Thomas Hübl: When we talk about collective trauma, we are talking also about a design. The trauma is a design factor in the world that we have been born into.
So we came into this world and grew up within a world that is partly designed by emergence and is partly designed by trauma. Trauma is non-emergent, trauma are the structures in the society that can’t grow, that can’t be updated. They’re repeating themselves all the time. And emergent structures, they grow, they update, with downloads, new updates. And I think many of us know how it feels when you update your work or some parts of yourself or how you are as a parent or how you are as a lover or a husband or a wife in relationship and you update yourself so you’re willing to learn to change, to grow, then it feels good. It’s not always comfortable, the process, but it feels good to feel I’m actually growing. Why? Because that’s an inherent part that calls us. And as we are developing, we feel more synchronized with the core that is calling us to heal.
And I think that’s an important aspect of healing because sometimes healing becomes very personal in the sense of, oh, it’s my personal effort. And I think we talked in the first session about it that, yes, there’s a lot I can do and give and commit to and practice, and I have to because I have to change my inner state. And at the same time, that’s only part of the story. The other part of the story is the power of grace, the power of a blessing, the power how life … like I’m swimming in a movement already. And that often we can’t feel. And the more we are dissociated from our spiritual essence and the more we learn to hold ourselves because it wasn’t safe enough to be held by life, first by our parents, by our ancestors, by life. When that’s not safe, holding myself and controlling everything in my life becomes the thing I need to do. And that’s also intelligent as a defense mechanism. And it kind of feels sometimes cut off from the river, from the water, from the flow that any way carries me.
If I can feel both my individual agency and that my individual agency is part of a bigger movement, and that I can tap into the intelligence of that bigger movement, something is moving anyway. I can’t make life move, but I can swim in the river. The interplay between how I can feel through my body, when we feel flow through our body, like before in the meditation, when we come down, when we put more attention onto our inner world and we can feel how life flows through us. And for some people that opens up and some people have what some traditions call Kundalini openings. So when the energy field opens up more strongly, then people speak about very strong flow experiences. So we can literally feel through our nervous system how life flows through us. And not to forget, we said in one of the first sessions, when we talk about life, we are talking about millions and millions of years sitting here.
That’s amazing. Conception of the conception of the conception and conception and conception and conception and conception. It’s a lineage of light, it’s a lineage of sacredness, of life giving birth to itself over and over and over again. And that’s the flow of spirit through us. And so sometimes just to meditate and feel and say, okay, I can tune in with my ancestors’ conceptions, and then I feel because it’s not so personal anymore, I’m embedded in this web. That’s very powerful just to set the intention, I connect to the power of this line or the tradition of life, of living that is pulsing in me too. And that is very powerful because that says that my individual self is actually, as a metaphor, it’s like a soap bubble within a much bigger stream of living. And so of course, there are things that happen in my life and they’re very personal and they’re very important. And at the same time, what’s encoded here in this body and in all that’s connected to it, is a lot of wisdom.
And sometimes when we feel hurt or when we are triggered in our pain, it feels so isolated that we forget the magnificence of how much is actually encoded in us and how much wisdom life had acquired already until today. I want to bring this back into our awareness because sometimes the healing process can feel like as if you need to run a marathon alone and opening it up again and again and say, yes, there is grace. The principle of grace is the aspect of the divine power that forgives. But forgiveness doesn’t work without owning.
And that’s very important in the mystical understanding. We say unconscious energy or disowned energy is destiny. What is destiny? It’s like there is no exit. As long as it’s unconscious, it runs us. Otherwise if it were conscious, so we have a choice. Consciousness comes with a choice. When it’s unconscious, the choice is in the past. And so forgiveness is a process of owning. Owning. Yes. And it’s so powerful when we all begin to look at first in our life and say, what are the things that I can own more? What are the aspects of my life or actions I did or ways I interacted with other people or things that I did in life that I can re-own more, say yes, even if it’s uncomfortable? Yes.
And even when we … it’s not only things we did where we feel, oh, this was off, this was kind of a transgression. This was too much. This was not okay, what I did here. But also owning my own patterns, not I’m still dealing with this. Yes, this is part of my life. There’s a certain amount of suffering in my life that is part of my life. That’s right. And the owning is very powerful. It needs a certain level of maturity because otherwise owning is threatening, and we want to keep certain parts of our lives externalized. So the principle of grace and the principle of blessing, they’re very close. Because grace is in a way a divine blessing that comes into our life. Often it comes into people’s life when there’s a real crisis. When something breaks open, light appears. And there are many people that describe that had a health crisis, a marriage crisis, a professional crisis, but in the moment it broke open, also something new could emerge. That has been prevented for a long time. That development couldn’t happen, so it needed to break through.
And so owning, and owning in a compassionate way, so to say yes, this is part of my life. And this can be health issues. For many people, is I tried already so many things to deal with this and it doesn’t help me. And this, yes, I’m walking that. I’m walking that. Then there’s a certain maturity to yes, I’m walking that. When we talk about collective restoration, that’s very important because that’s this individual, we start that practice also with our individual experience. And then of course we can expand that into our cultural experiences, like into our cultural fabrics.
