The Essence of Life

Anna Molitor: I’d like to welcome Thomas here to join us. Thomas, yes, great to see you with this. 

Thomas Hübl: I’m here. Thank you Anna. 

Anna: And so maybe Thomas, you could start by speaking to us a bit about what you mean by the essence of life, and I’m sure many of us are interested to hear specifically about how we can reconnect to it and find joy and connection in the present moment, especially in difficult or triggering circumstances. 

Thomas: Yeah, I think the question is what do we mean by reconnect or why are we reconnecting at all? Because fact is it seems we’re all living, if you’re listening, if you’re here in this community now we are all listening. So it means we’re all living. So when we are reconnecting to the essence of life means what does it mean not to be connected to the essence of life? I think that’s an important question and as we explored it, we can see that I think there are a few myth or assumptions maybe that we might hold about life that we need to confront in order to answer the next question about the essence of life. One is that we are living in a world where often the mentalization or the rational processing of life, which is very important, is exaggerated or highlighted because sensing and feeling life is reduced and we know that when we are hurt or traumatized, then feeling ourselves in a regulated way is hard. 

So our defense mechanisms and rationally over rationalization is one of them is easier or is more needed than staying with the pain, which is very good. These defense mechanisms are very important. But when we continuously live like that or when we create societies that have that overemphasis, then cognition sometimes has its own helicopter mind as I call it often versus like an embodied thinking. So that my emotions, my physical experience, my physical body experience and my thinking are coherent, which is called sense-making. So things make sense. Why do they make sense? Because what I think and what I feel and what I embody is the same message. And when it’s the same, what I feel and what I think is the same when I speak, I transmit that. That’s what kind of goes out into the world is one message and what I think and what I feel or what I say and what I feel. 

At two, I transmit twoness. And so we are living in a world where we have both At times we have a grounded transmission, which feels, first of all, it makes more sense, it feels authentic, it feels like I can trust what you’re saying, why? Because I feel and I can think the same message when I listen to you and my body receives information from you, my mind receives information. It’s coherent. So we could say the basis for reconnecting to the essence of life is embodiment. And then we can confront the second myth, which I think is important in our understanding of time. You can say, okay, my body is as old as my passport says. Or I can say, well, for sure my body is as old as my passport says. And at the same time, my body is much, much older because I am enjoying the whole achievements of thousands of generations of ancestors, people that lived before me, that handed over the wisdom to the next generation, to the next generation, to the next generation. And when I talk about wisdom, I talk about integrated life, the life that we could digest, the life that we could integrate, which means learning. 

So all the life that we learned from that we integrated has been passed on to us. So the question is when we look at history, is history behind us or is history us? The culmination of history is having this moment now. So integrated history is presence I believe, and unintegrated history is the past. And the past means overshadowing our experience, anxieties, fears, triggers, sadness, numbness, indifference, all those aspects because of which I think we ask, how do we reconnect? Because integrated life is connected. And so we want to create that discernment for today and say, wow, when I connect to my body, I believe I’m not only connecting to my physical body as Thomas, I’m connecting to the wisdom of all the that led up to Thomas. And you are connecting to all your ancestors that led up to you. 

So there is a lot of wisdom in the body. And on the one hand we talk about that wisdom as reconnecting to the body or feeling the body, having a regular practice, for example, through, and you can try this right now with me, when you say, okay, I feel my body and I connect to my breath and I slow down a bit, the way I exhale and I feel, where is my body safe? Where do I feel myself at all in my body, which areas of my body, my palms, my belly, my legs, my chest, my head, whatever, whatever shows up first. 

So I reconnect to body sensations and from body sensations with my breathing, my breath helps me to connect to my body sensations even more. It slows me down. Often when we are stressed, our whole expression goes up and out. When we have a regulation through our breath, slowly our stress can settle and slowly down, regulate many things I have to do the many things I’m thinking about. Because if there’s stress in the body, there are lots of thoughts in the mind often and as I come down, my breathing can help my nervous system to down regulate, especially when I exhale a bit slower, a bit longer. 

And then I can start with, okay, where does my body feel safe? Where does your body feel safe right now? Where does your body feel open? Lively, where do you feel inner aliveness in sensations like pulsing, streaming, tingling, low sensations or you feel yourself sitting on the chair, your feet on the ground, maybe even the ground? So when we say, ah, my breath, my body sensations are actually anchoring. And when I find myself often thinking I do anything about the thinking in the thinking, but I can do something about overthinking through my body because when the stress in my body I begin, my body begins to open up. And that’s why when we sometimes sit with a cup of tea or when we watch a sunset or when we walk through nature and we feel that our stress level decreases, I suddenly have more space to reflect. I can look at my life from a bigger perspective. 

