Thomas Hübl: Welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl and I’m sitting here with Elise Loehnen. Elise, warm welcome. Again.
Elise Loehnen: Thank you for having me. I love this little shadow club that we have going.
Thomas: Yeah, me too. I find it very enlivening and it’s paradox given the topic we talk about, but maybe it’s not so paradox given.
Elise: I don’t think it is. Yeah. I think if anything, yeah, that’s the point. It’s funny, every time I feel like we start out with a plan and then we end up somewhere else, but maybe that’s what’s needed in the moment.
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. I think we were, in this series of conversations, we’re circling a bit deeper into what actually is the nature of the evil? What is the nature of shadow or collective shadow and how does it show up and how can we work with it and how can we transform? So this is basically the conversation that we are in.
Elise: Yeah. I have so many questions for you. Does evil have a moral quality or is it more alchemical? Is it dangerous? Is it actually the source of energy that drives our lives as long as it’s properly used and transformed? I want to know how you perceive evil, darkness, and shadow that maybe isn’t generated or is generated by us,
Thomas: Right? So where do you want to start?
Elise: So maybe we start with, we’ve had many conversations about collective shadow, ancestral trauma, how we’re all corporate shareholders in the collective shadow. What happens to this energy that isn’t processed particularly in mass events like the Holocaust or when tribes have been genocided, et cetera, and there are too many people passing, there’s so much pain and trauma that stays present. Is that darkness all of human creation or is there a different substrate of evil? And maybe those are different things. Maybe we start, do you have a definition of what you think of as evil, shadow, darkness? Are they all elements of the same thing?
Thomas: Yeah, I mean one definition, maybe we could call it our tendency that seemed like against life.
If the sacred is life, like living the living process and the sacred is the creation process of life is what creates the cosmos, the universe, whatever the divine power or divine grace, then it seems like that there are forces in life that seem to jeopardize or hurt or sometimes kill life and or often kill life as a function of what we call evil, evil tendencies in humans, evil tendencies in groups or cultural subgroups. But I think it’s really important to have this conversation that we are having here, not to just easily call it that way, but really examine what actually happens in this anti-bios,anti-life tendencies. And then from there maybe generate a deeper understanding. Because I think it’s very important to envision that we often see individuals as separate, but we all a context. And the more separate that individual is, the scarier is the world. And so the more connected we feel, the less scary is the world and also the less scary is the evil, but it’s not that we deny it and that whatever it is doesn’t exist. But more connectedness means more resilience and more life. So separation is an integral part of the experience of evil.
Does this makes sense? The more separate this particle is, when I am in this separate sense of self, then my experience of evil is going to be very different than when I’m interconnected in the world. And I feel very, very much as an integral part of the process of living. That makes a huge difference. Who is looking.
Elise: And do you think that when you think about the person as separate rather than feeling really integrated or in a community of care, is it work in two ways where that person is more inclined to see everyone as other and be more polarized against other people? And then is that person also sort of a metastasized in a cell that becomes sort of cancerous because it’s lonely, it’s cut off, it’s metastasizing, it’s sort of doing its own thing alone. Is that also sort of what generates those forces and the collective?
Thomas: Exactly. You’re saying of course there are many different versions. It’s not just one process, but the tendencies the more separate we feel, either it goes into inner more self-destructive or inner processes that feel less alive, less connected, less bright, less creative, or it goes into outer destructive, like really herding or acting against something outside. But what is true is that the more separate we feel, the more we project things that are actually parts of us and parts of uplifted parts of ourselves onto the world. And we see this very strongly when we look at the cultural dialogue and the cultural conversation around politics, around all kinds of things like how many projections, outward projections of unintegratedness we have and how that overshadows the dialogue that we want to have. Let’s disagree about political agendas and be in a mature conversation. But that mature conversation very fast disintegrates into a very polarized conversation that loses its maturity.
And so you’re saying it. So when that in its extreme form, all kinds of tendencies can show up, but I think it’s very important when we look at evil then it’s not one thing because it’s not the one everyone looks through the same charisma or the same lens or the same sense of self. And so we need to also see who’s looking and then what are we looking at and what’s in the process of looking or feeling or experiencing. So how all of this is interconnected, I think very important. Otherwise it seems like there is something out there that is evil and I’m in here and it’s out there. And I think that’s already a function of the very thing that we are trying to explore here.
