Kosha Joubert: Thomas, to begin, I’d love to invite you to share what inspired you to focus on his resilient presence at this time and why this capacity is so much needed in our world right now?
Thomas Hübl: Well, I think many of us feel that there’s a lot of volatility in our world. There are all kinds of crisis or stressful events going on from wars to political upheaval to climate change, to many other things that are happening at the moment on the planet. And there is a very strong increase of or acceleration of data speed. That’s, I think, something we shouldn’t forget, that the world’s becoming faster and faster every day, every minute actually. And so our nervous systems in our bodies need to be able to process that. And often we see that the impact of an increasingly faster world brings up a lot of things in our inner world that are not fully integrated because we can say trauma is disorganized, information and healing is organizing that information so that it can turn into flow. So where it’s flowing anyway, it’s anyway easy, but where it’s not flowing well, it brings up some content.
And the same is also that since technology created or is creating a global village, some of the identity structures, collective identity structures also that were very important for some time are dissolving. Now, adaptability says that our inner world is able to adapt very quickly, and we did this for thousands, thousands of years, like to changes, but traumatized areas in us don’t allow that adaptability because trauma is frozen. So that is where we feel pressure, and that’s why I think we could call this time also the time of the great detox in a way, because a lot’s happening collectively and correlated in us. In every one of us, things are moving and there’s a tendency sometimes to shut that movement down. Or if fears come up in me now I could say, oh, wow, that’s a disturbance. Or I could say, oh, I’m part of detoxing some of our collective past.
That includes my own biography of course, but it also includes the biography of my ancestors and the biography of the culture that I’m coming from. And so when that starts to move, then it feels like stress. It feels like disturbance, it feels like all kinds of things. It feels like that I don’t know anymore the world that I’m living in because it’s changing so fast. There’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of not knowing where we are going and how the world will look like in five or 10 years. I think all of that can be potentially very unsettling or stressful. And some of us respond to that stress with some kind of activation and fear or fight and flight impulses. And some of us respond to that rather with a shutdown and overwhelm and numbness, kind of an indifference leaning out in a way.
But both is highly triggered. And we might feel separate from the world. There’s the world out there and then I’m in here versus I’m aware of the interdependence, the interrelatedness or the, as Thích Nhất Hạnh said, the “inter-being”, so that we are all one living system. But when we are triggered, we don’t feel like that. And we can also not just tell ourselves that we are interdependent, that’s just an intellectual thought, but we can learn practices and we can learn how to digest and be creatively part of that great detox. And that helps us on the one hand to stay more up to date with the world that we are living in. It helps us, everything we integrate, everything we heal, everything we learn to regulate in ourselves becomes resilience, and that’s amazing. So we literally can do something that helps us to go through this time better and stay adaptable, like become the change that is anyway happening.
Kosha Joubert:
That’s such an amazing reformulation of how we understand where the world is right now. It brings hope back to places where I think many of us have felt or sometimes feel very confused and hopeless at times.
Thomas Hübl:
And maybe one thing to add, Kosha, is also that, because sometimes when we are flooded or sometimes when we feel insecure, when we feel stressed, when we feel whatever comes up afraid, when we feel angry, when we feel numb and we don’t feel anything, so first of all, we might pathologize that we might say, “Oh, this shouldn’t be,” versus “Yes, it is happening and life asks me to develop skills.” These are evolutionary skills. We need to learn something in a time of a challenging time is a time of learning. And so we need to learn something. That’s what life asks us to do. So we need to learn new skills. And one of those new skills is to stay more regulated in a more volatile time or a time of greater changes. And another one is also that I find agency more and more agency, and that doesn’t need to be big things.
