Thomas Hübl: Hello and welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl, and today I want to invite you to explore something with me that I was pondering and speaking about. So in other contexts, what’s the difference between when we place hope into the future and we say, hope is that tomorrow will be better than today. I’m hoping for a better circumstance. And the other version of hope is that hope is in the agency, in the imminence, in the presence of agency that I can influence and co-create the world with others now.
So either hope is imminent in my agency to impact and also change things in the world now and the mechanism that we place hope in the future. So that’s a little bit, and then that has kind of branches obviously. And in order to look at that a little bit deeper, which I believe that we have a pandemic collective agreement somehow that postpones hope into the future. And that actually became some kind of collective architecture that has many, many, many implications on ourselves, our relationships, our family systems, our societies and cultures. And I think it’s important to explore if we are on a developmental path, maybe say, okay, I recognize or I feel strongly that I want to develop myself. I want to develop my inner world and expand my inner world, generate more wisdom in my life, integrate some of the wounds myself, my ancestors, the collective that I come from. And in order to understand that deeper, I think I need to understand a little bit the mechanism that in the traumatic moment and something is really painful or very overwhelming. Life says here and now in this body, in this experience, in this moment, life is not good for me in this relationship. And so in that moment, there is a me, that trauma response has the capacity to split space and time, fragment space and time into, not here, not now. So not here, not now is actually a very intelligent process in the traumatic moment.
But it’s important that we find a different relationship to that process because otherwise we hear some people say, oh, I cannot be fully present. It sounds like, oh, like an ability that I cannot perform. Which of course that’s how it looks like and that’s how it feels like subjectively. But that’s not the process. The process is that I, in certain moments become aware of the parts of myself that are not here, not now, not because that’s a problem or not because that’s not intelligent or that’s a dysfunction because it was an important function, which means it’s an important part of my intelligence.
And of course today what was in the past really deeply intelligence and saved me from much more overwhelm, had a protective function, is often not anymore appropriate in the moment and creates symptoms and side effects. Of course that’s true. But if I want to engage with the process of not here, not now, I cannot say either I override it and I effort to be present or just I want to get rid of the problem that disturbs me. It’s more I become aware that not being fully in my body, not splitting space and time, and so projecting a better version even of myself or of my life or of the world forward is an important defense mechanism. So it’s not that that’s good or bad, it’s not. That shouldn’t be because our mind comes fast. Oh, I shouldn’t say this. I shouldn’t place the future, my hope into the future. But what I become aware of is, wow, yes, one part of me is kind of postponed. It’s not fully here.
And so that might lead to that has many, many implications. And one is that I am not fully connected to my agency now because when I feel a certain level of discomfort, I go to that place where I think, oh, it’s going to be better later. Versus, oh, I develop more and more skill in a resourced way to find a relationship to what arises in me in certain conversations. In certain circumstances, stuff might come up as trigger or memories or fears and other emotions that come up in me. And either we sometimes say, oh, I want to get rid of that discomfort because without it, my life would be much better. Versus, oh, I can develop a new relationship with some of that content that is coming up and that helps me to digest what I couldn’t digest in the past. And that digestion helps me to anchor myself more in the moment because the place that is full of whatever came up, when I digest it and integrate, it becomes open as groundedness, as in a safety, as a sense of being connected to myself and to my body.
And so it means that that practice of digesting being reflected first, being aware that that’s happening. Secondly, being in relationship with certain content, fear, sadness, grief, stress, tension, whatever comes up that I find a relationship that begins to host and then I become curious about it versus, oh, I want to just get rid of it. Because often we try to get rid of this stuff that in a way in our childhood we already got rid of, so we already excluded that. That’s why it keeps coming back. It tries to reenter the system. So everything that we exclude actively will try to include itself again. So it’s a counterforce. So the repetition compulsion, it means it needs to come back again and again through inner and outer experiences or trigger throughout experiences in order to show up in my awareness and the function of rei, including, again, what we excluded mean, it starts with, first I become aware that it existed all in me, and I’m not just projecting this all the time onto the world or suppressing it.
The second one is explore what’s my relationship to whatever comes up. And as I do that, parts of me become maybe internally softer. I can stay a bit more with my inner experience. I bring more curiosity or compassion to it, and I melt a bit more into the sensations, my physical sensations, stress sensations, emotional sensations. And I do that as long as it’s not too overwhelming that I cannot stay there because then it doesn’t have any impact if it’s too overwhelming. But if it’s something that I can stay related to in a certain way, then we can melt it.
And that might come up during a conversation with somebody so that I feel the person says something, I get triggered, and while I am in the conversation, I’m practicing to feel my body, to feel the stress that is coming up, to feel my emotional response, to take a breath to down-regulate myself to a certain extent, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not responding to what has been said. So it doesn’t mean, oh, because some people say, oh, if I do this and I don’t respond to people, I lose my opinion. I am not anymore sharp in the conversation. I think exactly the opposite. The more I’m regulated, I can bring my, the crisp whatever perspective that I have into the room, but it comes with less charge and more presence.