I can begin to digest some of the situations of my day. There’s more space. I mean I digest and I allow myself to feel what I feel. My body digests emotions, my body digests experience and integrates that experience into learning. And of course that involves my cognitive functions, that involves my emotional functions, that involves my physical functions and stress levels, but it’s all of it. And so embodiment is for many people a way to reconnect first to body sensations. And then once I can feel my body sensations more, I can begin to feel even my core more, not only my body sensations, that’s amazing, deepening my body sensations, having more connection to the ground, like the ground comes closer. When we relax and we relax, our body opens up to the ground, we feel ground soil, land, earth. So we are more connected to not even to we are more connected. We feel the ecosystem more that we are. 

And as we feel the ecosystem more that we are what we feel is data, it’s data flow. And I feel my body, I feel data being channeled up and down my spine. And when I feel the soil underneath me or the land that I’m standing on, there’s data. So I’m being informed. There’s formation. So I’m being informed. So I begin to feel into it and also know more because I trust my sensing and my thinking. So sense, making things make sense. And so I deeply believe that our bodies hold a lot, a lot of more information. Our nervous systems are so much bigger libraries than personal libraries. My body is not just my personal body. My body is actually like an ancient library. And so the more I feel my body sensations, I get access to more data. It’s like a big heart disc, the heart disc that contains a lot of humanities knowledge. And with that knowledge comes intuition. So when I’m more connected to my body, I become more intuitive. I feel more things, I get a sense, I get a gut feeling. As we say, sometimes my heart is more connected to my gut and my heart is more connected to my mind. So this becomes like a flow and that coherence inside is that’s how we come closer to essence, because that coherence is in a way the pipe system for our soul’s essential intelligence. And that’s when I begin to feel, oh, what really matters in my life? 

What caused me really what matters really? What are the deeper motivations? I might have more superficial motivations and that’s great. But then there are deeper motivations that are connected to deep values that are connected to my creativity, that are connected to my purpose in life, what I want to contribute to the world, even if I sometimes our purpose is not always immediately clear, but aspects of it, I can clarify qualities. And as I contemplate those qualities, they will form a purpose slowly in relationship, in exchange with the world. So what I was saying until now is that sometimes when we are too caught up in our minds or when we feel disconnected, which means numb or kind of distant within our body, we actually can do practices like I described before, to come more in contact with our bodies and through our bodies we deepened the contact and create more coherence. 

The coherence is the pipe for our essence, for the light of our soul and the light of our soul. It doesn’t mean that everything in our life will suddenly be just good because where does this notion come from that it should be just good. Of course, things get usually better and more integrated and we become more resilient the more we do inner integration work and practice. But my maturity to be in good moments, joyful moments, but also painful moments is growing and that’s maturity. So actually our capacity to embrace life in a 360 degree radius that’s growing and of course some of the pain that I have stored in my body, some of the fears, some of the sadness, some of the experiences that are stored in my body through my inner work, I can integrate more and more, which will elevate my life energy. 

I will have more joyful moments, I will be more creative, expressive, related. So yes, things are changing obviously, and the maturity is growing. So we become more mature in life. We respond to life from a more mature place that is grounded and can hold more and more contradictions, polarization, fragmentation. And so that’s also an important part. So it’s the essence of life means that on the one hand I feel my internal, my deep motivation, what drives my life deeply, what is my deeper interest in life more? But it gives us also the resilience to do our healing work. It gives us the resilience to say, oh, my purpose is not just what I want to give or my career. My purpose is what I want to contribute to the world and create a positive cycle with the world because my intelligence meets a need that creates a positive upward spiral. 

So I feel that what I have to give has resonance. That resonance creates a positive cycle and that creates more of it. And like that our lives are growing including the challenges that we hit because it’s not a romantic story because we see what’s happening right now in the world. It’s not a romantic story. Sometimes it’s romantic and sometimes it’s not, but it’s not what that cycle depends on. That cycle says yes. Sometimes I’ll go through challenges or there will be times where there are challenges in my life and I’m here and then it’s easy and it’s flourishing and it’s opening and I’m here. 

So that groundedness in my body also gives me more courage and stability to become what I often call an ally of life, that more and more with the deeper sense of what drives me and also what calls me, many people that feel like a spiritual calling in their life, that calling is very interesting because something calls us to develop, to heal, to read books, to listen to talks, to practice, to being community, to explore more beyond what we know to look for answers to questions that don’t have simple answers. These are questions that fuel our development, but something calls us and that calling is essential. 

