Thomas Hübl:
There are three different dimensions of time. I mean there are many, but let’s talk about three different ones. The river of time, that’s a description of the impermanence that a description of the constant movement of life. So the Tao expresses itself through the constant movement of life, everything’s moving and that movement is nourished by the Tao to an expression of the Tao. So when everything’s moving, it goes through the river of time because we all were 1-year-old, two years old, 10 years old, and so on. But when trauma hits that river and freezes part of that river, a part of us is being unhooked or gets kind of locked in time. So time instead of being a river, a flow becomes a thing. It becomes a frozen part or a held part.
That held part shows up as tension in my body shows up as a circular pattern. I experience certain things again and again. I feel my solar plexus getting tied periodically. I feel that I create similar conversations or similar situations with people. So there is a circular energy, but the fact is that the part of us, if life calls us back constantly to show us, but it often doesn’t happen to show us that here is something stuck because that part wants to become the river again. But if not, then it looks like a stone in the river. But it’s not a stone in the river, it’s just a frozen river.
It’s not something other that blocks the river, but we experience it often subjectively as if it blocks the river. But that otherness, whatever that is in us, it’s a tension in my solar plexus. It’s other. I’m tightening my solar plexus. When you say that to me, it’s like you said it in my solar plexus got tight or my heart closed or my throat got tight. Other, I don’t say I contracted my throat. When you said that, we hardly hear that has a reason because we don’t experience it like that. It looks like other because it’s partly unconscious. So that frozen river is frozen in time. And when that’s in early childhood development, then it looks like it’s just like space. It’s like something is never ending, it’ll never end. But the sense it never ends means something got frozen very early in the spaciousness of very small babies.
It’s never ending because it’s not informed yet. It’s not informed yet didn’t become a form yet. Once that becomes a form, it lives in the world. When it’s before the form, it lives in space. That’s why we sometimes when that gets triggered, we don’t feel oriented in our life. We can deal with the matters of our life because we cannot even relate to that because that’s form and that part of me is formless. But the difference is that that’s not the formlessness of deep meditation. I wanted to differentiate this because for many spiritual practitioners, people say, oh, there is no time really. And I don’t think that that’s true. There is time and there is timelessness. And timelessness hosts time because my body goes through time and my development goes through time and maturation goes through time. The world’s maturation goes through time and deep spaciousness, like in our meditation, and spaciousness is calm, becomes more and more still, becomes more and more timeless, timeless, steeply magnetic.
And there is no time because it’s timeless. It’s before time, but it doesn’t mean that our existence is not living in time. And when we develop a deeper meditation practice, then the capacity to witness the river of time is growing, we have more and more capacity to witness the process. And there are different stages of witnessing, but that’s different. So that’s timelessness and the river of time. And when we engage in trauma healing, we find frozen parts when we have the frozen parts in the river of time when somebody got hurt at age one or age five or age 10 or later. So we learned to find those where the patterns are being created through introspection and reflection, relational practices, and bring those back into a melting process layer by layer by layer so that part can join the water again. And then it becomes river.
And what’s the river? Our soul, the impulse of life spirit. So spirit is movement. Our soul is movement. So the light is moving and one, the physical expression of it is the data of flow through our body, through our spine, through our brain, and all the different other movements it creates in our body that life creates in our body. So in the trauma healing, we are dissolving the crystallized pockets that are unhooked, that are frozen in time. That’s why there is a regression possible. When that melts, it becomes low. You can’t go back. Why? Because there is no back is a location. And people say, I fell back into a paranoid when it came again, and then it means there’s a location. But when that location joins the river, there’s water, there’s flow, there’s no back. And that is freedom. So when we become aware of those pockets of frozenness of trauma and it melts step by step and skillfully, it becomes movement, but it doesn’t have a frozen location to come back to.
Now it’s part of the orchestra, it’s part of the experience. And that’s why usually we don’t have questions in areas of our life that are flowing because they’re anyway flowing. There’s no question. The question comes around the stones in the river because they’re, the water creates turbulences, small spirals, and those spirals show up in us as subjective questions. Should I do this or this? What’s my purpose? Am I safe? Am I, how is it? What should I do? What are we going to do? These are water circles around stones that are individual, ancestral, or collective trauma contractions or breaks that need our attention. So the question is actually an amazing signpost to the stone. And if we have certain questions over and over again, instead of trying to answer them in the same way we tried already, we can say, ah.
So when that didn’t work already five times, most probably when I do it the same way, it won’t work again. So how can the question be a signpost to something deeper so that I begin to explore? And that’s what we often here or also say as humanity, is that when something happens, and not when violent events or acute trauma is happening, when something happens that disturbs me, then it looks like, but that is what’s happening and here’s the disturbance. And for me it’s just to deal with my disturbance. But I would say, no, no, no, the event and the disturbance, they belong together, they’re interdependent. It’s not that this is separate and I just need to deal with that stuff and then it’s going to be good.
No, that’s the hope is in the future, after I deal with this, then it’s going to be good. The hope is in the future and every time when trauma is having a word in the situation later is better than now. That’s what is true in the traumatic moment. But that’s not true ever after. And so I see, wait a minute, my own disturbance with whatever is happening in my closer or wider radios, if it triggers me, then what comes up in me is interdependent with that which is happening. It’s not just this is my disturbance, this is part of the answer.
So me looking at the stuff that gets triggered in me and finding a deeper awareness, if I integrate whatever comes up, then I become part of an interdependent answer. Not this is happening, this is them and I’m here and I’m triggered because they are the way they are instead of, well, yeah, they are the way they are. I’m getting triggered. But this is interdependent. The more polarization we see in society or in couples or in the more we polarize in a certain situation, this is entangled. If we release the original entanglement, then the polarization becomes development. If we don’t release the entanglement, there’s tension and polarization. There’s two.
And so that’s amazing because that shows that when we feel disturbed, that’s not just an obstacle that we need to come down. And then it’s good. Oh wow, I feel that something comes up in me that I don’t fully understand, and if I go deeper with it, that’s well invested time. Because if I can integrate what comes up in me, I contribute to also a wider impulse of change. But often we find this disturbing and we just want to get rid of this stuff that comes up in us. We see it as an obstacle versus as an interdependent process.
That’s why introspection, self contact, the deeper self-awareness tools to explore our inner process, relational exchange, sharing, having an environment where we listen to each other when we feel disturbed, not hiding it, but bringing it into connection, into appropriate connection helps us to clarify that. And that speeds up the development of ourselves, but also of our communities that shows up for a reason. It’s not just my stuff. And that once I’m done with it, then I can deal with this. No, no, me dealing with this is me dealing with that. And then it’ll strengthen my resilience to also come into a different action. But that I bring, if I accept my discomfort, I bring the hope from the future more and more into the present moment into my agency.
And my agency has the capacity to impact situation in a different way. So I think these are great, a great combination of, I don’t know, modern understanding and the ancient principles, especially with the river of time and ancient time, we didn’t talk about the ancient time is the third one is the condensation or the concentration of millions of years of life in us because we carry the achievements of life and humanity and life before humanity. We carry this in our bodies. But there’s a lot of achievements that we developed such a biocomputer. And the ancient time is the depth of the development, and that has a kind of an ancient field to it. So there’s ancient time, concentrated liquid of life. There’s the river of time swimming in our development and really being synchronized with our age also, which many people feel difficult sometimes. And timelessness as the deeper meditative state of being that has different kind of levels of depth or different kinds of states that compose timelessness.
