When we have more inner space, what’s the relationship between inner space and outer space?
So in the inner work, we are looking at where do I feel what we call regulated? Which means I have a choice, I can speed up, I can slow down, I can be stressed. Sometimes we work on projects. We are creatively stressed because we have to meet deadlines and we have commitments, or we have complex lives.
But in a regulated nervous system, I can regulate myself and come to, and I know and I feel what I need to regulate myself, and I can slow down. That’s one thing. I modulate my nervous system to slow down. When I notice there’s a lot of speed in my system, I can slow down. When I slow down, I switch my nervous system from sympathetic activation into parasympathetic relaxation. And I come back to a more spacious, more open, curious state. If I go deeper, then I go into deeper meditative or contemplative states. So relaxation is the beginning of spaciousness. And then mindfulness or meditation practices deepen that it into deeper states of meditation. So there’s a whole spectrum. And what we want to learn is to dance on the spectrum. “I should be all the time chilled. It should be all the time in this relaxed space.” No, I can be very active, participate in life, have impact in life, and at the same time be able to [Thomas draws a line from the center of his forehead to his chest].
And we did once with one of our training programs, like an fMRI study of meditation. And it was clearly to see that long-term practitioners, people who practiced meditation for a certain amount of years, had a much faster meditation depth in their meditation than people who were less experienced or were beginners. But beginners had a much faster learning curve in their meditation. So it means when we practice regularly, which is not once a year, more often, regularly, we develop literally we change parts of our brain and we have faster access to a deeper regulation. And that combined with some trauma work or inner integration work is a great way to develop a skill. And so when I have more space inside, it’s not just inside, it’s actually the space inside and outside. It is actually one space. So when I’m resting in a more spacious state, my nervous system transmits that.
And that’s why in a time of volatility and the time of crisis or poly-crisis, what we need is many, many nervous systems that develop an inner state of presence, because last time I said stress goes viral in a collective stress nervous system. So when many people carry trauma or stress inside, stress goes viral. If somebody gets very stressed, it’s easy that it stresses other people. But presence goes viral in stress nervous systems, but also in regulated nervous systems. So it means real presence can absorb stress, which means not even absorb, can feel stress and be part of its down regulating movement. When stress meets stress, the system stays stressed. So on the one hand, we want to develop, if you do any kind of sport, you need to train and you need to become fit to do what you do.
And that’s the same here. We want to train certain things, like the meditation we just did is one way, there are multiple ways, how to learn regulation and learn how to take our stress activation down into a more relaxed state. And to do this every day, to do that every day so that I develop more of a spacious interior, which is process plus space is conscious process. Process without space is identification with the process and I’m completely enrolled in my life. When I have space, I have time to reflect, digest, and integrate.
That’s why when we say, oh, we want to regulate ourselves, but we don’t have time in our life, that’s a consequence of having a lack of space because if I have a lack of inner space, I also have a lack of outer space. But if I practice inner space, I can create an ecosystem that is more regulated. It doesn’t matter if I work in an organization or if I am a parent or if I’m a lover and partner, or if I’m working with clients. The state of my nervous system is a tremendous asset. And I think that spreads more and more in our world how important our inner state is, and that we literally can do something. We can literally practice ourselves into becoming an asset.
And so what we need on the one hand is that development of regulation and resourcing in my own nervous system. And we talked about it and in doubt come back to your innermost circle of intimacy. So even if you look at ancestral, the ancestral dimension or the collective nervous system as we do it today, when I feel it’s overloading me, then come back to yourself, to your body sensations, to your breath, regulate your body. And it’s not a failure, it’s a practice. It’s very important. It’s not a failure, it’s not that I should be able to do it and that should be able to do it is what I call in the language of separation. In the language of unification, it’s I’m able to expand, then I feel it becomes edgy, it’s responsible to regulate myself, create more base ground soil space to move out again.
And this pendulation between my inner, and then maybe I read a social media post, or I look at the news and then I feel, oh, I’m getting activated, then coming back and regulating myself to be able to stay related to what I read. As long as I can stay related, it’s great. But if I notice that I become more disrelated, I need to slow down, digest what I read. Otherwise, I begin to overload my system and then I become part of polarization. That’s what we see now a lot in the world because the dysregulated part of me will not be able to regulate itself. So we need some conscious awareness and some practice to be able to say, oh, maybe I need some more fasting, not because I can’t do it, because that’s what I can responsibly participate in.