Elise: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I feel like most, I don’t know if I can say all I’m curious about your perspective, but when you see something or someone acting in a way that we would quickly label as evil or against life or malevolent, my understanding is that that person is just full of unrealized unmetabolized shadow and unhealed, wounded whatever might be happening. And that it’s not the same as some sort of, I guess I’m trying to understand the order of the cosmos. And so I don’t think of that person as that’s the devil or that’s some sort of pure unmitigated evil. That to me is someone who is deeply in shadow. I don’t know if you sort of have a framing for how you see that even the idea of Satan. Satan in the Old Testament I think has been sort of grossly misunderstood or mistranslated, which is really, if you go back and you read the stories, it is that Satan is the opposer in some ways the resistance, but part of God’s world and that we might see something as satanic that would push us off our path.
It might in some ways be protective. I’m trying to think of the specific story where Satan plays that function, but that of course that’s part of our world. The world isn’t always kind to us. It doesn’t always give us what we want. It opposes us. And it’s not necessarily evil that we don’t always feel kindness. I don’t know. But I feel like that Satan has been misunderstood. But then I don’t know, maybe there is some sort of massive darkness outside of God. And I don’t need to necessarily take this into a religious context, but I think that’s sort of the way that it’s been served to us. I don’t know how you see it.
Thomas: Yeah, I think as we say it, the world or our experience of the world and the world includes not only our planet, like the whole universe, let’s say there is a growing complexity. There is also a growing complexity through the increase of data speed and interconnectedness and feedback loops that technology give us. We couldn’t have all of conversations that excite us without the technology that we are using because we are not living in the same place. So I think just that allows us like a connection that otherwise wouldn’t happen. So let’s say that happens billions and billions of times. So the world is much more interconnected through technology than it was, I dunno, 40 years ago. And so I think the fact that we, maturity… like to have a cup where that is big enough that the world can flow through us, that we can experience information as a flow experience as a flow means that I can swim in complexity. But if not, if I carry trauma inside and it makes it harder, it makes me tight. And we all might know how it feels when we get triggered in something. So we become tighter, we have a position, we become more defensive, we keep more triggered or more absent. And so we cannot swim in complexity. And then complexity becomes overwhelming
When complexity becomes overwhelming. We want to simplify it. But the difference between maturity I often say is complexity is simplicity in the right cup, which means cup means flow. When the world can flow through us in a flow moment, you don’t have any question. It’s like just flowing through you. It’s just happening and it’s flowing. When it’s not flowing, it creates a friction inside. So it feels like overwhelming. But when it’s overwhelming, what, instead of staying with the overwhelm, we often try to control the complexity out there and then we need to simplify it. And I think often in conversations about good and evil, we try to simplify a world that otherwise is complex. It’s not that it has different aspects. And I think in our conversations we are bringing up different aspects of the thing that we are exploring without trying to say, okay, this is it.
And so you’re right. So there might be much bigger fields or much bigger qualities in the universe that we can also examine when we examine our global situation. And that might be part of it. But also when we talk about divinity, when we talk about the greatest mystic, we’re all talking about not twoness. So there’s not twoness and then there is the evil. So not twoness means a consciousness that is not separate from and therefore is not two, and it includes twoness, it duality, light and dark is a dual version of our world. So when we go into deep contemplative practices or when we listen to deep mystical teachings, the divine reality, God is not opposing the evil nature of life or humanity. It is an integral part of it. And when you read the Bible or other scriptures, it’s not that God is God and then there’s the other.
So that’s very important. So when we say, okay, when we use a mystical dimension in this conversation, then we also need to look at, okay, what is actually not twoness mean? And what does that mean in relation to our conversation about good and evil? And so then we come back to obviously there is something that is resisting. There’s something that is splitting, there’s something that’s separating and that’s separating force that is the root cause of many, many other symptoms that we call evil needs to be examined in its depth.
