Thomas Hübl: Feeling into Collective Presence
I’m thrilled to welcome Thomas Hübl back to Pulling the Thread—our first conversation, entitled “Processing Our Collective Past,” is one of my favorites to date, although today’s conversation doesn’t disappoint either. In Thomas’s new book Attuned: Practicing Interdepence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World he explores the idea of being present, or creating the internal capacity to host the experiences of others. He mentions this line from Fares Boustanji which sums it up: “To get in contact with the other, you have to be in contact with yourself.”
Thomas Hübl is a spiritual teacher, but his particular genius point is holding space for large groups, groups that can then begin to process and transmute dark, dense energy—energy that’s often held by traumatized culture and places. He has worked all over the world, because this stuck energy is…everywhere: And when we fail to acknowledge and move it, we’re stuck, repeating karmic cycles.
In Attuned, Hubl explains what we can all gain from getting in touch with our ability to host the experiences of others. As he writes: “When I speak to groups or before an audience at an event, it is not enough that I show up knowing what I wish to say. To be effective, I must be in dialogue with the whole, and therefore aware of the group or the audience as a dynamic system. Only noticing what is happening for me is not enough; I must be able to accurately feel with and adapt to the needs of my listeners. I need to clearly sense my participants’ degree of availability and curiosity. I also need to perceive whether and when I am being heard and received—or what else might be needed or present. The clarifying of the relational matrix comes with expanded awareness and offers an acceleration of our coming-into-relation. This is the leading edge of communication and leadership, and it requires deeper awareness of the intersubjective space from all.” This sounds like something we all need.
Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM THOMAS HÜBL:
Thomas’s First Pulling the Thread Conversation: Processing Our Collective Past
Attuned: Practicing Interdepence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World
Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds
Thomas Hübl’s Website
Follow Thomas on Instagram
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
THOMAS HUBL: Great to see you again, Elise. Hello.
ELISE LOEHNEN: Hi, great to see you too. I was just talking to a friend of mine who's a trauma therapist who had originally sent me your first book and I was like, I'm seeing Thomas again and you need to get attuned in two weeks or whenever it comes. Next week? Any day, right? Soon. It's coming out soon.
THOMAS: it's coming out tomorrow. The book's coming out tomorrow.
ELISE: Oh my god, amazing. Alright, so let's dive into it because we could go for a couple hours, and I know we only have one. So, first of all, congrats again. I know your primary medium is working in groups of people live and being present with them, but the book does an excellent job of translating a lot of these headier concepts about the way that energy moves in our world and gets stuck and shows up in quote unquote karmic patterns.
And I felt, Despite not being a therapist, but obviously sitting in conversation with a lot of people, that it's an incredible invitation to understand how to be with people in a more meaningful, substantive way. Maybe we can start with that quote. I think it's Faris Boustanji, hopefully I'm saying that correctly, "to get in contact with the other, you have to be in contact with yourself." Beautiful.
THOMAS: Yeah.
ELISE: so maybe let's start with that, how you open the book, which is how you do that, you, Thomas, and then how you show people how to be present.
THOMAS: Yeah, I think, first of all, it's great to see you again. I was very happy about our last conversation. It was so attuned also. And there was so much resonance. It was really beautiful. And Yeah, I think for me, it's a mix of like, I've spent 30 plus years exploring my own inner world. So that for sure has a big effect. So as you said, we need to be first be attuned or in touch with ourself, connected to ourselves, which is already in itself like a very interesting process because where trauma resides in me, I cannot fully feel myself and I cannot fully feel you. I cannot feel society. I cannot feel nature. It's like some information is missing. So having an introspective practice, meditation, contemplation, yoga, like whatever, some contemplative practice, we call our practice three sync practice. So that I regularly go inside. I get to know my body that I see. Wow. Actually my body is so rich. So much information. I can get to know more and more of my body and that helps me also to consciously experience my body as an instrument that's resonating all the time. Everything I feel about my body is data flow. You know, there's a constant data flow that I feel my hands. There's data flowing to my brain, back to my hands.