Something deeper that calls us. And I’m sure many of us feel and know that calling, but the calling is not something concrete. And we actually don’t fully know where we are going with that calling, where that calling calls us to, but we are following it. Something is like a pool and that pool is connected to our essence and it doesn’t matter for some of us, some the calling shows up as a need to heal and urgency to heal because there’s pain in our life. For others, the calling is like, I feel that there is more to life than what I see and what I feel. For some of us, we know that there is a mystical dimension to life. There’s a spiritual dimension to life, but we don’t know exactly what that is. The calling in the place of our calling, we know something even if that something is not always concrete, but we know something. There is wisdom in the calling. But if I reconnect to what calls me, the place in me that pulls me, how that feels, and when I listen to that, then something deeper. For many people that’s deeper in their hearts, something deeper inside goes up. 

There’s something essential to our calling. The calling is already, I often say the calling is the echo of our arrival. So in the calling, we know something in the deep connection to our body. We know something when we are able to drop in deeper. First it looks like it’s stress regulation, which is true. But after stress, regulation and relaxation comes more space. And when I listen and I feel more internal space and I listen to the spaciousness, I begin to reflect on my life. I allow myself to have questions resurface that come up in my life that I don’t try to kill immediately with an answer, but I let those questions blossom. 

I let those be, I let those walk me. Some of these questions they seem like Why I don’t find the answer? What’s my purpose? What’s my purpose? And then, but as I allow myself to have that question, it begins to mature me because I can’t find the answer. So I need to allow it to grow. I need to allow people’s circumstances, situations to complete me. It’s not just a me thing or I need to find my purpose. No, sometimes our purpose develops through a conversation. Sometimes my purpose develops a bit more through a talk that I hear that inspires me, a book that I read. And so my purpose is not just a separate thing. My purpose is in response to a world that is a collective intelligence field. The whole world is a huge biocomputer, and we are that huge biocomputer too. Everybody is. But in our trauma, in our separation, we feel of separate of then separate. 

And reconnecting is on the one hand, reconnecting. I begin to develop a deeper sense, a sensing of myself, a deeper groundedness, a deeper regulation. But reconnecting also means I reconnect to the collective intelligence grid. And I often say what comes back into relation can heal. So something that we privatize, we hold inside, we hide, we feel where we feel distant. If we create healthy relationships that help us to bring those parts back into relation begins to heal. And not only does it begin to heal our own healing becomes a remedy. And we know this from many people that heal their own trauma, their own trauma healing becomes actually part of their gift, becomes their gift. And what we heal in ourselves of is what we then are we support other people to heal also when they have similar traumatizations or issues in life. So the essence of life is actually yes, it’s something we can connect to deep inside of ourselves through the first, through our body sense, and then through sensing our core and maybe our spiritual alignment, something that we sense when it becomes still and we have enough space and we can listen to that space. 

We can listen to something that’s more empty. But the essence of life shows up in deeply meaningful conversations. The essence of life comes up when we do something and we feel we really contributed something to a person, to the neighbor, to a project, to the world. That’s the essence of life too. That’s the essence of life as relationship. And so we could also say that the divine shows up in the world, of course through revelation, through insight, through insights, through awakening, like a growing consciousness. But the divine shows up as right relationship, how we show up for each other, how we support each other, how we don’t stay. Each just centered on ourselves, but we begin to give. And that giving becomes a positive circuit. 

And so in those generous relationships, the essence of life is present. And more than that, relationality and generosity dispel trauma. Because relation, we are all wired to be relational. And in meaningful and deep relationships, we heal. And when we are generous, we heal the scarcity of trauma. Because trauma, that one trauma symptom is scarcity. There something is not enough. There’s not enough space, there’s not enough attention, there’s not enough safety, there’s not enough something. Trauma comes always with scarcity and generosity and crisis come with scarcity. Something is not enough for all of us. Something’s missing. And so in crisis, be generous, even if it’s hard because it’s hard. And that’s why purpose and service as such important qualities in the spiritual traditions. Because sometimes when one of us goes through a very difficult moment, generosity is the hand that reaches out to help us to go through the bottleneck of our own pain. 

And if somebody lends you a hand when you really need it, that generosity really changes something. And so how can we create a culture of generosity? How can we create the culture where we are, the hands we reach each other, we reach out to support each other, to go through this bottlenecks of pain, for us to see that we can get to another level of expansion. And that is also where the essence of life is active. Whenever that happens, it’s active. And I’ve seen so many moments in all this 20 plus years of groups whenever we are there, when somebody goes through that bottleneck, the sacred is present like deep healing moments. You can feel like there is a sacred presence in the room and something really heals when a deeper aspect of our trauma heals something sacred is in the room. 

So healing is deeply embedded in something essential.