Thomas Hübl: Hi, my name is Thomas Hübl, and first of all, I’m honored to be part of this Summit and I would love to bring parts of my work closer to you. I’ve been working on collective trauma fields for 20 plus years and want to share a little bit what I think is relevant to keep our hearts and our minds open, and also how to combine the deep understanding of how trauma affects our inner lives, our way we are relating to the world, but also how we create societies and how to combine that with our spiritual practice, our meditation practice, our deeper realization of much more profound states of consciousness and how all of this is interrelated related. And I want to start with a short definition just to be on the same page. Trauma is anyway, a buzzword at the moment, but trauma is not the experience that we go through, but it’s the inner response.
That’s why we call it also the trauma response to a strongly overwhelming experience. And the trauma response is an intelligent function that’s supposed to protect us or help us to survive better. And so that’s already one reframing because many people think the after effects of trauma are kind of a limitation or pathologized themselves for having those after effects, either from childhood or from adverse experiences or strongly overwhelming experiences that happen to us throughout our lives, but also what our ancestors experience can and might have effects in our lives. And of course, what the culture experienced the society that we grew up in and that conditioned us has an effect on how we look at the world. And so when we look at trauma or the after effects of trauma, that when trauma crystallizes in our bodies, in our emotions, in our minds, also sometimes in our spiritual inner unfolding, it becomes more tight, frozen, and we get the feeling life doesn’t move anymore.
So the impermanence of things suddenly seems to be permanent. So from a flow in life, and that peace is the immersion in the movement of life, in the conscious movement of life, suddenly we have parts of ourselves, parts of our family systems, parts of our society, parts of the world that are actually frozen in time. And that creates a tension. And the tension is what we call often suffering. And so when we live in the discrepancy in ourselves, we feel, oh, parts of my life are really flowing. Parts of my life are developing. They’re moving. They have a future. But where trauma resides, trauma is an un-updatable part of ourselves. Trauma only has a past. It doesn’t have a future. When we bring awareness and consciousness to trauma and we begin to integrate that past, then we re evoke movement. The integration of trauma becomes post-traumatic learning.
We grow, we mature, we feel more free, more open, more connected. We feel more in the flow of things again. And then we see, oh, parts that were frozen in time that only had a past suddenly have a future. And the future means they can be updated. We become more creative, we become more innovative. We have more intuition and innovation, inspiration that we can access. And of course we feel our hearts open up. When we get triggered and we touch our trauma, it feels like we are closed. The bodies become more tight. The emotions become either exaggerated or shut down. We feel more stressed or we feel chronically stressed. But when trauma begins to heal and integrate, our nervous become, our nervous systems become more regulated. We feel more open and relational and connected to the world, to other people, to situations. So the equanimity, the power of compassion, the power of love grows.
And so the understanding, the neuroscience, understanding the somatic understanding, the emotional understanding, the spiritual understanding of trauma, I believe is very important because it’s a beautiful connection of ancient wisdom, traditions, knowledge. The knowledge of various traditions and the knowledge of science are amazingly combined in the understanding of trauma. And so that’s a great segue into also grounding our spiritual practice. Because we have multiple trauma symptom, we have some sets of trauma symptoms. One is that when trauma happens, usually there is a lot of stress in us and the stress we call hyperactivation. So we become very stressed when we get triggered later in our life, even 10, 20, 30 years later, we still experience boosts of stress, of fight and flight symptoms that are exaggerated given the experience, but still we feel very stressed. So that is what we usually call triggered. But then there is another set of trauma symptoms which we often overlook or don’t see as triggered is when we become more distant extent and become more indifferent when we pull out of situations and relationships and we become more numb.
And that numbness and indifference is equally triggered, but it’s just shut down. So we have a lot of stress shut down. And then we have another symptom because now we have two before it was present, not two, now it’s two and there’s a crack in the glass. Somebody threw a stone onto the glass and now there’s a crack in the area where we are hurt or traumatized. We create others that when they trigger our trauma, we see those as other, it’s the other group, it’s the other person, it’s them, it’s there, and I’m in here. So suddenly inside and outside becomes separate versus one flow of data.
And we can say that trauma disorganizes the data flow in us, in our being, but also in our bodies and healing trauma reorganizes the data flow. We could say, when I see you and I feel you, inform me, which means in formation. So I have a form of you in me. When we talk about closeness, when we talk about open-heartedness, when we talk about compassion, when we talk about love, when we talk about presence, it’s the ability to be mutually informed. I have you inside of me and you have a Thomas inside of you in your nervous system. And the more congruent the inner versions and the so-called outer versions are the more intimacy we experience. So the deep practice of compassion is actually to realize that we all exist in each other already, but trauma creates a disorganization of that data flow. So relating is we update each other in each other.
