Thomas Hübl: I want to talk about the relational dimension of our inner work and also some of the relational principles that I think are very important if you want to approach trauma or collective trauma. Relation is actually one of our core resources, often also a core challenge because trauma hurts. Relation, trauma is often inflicted through inappropriate relation, and so the restoration of relation is a deep aspect of any kind of trauma work. In the last module, as you remember, we talked about the coherence, the relation, the intrapersonal, so the relation in myself to myself, and between the body, emotions, mind, my soul, the capacity to presence and the capacity to relate. And so we talked about the inner relatedness, how I’m related to myself. We can also call this self contact. And today I want to look at the resourcing and also the healing power that relating holds, especially when we want to approach the collective trauma past.
It’s basically always happening in one way or the other in relation to, in relation to my past, to my ancestors’ past, in relation to you, to your traumatization, in relation to a collective we space that has been hurt. So let’s speak a bit about the power of relation and the power of relation. I think Steve Porches, the kind of founder of the polyvagal theory, put it beautifully that we as mammals, as more or less developed mammals, we in our central nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, the one that creates activation activity and then also fight and flight. And the other one is the one that creates relaxation that can down-regulate the central nervous system into resting, digesting, reflecting, self-healing, regenerating, recuperating. So we have this tool, I can be active and I can rest, and that’s in a regulated nervous system. That’s what makes me participate in life, be passionate about things, be related, be out there, but then also be able to cultivate an interior silence space, meditative space, and a way how to kind of reflect on my life and my relation to the world basically. And so that central nervous system has a frontal part. It’s kind of a relational plugin. So when a mother or father holds a child, immediately, the nervous system of the child and the nervous system of the parent, when we really relate to each other, then there’s a synchronization. And the synchronization comes with [long exhale]. So when the child is activated and runs back to the parent and jumps onto the lap of the parent, and then the parent embraces the child.
Why? Because it’s safe. So there is introception. It’s like how I feel myself neuroception how I feel you. The great thing is if you feel felt by me, your nervous system recognizes this as, ah, there’s a safe space. If I feel felt by you, it’s ah, there’s a safe space. So when we feel felt means another person is open enough physically, emotionally, in the nervous system, resonant and open enough to feel us, it creates a sense of, oh, I feel seen and safe. And the dimension of safety is crucial for any kind of trauma work because trauma naturally comes with a sense of being threatened, being stressed, activated and numb, and people who developed the capacity of creating space for others. And naturally what Steve Porch is would call trained regulators, that we are able to support other people to regulate their own interior state into more togetherness and also more internal relaxation. But relaxation comes with embodiment. Relaxation comes with grounding. Relaxation comes with taking perspective. Relaxation comes with being able to digest my experience. Many people that are chronically on too high stress levels like we are just adding information to the current state and it piles up in our nervous system. And if it cannot digest, it’s going to get more crowded and full. And one day I will show symptoms of simply being overloaded.
So activation, relaxation, and providing in a way, lending the capacity of my nervous system by listening to you feeling you while I listen to you, being connected to my body while I listen to you. And providing a physical, emotional, mental, relational resonance surface. And in these circumstances, when somebody is triggered or very stressed and we provide those qualities in a few minutes, we can slow down and then really look at the challenge or at the issue that needs to be solved, but from a different state of mind. So we develop the whole framework, which is called transparent communication, which means communication is an awareness process. It’s a social contemplation that includes what’s happening in me, that includes what’s happening between us, and that includes also what’s happening in you and for you, what’s happening in you between us and what’s happening in me. So when you speak that there is an awareness of what I hear or what I don’t hear, and vice versa. So the basic relational wiring from very, very early on is, I feel you and I feel how you feel me? I feel you feeling me. I feel you feeling me. That’s relational music. I feel you feeling me? So when our nervous systems are in this open resonance and perceptive state when we hit pain or trauma or the past is I don’t feel you. I don’t feel you feeling me. I stopped my feeling of myself. And I cannot connect anymore my interior awareness. I feel myself and you at the same time.
But that’s crucial for communication because if I talk to you and I see, oh, right now you stopped feeling me or you stopped feeling yourself, if I continue in the conversation without noticing this, it’ll just be more and more stressful. So maybe it’s needed to take a breath, to take a short break and to allow whatever has been set off to be there in order to digest it to in order to come back to the relational space. So a moment and moment, moment to moment awareness of, I feel you feeling me. Or we stop feeling each other, which is okay because it usually has good reasons in our past while we did it, why we put that in place. It’s not a mistake, it’s a symptom of a process that was very needed.