And I think that’s also in the transition from into modernity and I think into the scientific age and into a deeper understanding of psychology, there was an opening in saying, oh wow, let’s include the fact of how we project stuff outwards, how we suppress part of our nature. That’s when I said at the beginning, it feels enlivening given. So I think there is something enlivening also in reowning parts that we suppress and that suppression becomes the fuel of that mysterious force that we call. And I think, yeah, so I think that how can we be in this conversation and not try to, for us and for everybody who’s listening, how can we be in this conversation and swim in the complexity of it without becoming unspecific and complex, fluid.
Elise: I don’t know if you’ve ever been in conversation with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, he’s a Sufi mystic and he is amazing. I love reading Llewellyn and I’ve interviewed him once. We’re email friends, I’m always trying to lure him back. But he’s essentially, I think sort of, I don’t know, in meditation, not in an external place right now. And he writes about the alchemical darkness in a way that makes so much sense to me. I don’t know if you perceive it this way and the way that people who are highly trained mystics can access, I don’t even know if he would call them these other planes or other worlds, but he would say, I think that this alchemical darkness is really the energy or the source of growth in our world or in this reality structure. But to touch that level of darkness requires great skill and safety and training and a deeper understanding.
And you could think about it in every level of our reality structure or our experience as humans, that that darkness is what feeds our growth. Psychological deaths, having experiences that are hard and then coming out of it and experiencing some sort of rebirth, losing a relationship, losing a job, losing an opportunity, illness, all of these things that we would code as bad or unwanted often, obviously not always, but that becomes sort of the fuel by which we get bigger and more expanded and more conscious, more awake, more aware, more resourced. Obviously it can have sort of the opposite effect, which is it can overload the system. We’re traumatized, we’re shut down, we’re corroded in some way or unable to really take that flow or that cup and move through it. But it’s interesting to think of it as dangerous, contorting overwhelming for most of us. And yet if it’s like, and you talk about this a lot in your work generally the titration of shadow when you go in, when you build these groups and these resonance fields and you start processing what’s there, it has to be titrated, but it’s like we’re built in some ways to feed off of this or process this feeding makes us sound.
That’s not maybe the nicest word, but I don’t know. The way that he described it for me at least took a lot of the fear out for me in the sense of, oh, there’s this other moral for him. It’s not a question of morality, it has nothing to do with it. It’s not animated in a way that he doesn’t anthropomorphize it, but that it’s there and we can sense it, but we don’t go there without proper training and awareness. Does that resonate for you?
Thomas: Yeah, it resonates. And I think I shared with you once when I flew to Kathmandu and I saw the city, I came in in the night and and they turn off in quarters of the city, I think every four hours a quarter, so to save electricity. And so when I was on the plane, I looked and I saw this dark spot, I saw the city lights and then there was this spot. I thought that’s amazing. That’s an amazing description of me on the plane is let’s say the perspective of the self looking down. And I don’t see, is this part of the city that has no electricity? Is that a lake? Is that a forest? Is that a part of the mountain that reaches into the city? I don’t know. Is that, that’s it. That’s a genius description of the human unconscious because in a way it means that the self, when parts of our nervous system and nervous system in the bigger sense, ancestral nervous system, collective nervous system, when part of our electricity networks are down in that, if that’s a part of the city, then people are there in houses there with candles and with small lamps.
But from the plane perspective, you don’t see that it just looks like dark like night. But there is a process happening in that quarter of the city. It’s just not visible. So the sense of self has no awareness of the process that is happening in parts of that self because we are numb to it, we’re absent. So when you look at absence, when you look at thousands of years of humanity, slaughtering, torturing, killing, raping, like doing racial trauma like antisemitism and holocaust, genocides, there’s so much pain that needed to be absenced, that there are patches like deep oceans, deep oceans where there’s no light, there is no light. But in that absence, there is a process, there is a war raging, but it’s completely quiet like a TV that you turned off, but you see the dark screen and you have no sound. But in there, there is a war in,
There’s torture going on. And I think if we look at it that way, we have been born into a world where all of that existed before we came. So we have been born into patches of presence like where we see that a city, but we were also born into patches of absence. So we are a natural shareholder without knowing that we are shareholder of thousands of years of humanity’s unresolved history as much as we are part of its resolved and developed history. And so we are walking around and we are looking through absence. We cannot see many things because our seeing doesn’t allow it. Our nervous system is shut down in certain places developmentally through our childhood ancestrally I believe.