Agency means that I know I can co-create this world with others. And in some moments we might feel helpless. We might feel, “Oh, I don’t know what to do.” That’s why we need to digest what’s coming up in us. Then also our expression of agency will get clearer to us. That’s one thing. So we can talk maybe a little bit more later about agency. And the other one is when I feel there’s a tendency to isolate. Because often or some of us, when we get stressed or when we get triggered, we isolate and then we try to effort more. Instead of saying, oh, I can have individual practices that help me to digest that stress and turn that stress into soil, to ground myself more into creativity or growth. I’m growing. I’m becoming wiser because every time we take a challenge on, we grow. Every time we resist the challenge, we might stay stuck, but I don’t have to do that alone. I can reach out to people, family members, friends, communities where I feel okay, I get the support, or even professionals sometimes when it’s too strong, I need to reach out to somebody that helps me to go through that phase in a different way. And that is I think what we could call responsibility, taking responsibility for a time of change, and it needs our investment. And it’s okay, what do I need that I can go through this phase if I’m triggered or stressed in a better way,
And then I see what that is, that might be different for every one of us. But that’s a great approach because then I feel, yeah, it’s challenging, but I can do something to turn the challenge slowly into growth. And I think if millions or billions of people do that, we are growing together. We are growing. We are literally building a new world. We cannot go to a new world by resisting the old world. We have to build a new world in that world, in this world here, and that’s going to transcend the old world into a new world. And I believe that capacity is what we’re developing together as a collective skill at the moment.
Kosha Joubert:
That’s beautiful, Thomas. And I think the sense that every step we take in our digestion is a contribution to the whole. It just really changes the game.
Thomas Hübl:
We can learn from each other. We can see, wow, when I feel overwhelmed, it’s not just me. Sometimes we feel, oh, I only have that problem. Many people are great, but I feel overwhelmed. I feel withdrawn, I feel fearful. But then we see, and we do this often in our groups. So there are hundreds of people and we say, okay, who knows that too? And then many, many hands go up. But that’s important. That means, okay, it’s not just my problem, it’s also it lives in me. But there are more universal shared experiences that are coated into a personal biography.
But some of the things, many of us experience, and I think that takes a little bit the pressure that only I’m dysfunctional in a way. No, we are not dysfunctional. We are going through a specific time of accelerated detox. And I think also, especially because the world’s getting so fast, more data needs to run through our nervous systems, and that brings up the places that are a bit congested or shut down and if we learn to work with it. But that’s something we need to learn. It’s not just that it happens, but it’s something we can learn. And that includes my individual practices, that includes my relational practices, that includes also my sense of the ecosystem that I’m part of. And so all of this furthers flow, intelligence, data exchange, relational exchange, and that makes us more resilient.
Kosha Joubert:
And sometimes these are also the things that we hide that stay hidden, and to just feel how the space between us is filled with this and the resilience that we’re going to. So yeah, maybe from here, Thomas, maybe you can speak a bit to the solution. How do we move from this state to a holistic interdependent well-being on all levels? How is that possible?
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah. First, let’s say there’s the “I”, the “I-you”, the “You” and the “We”. Let’s start with the I. We can say, I often say conscious energy experience is destiny, has a choice. An unconscious energy experience is our destiny there. There is no choice. The choice is somewhere in the past. So what does that tell us? It says, okay, more awareness is the gate to change, which means I need to become curious. If there is a challenge, how can I become instead of saying, oh, I don’t want that challenge. Oh, it’s challenging, but I’m curious about that, I really want to find out more. So the first step is that I begin to bring more awareness into myself. A simple thing, what we just did in the chat is to, I notice more and more when stress symptoms come up in me, how they feel, what that is, what are early symptoms of stress, how does it feel when it’s escalated?
So that’s a kind of an inner witnessing process. So I developed the skill of being more aware or intraception of my inner inner experience. So that’s number one. The more I feel it, the more I have access to a different potential regulation. So then I can see, wow, I have very powerful friends. One is my body. I get to know where in my body I feel safer and calm and grounded, where in my body I hold stress or tension and I begin to develop that skill. Every day I practice a few minutes or let’s say 10 minutes, I sit down and I practice. Where do I feel grounded, warm, safe? Where do I feel agitated, restless or numb? I train this through the training. I develop like a muscle. And then every time I get more stressed, I will feel it earlier. I can use my breath, I can use my body.