But if there’s no relational awareness that that’s happening between us, so we keep perpetuating it unconsciously and transparent, communication is a way of practicing that relational contemplation in order to increase our own anchoredness in ourself, my physical, emotional, mental experience, my awareness of the relational space, I feel you feeling me, the bridge as I call it, the connection between what I feel inside and how I feel you in my open responsive moments, there’s a bridge so I can feel myself and you at the same time in my triggered moments, usually I lose at least one of them that I either lose the feeling of myself and or I lose the feeling of you. And then we feel separate, we feel more isolated, or one of us feels separate and isolated. And that creates relational dynamics of course. And then the subtle information that every nervous system and everybody transmits information.
So for example, when somebody says, oh, I was really scared. Often we feel that the person contracts and gets tight inside. If I notice that, I don’t need to even speak to it or say, oh, now you’re getting tight. No, but I’m just aware of a tension that builds up. And by being aware of it, I can include that information in the conversation, or at least in my awareness, if I’m not aware of it, I wonder why you suddenly become reactive? Why certain things are too much for you, why you get stressed when I say X or Y or Z. And so a refined awareness of what’s happening in each other. What are the emotions that come up? What’s happening in the body? What’s happening in the relational space, maybe also spiritually. These are important streams of data that in refined present states are available to us, and we are less present or less connected
we lose it a bit or a lot. And that’s why presencing practices and relational practices are important because that is the micro unit of healing. And I know every therapist or every consultant or coach or osteopath, everybody who works with clients knows how important it is to be able to provide a healing space, a healing relation. And professionals train a long time to provide that, because wherever the professional, the therapist has unconscious spots that will project into the relation. So our own healing journey is actually an investment into the capacity to build consistent, safe, nourishing, potential oriented, coherent relational spaces that are the primary tool for any kind of trauma integration. If we take that micro unit and we expand it and multiply it into a we space like a group or a collective, then our relational capacity becomes the sound board, becomes the resonance space, becomes the orchestra that hosts every individual musician.
What do I mean by that? I mean that when we bring our relational capacity into a collective space, we create a collective relation, we create a field of relation, and that’s a very powerful tool that collective presencing. So for example, if one musician plays a solo and everybody else plays in the background, we need everybody else to step a little bit back, for somebody to step into the front or come up. And then when that person blends back into the orchestra, another person or orchestra comes back. So it needs that dance between the individual and the collective. So when in a healing space, one person brings their inner experience into the space, everybody else becomes the orchestra around it. And that means the person that speaks exists in everybody who listens, every nervous system carries has that person inside perception of the person is already in us. It’s very intimate. When I listen to you, you already happen in my brain that’s very close. The fact that you happen already in my brain is very close.
So I naturally feel you or I need to contract or numb parts of myself not to feel you because you’re already very close. And so when we use that principle for the power of healing, it means that when one person speaks and 500 people listen, the person exists 500 times in the perception of the group and exists as a person in a body as well, a particle and a collective brainwave state of perception. And these two together, they belong together. It’s one field of information, it’s interdependent. And that interdependence is the basis of understanding collective healing. So collective healing is the power of that field that is a very effective force for every individual, but every individual contributes to that collective field. And that’s the power of relation, that’s the power of human relation. And that’s also I believe the tool that we need to do collective trauma work and to together emerge into the collective witnessing, which is more than all of us just being in a room, it’s adding up coherence into a state that suddenly a more transpersonal witnessing happens through us.
And I’ve seen many moments when collective presence is so strong that there is a magnetism in the room. And I think that magnetism is the power that supports us to take care of the amounts of collective traumatization in the world and in different places around the world. So it’s not that from our separate sense of self, when we look at collective trauma, we might say, oh wow, there’s so much trauma in the world, we will never be able to work on this and integrate it from that perspective, it doesn’t work. It’s like when you have many separate computers, different laptops are not able to process such amount of data. But if you create a much more intelligent, wider network of computers computing together, the computing power rises tremendously. And that’s our strength. That’s the strength of human relation, that’s the strength of we space relating and presencing.
And that’s also the space where we see that individual healing and that the individual finds its place in the collective in a deeper way, like a puzzle piece that falls into place. So individual healing always has a collective change process that goes hand in hand with it, and the next healing has another collective restoration. So through our individual and collective healing, the whole collective of humanity is actually falling deeper into place, which means it’s more and more restored. And I think that’s pretty powerful. And for this module, just maybe to summarize, there is self contact. There is how I relate to myself that I’m willing to explore how I relate to myself, that I’m willing to look at the filter systems, how I look at myself. Because for many people, self-reflection already has a built in criticism, a built in scarcity. So I look at myself if what’s not right, what’s missing, what’s wrong, how I criticize myself, how I judge myself for certain things, instead of looking for what is so often the filter is already part of the hurt.
