EPISODE 98

October 15, 2024

Elise Loehnen – Owning Our Collective Shadow

Thomas Hübl and New York Times bestselling author Elise Loehnen discuss the often misunderstood realms of shadow work and collective trauma. They explore how facing our inner darkness can lead to profound personal and societal transformation, and share practical insights on integrating the messy, painful parts of ourselves for spiritual growth and global healing.

Without awareness, whatever is being suppressed in the deep layers of our collective shadow will be passed on to future generations. But by implementing new rituals and architectures of healing, we can transform stagnant energy into aliveness, creativity, ethical upgrades, and stronger collaboration across cultural divides.

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“We could sit here and argue about this while our planet goes up in flames or we can collectively link arms and get to work.”

- Elise Loehnen

Guest Information

Elise Loehnen

Elise Loehnen is a New York Times bestselling author and the host of the podcast, Pulling the Thread, where she interviews cultural luminaries about the big questions of today. She’s the author of the New York Times bestselling On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good. She has also co-written 12 books, including five New York Times Best Sellers. Previously, she was the chief content officer of goop. While there, Elise co-hosted The goop Podcast and The goop Lab on Netflix, and led the brand’s content strategy and programming. For the podcast, she interviewed 100’s of thought leaders, doctors, and experts.

Prior to goop, she was the editorial projects director of Conde Nast Traveler. Before Traveler, she was the editor at large and deputy editor of Lucky Magazine, where she also served as the on-air spokesperson, appearing regularly on shows like Today, E!, Good Morning America, and The Early Show. She has a B.A. from Yale and majored in English and Fine Arts. These days, she serves on two boards (Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams and Skinfix), advises a beauty bio-tech start-up (Arcaea), and spends her time writing, reading, and fundraising for causes and politicians focused on environmental action, social justice, women and children’s health, and a more equitable world.

Learn more at:
eliseloehnen.com and eliseloehnen.substack.com

Notes & Resources

Key points from this episode include:

  • The necessity of facing our shadows in order to be agents of positive social change
  • How true light work lives in the messiness of life
  • Exploring the shadow elements that live in our ancestral and collective nervous systems
  • How disowned transgressions halt our collective ethical progression

Episode Transcript

Thomas Hübl: Hello and welcome Again, my name is Thomas Hübl. This is my podcast Point of Relation and I’m so happy to sit here again with you, Elise. Elise Loehnen. It’s our third part of our conversation series, so I’m looking forward to this. It’s going to be a choosy topic today. So warm, welcome first of all.

Elise Loehnen: Thank you. Very excited.

Thomas: Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Did you want to

Elise: No, I was just going to say, I know we’re talking about evil and it’s various substrates and is it shadow? Is it condensed shadow? What is it? Is it disembodied? Is this real? And before we started, I was just saying to you that I’ve read a fair amount on the topic. It’s very difficult to find anyone who really wants to talk about it. I don’t know if that’s been your experience as well.

Thomas: Yeah, my experiences is that it’s complex and so maybe that it’s hard to talk about. It is also part of what it’s, and so yeah, maybe I think we should just dive in and explore it a bit and see why maybe that’s also your experience that the fogginess around the topic I think is already the topic.

Elise: Yes. And I think the fogginess around the topic comes from the fact that we live in such a binary, polarized culture where we see the world as good and bad and light and dark and all of these organizing principles that give our reality structure. But I think we are so inclined to say, I’m good and the bad is elsewhere. And I do not associate with it. I do not recognize it when in reality as we know, we’re all full of shadow. And that’s part of life, right? Realizing shadow and metabolizing it and bringing it out. And our world, as you know, is full of it. But I think that there’s a natural inclination to disown it and distance oneself and proclaim goodness, cleanness purity is just in us deeply to do that.

Thomas: That’s so beautiful. I think you said already one big pillar of the whole conversation is what you just said. I want to be on the side of the good, the light, the clean and the shadow is over there. And I’ll try not to be over there. I mean, that creates a polarized view and that’s why we are also out of touch, but we might be afraid of it. We might do things not to touch it and keep it there. And the ness, I think is an essential part of energizing whatever the phenomena is that we call shadow dark evil. And so I think that’s already spot on. That’s a big part of our conversation, right?

