why not just to live our lives. I mean, why would you spend tons of time meditating if you can do other things?
Diane: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Watch the Superbowl
Thomas: Watch the Superbowl, right?
Diane: Yeah.
Thomas: And so why, I know your new book is about to come out now and it’s “Waking Up and Growing Up.” Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you mean by waking up and growing up for people who are not familiar with the terminology and why to bother. Why-
Diane: Why bother with it?
Thomas: Right.
Diane: Well, you and I met some number of years ago, and I think that we were magnetized in a way by the work of Ken Wilber and by the connections that we meant through the integral world. And Ken is the first person that I’ve encountered that frames waking up, growing up. He also talks about showing up the cultivation of presence and engagement. He talks about cleaning up, which we can visit shadow work, for example. But he makes a very powerful distinction. And I think those of us who are contemplative by nature, who wonder what our purpose in life is, we’re curious about what it means to be human, especially given the fact that we die. Waking up is the experience of, we would say in the Buddhist tradition of discovering our true nature or finding the mystical core of our practice. And so waking up is very essential because it really answers our existential dread.
It answers the sense that we actually don’t need to be more, that watching the Superbowl is actually fine, but without knowing that we can live in a very divided way in the world and we can also feel that something isn’t complete, that something is amiss. And we say in the Zen tradition, we say that our intrinsic wholeness is always there, but we have to practice in order to discover it. So define that deep belonging that puts us so much at ease so that we can feel relaxed and available. And then the other side, I would say the growing up side is really related to dealing with time. So our deepest nature is in the timeless domain and the unconditioned domain and the ever present quality of being itself, where in the domain of time we could talk about learning and how it’s in our hard drive to want to learn new.
And when we learn it’s something that we previously didn’t know or couldn’t do. And then when we engage in time and we practice, we learn, or in the domain of what Ken refers to as growing up, we develop. So he’s very concerned with adult development and how adults can continue to grow and change throughout their lives. And then finally, the whole domain of the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of life on earth, the evolution of the cosmos is really time bound. So waking up captures the timeless and growing up captures the time bound and Ken’s very strong that to be a whole human being means to engage both parts of who we are and not just leave it to one or the other.
Thomas: Yeah, very much so. I mean, that’s also very congruent in my experience. And let’s start with the growing up. So as adults, if we make it into adulthood, that’s also a question. But as adults, and let’s say that’s more of our experience rests in an adult perspective, how do we grow? I mean, what makes us grow? You said there’s an inherent drive. What is that drive to grow and are there maps? What we are, how do we locate ourselves as an adult, where we are in our development, and can we grow further? What helps us to grow further? Maybe you can speak a little bit to that.
Diane: So there are a few different things to consider when we talk about growing up. So when Ken talks about growing up, he mentions the work in developmental psychology of multiple intelligences, meaning that in any domain that we choose to grow, we can learn how to experience more, we can develop more skills, we can get better at it. So it could be art or aesthetics, it could be athletics or kinesthetic, physicality. It could be our cognition and moving from very simple ways of thinking to more complex and nuanced ways that might include paradox, for example. So we can grow in many, many different domains. In the domain that I work in, which is in the spiritual world, what’s most important is the development in a certain way of you could say, I think there are two things and one relates. I mean I think you and I have this in common, it’s ego development, how we understand the self, for example, and that we may grow from egocentric to ethnocentric, where we’re aware of our group and our social context to world centric and where we can identify with all of humanity and the challenges around the world, the cosmic centric, where we actually experience identity falling away entirely.
So the self itself evolves who we think we are can evolve, and it’s usually in the direction of it is more expansive, it can be more complex, and it also generally includes more emotional maturity, more positivity, and more ability to really tolerate the differences from others. So one of the real bright lines in adult development is the way we relate to others. Are we coming from an adversarial perspective? There’s been a recent election. One of the things that magnetizes people’s attention towards President Trump is that he’s a very instinctive creature and he loves us and them, and he gets a lot of energy from identifying and dealing with his enemies. And that very impulse will evolve. So that what was formerly us and them is now all of us and all of them. So that direction of more, of more complexity, more expansiveness, more inclusion, more love is really the direction that our growing up is in.