And then when you look at this simple sentence, he blames her, she blames the snake. We are busy. This scene keeps us busy for thousands and thousands and thousands of years because we are not good in digesting. We are not good in slowing down and integrating our hardships and traumatizations like massive. And we are definitely not good in as a collective humanity, we are not good in reowning our transgressions, we’re not good in taking responsibility. So if there are thousands of years of killing and power over hierarchies and all of that, and we didn’t really take responsibility for it. So we continuously pushing the effects in front of us into the future and we are running into that future every day. So I think that’s very important to understand. We have been born into massive patches of darkness, of night, of not seeing, not feeling, being numb. And so we are operating and we are trying to ask ourselves what’s evil within that context? Because we are all in it. Does does this make sense?
Elise: Yeah, no, I mean it’s a snapshot of the world that we’re all living in right now too. Where, and to be fair, I think as a collective one, people don’t know. It’s not necessarily that they don’t want to take responsibility. I think people don’t know how, they don’t know where the bottom is. The bottom of the lake of darkness is, I don’t think that we have a good model for what restoration looks like. I think we go into a mental concept of if we just read about it or talk about it a lot or post about it a lot on social media, then we’ll be processing it in some ways in part because we’ll be identifying in that action, here’s the villain, here’s the victim, here’s the hero. Whatever context we can adjudicate blame and be certain and place ourselves again outside of it.
And then meanwhile, I think on top of that, not only do you have sort of the trauma, but you also have a population where everyone is scared. Everyone is in deep fear and defensiveness. I come from a rural state that’s become progressively more red. And when I go home, I can’t hate those people or be against those people or not understand a lot of the reason that they vote the way that they vote, which is not how I vote, but it is from fear, it is from feeling demonized. And so I think you get into that part of the country for example would say, what do you mean I am a white supremacist? I don’t know what you’re talking about. And there’s a lot of Montana, so 10% of the population is Indigenous. There’s a lot of trauma in places like Montana. There’s a lake of trauma in that, well all across the United States.
But there certainly, I don’t know, I think people don’t know when we talk about what does it look like to take responsibility, I think taking responsibility, and I’m curious what you think that that looks like is just staying forcing oneself, forcing maybe is not a nice word, but to be present with what’s happening in your body and to do your own shadow work really to take responsibility for those parts of you that are feeling incredibly vulnerable and threatened and demonized and claiming them and integrating them and loving them so that you’re not at least perpetuating it or projecting it or trying to disown it and make it someone else’s problem. What is responsibility? What is taking responsibility for the lake? What does that look like for you?
Thomas: Right. No, it’s beautiful how you described it because I completely agree with you. There are certain parts of that lake, like when it’s steep ocean where we don’t even know. It seems like there is no bottom to it, so we don’t even know how to ask stuff about it because there’s no sensing, there’s no feeling, there’s no orientation and seen from what we can see. We can see only a certain distance into the water, but a certain depth into the water. But we can see further than that our senses on the loud. And I’ve seen this literally, I felt that with multiple groups when we went and we did this Holocaust, second world war integration processes with Jewish people and German people in the room.
And there were moments when I could literally feel and see the end of the conscious universe that we couldn’t sense beyond the certain quality in the room because we were so in this lake of collective defense mechanisms that shut down or anesthetize pain. And without that, and we need that, it’s very important. If we were released, if that were released at once, it would be terrible. It would affect millions of people. It cannot. So we need that also. We need that shutdown, but we also need to develop technologies, social or cultural technologies to begin to titrate and soften and open that step by step. So for us to increase our current perception.
And so it’s true at the same time, we don’t need to start with what’s the most par. We can come back to our life and say, how often do I say things when I feel it wasn’t fully true? How often do I do things when I know it actually hurts somebody a bit, but I don’t go there and repair it? How often do X, Y, Z? Many things where I feel I can take more responsibility in the moment, how often do we become reactive and it hurts somebody around us, but we don’t come back and say, listen, I’m sorry, I know I overreacted and I didn’t mean it and I’m really sorry about it.