I can slow down for a moment. When I’m in a conversation, I am not answering immediately. I take one or two breath and then answer. So I make more space because when we get stressed, we have no space. When we are more relaxed, suddenly we have space. We can reflect, we can digest our experience. So how can I insert a bit more space when I feel life closes in on me, I need to make more space. And inner practice is one of it. Having a cup of tea and being present with it is another. Taking a walk, having a nourishing conversation or even share our stress with others that we trust. All of that creates space and movement, digestion. And I think these are two qualities that we can all practice. And every time I digest a bit of my experience, let’s say I come home from work and there was something stressful, and I take a few minutes to not go to the phone or to the internet, and I just sit down for a moment, I breathe.
I slow down my breathing a bit, I feel my body until I feel my nervous system comes down and is more regulated, and then I do what I do, what I want to do. So just short kind of moments of space can be tremendously helpful. And that’s not something huge. That’s something that every one of us can put into our lives if you want it, of course. And then what I said before, also looking what’s the relational ecosystem that is supportive? Like whom do I call when I’m stressed? Even if my tendency is to retract, I practice to reach out. And who are people that can listen to me and maybe who are the people that I listen to? So this creates an ecosystem of a deeper regulation in the relational space and maybe also to look for communities. Where are the communities that are really practicing some of that and the community becomes like a support system and helps us to regulate better. So these are simple practices. Of course, there’s so much more to say this we cannot do in one hour, but this gives us a little bit of a taste. It’s doable, but it needs curiosity. When there’s a challenge, let’s become curious. I want to learn more. This is a time for me to develop. That’s the message.
Kosha Joubert:
And I noticed, Thomas, that nothing in what you share about is about fixing ourselves, each other, even the world, but it’s more about becoming more intimate with ourselves, reaching out to each other, building community, finding our agency in the world. It’s like coming closer or melting into, can you just say a few more words about that?
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, that’s very important. What you’re just saying is because some people also fear a bit, and it’s important that it’s a fear, that’s not the truth, is when I’m not activated, I will not care for the world. When I’m not activated, I will become lazy or I will become complacent. And no, our mature self, when we are regulated in ourselves, we want to step in. We want to be active. Regulated activism is amazing. Dysregulated activism creates collateral damage. And once I notice and I see, wow, the state of our nervous systems, the state of our inner world is an asset. And it matters because still many of us might think, “Oh, if I just cover up that I’m stressed and I try to put a mask on it, people won’t recognize it,” but it’s far from true. We also recognize when somebody comes into the room and is internally agitated and is smiling, but the smile doesn’t fit to what the body expresses.
So that creates a double message. We are more sensitive and we feel that even if there’s a behavior on top of it that kinds of tries to put the mask on it. And so that means when I’m stressed and then other people around me also stress. Stress is like goes viral in all of us. But if we more and more of us feel regulated, even in a stressed ecosystem, we can support that ecosystem to come down. And especially everybody who works with clients, who are parents, or everybody who is in contact with many people during the day in their workplace, our grounding, our presence, that’s why we call this resilient presence. Our presence is an amazing asset. This is important because presence transmits presence. It calm the space down. When someone or some people are present, it can take the social system into a deeper regulated state.
And from there, we are not complacent or indifferent or we don’t care. We are just interacting with the world. And because we feel agency, not stress, that’s different. If my trauma stress comes up, that’s different from I feel I want to do something for this. I feel here we need to step in and become a voice for a certain value in society or take leadership. This is not coming from trauma stress. This comes from agency. I’m creative. I care about this, and that’s why I do something that’s a different place. And that comes from a mature place. So that’s very powerful. And sometimes some people feel, “Oh, when my fear or my stress declines, I won’t be active in the world.” And I think that that’s based on the fear, but that’s not the truth.