And one of the key things there, and there’s been a long-term study on human happiness that’s been done at Harvard and it’s been going on for over 75 years. And basically what one of the conclusions of that study is that the more we develop emotionally, meaning that we either by emotional maturity, what we mean is that we’re capable of great feeling and being moved. And because feeling is intelligent, it’s communicative, it’s full of information, but we don’t get stuck in feeling. And yet if you think about how we all grew up, none of us was taught how to work with our feelings. So emotional development leads to greater relationships, greater relationships lead to greater altruism, more engagement with the community, more engagement with the wellbeing of all. So we move from just being concerned about ourselves to those like us, to those not like us, to all beings in all life forms. So growing up is a big engagement.
Thomas: Would you say that then, for example, growing up is being stimulated in the 20th and the 21st century through all the tech development? I mean just the fact that you and I can speak right now and make, we are sitting thousands of miles apart and we can talk about adult development, but the last decades, the world has become a global village. Certain identity structures like local and collective identity structures are not relevant anymore or need to change significantly. So how is that part of as you’re even talking about adult development?
Diane: Well, with technology, it’s a little bit tricky. I’m not entirely sure. I can only really come from my own experience. What I would say is that it’s done a remarkable job of creating this global community. And one of the things that we experience when we travel and teach is that regardless of where we go, whether we go to Hamburg or Tel Aviv or South America or Africa, that we find very like-minded people wherever we go. And so this ability to connect across all of our experience with all these different cultures is incredible. And at the same time, it also allows those of us who are maybe still a little more frightened by difference, because that is something that happens in development is that difference becomes interesting and engaging rather than threatening. And the people who are afraid of each other are also finding each other.
So in a certain way, I see the global village, but I also see the gangster energy as well where people find each other in pockets and then kind of build in whatever that sensibility is. A friend of mine used to say, it used to be that you would hear conspiracy theories by the guy at the end of the bar, and that was just the person at the end of the bar kind of drinking and ranting. But now we can find each other online and really build those kinds of energies. So the energies are just much bigger through technology, I think. And sometimes I feel like those of us who are interested in connection and interested in growth, and we’ve seen the destruction that fighting brings, we’re just not, we’re interested in finding our way through that. We almost don’t have as powerful voice online in some ways as those who are using the energy of us and them to really build that energetic presence. For me, it’s still out. I’ve heard that the conclusion still out. I mean, I’ve heard the expression that technology has made major contributions to men’s minor needs. So I don’t know. What’s your thought about that, Thomas? I’d be curious to hear how you feel.
Thomas: Yeah. No, I don’t think it’s the fundamental basis to adult development, obviously. And I think technology, as you said, connected us allows us to have a bigger perspective because data flow is bigger. I mean, before it was newspapers, but before there was a time when we were living in different regions and there was culture. Ethnicity was far away, so we weren’t so confronted by it. And then the world grew closer and closer. And then wondering how much that complexity pushes us to push certain lines of development, this can, or you say higher because we need to swim in more complexity. And if not, then we always have this urge to simplify things. Yes. Because we need to stay in control of what we know. And so I think that there is a correlation not just, and of course the shadow gets amplified and development gets pushed into a more world centric direction.
But I think also, and that’s also why I wrote the book about collective trauma, because I think the dimension of the social traumatization that creates this shadow is also being amplified. You see it on social media, you see it all over. And I think that’s why I think there’s also some of the dangers that we see right now and the social polarization. And so they’re connected, but the charge is in there, I think is this kind of global development that challenges all the former levels of development, egocentric, ethnocentric, and so are being challenged by the pressure of that development. So that’s a little bit how I look at this. I mean, there’s so much more to say about it.
Diane: Oh my gosh, it’s such a huge topic I think in the US in a certain way. The other thing I think it’s really done is that it’s just changed completely the relationship to the media and the news so that people are listening to podcasters, they’re much more interested in a long conversation. They’re not really looking at headlines. There’s no agreement about what the headlines are. You can read the same headline and it’s spun in completely different ways. And then it’s kind of hard to know what to believe. So say compared to when I was a kid, there was a newscaster, his name was Walter Cronkite, and he would always finish his newscast by saying, and that’s the way it is. It’s really hard to know what way it is because all these different interpretive frames are used. And so that’s also an interesting challenge. So we’re getting very different takes on what is true.
Thomas: So how does growing up and waking up, or maybe more so cleaning up how help us to navigate in a world that is more and more complex, that is more and more fast, that is more and more interconnected also. And that is sometimes with AI and content being manipulated also, maybe sometimes less and less true. So how do we navigate in a world that has all of that? Because we can say, no, we don’t want fake news, we don’t want manipulated video. I can manipulate this video and have us say stuff that we said, it looks like Thomas and Diana talking, that goes out. So how-
Diane: That’s really true.
