Thomas Hübl: I want to take you into an exploration of the interplay and the interdependence of individual experience and the collective dimension because I might say, okay, I am a person, I am an individual in this world and I’m living my life and there are also other people around me and they’re living their life. And relation is how we get along with each other. And sometimes we get along well, and sometimes we don’t get along so well. And this is life. We can also say that within my personal individual experience, which created in the good sense, autonomy, belonging, becoming. So I know I became a grownup, mature human being. I can live my life. I’m functional. I can follow my passion, my creativity, my purpose, and at the same time, I can relate that purpose to the world because my purpose doesn’t exist just alone in myself.
But my purpose is something that co-exists with the need of my environment. So if there is a poet and nobody listens to the poetry, so the poet can write poetry, but the real unfolding of the purpose of a poet is in the participation of an audience, in the poetry and in the need of the audience. That poetry opens up new spaces that allow us to kind of see and feel more of life and take us maybe out of thinking that is too tight. It became too tight, and it opens us into new perspectives, makes us much fluid and allows us to listen through a different language to life.
And so the interplay between the person and the collective or somebody opens up a business if nobody needs that business. The business cannot exist just in its own by on its own just because it has a purpose. It has a purpose because many people need somebody that helps them to build a house or sell them food or anything else. So the business coexists in the one that found it and in the one in older people that needs the products and the services that this business offers. So the purpose is the coexistence of the individual and the collective.
And so sometimes when we think individual, we think actually individual separate. Now, what I want to look at now is how we, that relating sometimes means that I try to overcome the separation and interact with the world. And when we talk about principles like resonance, so sometimes we resonate with life and sometimes it seems we don’t resonate with life. But often it also means that I meet dissociated or numb zones in myself. And that’s why I don’t feel the kind of resonances that I have. And sometimes simply some things simply don’t resonate with me because they don’t kind of touch me in my energy and my intelligence or my potential. So it doesn’t have a strong resonance. But that’s a gradual spectrum that we move on. And it’s not all the same, which means that we, through awareness processes, we can learn to discern when am I in my autonomy, in my individualized self? And still I feel I am a part of a whole, I’m a part of a collective, a whole world, and so on. Or when do I feel individual? But actually what I’m saying, I feel a bit separate. I feel a bit alone. I feel a bit withdrawn. I feel I don’t fully belong. I’m afraid when I come into groups, I am afraid to not find my place in society. There are many concerns that arise out of a sense of a subtle or a strong separation feeling of being separate. And
We know that separation is one of the symptoms of trauma versus interrelatedness and interdependence being a sign of the individual and the collective coexisting in all of us, meaning being interdependent. And why am I talking about this? Because I have seen many, many times and sometimes in very profound ways how a bunch of people, sometimes hundreds of people come together into a room. And within a fairly short time, we created such a kind of intimacy, closeness, openness, and presence with each other that out of seeming strangers, suddenly we had a we-space that was fairly coherent. And the coherence of the we-space is something that we could call a presence within a collective or a group, a presence within a we. And when that presence reaches certain levels, it becomes a more and more powerful resonance body. So the individual is a string, and we is the resonance body.
So when a person speaks in a group about his or her own issues or life experiences, it’s like the music of a string and many people listening to the person, but not only listening with our minds, listening with our minds, emotions, bodies, presence, relatedness, spirituality. When we listen with all our senses and we are present, that listening is a powerful amplification of the person’s consciousness. So first of all, the person will feel that the person becomes naturally more present in the room and the person will have more insights because of everybody else listening. Just by speaking, the person will have more insights because so many people listen. And of course, for a healing process, hundreds of people listening are a powerful amplification for the person’s healing. So when we work with a person in front of a large group on some kind of integration processes, the process that happens needs way less time is much faster and deeper. We can use the amplification in the room as a laser for the person’s healing. And that healing ripples out into the space. And everybody who has a similar resonance in their own history, in their own biography, in their own energy, will get the benefit of that laser treatment, metaphorical laser treatment.
So that means that after some time of different people going through different processes is like when you take many drops of water and you let them drop into a lake onto a water surface, and every drop creates waves. So after some time you have an amazing wave pattern. And that wave pattern is the acceleration of healing within the collective. And of course, we need a collective group that comes together for the purpose of healing because that’s basically the basic alignment in the center of the circle that we focus on. But if that’s our center and focus, that’s what’s going to inform the group.
And so there is this beautiful interplay between the individual movement, progress, creativity, and the group amplification and the amplification of the group speeds up the healing for the person. And the same process also happens when we create a stronger group coherence for relating, presencing, of course, the same purpose, why we come together, because that’s what we want to do. We want to explore collective trauma dimensions, but if many of those ingredients are in place, we create a certain group coherence. And from a certain level of group coherence, we see a phenomenon happening, what I call kind of the emergence or the reemergence of the collective witness. And the collective witness is a more powerful state of witnessing than just many people being present to a situation. And so this kind of collective witnessing often shows up when we do collective trauma integration processes. And that’s every time I experience this, it has a tremendous power.
