Thomas Hübl: Hello and welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl, and today I want to invite you a little bit deeper into the conversation of digesting and also of course when we are with family members, but not only there also in our wider social environment and also in our own inner environment. To talk a little bit about the process of digesting things that come up in us that we are not fully clear about. First of all, what that means, where that comes from. When I get triggered by somebody that says something that I don’t like or I disagree with. So the disagreement is great sometimes, but often it comes with a charge. So we feel that there’s either some fear coming up, some anger coming up, some stress coming up. And so all these additional forces and not necessarily part of the disagreement, they’re maybe part of our past that come up in that moment.
So when I feel more charged then it’s interesting because then I go, wow, I feel, so there’s me in relationship to let’s say, a family member that has a different point of view or that has sees certain things in a way that I don’t understand, but then I’m not anymore. Once I’m triggered, I’m not anymore in a place in myself that I can even post that tension or stay with the disagreement in a way that can bring in some creative friction. And often we feel that we are actually pulling out of the relationship. We can really feel that we become more distant and we start to become a bit more defensive and we are already thinking about our answer before the other person spoke. That’s all. These are signs that I am in an elevated state of stress. And so if I walk a path of in a development or in an outer development, then me understanding a bit the mechanics of my nervous system better is important that we say the more stressed we become. I mean there’s natural stress. So sometimes we are more stressed because we have many things to do. We have full calendars and schedules and one meeting after the other and it fills packed. Or we have a project to finish or we need to pick up the kids and we come back late from work and it’s not working out well. So there are stressful moments, but that stress is okay if our nervous system can down-regulate that stress and let it ground itself again and digest it.
But we also experience moments when we get stressed or sometimes triggered by others, and then we walk away with a nagging feeling of arguing with the other person in our mind. And they said this and I should have said that, and I feel agitated. And so when I notice that I walk away with a load of stress, then I also know that that’s stress is only partly related to what I experienced and partly related to a stress that lives in me all the time just being highlighted through that experience. And so we want to, on the one hand, develop more awareness of the state of my nervous system. How does it feel? How do I notice that I’m more relaxed? So when our stress level, we begin to feel ourselves more. It feels more like I regain the richness of my body awareness. I feel my body more.
I feel that my breath is changing, my breath becomes deeper, I rest more in myself. I feel the ground more. I feel more connected to the soil. I feel more connected to the space that I am in or the people that are around me, which means my social engagement system opens up my heart’s more open. I’m more present, I can listen differently. And listening means I can listen to myself differently, which means my self contact gets deeper. So when I want to reflect about something in my life, then I need to first be in the state to do it because sometimes I want to clarify something in myself, but I’m too stressed. So I constantly drift away. I think about stuff that pops into my mind. I feel a bit tense so it doesn’t feel that easy to come to a place where I have more space. So more relaxation creates more space.
We slow down and we have more perspective. So I can look at the experiences that I had in a different way and begin to find clarity what actually happened there. Here I got scared here I was ashamed. I got angry here, I was numb and here grief came or whatever, and I needed to suppress it. And so I become more aware of my inner experience when I have space. And when my stress level escalates, I become more polarized. Fight flight. When it’s very escalated, we freeze. And so that shows up more when we get stressed beyond a certain level. And that’s all important because the more I develop, because I train it and awareness, it’s like a nervous system scanner, like an instrument. And so that tells me the state of my nervous system, the more I practice, okay, what state am I in? How stressed, how relaxed I am, I can learn to use my breath to down-regulate my stress more and more consciously in situations. And also after I was in a certain situation when that was hard or not possible. And so I developed in a regulation or fluidity. And one reason why I say that is because that’s something that we can do. Of course after we experienced triggering moment, but throughout our healing process or our integration process, we will see that the regulation will come closer and closer into the moment that is still or was triggering.