Elise: And I’m sure for people listening and part of our collective spiritual leaning, spiritually inclined world where there is a ton of shadow FYI, but you see it in the way that people reach for sort of the, I’m a light holder, I’m a lightworker. And not to negate that and say that it’s not true, but a big part of that is being able to contend and face your own shadow, your own darkness, the parts of yourself that you aren’t necessarily willing to acknowledge before you can really help or work with the collective.

Thomas: And we see that also in how embodied and real spirituality is or how, which degrees of disembodiment fuel our spiritual journey. I think that’s also important. The less, the more trauma and shadow is in my body, the more I want to be beyond it. I want to be cleaner. I don’t want to be in touch with it. I want to be in a harmonious state, and I think I want, don’t want, or I cannot. But often we say we don’t want to be in touch with the messiness of life, whereas true light work is in the messiness of life. And I think that’s very different then it’s grounded. It’s is able to go into difficult places and bring that energy of consciousness and awareness and clarity into places where it seems it’s not. And that’s I think, where love expands. So that’s true. So we need to see if our spiritual practice is a bypass because of our trauma or if it’s a real transformation. And that’s a big difference. Yeah.

Elise: Yeah. Oh, Thomas, I have so many questions for you. Can we start, can you talk about how you see substrates of shadow and from the everyday dissonance or to the deeper layers of trauma or darkness to how it becomes these sheets of blackness geographically and to even pulling out, I don’t know actually, if you have a ger Jian view of worlds that are more and more density, do you believe in sort of a satanic figure? I don’t know. Will you tell what do you think is going on? And then let’s talk about what you feel is going on.

Thomas: So the way I look at it, and I think also through the work that I’ve been doing also in deep collective shadows or traumas in social and collective fields, is that, so let’s understand first in the traumatic moment when there’s so much overwhelm that being in the presence or in the present moment is too much for a child that gets abused. For somebody that experienced violence or racism or any other forms of transgression that really hurt our being. To shut down, to numb and shut down the pain is very, very important. So that we can pull out from a certain part of our body, of our emotions, our thinking, maybe our relationships, and we numb that there’s kind of an anesthesia from that moment on in a part of our being. And that anesthesia, we say light is conscious awareness. So when I pull that light, the sensitivity out of a part of my body because it’s too painful, then there’s less light.

There’s literally less flow of light, there’s less conscious awareness if that gets fixated. So it becomes an unconscious area. Or if I chronically suppress my life energy, my joy and my sexuality, my whatever, my aggression, my fear, my grief. So there are degrees, shades of suppression and unconscious living. But it doesn’t mean that in that area of my body, my emotions, my thinking, my relationships process is not happening. That’s very important. There is something happening, but there’s something happening without my awareness because I pulled out my awareness. So there’s process without awareness, and often when we look at anything to do with shadow dimensions or shadow effects that seem like having a life on their own, they have a life of their own because we collect individually and collectively because collective shadow is a collective shareholder company, 8 billion or more now already 8 billion. And some holders are funding that organization. So it’s not that there isn’t a separate from anybody being, but we are all funding that shareholder organization, that shadow organization. And the less I want to be connected to it, the more energy I feed into it.

Because if I distance myself from my own shadow, if I don’t want to be in the question, this usually is when we want to be very clear about this is good and this is not good, and this is bright and this is not bright. And then the more certain we are and the less we can be in the question of the muddiness of life, because being in the question means I want to be related to life. But if I want to be very clear in my morals, then I am actually suppressing often that material even more. I say, it’s nothing to do with me. I’m on the good side. And that is, I think, I mean that’s a beginning. I mean, it’s a big topic. We could maybe have five conversations on this topic, but it’s a beginning. Let’s say

Elise: It’s a beginning. Yeah, no, and that tendency to disown or refuse. And we see examples of this all over our culture every day, and we’ve had some big lessons in it in the last year or two in the last decade. But that instinct to avoid the muddiness, to not bring any conscious awareness to those big questions, is that because it’s painful and ambivalence, ambiguity is painful? Is it, I know it depends. Some people are triggered or have some sort of held trauma, or is it fear that you will be taken over by those feelings? What is it that makes us suppress and repress?