Thomas: And so how do you see growing up and waking up helping us to navigate in this world that is very complex and it’s not anymore. You can’t control this world except if you hook hold it and simplify, which doesn’t pay justice to this world. So maybe you can speak a little bit for our listeners.
Diane: Well, I’ll just speak to my own experience. I mean, at the beginning of the book, we talk about, for example, the kind of stresses that my students experience right now. And you’re naming a lot of them. They’re all very wired into their devices. So they’re having trouble with their attention. I would say they’re extremely busy and they’re moving at a very fast pace. Transportation, automobiles, the computer, how many emails you get a day. There’s a tremendous amount of what they would describe as busyness and distractedness. I think that there’s pressure around identity here, certainly what your ethnic, racial, gender identity is and how it is you communicate that, you do or don’t identify with it, and whether that’s supported or not. So there are those kinds of challenges. There’s kind of an epidemic of loneliness because these very immediate communities that we used to enjoy because we lived next to each other and we shopped in the same place, and now some of us literally find more community online than we find in person.
So basically the way that we’re responding in the book to that Thomas, is we’re saying that to wake up is fundamental because regardless of the conditions, whether it’s in the destabilization of the government in the US or whether it’s in the healing, the work that you do on the European continent where people are still trying to integrate the trauma from the first two world wars, or whether it’s just the strife in certain parts of the world in Israel right now in Gaza, that knowing who we truly are and being deeply at home in ourselves and being able to experience a kind of, you could call it a kind of indestructible unity with all that is, is there’s nothing more important in my view for these really turbulent, changing, fast changing times. Because rather than reaching out for the news or even reaching out for certain quality of relationship, one can turn in and in that place find both an experience of peace and an experience of wellness, if you will, wellbeing and some sense that things are okay even under the worst of circumstances.
So there’s nothing like spiritual awakening, but spiritual awakening doesn’t help us with some of the issues that we face. So for example, in my life, I’ve been in a number of different spiritual communities where certain kinds of challenges, it could be scandals with the teacher or it could be certain kinds of disputes arising among the members, or it could be issues related to money or power. Because those are always coming up. And what I saw was that spiritual communities were not very well equipped to deal with those. That the ability, the skillset that goes along with growing up, which has to do with being able to manage anxiety in your body, knowing when adrenaline, cortisol are flowing through your nervous system, and that we use that language of triggered and that you’re triggered. So listening becomes impossible and thinking actually becomes impossible and you can’t remember why you like somebody.
So meditation creates the ground of relaxation to be able to work with the body in that way, but without really addressing it, the minute you’re off the cushion, somebody can disturb your wellbeing relatively easily. So these communities just, they didn’t have those skills. They didn’t know how to negotiate, they didn’t know how to listen to each other. So that’s when I really found Ken’s model super helpful because I thought if waking up won’t let us work through a conflict, what good is it? So the growing up has a whole set of skills and ways of relating with one another that I think are really essential if we’re going to get through hard times. So I would say in relationship to what we’re experiencing now, the deep piece of waking up and the skills and the learning that we’re doing with one another, both very important.
Thomas: Yeah, I very much agree and Ken’s work inspired me from the beginning of my twenties. I think I always loved the complexity of waking up, growing up, but also cleaning up and showing up important. I also think that as you said, that there’s the spiritual practice and the timeless. And for me, the element of time is represented in growing up, as you say, but also in integrating our capacity to become a grownup human being. Because I think in many ways, and look at our society, look at social media, look at the political landscape, how many conversations are mature and grown up in a way hold the complexity of the conversation. You find a lot of fragmentation, polarization, othering. So I think that this is very, very important what we are talking about. And just meditation alone won’t do that. So it’s very important. So I think you beautifully framed that. So what else can we find in your book growing up and waking up? So you related it a bit to what your students experience. So when you go through, what else do we find that can help us practice, help us become more whole?
Diane: Well, I think the great spiritual traditions still have a place. So I mean the humanistic perspective of secularism where we’re not orienting to the authority of a church or of a particular spiritual lineage, but we’re actually free to explore what is true for us and how we want to inhabit it. It’s really important, the freedom that secularism gives us to be who we really are and not to feel like we’re subsumed in an orthodoxy, but I think that the great traditions have so much to offer us and that it’s really up to us to help to evolve them and to think about them under these new circumstances and these new pressures. But I do think that, I mean, I am encouraging people to explore if there’s a way to relate to the great traditions in a way that can be supportive. And then we look at, for example, what is the role of ritual in a postmodern or a post postmodern life?