And so we are actually all the time in a flow. And then also my emotions, my mind, my capacity to relate to you and feel you right now is also data that my senses transmit to me and then to you. And so like this, we are establishing between us a field of data flow. We call this nervous system synchronization. And I think attunement makes life simply so much richer and so much more, I don't know, deep, full colorful, also nuanced and Also, like we are also feeling the aspects of life that are painful, we are also feeling those more, and I think also that part of life, or especially that part of life needs us, but maybe that's something we can talk about later. So yeah, attunement to myself means tuning the instrument. Attuning to you is that between our instruments, music's playing. I think attunement has a lot to do with my data flow beginning to resonate with your data flow. It's like when you have two cars driving on a highway and they're driving at the same speed, I say sometimes, so then you can actually open the windows and talk because you're matching your speed. I think attunement is a little, not a little bit, it's like that. And so when we feel each other, we actually create a data connection that allows us to communicate whatever needs to be communicated, things that are easy, where we resonate easily and the things that are also conflicted, contradicting, different and learn to do that, the relationship becomes stronger than the difference or the conflict. So yeah, it's maybe a beginning.
ELISE: You mentioned your three sync process and you write about this in the book and there are exercises, very short exercises that people can do. And so much of it feels like a type of body intelligence or somatic sensing, right? Which I think, we're not taught this, that if you slow down even for 20 seconds, 30 seconds, and you just start scanning your body, you can sense where you're tight, where you're excited, where you're clenched. The body is full of information and, as you were just saying, that can be a block or a black hole or you can be running energy well, right? Where you're releasing it into the ground or can you talk just briefly about that 3 sync process? Just because so often, it's hard to be present with anyone else when you're so internally diverted, right? Like you're internally, without being conscious necessarily, but you're not in your body. Or at least I experience a lot of Dissociation.
THOMAS: Yeah it's actually, as you said it, that when we see there are two major movements, one is stress and high activation shoots energy upwards that we can fight. Runaway flight in the, when it's really escalated and we freeze or we faint. And so there are different built in mechanisms in our autonomous nervous system that we experienced sometimes when somebody says something, it triggers us. We feel a rush of energy and it's literally stress and emotional content coming up, and then it feels much harder to be grounded, connected, to have space, but the other way is also true that when I become more aware, Oh, actually, I feel a bit tight in the solar plexus, I feel a bit stressed, and I pay attention, I embrace my stress, I Slow down my exhalation a bit.
So then I can learn and it's a training. It's not maybe happening right away, but it's a training that I can more and more regulate my nervous system. Then I feel the opposite movement. I feel a movement downwards. It opens the lower part of my body. I feel again, the ground. I can feel even into the ground. Then I feel my body sensations more and a wider range of body sensations. My focus gets wider. I am more able to reflect. We all know, you know, let's say you have a lovely cup of tea or coffee. You're sitting somewhere. It's kind of late afternoon or early evening. You see the lovely light of the sun and You can reflect on your life. Why? Because the nervous system is in the zone where the nervous system creates the best environment for reflection. And I can digest my experiences. I can feel into the things that still linger around in me or circling in me still, Oh, what was in that conversation? Or why did this go that way? and what should I do? So I can digest my experience. And when I digest, it's like with physical food, what happens to the food, it gets integrated into the body. So we integrate those experiences and we call that learning. When we do the same thing with trauma, we call that post traumatic learning, because the organism learns something through integrating trauma, but also regular experiences that I cannot complete.
I had a difficult conversation in a team meeting. I walk away. It's still working in me for some time. But if I take a moment, I ground myself, I feel, Oh, I've got maybe a bit ashamed. Something has been said and I felt exposed, or I felt scared, or I got a bit angry. And then I stay with the emotion. I can digest it and see if there's anything, any action or anything that needs to be done. Or It's simply integrates itself, and I learned something. And so three things in our practice means I learned to get to know my body and the stress state in my body. I get to know my emotional experience more or also, when I'm emotionally overwhelmed and I cannot say what emotion I feel, that numbness or overwhelm is equally important and often gets overridden.
So that's Worth talking a bit more about. I can notice when I'm stressed, my mind is much more active and tight. Like I'm thinking more in loops. When I'm relaxed and open, my mind is spacious, creative, more reflective. It's not so busy. It's very important for people that want to meditate that we cannot quieten the mind in the mind, because the reason why we overthink is because we carry stress in the body. So being able to regulate the stress will also make my meditations much more quiet. And I think, so that's amazing for Basically everybody, because learning to regulate consciously our nervous system, grounding ourselves is so helpful in so many moments in our life.