Thomas: Originally, I think the main process of suppression is suppressing pain is suppressing overwhelm. It’s too much data in the traumatic moment. There’s too much data that our nervous systems cannot process. That’s why not here, not now. Not being present is actually an intelligent function of the trauma response.

So if I can not be here and now in the strong pain that is happening inside, it’s intelligent in that moment. It’s not intelligent in general, it’s intelligent in that moment. And if after that moment where that’s intelligent, we could integrate that through a lot of support and care and love, and we can learn to integrate the trauma information back into conscious process, then it’s a necessity in those kind of adverse moments. And so at the base of it is there is suppression of pain. But then when we deal with that stuff through our shadow sites, many people want to, as you said, we might be afraid that we will be taken over. We might be afraid that it’s too much, that there’s overwhelm and we split off so much information that there is a layer of it that we ask questions about.

But the true shadow, the even deeper shadow, not the true shadow, but the even deeper shadow is the one that we don’t ask any question about. It’s like in the ocean, as long as you see some lights penetrate the water surface and you can see 10 meters, 50 meter, I dunno, down into the water, but from a certain depth you don’t see anything. So there are questions we ask. There are questions that we kind of intuit, and there are questions that we don’t even know how to ask because we have no trace to that question that the deepest suppression is there. But that’s also where potentially the biggest transformation is of humanity and it’s buried. And we don’t ask questions about that part.

Elise: What is the deepest part of the ocean? I have ideas. I think too, in thinking about as a Jew for example, the last year has been very painful and triggering in part just because I feel like there is an inability to hold the messiness and hold those questions that we were talking about. And the polarization is so intense and only adds, I think, to the sediment. And I think part of it is that it’s so very difficult to imagine. I think we all want to, again go to, I’m good. I know that I recognize the villains in this. I recognize the victims and to identify with that sort of story, that drama triangle. But I think that on a deeper level, we all recognize that our ancestors, whether immediate or many, many generations ago, that we all have participated in this violence to be here alive on the planet.

We’ve all benefited to in some ways from violence and death. And maybe that’s a really dark vision. But I think that we all on some level recognize there is no, we can sort of trace all of this back and get chances are my people enslaved, your people, your people enslaved, my people, that there’s just so much darkness that just sort of, it’s slippery. There’s no ground to stand on. And so I think it’s easier to sort of avoid. I don’t know. But what do you think is, I don’t want to take us on too much of a tangent. What is that deepest substrate?

Thomas: Yeah. The thing is, if we say there are dimensions of depth to the human experience where our sensing is so dimmed down, so filtered that there’s hardly any sensing or no sensing possible, then we can only live as that question.

So we need to be humble enough in order to do real shadow work. We cannot go to do our shadow work when we think we know in order to do shadow work. I need to be humble enough that I know I’m doing this because there’s a certain dimension of life that I don’t know, that I don’t feel, that I’m not aware of. That’s the nature of shadow. So if I go in with, oh, this is how it is, I will not do much work because I will miss it, because my certainty will be another filter that doesn’t allow me to see the incongruencies, to see the uncanny edges, to see how the movement of the shadow shows up in my life as difficulties. There’s frictions, there’s incongruencies, there’s all kinds of strange symptoms at the edges of my conscious universe. And I train myself to pay attention to that.

I train myself to see the strangeness or the incongruency of experience that points me to what I don’t see. And so that means that I am more and more in the inquiry and less and less in the certainty how it is. And the inquiry will lead me deeper, will show me wow. And I begin to do the work. I often say it’s like you have a lantern or you have a candle and the candle has a certain radius of illumination, the light of the candle. So you see a bit what’s in the room. So you can only start in the parameter of what you see, and then you can expand your awareness from what you see into the deeper territories. And that also needs courage because as you go deeper, more will come up. So what people called you will face your demons. Yes, you will face your demons, but your demons are not kind of all kinds of strange creatures.