And so from subtle dishonesty, so to not have a conflict, to make it a little bit round the corners to lying in relationships, people have other relationships and don’t say to their partner, their partner feels something but feels very confused. It distorts our intuition and its not honest and it’s selfish because I want to keep something in place and I don’t dare fear whatever it is, whatever my childhood trauma maybe makes me not say it, but it doesn’t matter. It’s me acting like that. And so there are ways that are much closer than the large trauma that we look at in our society that we can bring closer home and say, I begin to work on this stuff that I can work on and we will all find something I’m sure that we can refine, that we can refine and we can refine. And in the spiritual practice we call this, you begin to live and create the world around you that you really want to be living in.
And so every one of us is an individual, but is also an ecosystem. All our interactions, all the people that we know, everything that we put out into the world, everything that we put out on social media creates a world. If I put out very polarizing content, I will live in a polarized world because I am co-creating it. If I act from a different level of maturity, I will live in a more mature world. We are all creating, partly co-creating the world that we live in. And if in my own sphere of influence it looks like that, so then I need to start here and not talk about them. I can do the word. So it starts from here.
And then of course we can stay in the narrative that it’s hard to take responsibility, for example, the ancestral participation in slavery or racism, but that is also often a simple exit door to say, maybe we can all create a deeper conversation without going into deep blame or deep trauma. We can create conversations, cultural conversations about how we experienced that. And I think how we experienced the legacy that we were born into and create conversations, not even deep trauma work, just conversations to move that and to develop collective spaces that can start to move some of that energy, bring more insights, and also notice where it becomes uncomfortable and stay there a bit longer and be together. So there are ways to do it.
And then there is a deeper ownership because I believe what we call evil in the world is partly the creation of disowned atrocities, disowned aspects. And you are right because it’s not that what our ancestors did is what we did. We didn’t do that, but our responsibility is ability to respond to that action. And if I cannot look there, because when I look there, I find I moral conflict in myself. That moral conflict is my work. Not that my ancestors were that my grandparents were in the second world war, but my relationship to my grandparents being in the second world war, that’s my work. I didn’t make decisions at that time, but if I cannot look there, I anesthetize my past and I am part of that lake.
Elise: Yeah, no, that’s so helpful. I mean, I think about this, I laugh at myself all the time in part because I think particularly right now, and obviously I wrote a whole book about goodness and clinging to this idea of goodness and using it as a shield against the world as a form of protection, but that I laugh when I drive my kids to school and I’m like, oh, I’m so irritated with a driver who cuts me off and then within 45 seconds I’ve cut someone else off. But yet we don’t witness ourselves as not living up to our values or perpetuating the same things that we hate. I think too often about that this idea of the life review that people talk about experiencing and near death experiences or that might be part of what happens when we die, where we get sort of this receipt, this reckoning in both positive and negative ways.
And there’s part of me that’s like, oh, this would be overwhelming. This is not a good idea. But to have some sort of 23 and me database, Thomas, where you could pull up sort of your entire ancestral line and see their sort of moral crimes or what they might’ve been a participant in and where they might’ve been a victim and where they might’ve been a victimizer. And in part because everyone’s list would be long. And there are no, I think anything to put to rest this idea that there are clear victims and victimizers and that there’s a way to align yourself with the victim pool, I guess without taking any ownership over who you in turn have hurt anyway. It’s a morbid idea, but I think it would be revelatory for people to recognize, as you’ve said, you can’t run for this from this. It doesn’t mean that you have to embrace it all or attend to it in one afternoon, but part of it is just relaxing, releasing into this idea of, yeah, I don’t always live up to my highest values because I’m human. And that is part of this process of trying to work towards some sort of wholeness is this ongoing embrace of shadow and recognizing there is no perfection. Perfection is not part of wholeness, and the more you run, the longer the shadow gets.
But to go back to evil, do you think all evil is sort of this disowned shadow? These are they entity cast off shadow entities that are waiting to be integrated? Do you have an idea of what you think it is?