ELISE: Yeah. And so many of those stress responses, you know, we learn them, fight, flight, freeze, faint, but they're micro, right? They don't show up in the same way that I think we've been conditioned to believe. Like the fight urge doesn't mean that you're actually fighting. It means you're having this like, surge of anger, rage, impatience, frustration, whatever it is. So I think we miss a lot, they're so much more subtle than I think that we think. So I want to talk, there were so many roads that we're going to go down from that. I want to talk about empathic overwhelm and groundedness because I think as you say in the book, that's the biggest question, people saying, I'm so sensitive. I can't handle everyone else's emotions. Then I want to talk about how energy is contagious and travels and gets stuck and creates your collective traumatic ancestral trauma work. And then I do want to talk about, you mentioned the numbing or the people who say, I don't feel anything. And the way that we are like, Oh, then there's nothing to see there. But that I think many people listening will say, Oh, that's me. Like, my memory is a black box, or I don't know what I feel. So those are three roads. Do you want to pick the order you want to do? Which order?
THOMAS: Let's stay with numbness for a moment because I brought it before already. And it seems like an important piece where lots of misunderstandings happen, because naturally, when I ask myself what's in my body? How do I feel my body? Sometimes I feel tight, sometimes I feel open, I feel inner sensations of aliveness in certain parts, maybe not in other parts. So I begin with whatever I find and then by attuning listening, I will see that the more I practice, it becomes richer, more refined, I get more access. I can even start to feel my inner organs, how my body is either in a good communication inside. There are certain parts that are more marginalized in my own body, so I can get pretty refined access to my inner experience, which I think is also good for my overall well being and health that I'm kind of, more in tune with myself and I can feel imbalances in my body earlier and then emotionally it's the same. It's like either when I ask myself, what's the current emotion and I can say, Oh, I'm, I feel a bit of love. I feel a bit of excitement and curiosity. I feel a bit of fear or a bit of anger, a bit of, so I will be able to name it if there is not immediately or pretty fast, a feeling of an emotion, that I can name, then many people try to find something and I would say, No, why? Let's just be with the fact that not feeling for many of us as children, it was such an important mechanism to deal with the overwhelm that we experienced, with the overload. We simply needed to shut it down. Because, let's face it, children, I often say to parents, be aware that your children are also your prisoners. Up to a certain age, children cannot walk away. If there are overwhelming situations, it's very hard for a child to leave the context. So, when things are great, then it's anyway great because then my parents, my teachers, my environment gets me and fills me and I can regulate myself and I say, Oh, this is too much, or I want this, or I don't want this. People hear it and respect it. But for many of us as kids, that didn't happen all the time, whereas for some of us, it didn't happen very often. And so if I cannot regulate myself in relating and sharing what I need and what is painful and what is beautiful and what I like and what troubles me, then I need to deal with those inner states more and more on my own, and then shutting some of it down actually is better than keeping the disturbance going.
And so numbing and absencing, like leaving a bit my body, leaving a bit my emotions, and in traumatic situations, leaving even more and shutting down a part of myself, was super intelligent. So when we cannot say what we feel, Many people think it's a dysfunction. I can't do it. And in our work, we always reframe it and we say you were able to pull out. You were able to shut down. You were able to not feel. It's actually an intelligence that's working here, not something that's not functioning. And so, if we depathologize not feeling, when people say, oh, I can't feel my body, I say, okay, great. Let's not try harder. Let's first, together, Notice and respect that maybe in what you're touching right now, not feeling was better than feeling that there is like a positive attention to the inner state we find and not immediately a pathologizing of that in a state that something must be wrong with me because it seems like everybody else can feel and I can't, which anyway is not true, but, that we see, oh, a positive relationship to the process that is happening also allows us to be more curious and get to know the state that I don't feel in my body.
And I have seen thousands of people, once we come to that moment of accepting and being curious, change starts to happen by itself. And so that process of numbing or in a strong way, dissociating in traumatic moment is very intelligent at that moment, if it doesn't get reintegrated, so it has side effects in our life, obviously. And so when I ask myself, what do I feel? And I can't feel, then I can say, yes, I feel that I can feel, which means I respect my inner overwhelm. And I see if as compassionate or loving as I can, I relate to that part and say, I feel consciously that I don't feel. So it's not an unconscious numbness. It becomes a conscious numbness. And that opens up maybe what's underneath and I can learn to resource myself and that's very strong, then I need to maybe train this with a skilled therapist or set it, put it in relation to good friends and bring it into relationships so that I have co regulation that the relational network is very important that I don't stay too much alone with that process.
But I just want to point out that we change a bit the notion or the relationship towards certain parts of ourselves. And when we touch overwhelmed parts, of course, I'm not overwhelmed often right now in that moment, but I'm touching a part of myself that got overwhelmed somewhere, most probably in my developmental time and I'm revisiting this. And then sometimes if people, I don't know, if somebody raises their voice, I don't know anymore what I feel. So because that triggers a part of me that was shuts down in a millisecond, because that part is shut down all the time. And When the right trigger comes, I experience that.