And I think ritual is so deep in our evolution and so beautiful that we can engage our intention through a series of actions or a series of gestures with sounds, with music, with chanting that we can do in a group. It’s very soothing to our nervous system, to engage ritual and to do it with others is really powerful because our intentions get bigger. So there’s a chapter on ritual that I think is important. We talk about the importance of embodiment, of course, and doing physical practices. We use that language of cross training, which really comes out of physical training because we know how important health is and nutrition and embodiment, and particularly in postmodern times where we can become tremendously disembodied as we know, sitting in front of a computer screen playing video games all day, texting your friends and looking at porn on another screen, it’s not so wholesome.
So staying really connected to the body is really, really important. And then relationship, which is where you’re so exquisite, to help people with that with healing. So I think we address those in different ways and we just use examples from our own practice why we find it’s valuable in these times to have a community, also a sangha where you’re not the only one. You actually can build a lot of commonality with others and then learn how to enjoy your uniqueness and your differences without being caught by it. I mean, I first learned about that working in Germany when I would facilitate the big mind process and I would ask to speak to a particular voice. And Germans really don’t like answering in unison.
It just brings up a lot of bad feelings, like when you answer all the same at one time, that quality of communion. So I would always have to encourage the Germans to remember that they’re autonomous beings and if something is happening that they don’t approve of to take a stand. So autonomy and communion are really important. We get so mixed up. We think we’re going to lose ourselves in groups or that we have to remain extremely autonomous or this word sovereignty gets used in our circles a lot. But sovereignty without communion is meaningless because interconnectedness is the truth of who we are. So community is great. There’s that old saying, I love humanity. It’s the people I don’t like. So having a sangha, you get to practice.
Thomas: Right. No, that’s lovely. I completely agree with many things. You said also with the power of community, the power of rituals, how healing rituals have been lost in our postmodern world and I think need to be brought back in. The power that they generate is fantastic. And also how we expose ourselves to the parts that are triggering or difficult for us voluntarily. Not just life confronts us, but that we sign up for the discomfort that we experience sometimes. Yeah, that’s beautiful. I mean, you also worked a lot on mediation or conflict solution. How is that part of your book? Did this find a way into this book? Because I know when we earlier some musical we talked about that and also how your understanding of mediation and conflict resolution deal with the current polarization, fragmentation. There’s so much tension in many societies at the moment. Is that also part of it and how
Diane: Well the conflict is, it’s intrinsic to relationship because we talk about the miracle of we. And the reason we is such a miracle is because we’re the same and we’re different. And so the part of us that recognizes one another is the same, and we give each other a unitive experience where we’re soothed and we become one. And it’s very lovely. Well, if that isn’t challenged by our differences, it becomes complacent and often very stagnant. If all we do is reinforce how much the same we are, there’s no growth. So it’s our differences that really bring the excitement and the learning and the challenge to relationships. So conflict is built in now. Some of us are prone towards moving towards conflict. Some of us avoid, some of us always try to smooth it out immediately. So we really look at conflict as a tremendous opportunity for growth and for systems to be challenged and stimulated.
Now, doing this at scale I think is much more difficult In the size groups I work in, it’s very, very interesting and satisfying to work with conflict because it wakes us up and we’re very stimulated and then we start to discover the commonalities and we add value and we explore both. And suddenly it flips and I see it from your point of view and you see it from mine. And then there’s this creative upwelling of ideas and solutions. So on a small scale conflict really, really can really be worked with in a way that’s very energizing to individuals and to groups. But I think once we hit a certain scale, it’s much more difficult because people view, people are drawn to the conflict without the skills of working with it. So we get magnetized online to wherever there’s a dispute, even if it’s between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, these rappers who are battling it out.
And it’s very energizing to experience the battle. And in this case, it’s symbolic in a certain way, it’s being enacted in symbolic ways, but there’s still harm. There’s still harm being done. So for me, I’ve seen the inability to work with conflict create tremendous harm my whole life. I’ve seen that. So my experiences in small individuals and groups and pockets of people, they’re really developing a tremendous skillset. And I would even think that negotiators perhaps in Gaza and Israel are doing some really tremendous work right now with conflict. But how you get the population to engage in that same way, it’s a much more challenging question.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s very interesting to me because I think also what helps us to facilitate the current amount of tension or polarization of fragmentation in our society. What would be the equivalent that you said, okay, in your groups you have, so conflict is often energizing and breaks certain stagnations and it release energy, but we need to be able to facilitate that. Otherwise it can just be another retraumatization and go back to start the monopoly.
