Thomas Hübl: Hello and welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl, and today I want to speak to something that I think many of us feel right now, that there is a lot of collective stress, collective and political and social fragmentation, polarization. And I think we all need, first of all, a good inner practice to stay kind of connected and in a way mature in our responses versus our reactivity. And to also be able to touch into an emergent response, which means a response that has a future that doesn’t just reproduce what we already did in the past. And so the reason why I speak a lot about collective trauma is that we see, same as in an individual life, we develop these patterns and our unconscious identifications with past pain create patterns. And those patterns keep repeating themselves. And I think many of us know how that feels when you have relationship arguments, when you have recurrent issues at work or in your experience of the social fabric, no matter what’s your political agenda or direction or in any other place.
Even with our inner voices, with our inner processes, that there are recurrent thought pattern mindsets, emotional patterns, recurrent fears, anxieties, shame, anger, whatever grief. And so similar as it’s in our individual experience, the collective psyche, like the unconscious of our societies, the unconscious of our collective experience has or is subject to the same process, the repetition compulsion of large patterns. And I think a sentence that describes this well is history repeats. Yeah, history repeats. And we see, when you look back in history, you see certain patterns that happen over and over again, conflicts that happen over and over again and more polarizations, political divides.
And so today I would love to speak again given its so up. And when we look at our news feeds, when we look at our social media feeds, how much polarization we see and polarization on the one hand is there’s a symptom, and the symptom is we see polarization. But when you look a bit deeper, then you see, oh, there is a polarizing or fragmenting force that creates the symptoms on the surface. Same as when we get triggered, we don’t feel our trauma directly. We feel the effects of our trauma, the symptoms of our trauma.
So when we use our triggers and say, first of all, when I get triggered by something, I check in with my, what’s my relationship to my triggers? Do I think that I’m a bad person when I’m triggered and I should always become and connected and kind of in a state of equanimity and openness or we are all human beings. We get triggered at times, triggers a signpost to growth. And if I don’t ignore my triggers, but I use my triggers as a developmental journey, then every time I get triggered I can go deeper and check in with myself what’s actually happening. And when we look at bit deeper what’s actually happening, we will often find that we are not anymore responding to the world from a mature perspective, but we are actually reacting to the world. We are in a reactive mode that comes from younger aspects of ourselves, unintegrated younger parts that can get re-triggered because it seems like sometimes when we speak to people and then it’s person A and then two weeks later it’s person C, but it’s the same trigger.
So then we see, wow, it’s actually not so related to the specificity of the situation. It’s related to the specificity of my trigger. And all kinds of people can trigger that or all kinds of people can say things and I feel hurt can say things and I feel scared can say things and I feel ashamed. So it’s not so specific often to the situation, it’s more specific to my inner experience of the situation. And that’s what we can change. That’s why I often say the future has the power to rewrite the past. But when we say that, we can say yes because the past is not just what happened a year ago, 10 years ago, 50 years ago. The past is also how we experienced what happened, how people experienced the second world war, how people experienced certain disruptions in the world. That’s the frozen past, that’s the trauma content that we can change, that the future.
I can work on my childhood trauma, which is the past, but it’s also how as a child I experienced the way I’ve been brought up. And so we always talk about what happened and how did we experience what happened and what we experienced that is subject to change because history is, history could occur. Course of events is the course of events. But the frozen past in us, the past that we couldn’t integrate, this learning is still frozen in us and can still get triggered and often does. And so I think many of us might know how that feels periodically when we get triggered and also that then we respond to the world not anymore from the potential of our intelligence. We react from past reactivity, fight, flight, freeze, fawn mechanisms, and they don’t carry our potential. They don’t carry our intelligence, they don’t carry emergence.