And that’s, I believe, an amazing contributing factor to any kind of dialogue. Even if the dialogue means that we disagree, we can stay more in the disagreement without having to shut the other person out, or the other person is just wrong. And I close myself internally, so I’m not listening anymore. So I’m also not learning anymore. And so I’m not building bridges because I am in my fixed position. And I’m not talking here about moments that are violent or traumatizing where people get hurt. I’m talking about when internal stuff starts to resurface through triggers in life, then the muscle to learn to be with that inner process and also stay related to what’s happening around me. That doesn’t mean that the action or the outer response or the engagement in the world is not happening, but I’m talking the few milliseconds or a second before the response just has more space so that I can differentiate between my reactivity and my responsiveness when I respond from a clear place.
Also a place that can say clearly yes or no, I like this, or I don’t like that. That’s not reactive. But if it comes with a charge that is reactive, then it is reactive. So there is of course a difference between engagement and reactivity. Reactivity comes from our past. Responsive engagement is a present fluid interaction with the world. And that’s why it has a future. It has potential in our reactivity, we don’t have a future. We only have a past. And so doing our inner work, and if we look at it, the more people learn to digest the inner experiences like archeological layers that surface either from our childhood or from our ancestors or our collective cultural field, when that comes up in us, it feels often uncomfortable, but it’s also a way how life tries to digest es the past through us. So it’s actually like a detox.
And many people think, oh, when it comes up in me like this, I need to deal with my stuff. So to get that stuff out of the way so that I can be with the world that is there. So something’s happening there and I have my stuff. It’s almost like a very mechanistic worldview. So that we are an object in space that sees something out there, and then something happens in that box versus no, no, we are an interdependent system. We are one biosphere. And when we experience our life or life, of course things will come up in me, but what comes up in me is not separate from what’s happening outside. It’s interdependent.
Like the air that I’m breathing is also not separate from the air and the trees that are producing this air. It’s an interdependent system. The food that I eat is not separate from me because it’s being assimilated and it becomes me, basically becomes my cells and the substance of my body. And that’s also true for processes that happen in family systems, for processes that happen in society. And maybe in the next episode, I will speak a little bit more to how the digestion process might work maybe a bit better, or that we can create the skill. And so the more we can bring through our inner work, the hope slowly back into our embodiment, into our sense of agency, into that sense that I have that deep in me. There’s a creative force, there’s a creativity that which creates life is flowing through my veins, is flowing through, my nervous system is flowing through my being and has the capacity to create something meaningful in the world. And that’s what we usually call purpose. So the integration is purpose and that we are able to make a contribution. And that contribution doesn’t have to be always a big thing that we do.
I can have an influence on the circumstances that I am in right now, is an imminence to the response. And we know this when there is some unclarity or stuff going on, we might postpone the response into later. And the more I become aware of that and the more I become aware in a less judgmental way, oh, I shouldn’t do this now, I should be always present. No, I want to get to know the mechanism of postponing processes into the future. And slowly through me becoming aware of it, it’s already the beginning of a reverse because awareness is the beginning of change. Once I’m aware of something, it’s much easier to bring change into it. As long as I’m not aware of it, it’s just happening. And I often don’t even recognize that that’s happening.
And so bringing hope more and more into the moment, but that’s not just a cognitive, oh, now I should bring hope back into the present moment. When I think about it, it doesn’t mean much, but I develop more and more awareness of the process and that leads to me becoming more imminent, more responsive, and also that I feel more and more the agency that I carry inside. And I think if more and more people do that, then we create the societal skill, like a collective skill of integrating the stuff that comes up in us, in all of us in relation to world events, in relation to what happens in our family. And we develop a skill. And that skill I think is really powerful because that skill turns a lot of the aspects of the world that seem to be constantly repetitive. They have no future because they’re stuck in time that we can digest those more and open new possibilities. So suddenly we create a future where there wasn’t any future because it was frozen stuck, and now it starts to move. But whenever we digest something, it becomes part of the movement. Remember, if you take a tomato, you eat the tomato, the tomato is on your kitchen table, it’s lying around there or in your fridge, so it’s there. But when you eat the tomato, what does it become? You’re walking, you’re talking, you’re thinking. So something that looked like static becomes movement.
That’s the same when we integrate parts of our trauma or wounds what was frozen and felt more like a tension, a numbness, a problem. When we digest it, it becomes movement becomes expression, becomes creativity, becomes vitality, becomes relatedness, and responsiveness becomes clarity. So it becomes held. Life becomes flowing. Life and flowing. Life is a more unified world held life, or there will be whole lives a little bit in separation. Whatever is flowing and integrated is part of unity. So I leave us for today with that inspiration that of course might bring up all kinds of responses in you, but it’s the fun of it that we stay with our, and we explore our inner responses like the topic, but also how it lands in me and what it brings up, all the arguments for it and against it. And this we work our questions in life. And so I wish you a lot of joy and fun with it and see you next time