And I believe that’s also one of the resources because we could say there’s so much collective trauma in the world, how could we ever work through it and come out in a better world? I think of course when we look from the current perspective of separation, it looks like it’s going to take ages and we don’t even know because we are reproducing trauma all the time if that’s going to work anyway. But in these moments of collective witnessing, I saw the power that exceeds, by far, the computing power, like the processing power that regular groups have. And that makes me very hopeful because that power transforms much more collective stuff in a much shorter time, and it leads to a very special group experience where we can all feel like as if there is a magnetic, there’s some kind of presence in the room that helps us to surface collective wounds and pain and trauma and digest it together and integrate it so that bigger chunks of our collective past can get digested like in a regular body, that when we eat food, we need to digest it. When we don’t have time to digest the food at a certain time, we can’t eat anymore because the body can take it.
And the same is true for the past if we are too full of unintegrated past our nervous systems and our bodies can’t take it anymore. So we have to have spaces where we digest the past together in order to integrate those experiences, make them the fertilizer for our collective future, but also open up space in us for new innovations to come through.
And that’s what we need so much today in our world. We need to open up spaces in order to allow a new world to land. That will be the answer for climate change and the current challenges that we have. But for this, we need to kind of empty out the stagnations and all the unintegrated energy that keeps the storages full. And that’s why it’s also sometimes hard to move with a collective because there are heavy weights in the collective unconscious that feel like it’s pulling down into some kind of standing water where we can’t move together. And I think we have tools to loosen that up and to create more movement, which means more evolution, more progress and more integration.
And so again, the individual, I as an individual can bring myself into a group in a certain way, which means that I develop my capacity to listen, to listen also to others when it’s not just about me. That I can host others’ experiences, participate in other people’s experiences. And when other people share, I can be very mindful of my own inner physical, emotional, mental experience. Because often I will feel that while somebody speaks, I go through different inner processes while I listen to another person. And that what I go through is partly of course connected to me, but is also partly connected to what the person expresses while he or she speaks. And that’s very powerful if I can learn to listen to that and notice the fluctuation that I notice when I get tired. I notice when I’m energized. I notice when I have strong resonances.
I notice when I check out and I find myself thinking about my emails instead of listening to the person. And all of this is not about judging, oh, I should listen like a moral stance. I should listen to the person. No, I just want to be mindful of not losing my attention and drifting off and thinking about something else, why that’s happening. I maybe can’t say, but I know that it’s happening and the fact that it’s happening means something. I then in other moments, I will be very dedicated and I will be very empathic and feel a little when another person speaks, and then I will reject what the person speaks and will ask me why I’m here at all. Those inner movements are all interesting. Not one is good and one is bad. They’re all interesting. And I can develop a sense of listening.
So one aspect as a participant in a group is my inner level of listening. And the other one is that I know when it’s my place, when I feel an urge to bring something in that I also bring my piece not only for myself, it’s also for myself. But because I know that I also hold kind of information in myself that is for sure relevant for some other people in the group as well. So it’s never just my own sharing. I also give something into the group. I contribute something that becomes a fertilizer for other people’s processes too. So the participation is either an active participation where I show myself, or it’s kind of a listening and receptive perspective and listening with a certain inner attitude of awareness, curiosity, interest, and a witnessing of the fluctuations in my own internal states that I’m going through.
And so that’s the individual and the collective, as I said, we can pay attention to the collective quality. So every one of us has an awareness also of the collective around us when I’m very triggered myself. So most probably that’s way smaller when I am open and present. So maybe that’s way bigger my capacity to feel and be attuned to the collective space. So then I can feel into the group, I can feel into the collective presence. I’m mindful that I’m sitting in a group of hundreds and hundreds of people, and I can feel the quality that we share, and that at times the quality is very coherent and present. At other times, the quality becomes more fragmented and maybe restless and not so present. And that I pay as if I can as a participant of a group that I can pay attention to that I don’t need to immediately say, oh, present is better than not.
Just I noticed that that’s what we go through right now. Why we go through it. Maybe it’s not always that clear, but we are committed to find out. And so the purpose of the group is important, the inner attitude of the individual, the attitude of the individual towards the collective, and of course also the collective holding of every individual that when we all listen to somebody, we provide a space of respect, of compassion, love, presence, curiosity. And that’s of course, these are the main ingredients for somebody’s own in a development. So I hope we could see a bit the interdependence that the person that speaks happens already in everybody’s nervous system of the people that listen. Same as I appear now in your brain, and I am coded in your perception so that when somebody speaks in front of a group, there are hundreds of versions of the person in everybody’s brain and perception. So there’s the person and there’s a whole field of the person. And the person in the field are one existence. They belong together. So the coexistence, the entanglement, or the interdependence or being has a very powerful function. And I think that’s the basis for collective healing work that we are walking into.