Kosha Joubert:
The team has helped to bring in some questions from the q and a. These are live questions that have come through here on Zoom, and it will start with one from Joan who asks, can you elaborate on what you mean by time of detox rather than a time where the world is simply deteriorating?
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah. It’s like when we look at human development, when we look at human development, we can see sometimes it looks like, wow, especially when our passport says that we are grownup, no matter if we are in our twenties or fifties or our seventies, the passport says you’re a grownup person. And then, but some moments teach us humility because we notice, I don’t know, in our marriage, intimate relationship with some colleagues at work or in society, we suddenly respond like a 5-year-old. So even if our passport says we are grownups, the inner software is not always grownup, and we know that. So when stuff happens in the world, in our collective space, because I believe we don’t have yet the right architecture in our society to take care of the massive traumatization all around the world in our collective spaces, we will see that it’ll be like a wave.
Sometimes it feels, wow, we get something and then it feels like, oh, it’s disintegrating into an earlier stage of development, but that’s only a sign that’s not that it’s just happening now. This was there before too, just we didn’t see it. So when things are going up and down, it’s a sign that there is something in our individual or collective unconscious that we don’t see. And the crisis or a challenge begins to make that more visible. So now I can say, no, I don’t want that. Or I can say, yeah, it is uncomfortable. And sometimes we grow through discomfort, but it’s something we need to look at, cannot just not have it because it’s already here. And we can use the moment of awareness to say, wow, this is something we haven’t paid attention to or enough attention to in ourselves sometimes or in the collective space. And now we have to look at it.
It’s not when an intimate relationship has a crisis that the issues that created the crisis weren’t there before. And now just in the crisis they came out, no, they were there all the time. And now it hit an edge because evolution needs to go forward and it creates a pressure with those structures that are more frozen. And so I believe we are in such a time of a great detox, which is not comfortable, but necessary because we see that we need to grow in order to do things differently. And we see massive polarization. We see massive fragmentation, we see the big rifts in our societies, but those rifts are not just there now, they, they’re being reinforced by certain qualities in our time now, but they are symptoms. And I think the more we learn to say, okay, what can I do to become part of the healing and the integration and the growth, and what can we do to be part of the healing and the integration and the growth, then together we will develop collective agency, A collective agency that is not kind of a compensation of the regression.
It’s actually a real growth. And I think this time asks us for that. And sometimes we might think the emotions, the stress, the things that come up in us are like a disturbance. And this disturbs me from being with this, but it’s like when you have a jigsaw puzzle, every jigsaw puzzle piece is a piece of the whole. And the pattern on that one puzzle piece is part of the entire pattern. So no one is outside of collective trauma. Collective trauma is not all the others have it. No, we are all part of it. We are in it. And in order to create a subject object transcendence so that we can become more and more aware of collectively, the collective wounds that we have been born into is a collective skill.
And a collective skill needs a certain level of collective collaboration, coherence building, and kind of shared agency so that we develop tools and mechanisms and then architecture in our society that can help us to take care of that unintegrated past and not repeat it periodically. And we have an amazing chance now, which doesn’t mean that all the things that are happening are perfect and good. No, they’re not. But if we can meet that from a mature and regulated place, as Kosha said before, also our impact work, our social political environmental impact work is much more impactful because it comes from a relatedness and a sense of interdependence, dependence. And I think that these are great powers that help us to be even more effective, and we take care of the things that needs to be taken care of right now.
Kosha Joubert:
Yeah. Thank you, Thomas. And in response to that, a lot of people in the chat are asking about agency. So Florina is asking, what does agency mean? Nancy asked, can you talk more about agency? And maybe also what is the connection between agency and resilience?