It’s all this stuff that has been individually ancestrally and collectively suppressed. So it’s not just so simple that say it’s all your individual stuff. No, no. It’s like it lives in different parts of the human nervous system. The individual ancestral and collective nervous system has shadow elements and has the parts that are anesthetized. There’s a lot of collective anesthetized consciousness and it’s frozen stuff. It’s the stuff that doesn’t allow evolution to move. So it’s the repetitive patterns that we are caught up like hell in a way is almost no time is passing in the suffering.

It’s like when it’s the thickness that you described before, the density of different worlds. And these worlds are not separate from us. Parts of us live in this world. Many of us know that there are parts and we are working already for a long time. But that part is what many people say still there. It’s like it didn’t move much. Yeah, because it lives in an energetic prison that we didn’t manage to unlock yet and turn that part into movement. So everything that slowed down into as if you drive your car into send and you drive it in, it seems like difficult. That is what some people describe as hell, that suffering where almost no time passes. It’s kind of very slow and thick process because when we are flowing and when we are creative and when it’s bright us and we feel energized and we feel refreshed and we feel happy and joyful, yeah, that’s flowing. We all notice that there’s joy, but there’s another side of it. And the density that we can see that we can’t feel is also so slowed down it, it’s like frozen.

And that frozenness of life I think is where many people cannot or don’t want at this stage. Not that they cannot in general, but it’s like it needs a lot of courage to say, I begin to open myself in a titrated way, not from zero to a hundred, but in a titrated way, I will explore the shadow land of my own life, my ancestors’ life. And not to forget that we are not talking only about trauma that has been inflicted. It’s also, as you said before, the trauma that we or our ancestors or our cultures inflicted. Because if we hurt somebody, we heard the flow of light. We heard the natural law of ethics is not like a philosophy. Ethics is a flow of energy through us. So that’s how life is either aligned or not aligned. And so when that gets hurt, it turns off the flow of light. So all the disowned transgressions of humanity create that valley where we can see.

Elise: And is this layer, this dense sludge, this blackness, this extreme layer of disembodied energy, pain hurt? I’m assuming as our population expands, if we’re not metabolizing it or releasing it or moving it, it just gets deeper and denser a more intense layer of sediment. Is that how it works? And then is that energy animated have a primal owner? Does it want to kill us?

Thomas: No, that’s the point. It’s like that’s how we look at it. When we are in the shadow, it’s an it. The itness of the shadow can be from simple things to the itness of all kinds of entities that are bad and that we don’t want to be associated with the concentrated essence of this. But yes, it has an owner, the owner is us, but the owner disowns the ownership as a principle. And that’s why it looks like an it. It looks like it’s hunting us. And so the disowned shareholders, we all hold shares, and if you would really own the shares, we could transform them. But if we don’t own them, if you disown the shares, it looks like there’s an organization that does it, whatever the it is, and you hear the shadow in many conspiracy theories, you hear also that there’s sometimes even a core of truth. And then there is a lot of it to it. The ification of life is always something to listen to first. Let’s first listen what we are saying when we are saying that. And so it has all kinds of shades. When we listen to the public discourse, we can also hear the shades of the collective shadow speak. And it’s not that we want to disregard it or that it’s not good that it’s there because fact is it’s there and it’s not the question if it’s good or not good. The question is how we create the relationship to that which we collectively disown.

And if we can train that differently, if we have rituals in our society, if we have an architecture of healing, we will take buckets of dead energy, re-own it and turn it into aliveness, turn it into creativity, turn it into progress, turn it into ethical upgrades, turn it into all kinds of things that make us more alive, more juicy, more together, more collaborative. And so the other side of that shadow work or collective trauma work is also an amazing post-traumatic learning, an amazing growth, an amazing resourcing of T.