So what takes me maybe now an hour to come down integrate, because sometimes even after days, we are still thinking about certain situations where we get stressed. So the delay time is decreasing and the practice comes more and more into the moment. So that also means when I, throughout the holidays, many people are with their families and also, especially now in the state of our current world, we might agree or disagree on many things. Some things are triggering because they touch our childhood experience or conditioning or wounding when we are with our families so that there might be triggers coming up there. And we also might have different political views, often different political views, alienate or separate people in family systems. And of course the more skill I develop in myself to be with it first and not just think how to get rid of that discomfort or the trigger, but how to in a resourced way or a titrated way, come more in touch with my trigger.
Then postponing my recovery after trigger more and more get shorter and shorter. So I train a muscle to regulate myself while I am in the conversation with my family members about certain things. And I notice my own reactions and the more skill I develop here because my own inner world gets bigger and growth, I actually developed that capacity to sense the people, for example, in my family or in my work environment in a different way because I have more space for it. And as I said before, the more I am grounded in a situation and then when I feel stress comes up, I can regulate it. As I am in the conversations I have also more availability to see more clearly where other people come from.
So with more space, we are also, when it’s about triggering each other, we can maybe see more and more that many things are not that personal because many things come from people’s triggers and past themselves. And we can be more fluid in receiving that without immediately reacting to it. And even if I feel reactive, but through my practice, I can host it more in myself, let it be not shut it down, let it be. And I’m willing to explore, oh, there’s physical tension, there’s maybe physical stress. Then there’s there emotions. Then I notice how I fluctuate in and out of the relationship. Sometimes I feel much more withdrawn. Sometimes I feel much more connected to my environment. And then I pay attention to how I frame it, what my mind thinks. Because I might judge myself for all the things that I said right now in many ways. Oh, I should be more present. I should be more able, I should be more clear or I should step in more or all the shoots. Or I notice, ah, because I notice these processes and because I become more curious, I can confirm in myself qualities. Like when I get afraid, I tell myself, yeah, I’m getting afraid now. And I’m saying yes to my fear. I’m getting angry. I say yes to my anger. I don’t need to act it out immediately.
I can feel it in my entire body, but I don’t need to immediately act it out. And so the more space we create it, it’s a skill to stay more engaged in situations that maybe earlier in our life we either turned away from or we became very reactive or maybe aggressive or passive aggressive. And I can bring more of my current experience into the conversation. And I think especially now when family wise, workplace wise, society wise, there is a lot of polarization that affects all these systems. And of course in our family systems, a lot of our childhood conditioning or trauma will be activated because that’s the place where it came into existence. So that’s an amazing practice environment. If I frame certain challenging moments, not just as these are the bad moments that I don’t want to have, but these are the moments when there is a potential growth and expansion.
And I’m actually curious about developing a capacity to sit more in this moment. Because in one way it’s also life becomes our teacher in that moment. And I don’t need to stay in every moment that is uncomfortable. It’s not at all what I’m saying. And especially when there’s a potential that we can get hurt. I’m more speaking about inner triggers, inner movements that come up when we experience what we experience. So sometimes it’s really important to leave a situation because it’s not healthy for us to be there. But that’s different from, oh, there’s a discomfort coming up and a judge that discomfort is negative and that’s why I don’t like you. So that I into rest more in my discomfort and that this is my discomfort and there is you and I can learn to differentiate those and work with it. And so the more we learn to reflect, digest, and integrate, reflect, become aware of digest, be with experiences or for example, there’s some fear coming up and somebody says something and I notice, oh, I’m getting afraid.
I soften a bit. I reconnect to my fear, to my body, and I slowly can ground the fear. Of course, if it’s not too overwhelming, then I begin to digest it or other emotions, grief, when I feel grief comes up. So to say, okay, let’s give the grief the stage in me and notice it, connect to it, let it expand a bit and listen to that emotion detoxing itself. And often emotions initially get a bit stronger and then they start to fade out. And that my nervous system can digest the archeological layer of my past. And so there is a skill building happening that sometimes is driven by, oh, I do this a bit. I want to develop because I want to get rid of that stuff or I want to develop through that stuff and that whatever comes up in a family system because one person says something and the other person has an inner experience or an inner reactivity.