Thomas: Yeah, yeah. First I want to just respond to what you just said, and I’ll come to this because it’s very important because people are suffering whatever is the history, for example of racism or slavery and racism or the history of antisemitism. As we are having this conversation, people are suffering. So the privilege is to be able to turn away from that, but it doesn’t mean that the suffering today disappears. So everybody who has the capacity or any kind of awareness to say, oh, I can look deeper, I think needs to look deeper. Awareness comes with ability to respond, complete unconsciousness. So it’s a complete unconscious, so you can’t even talk to it, so it won’t reach certain people, but for everybody who is privileged enough to have the awareness and the time and the space and the means to look at the collective history, it’s important because it has consequences today.
And it’s not just, oh, do we do it or not? It’s likely to go to play tennis or not. That’s not the conversation. The conversation is much more vital. I think that’s why it’s important that we check in with ourselves, am I really doing what I can do and what I don’t see because I absolutely don’t see it or I don’t have the skills to work with it, but then I can at least go and find out if there are ways and skills to do that. So, because I think sometimes privilege is also being used to turn away from the things because they’re uncomfortable. And then we say, okay, it’s hard. Yeah, it is hard because our humanities history is hard. Hard is like heart means we become tied to not feel pain, but we also as humanity created a lot of pain.
And no matter in which composition, where in the world we were born and what’s the composition locally where we arose, I think there is more we can do than we do at the moment. I’m sure. And the second thing that I want to underline, you said something very beautiful is it is messy. It’s not going to be perfect, and there’s no clean version to do this. It is like life is a process of often unexpected things that happen in our lives. And even the need to have it clean is something to look at or the need to have perfection. Because the Tao Te Ching in Steven Mitchell’s translation, it says, true perfection seems imperfect, but it is perfectly itself
True, perfect, beautiful, seems imperfect, but it is perfectly itself, which means energy that is here never lies what’s happening. There is an energy here that is part of what’s happening. And often we are disconnected from that. And then we don’t understand why these kind of things are here. We are looking for, we are disconnected from the process and that’s why we are looking for perfection at the end of the tunnel, but how to come into this. So this is I think, an important process.
And the second about the question about the evil, you said, I deeply believe that. I think one, another pillar of the complexity I think that we need to bring in here because it’s not a simple answer or a simple question that we are exploring, is we talked about this absence before. And so the anesthesia, the not sensing, not feeling, the disconnectedness from life and the flow of life. And that’s where other options than life come in. Only when there is a disconnect, there’s another option to not live, to kill life, to, there are all kinds of things coming in. And so that’s one aspect I think to contemplate. The other is when one description of hell is no movement.
So one description of hell is when the movement of life stops and there’s no development, it seems like an eternal stagnation. And so I think that is also important because often we experience that quality of evil as if it persists. There is no movement. And the experience of deep suffering is that the suffering will stay forever. And there’s no out, there’s no perspective, there’s no hope, there’s nowhere to go. So it’s a description of inertia. It’s like a description of no movement. And I think in that state, and parts of us might live in that state parts, and some people might experienced their life in that state of not movement and trauma, trauma is freezing life.
So when we have massive patches of frozen life, there is no movement, nothing’s moving. So the pain is completely mute, but it’s frozen. And I think that’s another aspect that we need to bring into this conversation of no hope, no future, there’s no way out. It’s like eternal suffering. And that’s a state that lives that is amongst us. And some of us are more entangled with that state, and some of us are less entangled with that state given what we have been born into. And it’s not the question of if this is good or not good, it’s a question is this is here. This is part of our planet. It’s like a dimension of our planet that not everybody experiences. And that’s why we sometimes don’t understand it because we say, well, what are you talking about? But there are some people that really experienced most of the life in that state, and that’s terrible.
And then when we see effects of that in our society and say, how come? But every time we say, how come vi, but why are we so surprised? The surprise is an interesting phenomenon. Why didn’t I feel that? And so the not sensing, not feeling the anesthesia in our society is a big part of the dissociated evil process that we see that surprises us, that comes as a big anomaly in life. And so that’s why I think that relates a bit to what you said before about the mystical teachings of being able to touch those layers in healing processes. And some healers train themselves to be more able to be connected to those layers that are often, they don’t appear, they don’t show up, but the fact that they don’t show up doesn’t mean they don’t exist, which we see only a fraction of reality.