So moment to moment to moment, the actual data of life updates life in the trauma area, that update is limited or broken. So I begin to relate to you from the past. I have images about you, I might have biases about you. I might project all kinds of information onto you. That’s the part that I cannot feel it’s now on your face and vice versa. And like that we create the world a reality, a life where there are lots of others, there’s lots of fragmentation, there’s lots of polarization, there are lots of conflict because we are not anymore connected to the in existence of each other. In each other. We are living in each other always already.
But where I’m hurt and traumatized, I don’t feel it that way. And we need to respect that. If we want to heal it, we need to respect it first, pathologize our inner experience, see the intelligence in the original protection mechanism that we call trauma response and learn to work with the intelligence to heal, grow and induce post-traumatic learning. And so that’s why I believe some of the big teachings of the wisdom traditions and a deeper and deeper understanding of trauma actually super related and maybe an iteration of a new modern language that we use to describe principles that have been described in wisdom traditions for thousands and thousands of years.
Also in meditation, if there is a lot of trauma stress in my system, some of it maybe I’m aware of, some of it I’m not even aware of. And then in meditation, my mind will be constantly talking, moving, be active. But if my nervous system is more integrated and regulated and I have a deep meditation practice, I can take that stress ground, that stress, let that stress be rooted so it gets regulated into relaxation. And then in my meditation, my mind will be much more calm. If there’s a regulated nervous system, doesn’t have a busy mind, a stressed nervous system is like a wind that turns on the windmills of the mind. But when the wind is being grounded, the windmills stop so it becomes calmer. And then whatever meditation technique I’m practicing will be much deeper because I don’t need to struggle with a busy mind.
And so even in the regular meditation practice, the integration of trauma, stress, a learning of regulation so that when I’m creatively stressed or when I have a lot of things to do or there’s a lot of demand when in the moment, for example, I come home in the evening, I can downregulate my nervous system, I can bring my body and my mind into a different state, and I can do that faster and faster. And we did FMRI studies on meditation practitioners that where we can clearly show that long-term meditation practitioners are going much faster and deeper into deep states as we would expect, but we can see that practice changes our capacity to deepen our access and also to regulate our nervous system in a different way so that we can drop into deeper meditative states. So that’s very inspiring. But the study also showed that beginners of meditation actually had within one year a quite fundamental deepening of their capacity to drop into deeper states.
So there’s a lot of progress if we have a regular practice. And so if we summarized it to see the trauma responses and intelligence that saved us or supported us in very difficult moments in our lives, we are not addressing a limitation, a shortcoming or a dysfunction. We are addressing a function that we need to learn to understand, to feel, to come in contact with and become an ally of its intelligence. And as we become an ally of its intelligence, we can begin to heal. And the healing process obviously is often also a relational process because some of the trauma needs to be treated or worked on with professionals and or in relational spaces in groups where we can hold each other deeper. And then we see that our nervous system actually becomes more and more relational because the basic building block of relating is, I feel you and I feel you feeling me.
I feel you. I feel you feeling me. That’s how we ideally grow up as children in a safe environment. That’s how we learn to regulate our nervous systems through the co-regulation with our parents. And that’s also how we are able to co-regulate stressful situations with other people when they’re stressed or they with us when we are stressed. So like this, we create regulated or cove ecosystems, and these can become communities that have a different quality, a different quality, a different atmosphere, a different relational capacity. And I believe depleted this kind of relational space because that’s the basis of psychological safety.
That psychologically safe space allows us not only to be more connected and have a more meaningful life, to have a deep spiritual practice also to allows life to detox the parts of our lives and our society’s lives, the trauma of our societies to detox, to become the food of our evolution, the fuel of our evolution. Because if you look at it on a collective level, the collective trauma that’s frozen, I call it often the permafrost of our culture is not moving, is not emergent. So there are emergent processes, which means life that develops and is growing and is evolving. And then there is the non-emergent life that’s like a stuck cd. Things that happen again and again and again. The same conversations, the same social issues, the same political issues, the same conflicts. It’s like a stuck C, the repetition compulsion, the repeating nature of trauma that cannot heal and often experiences of retraumatization so that in our societies we see a similar process. And not to forget, we grew up in societies, most of us that carried a certain amount of trauma. And maybe because of that we normalized it. We don’t even see it anymore. We sometimes say, oh, that’s how life is. People get triggered, people feel separate. These kind of things happen. There’s violence, there’s this, there’s that. Oh, that’s how life is. Political conversations, recurrent political conversations. And I would say, no, that’s not how life is. Some of it is how life is. That’s integrated life, that’s evolving and developing, and there is a part of life.
That’s how life is when it’s hurt. And I think it’s good to make that explicit when we are in this repetitive loops, that’s not how life is when there’s constant triggers, that’s not how life is. That’s how life is when it’s hurt. And once we know there’s something hurt, we can look at, okay, how can it heal? What kind of treatment does it need? What can we do together to ease the pain? And so when we look around the world, it doesn’t matter if it’s colonialism, racism, wars, genocides, you name it, gender violence, antisemitism. There are many big wounds that haven’t been tended to.