It’s not just that. That’s separate from the family system. They’re interdependent, they belong to each other. And we spoke about that in the hope is in the future. The hope is in the agency. So it’s also that what comes up in us when we see the political landscape or what comes up in us when we see what’s happening in the world or in the family system is not separate from the outer experience. It’s interdependent. And the more of us have a good practice, it’s like a muscle we need to train to integrate stuff. First of all, we bring cause and effect. Something happens and there is an effect. We bring cause and effect closer, we become more present cause and defect closer, we become more immediate. Cause and effect closer means I have a higher capacity to be with my inner process as it’s happening. Not that then I need a long break to recover. And if I need that break to recover, it’s okay. It’s great because that’s my state. Through healing and integration, we strengthen a muscle. And that muscle is very much kind of an ally of life because the closer cause and the effect come the closer we are or the more intimate we are with life.
So when cause and effect become very close is an inherent feeling of closeness or intimacy with life, that’s a very pro-life experience power. And that is agency. So we are intimate with our agency when we are intimate with life, when we are in the experience, but not fully unconscious in the experience, but conscious of the experience. So there’s space and there is sensation that is flowing. And as we said last time, the more we become curious and we are doing it because it’s like in our work, it’s like an art form. It’s something that grows and matures and becomes more efficient also over time. And so that’s a real human skill. I think that’s a deep skill of our heart, of our humanity to do that work. Because the more we integrate our inner world, first of all, the more range we have to be in life, the more we are healing impulses where we come also in our family systems, I see this often that people that do their inner work actually become the ones that eventually inspire other people in the family system to do something similar or because trauma is a disorganizing principle, something is disorganized.
Trauma healing is an organizing power. So it begins to line up things align, things bring things into a new order or into a new flow. And all of that is great because the more we practice it, the more we become that, the more we carry it wherever we are. And so it has a real added value. So we become an added value where we go, not because we do something, but because of who we are, our inner state. It’s not doing, I’m doing integration. Integration is a function of a deeper capacity of being with. And I think especially in this world where we see a lot of inability to be with and a lot of canyons between each other, like the capacity of being with inclusion and wisdom. Because at the end of the day, being able to host a family member that before I needed to separate myself from the more I do my inner work, I’ll see that there is more and more way to be with each other.
And even if we disagree, we will be together in the disagreement and honor each other for the points, but we don’t externalize and polarize. That’s a different process. We can hold the tension between ourselves that we obviously face here, then we are not polarizing, then we are aware of, okay, there is a tension and we have the capacity to mature. Our mature self has the capacity to host tension and not to reject it because when I reject it, I make you other when I feel it, we are still in the same space. And so I think especially the times of the year where we come together also with our families, and of course in every other situation where that appears, these skills are very important and can induce a lot of healing. And the same is also true for the more I drop into, I learned to regulate my down-regulate my nervous system and become more spacious, more reflective.
Of course when we around the new year. And if we have maybe a bit of time around the holidays to sit in as that reflective space and review our year, maybe see all the things that happened, also some patterns that keep repeating themselves. It’s an awareness process. Maybe I do some journaling. I want to explore a bit out when I look at the river that came up to here, what happened, how did my year look like? What did I experience? And then I can write and be in that journal a bit, contemplate, let things arise, feel into attune to, and the same I can do for the new year. So where do I feel my energy wants to go? What seems important? What are the values? What are the qualities? What are the projects? What do I want to develop more? Where do I feel my creativity? Maybe also what wants to be restored? What topics, themes do I want to deepen in myself? What wants to heal in myself?
So if you have the possibility to take some time and space and do some kind of end of the year reflection and attunement to the new year, I think that’s a very, can be a very powerful process that can also bring a lot of insights and new inspirations. And so I wish you a beautiful time and also a beautiful practice and to see what we spoke about as a skill building that is an art form and takes its time, not just a quick fix, but it it’s art that deepens and is beautiful and creates its beauty. So I wish you a beautiful time and see you next time.