Thomas Hübl:
So agency, if I grow up in a way that allows me to regulate myself in relationship, like of course in myself, but also in myself in relationship, then I have the feeling I can co-create the relationships in my life. If I feel I grow up, for example, in a family system, that’s often not possible. Many of us learn to hyper regulate their inner world because it wasn’t possible to regulate this in relationship. So then it feels like I carry all this stress or burden and not I feel I have impact. I feel I can co-create the world with others. So that’s agency in trauma, trauma. What does trauma say here and now? In this moment, life is not good for me.
In a moment of abuse, of violence, life says here in this body, in this experience right now, life is not good for me. So not here, not now is better. And in the traumatic moment, that’s true, not here, not now is better than to stay in the overwhelming pain. And in that moment, timespace gets fragmented. So there’s past and future, but it’s both the past. So we are living in this disturbance of what we couldn’t experience. And now because, and often we pathologize not being present instead of learning to understand its intelligence and integrate it skillfully back into presence, not try to effort to be present. And so with that mechanism of not here, not now, which many, many people experienced in some way, not here, not now, became a collective agreement sometimes that we are hoping for a better future, which in the traumatic moment is very important because this moment is not good.
So there must be a better future. So we put the agency into tomorrow, it’s a pearl. We put that pearl into the future, but then in my life I say, oh, I have difficulties in this moment. I don’t speak up in that moment. Then I feel the upset later. And then I say, but next time I’ll do it better. And next time when I’m in the same moment, I still don’t do it differently. And then I say, again, I will do it differently in the future. Often this agency pearl, resting in the future, hoping for a better moment is never going to come. We have to build a new world in the challenge of the old world. So we bring the pearl of agency back into, now that I feel in this moment, in this world, I can co-create something meaningful with other people that changes something in this moment in this world.
And this is a felt sense of creativity. And of course, since we all carry some sort of trauma, some aspects of our life might feel very strong and have a lot of agency and others feel like, wow, in this part of my life, things are not changing. It seems like always the same because here we need healing. And healing helps us to bring the agency back into now, which means it even in a volatile situation, we are not hoping for that it will change in a few years. What can I do now? What are the steps? Even if they’re small? And even if that is my own healing, whatever it is, what can I do now that will contribute something meaningful to the world and to the change that is happening in the world now? And whatever that is, from very tiny steps to large projects. This is what agency is about. It’s the feeling. I have a power to co-create the world together with others. Not that I create a world, no, it’s we create this world together. And I think that’s a beautiful resource. And even thinking about what is that for me in my life and where does that work, connects me to the resource. And from there I can expand it into other parts of my life.
Kosha Joubert:
Yeah, amazing. Thank you so much, Thomas, for guiding us through this meaningful gathering and for opening the door to a deeper exploration of what cultivating resilience really means in this world as we live in it right now. And I’m also really grateful to everybody who has joined us here because there is such a commitment in coming and wanting to learn about these themes and wanting to be part of this solution. And I’m excited because I think many of us, as we start deepening these topics with you, we feel how much deeper you could take us, how much more we want to know about what you are bringing. So we’re also wanting to let everybody know that if today’s event resonated with you, we invite you to join our upcoming course called Whole-Being Wellness: Aligning Mind, Body, and Spirit for a Vibrant Life. And again, the website is open. You can go and have a look. It’s not what you would expect maybe when you hear wellness course, but extremely powerful work. Enrollment is now open for a limited time. The course begins on May 21st and includes five live sessions with Thomas, with guest teachers, and some powerful bonus content to support your journey. This course is for anyone who wants to build more capacity, reconnect with purpose, and strengthen their inner foundation, especially during these uncertain times. Thomas, I’d love to ask now, what are you most excited to explore in this upcoming course?
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, what I’m most excited about is that what I mentioned a bit before, that individual health, like merely individual health is kind of a myth because every individual from just breathing air, we notice, wow, we are always interdependent. And the ecosystem that we are part of is important. And the ecosystem that we are part of means many things. It means nutrition, it means it means relationships, it means the environment, the natural environment, and it means systems that we are part of every day. And so interdependent health is yes, I learn to regulate myself more and more. So that means that the challenges that I go through, I’m more and more integrated. So I feel I’m more at home in this world. I’m more resting in my life. I have a sense of agency in my life and purpose. And at the same time, that creates an ecosystemic impact.