And those wounds are not just individual. Those wounds are cultural, societal, global and de normalizing. That’s how life is or collective trauma. And having a bigger collective awareness, collective awareness of the trauma that resides in our collectives, we need collectives for collective awareness. So we decentralize a bit hypnosis that we are hypnotized with individuals and we see more the ecosystem nature of our being. That we are not just individuals, but we are the ecosystem. We are not just on the planet, we are the planet, we are nature, we are society. And so we are much more plugged into a huge supercomputer that we call life. And that supercomputer has an amazing data flow. And when we are plugged into the data flow, we don’t feel separate from that data flow. So we don’t need to connect to the data because we are the data. The biosphere is a huge web of light fiber that we are, that we are.
But sometimes we feel separate or maybe often we might feel separate from that. And then we see, oh, it’s just an idea. It’s a kind of a spiritual idea or concept when in fact the more we re-inhabit our bodies, the more we ground ourselves in this amazing nervous systems and bodies and ancestral lineages that we live in, actually the bigger becomes the map that informs our life and our reality. And so that’s why I think the wisdom traditions that kept the wisdom teachings and the wake consciousness throughout generations, the timelessness and the time throughout generations and a deeper understanding and also scientific understanding of trauma together in a deep dialogue, I think have a great potential to unify our world when sometimes which is changing. Also, science and wisdom traditions are kind of in separate corners. I think meditation is another way where we find a deep connection, some of the wisdom aspects.
And I think trauma too can be a unifying force to combine these two powerful fields as one path. And given what we see right now in the world, we need communities that are much more regulated, that are grounded in deeper presence, that are more deeply aligned and interconnected or into being with life, to also be willing to be in the discomfort of this time because this time with all its different crisis being, it conflicts, climate change, challenges to our democracies and many more things are challenging. And so we need inner centeredness and we need also a willingness to be in the discomfort of change that we cannot control to give birth to something new within a time that is challenging. And I think events like this summit for example, or other summits and bringing communities together to deeply reflect on the multiplicity on the many dimensions that we can speak to when we talk about life and wisdom and awakening and society and peace in the world, how we create peace.
Because healing trauma is also a deep step to a more peaceful interior. Healing trauma is a way to development. Healing trauma is a way of upgrading our ethical understanding, our ethical way of living. Healing trauma is a way to open our hearts and develop more compassion. Healing trauma is a way to create more meaningful and deep and lasting relationships. Healing trauma is a way to open to higher or deeper dimensions of life. And wisdom, and wisdom, traditions and meditation, RNA can be an amazing support to heal ourselves. And when we say ourselves, we are not just talking about ourselves as separate individuals is ourselves as ecosystems.
Because if every one of us brings more grounding, more regulation, more healthy relationships into life, we create an ecosystem around us. It’s not just in me that it changed, it becomes a property of the ecosystem. It is a property of the ecosystem. And so it has a much wider radius of impact. And the more we see that in the world, we actually begin to create new hubs within societies or in our world that operate on a higher level of resilience and relationality and inclusion and change and fluidity, creativity. And I think these are all qualities that help us to take care of some of the issues that we are facing at the moment.
And so given all of that, I think that the power of the understanding and the healing of trauma and the power of the wisdom tradition, meditation, compassion, peace, building, are very close friends. They walk side by side and together we create a very powerful path. And I would love to leave us a little bit with meditate that helps us on the one hand to drop deeper into ourselves obviously, but also see that how in an integrated or unified nervous system could cognition our mind thinking, sensing and emotion. And our body are one alignment, like a data flow through a central nervous system. So cognition and sensing is sense. Making things make sense. If what I think what I feel and what I say is congruent, it’s one message. It’s a unified message when what I think is different from what I feel and what I say, it’s an incongruent message that sends out like a split.
So the more we create alignment and flow in our nervous system and the word matches the energy, so what I say and what I feel is the same, let’s unification. That’s authenticity, that’s vulnerability, that’s the highest contribution I can make to communication conversation, but also to peace. Because if there is no tension between my word and my experience, then I send out a unified message. If there is a lot of tension in between the trueness of the words what I say and what I do or what I live, then I am projecting a lot of stress into the world, which when we bring attention and awareness to it, we can change. And the contemplation I want to invite you is very simple practice that we can apply in our daily life either for a few minutes or we can sit for much longer. And so maybe after introducing a few principles about individual ancestral and collective trauma or also individual ancestral and collective healing to restore and restore doesn’t mean go back, but restore means go forward into a version that we don’t know, a version of ourselves that we don’t know yet that we are finding out.
So then on these different levels, we can bring healing and we call this IAC fluidity. Liquefies Life makes life more fluid and we will practice a meditation now together that kind of is along these lines.