I think nowadays we see in the social media polarization, we see that there’s too much overload and the overload turbocharges the fragmentation in our society. So we need a regulated use. And that regulated use is that I learned to feel the signs of I am still in contact. I can feel what I read. I am not just a mental machine reading news without any body because my body is already numb, but I’m still in contact. And if it’s too much, it’s too much. It’s not if it’s good or bad that it’s too much, it’s too much. It’s like when you put your hand on your oven and it’s too hot, you’re not asking yourself, is this now a limitation that it’s too hot or not? No, you take it off. So you regulate yourself because it’s not good to overheat your hand on the oven.
We don’t see that as a limitation. We see that as a responsible way to stay related to a world that expresses a lot of polarization, othering, stress symptoms, climate change, impact, whatever, and I become part of maturity when I do that. I become part of a mature world because maturity means that I can stay regulated when I’m meeting the world and the circumstances of my life. So with other words, inner spaciousness and inner regulation goes viral or creates an ecosystem. My ecosystem self is the water that I spread every time I’m in touch with somebody, every time I talk to somebody. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the local supermarket or if it’s a client or if it’s somebody in an organization or the people that I work with. When there’s more regulation, I’ll spread more regulation around me. So I become not only a regulated individual, I actually create an ecosystem around me. The way I do things, the way I respond, the way I am dealing with my own triggers, the way I listen to people, the way I feel, you feeling me, I can practice, that all depends on my inner state of regulation.
So that skill is not just an individual skill, that is also an ecosystemic skill because it becomes part of the atmosphere that I create around myself. And if many people create that ecosystemic field around themselves, which includes all the relationships that these people have, then we are creating more and more like a bigger and bigger ecosystem that is more regulated and has a mature relationship to the events that are happening in our society. And will refrain from overloading themselves, because regulation means like when I eat, when I eat, I know, okay, now it’s enough. So if it’s regulated, I know my body tells me it’s enough, I don’t need more food and then I stay regulated in my body.
And so from the… Because it’s not just an individual. The individual is always ecosystemically active. Same as all the defense and compensation mechanisms are ecosystemically valid. The three-year-old defense mechanism fits perfectly to the ecosystem of the family. It makes perfect sense in that ecosystem when it was needed. And when that person works in an organization, that defense mechanism is ecosystemically active, too. It will impact other people around. Some of them will meet it maturely and some of them not. So some of them will get triggered, some of them can hold the defense mechanism in conscious awareness and will create in a way an impulse of inclusion versus exclusion.
And so this maturity has an impact on the level of space, but it also has an impact on the level of reversing certain patterns because conscious awareness and maturity is less prone to participate or co-create patterns with other people because it has a higher level of awareness. So unconscious patterns can only continue to function in partly unconscious environments. Because also the unconscious is not just in the box of a person. It’s a collective process, too.
And so the power is that just by what I said right now, that we are individual viewpoints obviously, and we are ecosystemically active. We’re designing the ecosystem, the quality of the water around us. That’s already very impactful. And that gives me a different regulation to respond to the, of course, people in circumstances that are close by, but also to the global events that are happening with more maturity. And then so that’s about space, spaciousness, and some of the other questions that came in. It also says that when I practice opening myself to what we will do a bit more now to the collective nervous system, that first of all, I change my mindset that I’m not just an individual, but actually the more I ground myself and open up, I say, “Yes, I’m an individual. I have an individual responsibility in life, but I’m also ancestral. I’m the consequence of a lot of the ancestral information that comes to me. And I’m also collective because I am embedded in the collective architecture and the collective archeology has an effect on me. That I was born in, that I grew up in, that I was breathing and conditioned by.”
And also, as we said last time, the collective is detoxing material. And that’s not just, oh, a person detoxing or the planet detoxing, because that was also one question. It’s where is the twoness. The question is where do they become two versus a whole spectrum of experience. So that of course when the individual heals or detoxes something, the planet is detoxing something. And so when a regulation comes in and more relatedness, it creates more resilience. And more resilience creates because maturity and relatedness and agency create resilience, groundedness, many factors that contribute to resilience in the individual, but also resilience ecosystemically because that ecosystem will be more stable. A more dysregulated ecosystem disintegrates faster. A regulated ecosystem can stay related to stronger impacts for a longer time.
So that’s why one definition of resilience would be the impact, the kind of intensity of impact that we can still stay related to without fragmenting. And so ecosystemic resilience, and then I can begin to change my worldview of how I’ve been trained as an individual, at least in certain cultures, that I’m a separate particle versus I am of course an individual and I am the ecosystem and I am the whole too.
And that means in my nervous system, I can feel when I go to my inner sensations, I can go to my body sensations and feel what we call the innermost circle of intimacy is this alignment. It’s like when I feel my core, I feel I can come back to my core. When I get triggered or activated, I can come back to my core and feel myself and regulate myself.