And so when I come deeper into contact with myself also through practices as we did it in module two, feel my body, my emotions, my mind, my state of presence. And then I develop a deeper self contact. And I feel you feeling me, is the application of self contact in the relational space. So whenever I talk to somebody that I feel the person that I’m speaking to, I look at the person through my body. My body has eyes all over and I can feel and see another person’s body all over. So it’s not just minds talking to each other, it’s body minds talking to each other. So my body feels your body directly don’t need to think, oh, your body posture is like this. What does it mean? My body communicates directly with your body, my emotions. Feel your emotions moment to moment. You don’t need to explain to me what you feel. I feel your emotions because if I rest in my emotions, they naturally resonate with yours. So if you become sad, I feel it, and you are a bit scared, I feel it immediately. And when you are happy, I feel it too. And when you can’t feel yourself, I feel it too. So emotional bodies resonate with emotional bodies all the time.
And my mental experience, a cognitive understanding understands your thinking and your rational and scientific and philosophical understanding. And so we can resonate on that level too. And we can also feel when we use the mind as kind of a construct to protect the hurt in the body and in the emotions. So when thinking becomes actually an avoidance of feeling oneself and when thinking is an integrated part of the whole, that’s understanding. So when I feel you feeling me, we can feel when people retract more into themselves, when people shut down wall off, when people are open. And all of this is part of relational awareness. I don’t need to address it all the time, but I’m aware that it’s happening and I stay engaged. And in the relational awareness that I see, what are the moments when I’m present in a space and what are the moments when I actually disengage internally? I get disconnect from what’s happening. And it’s interesting because to disengage is not to regulate myself when I disengage, something happened.
And it’s good for me to be aware of the moments when I disengage because usually that’s already a symptom that something is happening that I’m not fully aware of. And the other part I think that I want to mention is like life, energy, vitality. When I go into a conversation, let’s say with that high level of vitality, and I walk out of the conversation with a lower level of vitality, I know that I wasn’t fully aware of the process because I kind of lost life energy on the way, and I’m a bit more tired. These are conversations that were maybe too long that were not precise, that were we disengaged, where we checked out where it was challenging. It was a stressful, all kinds of words that we put onto dynamics that where we are not fully conscious. So every time my energy level drops, it’s interesting, I don’t maybe always know why it is, but it’s good to recognize it. Ah, I’m getting a bit tired when I listen to that person. I’m getting tired when I listen to somebody sharing in a group or in a board meeting, what’s happening here?
So I bring my attention to the dynamic in the room and into myself, and I look what’s actually what happened. So vitality is a great indicator for processes that are on, which means conscious. And when we drop, then often after difficult conversations, we are happy that they’re over. But what does it say? It says that I needed to avoid or deny or shut down a part of myself in order to stay in the situation. So what were actually the feelings, the discomfort that came up that I needed to suppress? And every time I suppress something or I resist an experience, my life energy will also drop. And I think these are just a few fundamentals. There are many more that I cannot share here now, but if I’m part of a process of listening to other people or in my daily life in relationships or workplaces, these are indicators that are already signposts, like small bells that go off, catch my attention. And so there are kind of barometers to look at what’s actually happening right now that I’m not fully aware of in the relational.
Yeah. So we have the relational dimension, and as I said, we can bring the relational dimension even into the collective for group space. So we have the I the U relation and the we and altogether kind of compose our kind of relational awareness when relation is the actual data flow that’s happening in the moment. Relation is the data connection and how we communicate is the data that we transfer. If the data connection is bad, like weak or disconnected, the VC or the emails or the streaming is not happening. So that’s the conversations often in conflict or where it seems like we don’t hear each other, we are kind of stuck with each other. The relation is connected and conscious and present data gets immediately transmitted. So that’s great because that means that taking care of our relational capacity and taking care of the relations in our life are the extension of our immune system. I believe that living in a healthy relational ecosystem is very beneficial for the individual and it’s very beneficial for the people in the ecosystem. And that’s why taking care of our relational networks, I’m not talking now about Facebook, talking more about our actual relational network. People that we see every day, meet every day family, colleagues, friends, to take care that those relations can be as clarified as possible because it’s part of not creating toxicities, but to live in a water that’s clean and fresh.