There’s so much of reality that is kind of underneath the radar of our sensing and seeing and feeling and communication. But it’s here. And so we call that spiritual, but it doesn’t mean that it’s spiritual in the sense of religious. It’s not in the range of my perception. If you have a certain instrument that tests from one to hundred and then there is an impulse at 10,000, so you say it’s not there, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there. We just don’t test it in this range. And so I think that there’s this absence of awareness, the unconsciousness, but in the unconsciousness there might be eternal suffering. And there are different layers of that.
What people describe as hell in the scriptures is actually a deeply frozen state and the muted pain that has nowhere to go. And we are being born into that again and again and again, generations of the generations. So I think that’s important because that’s part of the water that we grew up in. And some of us had a much deeper experience of that than others, and others would say, but what are you talking about? I don’t understand this. I live in my apartment. I live my life. For me, this sounds like absolute crap, but that’s part of it.
Elise: I don’t know if we have time for this question, but do you find it gendered, is your experience in doing this work gendered in any way? Do you feel like because men are potentially conditioned to be more anesthetized from their feelings or to be an overdrive and the growth in individuation, while girls are conditioned to stay in relationship and stay in communities of care? And you could argue that men have perpetuated more traumatic events than women historically. I’m not saying women are off the hook, but do you find that men are particularly loathed or ill-equipped or unsure how to do this work?
Thomas: No, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that men in general are ill-equipped to do this work. I would say there is, at least in my understanding, there is, or in my experience, 25 years, I’m running very large groups sometimes, and it is consistent that approximately 70% of the participants are women.
So when it’s about healing and in a work and restoration and really looking deeper, there’s definitely a probability of a higher probability on the side of women. But I think that gender, I think it’s much more fluid. And that, let’s think about it as a fluidity, not as a two poles, but I see that female qualities are much more in the space when it’s about healing, which also makes sense because that’s also the energy we need in order to do the healing work. And I also see that by tendency, men are often expressing different qualities. And see that is at first, at least as, I dunno, either weaker or I woowoo or just the stuff that we don’t really need because let’s continue, let’s move on. And there is the, let’s say transgression part of, let’s say this anesthetizing and transing and committing or inflicting trauma that creates anesthesia in the transgressor as well. So I believe every time trauma happens, it splits the world into two and there’s a shadow trauma being copied into the transgressor energy. So there’s trauma on both sides. There’s a moral injury, there’s many things. But we also have to see that historically, often men were the ones that defended the tribe.
So there’s the transgressing, like the invasion type of war, but there is also the defensive type of war like protecting the tribe, which has similar consequences. It’s also fighting and war and killing. And so I think that the story is much more complex than it looks like. But I think working with the wounds and also the moral injury of trauma and killing in wars and many wars over the course of humanity’s history is definitely needed. And we need spaces for this. So yes, I think there is a different probability, but I don’t think it’s gendered in that sense. I think this is also a more complex question.
Elise: It is a complicated thing. I’m really curious about it. Maybe we will do another,
Thomas: I think we should do another one, and then we will zoom into exactly that question. I think that’s really, and I think there’s so much more about today’s topic too, but I think we are slowly deepening. We are putting the puzzle think we’re
Elise: Going there,
Thomas: We’re going there.
Elise: And when I talk about masculine and feminine, I think about it the way you do probably, which is that these are energies that we each contain and people who present as female are culturally conditioned to be more able to do one than the other and vice versa. So it’s a complicated
Thomas: Exactly. It’s a complex question that we need to unpack a bit more than having a simplification, just
Elise: Dropping it in the last few minutes.
Thomas: Yeah, yeah.
Elise: I’m
Thomas: Enjoying our conversations and I think we are doing exactly what’s needed is to open the space to allow the question to first come fully into the room. Because there is no simplified answer to this. I think it’s an exploration as we do it, and that exploration will lead us deeper and deeper into an understanding. So I think we are doing it really well.
Elise: You’re the best. Thank you, Thomas. It’s always so lovely to be with you.
Thomas: Thank you. Likewise. I’m deeply enjoying this. It’s very lively and I think we’re in a very creative space together. So let’s continue.
Elise: Let’s do it again. Alright.
Thomas: Alright. Thank you. Thank you. This was lovely.
Elise: You’re the best.