Elise: That’s so true. That’s such an exquisite definition too, of conspiracy theories because there is that cord of truth, that’s the hook and then all that itness that surrounds it. And if we could hold that cord and bring people back and reintegrate that with love rather than extreme ownership or rejection, flipping it out even more. All right. You mentioned entities. Can we talk about entities and the different variations of disembodied energies? And I also want to talk about exorcism. I mean, do you have all day,

Thomas: Right? I think we need a part four, right? Because these are things that I think really need some space to unfold because otherwise we simplify some of the stuff we are talking. So I think it’s good to maybe to do a part. If you don’t, then it pays more justice to the vastness of what we are talking about. But it’s very interesting because especially in this time, we need a skill to be in the unknown. And even also all kinds of theories that explain perfectly how things are. We also need to wonder, it fulfills a function because it gives me a certain certainty in the uncertainty of the current moment. A collective post-crisis moment is defined by its uncertainty. And a crisis means that development couldn’t happen for a long time, and the pressure gets so strong that certain valves explode. And then you have all kinds of crisis say, oh, this is the climate crisis, the wars, this, this. And so yes, that happens, but it also shows us that we are living at a transformational edge at the moment.

And being in the muddiness of it already needs a lot of development. Otherwise, I need to categorize or create some artificial certainty in, oh, this is how it is now. I know that this is how it is, serves something in me and what it serves, it also kind of helps me to calm down or quieten some of the fears and the existential threat that comes up if you don’t know where things are going or when structures fall apart. So we need to be also aware of that. So one function is also to rest more in the uncertainty without becoming swallowed and become unconscious fully in it. I’m not saying we shouldn’t use, of course, we should use our intellectual capacities. And at the same time, they also sometimes serve a function that is also connected to the shadow. So that’s one thing

Elise: Before you go on, I think that that’s such a, and people, I feel like I hear a lot, you’re so calm in the face of all of these collective crises, and I think this is where I find being certain in the uncertainty or having faith, which is in some ways the opposite of certainty, that for whatever reason I chose to be here. I think we all chose to be here at this moment of time for this period of intense transformation. And that there is a reason that this is all unfolding. And I don’t know exactly why or how or what will emerge, but I think bringing that level of consciousness of I’m here to help this transition in some way for all of us, for everyone listening, for everyone who’s not listening helps or is an anchor or grounding moment of, okay, deep breath. Not that this is necessarily going to unfold in the way that I choose according to my preferences. Not that I have a lot of control necessarily, but that there is something happening and I’m supposed to be present.

Thomas: Right. And this also reminds me of what you just said is I think that there are different versions of whole. So when there is trauma and then non embodied, what does it mean that my conscious awareness of life flows through different parts of my body and through the different parts of my body I can feel life, I can sense. So when I’m more disembodied, the information that is in that part of my body is not gone. It’s still there, but I feel it less so disembodied or split of information is kind of like a cloud in nowhere. And so the nature that’s a chunk of past that the energy cannot move, it’s kind of in the trauma split. And so that past needs a future that resolves it. So that also means not here, not now becomes if it’s shared by billions of people, becomes a collective state of interacting with the world, which means hope is often in the future, healing is in the future, awakening is in the future.

Many things, the solutions are in the future, but the future is not the real future in time is the future. It’s the reverse of what we can’t experience. The whole package of pain needed a future. So then the hope is always there or the hope, I think true hope is in a connection to the sense of what you also spoke about, the sense of agency that I’m living my life right now, even if there’s a crisis, the hope is not that we will resolve the crisis, we don’t know. But the hope is that I feel that I can do and contribute something to the current situation because I’m connected to a sense of agency.

So the hope is in the agency, I’m not frozen here and I have nothing to, there’s a sense I’m co-creating this world. So I’m connected to a certain degree, to the creative energy of the universe. And in that place that feels that I’m connected to something bigger also, as you said. So there’s a reason why we are here right now and we are bringing intelligence into this moment. And so that intelligence matters all of our creative intelligence. And not only me alone, it’s in the conversation. We give birth to new things. So we’re an orchestra, not just a solo pianist or a solo violinist. And I think that’s very important. What’s my sense of hope? And the hope in the future is a trauma symptom or a defense mechanism that is important for many people that future is important. I’m not saying it’s wrong or not important, and it needs to be respected. It also postpones a lot of the processes into a later. And so we are then also a bit stuck in the later, that later will be again later. It’s like a pattern.

And so presencing starts with the willingness to do the inner work. It’s like you’re standing on an island and you increase the island, you make the island bigger and bigger, and the bigger the island gets this more stable. You stand in life and the more you see, the more land you see. And so that’s different from, oh, it’s going to happen there. No, it’s going to happen here and here. It’s going to happen step by step. And the integration process will illuminate more of the shadow and make it a conscious land versus an unconscious land where the lands hurt and also where our embodiments hurt, the lands hurt because our body is mother earth.