ELISE: Yeah. I mean, I feel like sometimes you'll hear people say, essentially, Oh, I'm just not that sensitive. And would you argue, and then other people who say, like, I'm a highly sensitive person and I'm an empath and I'm continually overwhelmed, right? But it feels like people sometimes are desensitized. Not not sensitive. Do you feel like there's sort of a factory setting for all humans in some way in terms of like the baseline and then some of sometimes it gets dialed up and sometimes it gets dialed down? I mean, I'm sure There's differences, but you also get the other, you get the people who are completely dislocated from their sensing organ or their feeling organ. And then you get people who are living in a state of perpetual emotional overwhelm.
THOMAS: Right.
ELISE: Can you talk a little bit about that and that lack of maybe groundedness?
THOMAS: Yeah. Yeah, I would say that both is true. I think we are not all born with the same level of sensitivity. And we don't need to. Some people need for their purpose and their life, like a more highly attuned nervous system. Other people need different qualities, so they are born with a different intelligence. It doesn't mean that the one is better than the other. They fit to whatever, whoever we are and whatever we want to express in this life. So I think there are differences. And at the same time, what you also said is, I think we're all sensitive beings to start with, and some of us learned to shut down parts of ourselves because that was the best thing to do in the given ecosystem that we call core family, that we call education system, that we call, you know, society, where we grow up. When we're simply constantly threatened, or when we live in a constant fear that relationships will break apart, families will break apart, there's alcoholism, there's racism, like, of course, we cannot stay in that sensitivity. It's too overwhelming. So we actually stay true to our future development by shutting down certain parts in order not to be constantly triggered.
And, So I think that both is true. And then, I think, recognizing high sensitivity is important and sometimes because we also experienced it that way, by if somebody with a very high sensitivity grows up in a family system that notices and is attuned to the highest sensitivity, that person can regulate and ground their experience again and again until the nervous system has that wired so strongly that it becomes the way we live. But if somebody with a highly sensitive nervous system and the people around don't get it, it's like when somebody is very sensitive to music, not everybody hears music in the same way, but for some people, even small disturbances in the music, they are very obvious. And for other people, it's, yeah, it's okay. It's like, it doesn't matter to me. And so that when there is an dysfunctional attunement or constant overwhelm, or like a constant danger, Or a constant disruption in the relational trust, then that's being experienced very strongly. So we actually learn to pull out of our body through the stress or to shut down and go inwards or to create a wall. There are different defense mechanisms, but so we isolate in order not to be so overwhelmed. And that's why I'm often saying, yes, let's honor That there was a lot of overwhelm, but let's also honor that it's like a tree with a big crown needs big roots, broad roots, and then the tree becomes more stable. We call that grounding. And our body is actually, I believe, soil. Our body is the earth, the planet, its substance, and substance helps us to ground sensitivity. So it feels like we are more to more held in our body and we can resonate through our body more. And some people feel like everything just goes indirectly without having some kind of filtering mechanism.
And so I have also seen people that came and were very disturbed at the beginning and slowly the grounding and the digestion of some of the overwhelm brought more strength. And then More and more of you experience our sensitivity again as a blessing, because, you know, just for any therapist or anybody that works with clients or patients or children or teachers, but also everyone as a parent, like we need our sensitivity to be able to attune. So when it's in a good balance between grounding, like exhaling and inhaling, taking data in, when that's in a good balance, our sensitivity is not an overwhelm. It's the blessing we bring to the world to express our gifts. And it's also, we learn how to regulate ourselves and live a lifestyle that fits to that sensitivity without constantly needing to protect ourselves.
ELISE: Yeah. I often think that we're a bit like, there's certainly a better metaphor, but you know, washing machines, where we are processing, moving what's in us to create an ability to help process or move energy that's also present in the room. And we all know people who are exceptional at this, right? Like, both in the positive and the negative. People who can really bring that vibe down quite quickly, who are really heavy and dense. And then others who sort of enervate a room or just lift it through their presence and, or the people that the friends that we all have where you can go for a walk and both of you are processing or co processing and you just leave feeling so relieved, so light, so, cleansed is maybe not the right word, but can you talk a little bit about what how energy, and I thought you did an exceptional job throughout the book, both in talking about sort of explaining morphic resonance, Rupert Sheldrake's idea, talking about string theory, some of these concepts that can break our brains. All of these theories about how energy moves in a way that makes it very real, that not only are we imprinting on each other and projecting and receiving, but that it sticks around in our environment, right? This stuff is ancestral, cultural, and familial, old. And sometimes we don't always know what it is. It's not attached to any story. So can you talk a bit about this emotional, energetic field that we live in?