And we might see that we might argue an intimate relationship argument. So in work experience, we set those things already and now we are saying it again. And then we say, oh, but these things are not changing. So it’s not that that’s unique, it’s repetitive. And so when we look at society, we also see that there are repetitive patterns. They maybe have a longer timeline, they’re not maybe just that frequent. Some of them are, but some of them are longer. And so the repetition takes longer to reoccur. And obviously otherwise we wouldn’t say history repeats. We know those cycles. And that’s why we need, I believe two ways. I need an individual in a practice to work on my own in a software basically that is able to compute my daily experience. And the more fluid and integrated my perspective is the more bandwidth I have to swim in complexity. And it’s very important because we are living in a time that is becoming more and more complex and we need to learn to swim in complexity. But in order to swim in complexity, we need an integrated self. And the more integrated is ourself, the more the self is the cup for the world, the more integrated is the self, the more world can be hosted inside, which means I can stay related to the events that are happening.
And if not then either I have a lot of great values and ideas, but I can’t live them. So intellectually I understand many things. I read many books, I heard many podcasts, I did many things. I’m intellectually fantastic. I have it figured out, but actually in daily life I can’t live it. My understanding, cognitive understanding and my reality are two. So that means my practice is to embody what I know and to learn to live that emotionally, physically, relationally, ancestrally, spiritually. At the same time, the other defense against complexity is simplifying reality, like a simplification of the world. Because if I cannot swim in complexity, which means I swim in a river and I learn to swim skillfully and I am interdependent with that complexity, I’m interdependent. The complexity of the world is not other. If it’s other, I’m overwhelmed and it’s okay to be overwhelmed, but it’s just important that I know what the other ring of is.
The complexity is not out there. It’s not that the world is complex, the world out there is complex. No, that’s already a symptom of some kind of overwhelm on some level of myself that I am not able to host the world in myself. So the in existence of the world and the existence of the world, seemingly outside of me are two. So less of the world can land in me than actually exists. And the more integrated my self is, I’ll be open to learn. I’ll have access to emergence and I’ll be in a fluid relationship with complexity. So the integration and the maturation of self is very important. And we need practices to integrate ourself. And that’s a lifelong journey. It’s not just a quick fix. We are becoming more mature as adults. We keep learning and developing and we become wiser. How do we become wiser by integrating the difficulties that we meet may become wiser. And eventually if we really polish, if our soul’s journey polishes ourself and we face our challenges and integrate those into learning, then eventually we’ll maybe become an elder in society will become a wise one.
And so when the disembodiment, like great ideas, but the cup is still too small, but I have great ideas or the simplification, grasping a piece of reality and say, okay, this is how things are. Because the interdependence with complexity is that it’s not that I know everything about complexity, that’s also not the point. It’s like as if one part of the supercomputer tries to fully know how the supercomputer works and tries to control the supercomputers complexity. No, but I have access to the data of the supercomputer because I’m swimming in it. That’s a different flow state. And when I’m in a flow state, I am swimming in complexity, which means sometimes I’ll need to learn, sometimes I have something to teach. I will manage to deal with the challenges that come up in my life. I will reach out when I need to reach out. I will figure it out myself, and I need to figure it out myself so I will be in a more fluid relationship to the experiences and the unfolding of my life.
And so that in a work is very precious. And at the same time, if individuals and the ecosystems are not two, they’re interdependent, it means first of all, that means that my inner development will become an ecosystemic property. So I will form my ecosystem in relationship to many people relative to my maturity if I’m often regressive and if I’m often in reactive modes, that’s how my life’s going to look like. If I am in responsive modes, that’s how my life’s going to look like. Because there’s more compassion, there’s more clarity, there’s more clear yes and no. There’s more embodiment, there’s more accountability, there’s more generosity, warmth, care. There are many qualities of maturity that will co-create the atmosphere of the ecosystem around me, all the people, and not only people, all the people, all the plants. All the animals, the planet, the ecosystem that I’m part of.
And that’s, I believe also true for the ecosystem itself. So the collective dimension, how collectives are being hurt and fragmented through large scale impacts that equally needs attention and that needs attention from us. It’s the, it’s not only me being part of the we, it’s the capacity to build collective witnessing spaces, collective rituals, collective, collective architecture that is able to process the larger wounds, the blow to the social fabric as Kay Ericson called collective trauma. It’s a blow. And the fragmentation of the social fabric of society and the after effects of that blow is our homework. The legacy of immigration, the legacy of racism, the legacy of a Native American genocide, the Holocaust, genocides around the world wars, the first world war, the second world war, you just name it.