And at the same time, it requires, as I said, a certain level of maturity that is part of the evolution of my relationship to the divine, to spirit of the divine. Because one aspect that I think in the spiritual healing and also in the spiritual trauma that we need to look into is what is actually my relationship to spirit and how mature is that or how young in the sense of young or regressive is my relationship to spirit? And it’s not about judging it as it should be like this, or it should be like that. It’s more about the language of transformation doesn’t say “It shouldn’t be like that.” It says, “Let’s be aware of that and see how it can grow, how it can move.” Because if I judge it and push it away, I’ll never have access. But if I invite it into my life, “Come, come…” I can say this in my meditation even, “Come, come. I’m here. I’m available.” And then, I see how often… Because it’s very interesting that the big wisdom traditions, the core teaching is the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. So, in the moment you give it the name and the shape and the form, you put something on top of it, you actually separate yourself from the Tao.
The divine has no face. Don’t create an image of God. But we ended up with the white man with the beard, a judging God, a wrathful God, all kinds of images that have been projected onto the true nature of the divine that has nothing to do with them. It’s our internal, individual, or collective psychology that is creating those projections. And that’s where a lot of either deep dependency or independence or resistance comes into play. Either I’m very dependent that I’ll stay safe through my spiritual practice, and it’s a constant negotiation that nothing happens to me. Or it’s a resistance. No, I don’t need this. I am adolescent person. I’m independent.
But that’s different from a maturity that I own more and more the parts of my life that need to be owned by life, because the nature of trauma is that something needs to be excluded, something needs to be externalized. And with it, we externalize ethics. And then, ethics become morals or laws, external laws, because I can’t feel anymore the internal law. As long as I feel the flow of light, conscious awareness, I feel the law, the Divine Law, the law of life. And that lives in us as a spiritual practice, as right relationship. The power over hierarchies can only happen with a certain amount of dissociation from the law, because in spirit, nobody’s elevated.
We are here because of the right to be, the right to become and the right to belong. But also, the commitment to support the right to be, to belong and become in everybody. It’s also a responsibility. It’s not just, it’s my right, it’s also my responsibility. And so, when we talk about restoration, we also talk about the deeper understanding of grace. As I said before, that there is a bigger part of life that is active in us. The Tao gives birth to everything, it nourishes everything, and it takes everything back into itself. The immanence of the divine means that the divine is creative and is active in and through our life.
And so, there is an [_inaudible_]. And the more I open myself through a good spiritual practice, the more I open myself, I’ll feel it. I’ll feel it flowing through me. And then, through the light, I feel more connected through everything. Light is a way to describe light, but also conscious awareness, embodied conscious awareness. When we do this as groups, the spiritual practice plus the healing and integration practice, the re-owning of my suffering, my pain, my trauma, and the re-owning of the transgressions, which is the shadow trauma of the traumatization, create wholeness. Wholeness means we can upgrade the coherence of a group, an organization, a society, a part of a society. And that creates more and more possibilities. That’s not just a commitment to ourselves. That’s also a commitment to the future generations because the future generations can land or download themselves into a more open environment, into a more open ecosystem, into a higher coherence level, which means it attracts more wisdom, it attracts more light, it attracts more potential.
So, healing myself is not just a personal quest, although of course, when there’s suffering, there’s a driver that I am looking for answers, I’m looking for a deeper awareness, I’m looking for a deeper revelation. And like that, I become part of the revelation. The revelation is anyway happening, and it’s like I’m signing up for it. And then, life reveals itself more and more to me, and I begin to become aware of a bigger radius of life. That is the context to my existence. And the more I reveal the context to my existence, I become more whole as the uniqueness and the universal nature at the same time. That’s very important.
I’m not anymore defining myself through the partiality or the partial aspects of life. I become more whole as presence in a way. That journey, once we sign up for that journey, we notice… And that’s a good question I think to take with us, what actually cares? Something cares. There is care. Life wants to heal. When we look at our inner experiences, patterns, our past, our trauma, when we support each other, everybody who works with clients or patients, there’s something that deeply cares, that life can heal itself. And so, the inquiry into something cares. Life cares about itself. Life wants to heal. There is a self-healing mechanism in life, and we are part of it. We are it.
Contemplating that which cares, that which heals, that which reveals itself, brings us in touch with a very deep place. When I sit in meditation or in my inquiry, however I inquire, some people inquire through journaling, some people inquire through taking walks in nature, some people in sitting meditation, but to get in touch with that which deeply cares. And it cares about maybe my own healing, maybe it cares about the healing of other people, maybe it cares deeply… I care deeply about what’s happening in our societies and our cultural healing process. The different layers of care. But to ask yourself the question, that the care is not just the personal care. The care is personal and beyond. And feeling into that, tuning in with the care I think is very important to harvest resources, to touch deeper resourcing that can be very beneficial for our individual and collective, our ancestral healing process.