Diane: You end up in a win-lose, right? So someone gets to feel good and somebody else feels really bad because they’ve lost and that satisfies certain developmental parts of us. But to be able to feel the release and both and the creative solution is a different, and in my view, much more graceful and elegant kind of satisfaction as opposed to the density of the win lose. I’ve actually thought about doing a podcast. I thought about calling it beef because that’s what we call it in the states. They have beef and people could bring a conflict in and then we could model helping them actually move through it so that people could see it. Most people don’t have the experience of seeing it work through very beautifully. All they see is win lose scenarios, and while that gives energy, it also divides and it leaves half in a very one down position, which is not a great, I mean, we know very well that leaving Germany in a one down position after the first World War was literally what set up the conditions for the second World War.
That’s what it did it. And yet on a collective level, we know nothing about how to do that. Well, that’s not true. I mean, I think the democracies have done a relatively good job of that. It’s just that the rise at the far right now makes it much harder, I guess. But there’s always, even with the western allies, other people, other cultures feel one down.
Thomas: Exactly. And I think also, I deeply believe we need collective structures for this. I think we need a collective something. There was a time when hospitals didn’t exist and now they seem like so normal, but it wasn’t always normal. They have invented or created and then we saw it’s great, and then it became normal. It became a structure of our society. I don’t think we have a good structure of dealing with this collective fragmentations and also this massive collective wounds this one has created. And I think without that, without dealing with the legacy, I don’t think we can. We will see the conflict symptoms all the time, but I don’t think we will get to a good way to upgrade, upgraded and talk about collective growing up, the collective like adult development. I think it needs some mechanism to do, and that’s why I loved it when you mentioned the rituals, because I think rituals are always, if they’re well designed, they can do such a job. Yeah, that’s right. They can do it through rituals, they can serve and be kind of a role model for collective growing up and maybe also collective waking up anyway. I mean, meditation is often being practiced in collectives.
But maybe, yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
Diane: Well, I noticed I used to be the director of the office for dispute resolution in our judiciary. And what I experienced then is that the public was not very well educated about mediation. So I had to do a lot of education of both the lawyers, judges, and the public. And that there was still an impulse often to feel like if you litigated or if you brought it to court, that somehow you would just get this clean win. There’s still this kind of hanging on to, and I think we promote that so much in culture, that U.S. culture is the worst in this way. I mean, we’re always, we’re in a win-lose structure all the time and stoking the fantasies that everybody can be on top. So in a way, it takes in a certain way, a little bit more courage to be willing to say, for example, to mediate because it doesn’t promise you that you’re, you’re just going to win.
But the truth is, and this is something that Voltaire said, he said he was ruined in court twice, once when he won, once when he lost. So it’s somehow can we give people enough experience and like you’re saying, create the structures perhaps where they can actually be supported in having a different experience. And then people see that it’s possible and it doesn’t come at such a great cost to your self image. Even in the ordinary conflicts we experience with one another on a daily basis, we still have that very old sense of threat and that very old sense that something about our self-identity is going to be compromised if we somehow move with more curiosity towards each other.
Thomas: Yeah, and I think if you just look at the evolution, how much fight, flight, freeze mechanisms are ingrained in our autonomous nervous system, and we are all looking through the nervous system in one way or the other, however transcendent we are in daily interactions, it has, as you said before, you can sit and meditate and be very blissful and maybe peaceful, but if somebody triggers you later, often at least there is some kind of coming out of that state for many people, not maybe for everybody, but you need to be very anchored in that bigger perspective, not to get sucked into some of these things. And I think that we need to really rewrite, and I think we can rewrite those millions of years of being killed. I mean, I think the waking up is literally a way to rewrite those strong imprints because what is the nervous system and what the genetics, it’s a concentrated history. And so it’s like a memory stick being passed on all the time and everybody adds a file or something or changes some files or destroys some files. But that I think we can literally rewrite it. And I think growing up and waking up ways, how to rewrite those tendencies that seems so imperative to some reactions that we have.