From Asia to Africa, to Australia, to Latin America, to anywhere in the world. Of course, north America, we see wounds of colonialism all around the world. So our societies have large scale scars, carry large scales scars. We have been born into those and we normalize very often deployed to the social fabric. That’s the society that we know. We don’t know it any other way because we grew up in it. We’ve been born into this world. So that’s the world we know. And so there is the integrated part of this world that’s anyway emergent because integrated reality is emergent and non-integrated reality is non-emergent, is repetitive, keeps reproducing itself. And I believe we often find ourselves fighting and arguing, but the repetition compulsion of life, which is a waste of time because like this, we can’t change.
And what helps us to change is to build an architecture, to build rituals and healing spaces that are able, where we come together and we say, as citizens, we have the responsibility to take care of the legacy that we have been born into. That’s not over. And we can tell ourselves whatever we want, let’s just look into the future. Let’s see the brighter future. Let’s just go. Yeah, that’s great. But the repetition compulsion means that it’s like you’re driving on the highway and you see the sign of exit 51, it goes to a certain town and after 10 kilometers you see exit 51, it goes to a certain town and after 10 kilometers you see exit 51 and it goes to a certain town and so on and so on. So the past that is not integrated will show up in front of you again, and there is no way out except slowing down, paying attention to the past.
The past that is recurrent is repetitive, not the past that many people call history because integrated history is the present moment. Integrated history doesn’t bother us in that sense. The unintegrated history is interfering with my experience of now. It’s the anxieties from the past that are interfering with my decisions today. It’s the anxieties of the past that are the basis of some of the social and political and other decisions that we make. Now it’s not, we take those decisions or we make those decisions out of freedom. We tell ourselves that we are really free. But freedom is not just that I can do what I want. Freedom is the capacity to bring our emergent self into the moment and into an interrelatedness with the world. And freedom means to have a choice now, not to reproduce the past and call that freedom. That’s not freedom.
That’s being bound unconsciously to behaviors, mindsets, and ways of acting and living that are imprinted by the past to slowly come to a conclusion here. So what I’m pointing to today is on the one hand, the beauty and the importance of doing our individual integration work to mature our ourself, to integrate ourself, to be more steadily in a grownup perspective. And from that grownup perspective, we have a much wider fluidity, freedom, choice, responsiveness, and relatedness and resilience to respond to the current state of the world. And that we create the citizen’s responsibility to say, we all have been born no matter in which country around the world. We have been born into a legacy that our ancestors, the people that walked before us couldn’t integrate, were hurt, or created trauma. That’s part of our job. Somebody needs to clean up the living room.
And so volunteering and participating in cleaning up the collective living room will help us to make different choices, will help us to create a new movement or an integrated understanding of who we are as societies, who we are as a humanity, who we are as a planet. And I think that’s really exciting, but we have to have rituals for this. We have to have an architecture that we build for this because that architecture doesn’t exist.
It doesn’t exist on a mainstream level. And so when I as a citizen say, yes, I’ll do my part, I don’t have to clean up the whole living room because there are billions of other people that are living in the same living room that we call humanity. But if every one of us does some, or at least enough of us do some, then the living will be cleaner and cleaner or brighter and brighter, more open, more loving, more compassionate, less fragmented, less polarized. And we will be able to see each other better because there is not so much fog in the living room and the communication will be improved, the global collaboration will be improved. The fairness and the integration of different levels of societies will be improved. I think there’s so many win-win win effects to cleaning up our collective living room. And so I will speak more especially to the second part in the next solo episode of point of relation. But for now, I will leave you with these inspirations today and also see where you find yourself inner a journey and in your we ability to be part of a we is not just me in a group or me in society that is around me. The we ability has many layers to grow until we feel again that we are like an interdependent net.
And that interdependent net has a lot of flow dimensions to it and can create a wonderful collaboration to solve contemporary issues. And so I will come back to that. I’ll leave you with this inspiration today, and hopefully it speaks to your own understanding desire, how as a collective we can take care of the legacies that we do and help in a bigger and brighter world. Thank you.