So health starts to radiate around us. So we- either fragmentation creates kind of a sense of fragmentation in us or amplifies it or the other way around the fragmentation is being integrated so that when there is stress around us, we can transmit regulation. And so regulation starts to grow around us, in our workplaces, in our families, with our children, in our social impact work. It becomes like an ecosystemic quality because everybody we interact with will benefit from that. And so our own inner skill building and state becomes an asset in the ecosystem. And like that we build within the volatile world, we build more regulation and we build islands together and community and fields together that are more regulated and hence more creative. And so if we do that, then the interdependence is actually a very important factor of the self-healing mechanism because everything that becomes too separate, dries out, and everything that stays in the exchange within the ecosystem flourishes.
Kosha Joubert:
Beautiful. And just to make it a bit more concrete, what can participants expect during the live sessions?
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, all kinds of things. I mean, of course there’s content that we learn something together. And then there’s also a lot of practice. There’s journaling, there are meditations, there is the exchange with amazing guest faculty that I think bring very powerful work into the course as well. So there are lots of different ways that help us to understand things more, but then also to deepen our practice and have, what is real understanding is that my physical body, my emotions, my mind, spirit and the relationships around me are part of understanding, understanding they’re one flow or one coherent flow. So when we say learning or content, it’s not just intellectual content, it’s holistic content. It’s content that reaches my body, my emotions, my mind, my relationships and so forth. And so I think it’s a very holistic exploration and it gives us a lot of time to reflect the content back onto myself and become more aware how some of the things work in my life and get change impulses and also be embedded in an amazing global community, which is I think a very important resource.
Kosha Joubert:
Yeah, I think that’s often the strongest aspect. This also the transmission from the course, from you, from the community into the lives of each of us. And I think in all of your courses, we experience deep inner transformation simply by being part of this field that is created together. Yeah. Any last words from you, Thomas, about the course?
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, I think this is a time to be adventurous. I think this is a time to say yes. I can see it’s challenging and sometimes it’s a lot, and I’m curious, and I’m bringing myself into this time by looking for what I need to go through whatever I’m going through better. And to be curious and say, yes, this is the chance to evolve. This is a chance to evolve, and how can I be part of the evolution so that there is enough maturity and groundedness and regulation to literally live in a different world. The next world is not in the future. Then a different way of living together is something we need to create. And the more we create it, it becomes the world. So, after hat’s happening now, it will be better? No, we need to build it now. And the volatility of the world is not an excuse.
That’s the challenge that shows us that we missed some stations of evolution already. So it escalates more because evolutionary drive pushes and the fluidity of our nervous systems and bodies can adapt to that. But if it’s frozen, then it creates pressure and the pressure grows and grows and grows and it escalates the symptoms. So when something looks like escalated, it’s not an excuse not to grow. It says, oh, wow, we actually didn’t hear the more subtle versions of it, and now we need to really look at some stuff. And as we look at it, we grow together. And I think this is amazing. I think it’s amazing that we are being called to be adventurous, to be together, to support each other in the growth, to really be nourishing and caring for each other’s development and to become the world that we want to live in. Nobody will build it for us. We need to build the world that we want to live in. And so even when it’s volatile and it’s challenging, we can do this.
Kosha Joubert:
So this time as an adventurer and an invitation to an adventurer. Thank you. Deep gratitude to you, Thomas, for sharing and providing so much value and wisdom today, a message that we really need at this time. And also, I just want to thank everyone who’s here on our call today for listening and participating through your presence. And again, we’d love to continue building community with you and invite you to join us for the upcoming course, Whole-Being Wellness: Aligning Mind, Body, and Spirit for a Vibrant Life, which will start on May 21st.