Diane: And this idea of rewriting is really, really powerful. One of the ways that we can think about it is when we’re, imagine we have a meditative, meditation practice and we have access to that experience, that experience helps us be able to really look at the experience of being triggered, to feel it, to sense it, to see what it does to our cognition, to notice how we feel gripped. And then the very fact of being able to observe that creates new neural pathways in the brain. We’re literally evolving the brain when we’re practicing dealing with the fact that we’re triggered, that old nervous system is that on fire just by observing it, we’re changing it. So I like that moment of confidence when you said, I think we can do this. I do too. I do too.
Thomas: The only thing I would add to, at least in my experience there is the power of the observing or the witnessing, like this deeper consciousness that we can rest in and observe this. But what I’ve seen in the last 20 years, I think that often since the trigger is a symptom of a deeper root, I think underlying because the underlying trauma behind the trigger, the trigger shows up on the surface. But there is something in the depth I have seen that the better we get at integrating those deeper roots so that we first of all change our relationship to the trigger. We have the consciousness that you spoke about, and then we have the precision to, I often call this, to take the needle through the trigger down and bring whatever is in the depth of our unconscious and integrate whatever the trigger is a symptom of. And that creates a wholeness in the fabric individually and collectively. And I think that creates a liberation, like a win-win win because you get the energy back that you needed, that you
Diane: To hold that in place
Thomas: To hold the fragmenting force. We look at societal fragmentation, but actually we need to look at what is the fragmenting force that we don’t see that creates polarization. And once you see this, then it becomes vertical development. And that’s why I think when you speak about growing up, I think the integration of trauma, it means that the past becomes presence
Diane: Ad when it surfaces, Thomas, does it surface in the form of, I mean, because usually you’re getting often just a sensation when you talk about the needle going down. Does the surfacing happen in the form of a memory or how does one recognize if one has access that deeper memory, whatever that happens to be?
Thomas: Yeah. When we do this work, we see in the moment you go beyond the symptoms because the symptoms show up as something in your body, something emotional, stress ly, all kinds of symptoms, trigger symptoms or distance or indifferent,
Diane: Withdrawal,
Thomas: Withdrawal or all kinds of things. And you see that the original space has been left. You have two instead of an interdependent hole and so on. And then whenever we go beyond, when we first befriend the trigger as something that we want to be with and not we want to get rid of, if you can go deeper, then when you touch the original hurt that created this fragmentation, you see immediately there’s a melting of the fragmenting power. Then there are two movements. One is up the spine, energy comes up and liberates something and becomes more creative and relational. There’s an expansion of the social engagement system, and there’s a reunification in the relational space, and there is a downward movement that opens up the body and the base and grounds thing. So when we say Reem embodiment, the trauma is a disembodiment and the integration is a re-embodiment, and then we naturally inhabit the body in the place where it was shut down again more. And that’s amazing. That’s amazing. So it’s a win-win, win because the energy you needed to shut it down is melting. Also, the developmental energy that was frozen is liberated, so can make it into its vertical adulthood, and you feel more grounded and more relational.
Diane: That is a three way. Yeah. Literally down, up and across.
Thomas: Yeah, exactly. It’s more grounded. You’re more relaxed. Your nervous system is more regulated, you’re more relational. So there are many, many, I think that is a great way to drive, to put more fuel into the growing up. So I see our time. Anything, Diane, it’s lovely to see you again, first of all, and I’m enjoying this. Me too. Of course. I have so many more questions about how you’re doing and what’s happening in your life, but for another time, anything for our listeners that you think would be great that we didn’t touch on or anything that you want to? Yeah,
Diane: I think the vivid moment for me in our conversation, I loved all of it because I always am learning when you and I talk, but that moment where you said, I think we can do this is really inspiring. And so I just want to underscore to our listeners to really have confidence in your ability both to wake up and grow up, and that you started out with the question of why should we bother? Because it’s the most important and powerful thing we have, and the biggest threat to who we are is really conflict with one another. It’s not climate. I don’t know about ai. I’ll stay out of that. And our greatest power is the fact that we can learn these skills and we can grow, and that cohesion and that relaxation and embodiment that you described is our natural way of being. And so to just be able to be encouraged that your practice is worth your time. Absolutely.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s very beautiful. Thank you. I very much agree it. It’s so important, and I’m happy you bring out your book and you inspire more and more people. It’s lovely to see you. Thank you very much, and all the best for you. All
Diane: Right. We’ll see you down the road, I’m sure.
Thomas: Yes.
Diane: Bye Bye.
Thomas: Thank you.