Elise: Do you think the climate crisis is an extension or explosion of all of this disowned, unrealized shadow? It’s just sort of being thrown back in our face?

Thomas: Yeah, I think very much so. Because when a living system, of course, many living systems in evolution go through this wave. So if an increase of population, a decrease of population, and we over consume resources. So there’s a natural cycle to life due to go through this phases. And life has naturally built in feedback mechanisms that we feel we are in touch with the natural resource. But many people even say, I’m on the planet, on the planet, it’s like the glass is on the table, but my body is the planet. It’s not on the planet that the substance of my body, the carbon, all the stuff, the water is the planet. And so consciousness is in the planet through our awareness and our consciousness, we animate the land. And if that animated land is open, responsive, sensing, illuminated, then the information exchange in the biosphere is fluid.

There’s a fluidity to the same as there’s fluidity between our hormonal system, our nervous system, our cellular systems and tissues and organs. So when it’s open, the feedback loops work well, when the inner body information technology is hurt through trauma, it’s this disinformation and look into our society. There’s a lot of disinformation, but that also happens in our bodies. So this cellular matrix is not anymore informed in the way it nourishes and informs put it in a form. So inform means it’s creating a form and that form becomes a coherent form. My body is a coherent form, but it needs to be informed. And so information informs life. And so then feedback mechanisms and natural adaptation movements in life work. But now we need a lot of moral pressure or we create a lot of moral pressure. I don’t think we need all that moral pressure, but that how to respond to climate change because something doesn’t work in the immediate information technology in the fabric of life. And so we could say that shadow has implications on how we behave, how we change, how we create systems. And yes, so the crisis shows us more and more where we are stuck.

So yes, there is a direct correlation between the collective unconscious. And the other part I think is that when certain things are happening in a certain way, we say, oh, we could have done it better. And I would challenge that notion. I would say, if you did it that way, maybe you couldn’t have done it better. Could you have done it better? You would have done it better.

So what was actually happening that could didn’t happen. And so we could say we are saying, oh, we could live in a more sustainable society where we exploit the natural resources of the planet less. But we could also say if billions of people carry some sort of extra trauma stress in their bodies and that extra, not the regular stress that we go through in life because of natural activation and relaxation through projects and things and a lot of things to do, that’s okay. But I’m talking about excess stress that exceeds the natural regulation in the nervous system. So chronic stress that’s always on fire, maybe conscious that burns natural resources. So when there’s chronic stress in the body, we are exhausting the natural resources of the body chronically. And after 10 or 20 or 30 years that happening, when we become a bit older, the compensation mechanisms start to get a bit weaker, and then we decompensate into all kinds of illness or issues in our life and so on.

And I think we need to look at if that inner hardened software is not sustainable in the self, how can billions of cells create a society that is sustainable? And instead of saying, oh, we are not doing it right, we could also say, yeah, but the process tells us something. Maybe we need to listen to what’s happening. There’s the thing, oh, this could be different. We could say no, but it is not different. So let’s work with the fact that it’s not different. Instead of denying it and putting a patch solution on it, let’s say, okay, so maybe there is a reason why we are creating and we need to work and transform that reason.

Elise: Instead of resorting to denial and or blame, there’s a collective responsibility to take ownership of it and recognize it and recognize each our own parts in it. So let’s talk briefly if we can, about what, because you work in parts of the globe where there is sort of an extra layers of sediment extra, and it feels that way I think for people who move throughout the world. You get to certain places and there’s a density or heaviness of what’s happened there over time. And other places don’t quite have that level of dense energy. Can you talk a bit about what that is and how you feel or sense into it?

Thomas: Yeah, so I think the first, you said it beautifully. The first step is always ownership. I often say in the core of the bible and the paradise, he blames her and she blames the snake, but nobody says, yes, I did it. Yes, it’s true. I own my action.

And that that is the story of humanity. If you look at how many unrecognized genocides we have in history, how many unrecognized violations, sexual abuse, like dictatorships, you name it, it’s like colonialism, racism. There’s so many disowned owned transgressions. So the owning, even the willingness to come closer to an ownership, instead of turning away from that and saying it’s too much. Say yes, it’s a lot, but step by step, I can turn towards my own transgressions where I lied, even if these weren’t massive transgressions, when I’m dishonest, when I’m not fully saying the truth, whatever, when I said something and it hurt somebody and I didn’t restore it or whatever, I look at myself and I start to re-own and be more honest to some journaling. Find out what actually happened, what emotions come up. I illuminate that part in myself. The same is with my ancestors. I worked in places where it’s very hard for people to look at what their ancestors did because there was a lot of transgression in their ancestry. But either I look away from it, what I exclude will be clued,

It’ll stick, it’s, and what I turn towards, even if I don’t know how to do it, I can find out there are ways how we can find out how to turn step by step to the lives of our ancestors and create a responsible, a relationship that is responsive. Not that I did that, but I have a relationship to what happened in my own family system. And so there are ways how step-by-step and not alone, we can do all of this together in groups where we can have containers that can support us to hold it. So we are building containers in this vessels, spaces in those places where we don’t go there alone. We go there in community, we go there skillfully. We know that there are limits to what we can do. We know that we can’t resolve everything at once, but that’s also not what life asks of us.

Life says make a step, step on the ground that appears, make another step, step on the ground that appears and like this, you will find a path. And so in the underworld that in the world of shadow, we don’t know the path. That’s the whole, that’s the landscape. If I want to know where I go, for me to go there, I will never go there. So I need to make a step at the time. And then the candlelight illuminates the next meter and I walk and then there’s another meter. And like this, I create the path. And what I’ll find my challenge, me, what do I find might strengthen me? What I find might bring all kinds of stuff. But I am saying to life, I’m your student. I say to life, I want to study. I live my life. I signed up for this life to grow, and I want to learn from you, from life, from the greatness. And I think if we do that, then in these places we create communal healing architectures where we don’t do it alone. We do it together. We support each other, we become each other’s, we witnesses, we become each other’s resources. We become each other’s friends in the journey. And that life brings light, which means conscious awareness into less illuminated areas, as if the bottom of the ocean suddenly starts to glow

And we can see what we see. And the more we see, we know what we are dealing with. And then we can re-own step by step the energy or create healthy relationships so it stops haunting us. It be, there will be more relationship, which means becomes peace. And of course it sounds easier than I can speak about it now, but that’s what we do in order to dilute the density and allow more flow.

Elise: That’s beautiful. And I think in the same way of reframing this climate crisis as we would do something different if we could, part of this invitation for this work has to be, or it feels like it requires turning down again, going to the way that we tend to blame or take shadow that we’re scared of and project and move away from this idea that anyone here, it has never transgressed or that anyone’s ancestors are pure light, right? That’s not the point. That’s not what it is to be human. And so we can turn down some of the volume on our culture, which has become very focused on victimhood and owning who gets to be the biggest, who has had the most transgressions against them.

I don’t know what it looks like to slowly change that narrative into one of interdependence and shared responsibility. And not a reset, but almost a, we could sit here and argue about this while our planet goes up in flames or we can collectively link arms and get to work. And I don’t know how to encourage people to do that. But the opposite, I think is only adding to our collective burden. And as we’ve talked a bit like the past and the present and the future is a little bit a strange concept in a way, but we don’t really have the time it feels to sit there and allocate and adjudicate and blame

Thomas: Maybe for part four. 

Elise: Good, and spirits and exorcism

Thomas: We have, there’s so many other things because I love it because we are unpacking something here and we see this as part one because there is so much more to say. And also I want to say a lot about the scarcity of time or the scarcity of attention to our pain, but maybe we park this for the park for a conversation and let that be our cliffhanger. Because I see on the one hand our time, but I think that’s also a lovely development if you’re up for it. I think we can unpack this more and it’ll pay more justice to the topic because I think we are building a container for the conversation also.

Elise: Yeah, we’ll just keep on keeping on.

Thomas: Okay, so let’s do that. Thank you. And I really love our conversations and the truthiness of the conversations, so thank you.