THOMAS: Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. It's very complex. There's lots to see. Let's see if I can keep it brief.
ELISE: Do you like it when I ask you three questions nested in another one?
THOMAS: Right. So let's start with. What you said, Steve Porges, I think beautifully described in the polyvagal theory that basically our autonomous nervous system, the vagal nerve is deeply relational, we see this as mammals. We see that nourishing our children needs lots of connection and we call this co regulation. So the stress of a child can land in the mother or the father in the good sense. We can land in relationship. We feel the stress together. The child can ground itself. So what that wires, if that works well, is when I feel agitated, afraid, stressed, I can go back to a safe space. It helps me to ground. I internalize a bit of the grounding and develop my own regulation.
If this works well over a period of time, the child's nervous system internalizes regulation by itself. So when the child grows up, I know when I'm agitated, I will always find people to co regulate with. I can also regulate myself well, but I will find support. Support will help me to ground. I will develop the relational network that will reflect that. For other people that were more alone, And they couldn't co regulate with their parents. They often learn to do it alone. And then in life later, we also try very hard alone because we didn't learn really that reaching out is safe. Often it was not safe or it was not helpful. And so, and that also has a design effect on how we design our social life later and how much we trust people, how much we see people as resources when we don't feel good to really, that it's actually a win, win to co regulate with each other. And we also learn to provide that function. So when our friends feel distressed and we listen to them and we feel their stress with them and we are really there, we are present, we are attuned, within one, two, three minutes, we can see how the stress in the nervous system relaxes. And then we can literally look much better at the facts of what's actually happening in life, or what's happening in my company, or as a parent, or whatever, as the partner in our intimate relationships. And so we gain perspective.
And so on that level, Co regulation and that it's built into our nervous system is amazing to know and is something, even if it has been hurt to a certain extent, we can kind of rebuild that function. And it's great for us, but it's also great for us to be somebody that can provide it. And in a way request it also from life and ask for it if we need it. So I think that's an amazing function in a social ecosystem. And we all build social ecosystems. And that also means as exactly as you said, we all imprint on each other. And it means everything we heal, we mature, we develop in ourselves, is never just for ourselves only. It's always also ecosystemically relevant. So if somebody becomes more open, it will affect all the relationships that person has in life. So all the relationships will begin to enjoy or benefit from the fact that I grow, everybody that knows me benefits from my growth because it will nourish all those relationships. So we are always ecosystemic and individual at the same time.
Now, because you mentioned things that are lingering around in family systems, we have done a lot of work in our work in the last 20 years where we said, okay, what's individual trauma and development, what's ancestral trauma and development, and what's collective trauma and development. And I call this in the book, the IAC work, Individual Ancestral Collective Fluidity. Why? Because that work helps us to liquefy what's a bit stuck, what's frozen. What's less moving, what's not developing and that we see on many levels that intergenerational trauma, so trauma that grandparents passed on partly to the parents, they passed it on to us, maybe we passed it on to our children, that there is a data flow between the generations. It's like an echo. So everything that cannot be digested In one generation has an echo to the next generation, and we more and more know that there are epigenetic factors that encode for this. There of course, psychological factors, there are social factors. There are more factors that like, it's like different dimensions of the same thing that affect us and so spending some time, and I love this because I've seen so much change happening, like I've seen family systems where people literally didn't talk to each other for three decades, then somebody works on that like family intergenerational trauma system and the same day a person that they did, that they had no contact for three decades calls the same night, or writes an email the same night, or estranged parts of family systems suddenly begin to move, and you feel like a healing process is being set in motion.
That is not just affecting the person that's doing the work, but it begins to affect fragmented family systems. And I have seen this over and over again. And I think that we see our inner work, not just this personal, and of course, attachment work is very important and we need to do it. And there is intergenerational work that affects our attachment work. And there's collective work. So they're all kind of a system more than separate islands that we need to work on. And you said it, because whatever is integrated is not lingering around but becomes our perspective. Whatever is not integrated, as Sigmund Freud already said, Is part of the repetition compulsion. So we'll create patterns, cyclic movements to try to resurface again and again similar intimate relationship dynamics, similar work dynamics, similar dynamics in certain parts of our lives that we call patterns. But the root of the pattern is not the behavior, it's energy that's circling somewhere in the depth of our unconsciousness. Once it's being harvested, the pattern stops, 'cause the pattern is just an effect in life of circular energy flows. They cannot release themselves that are stuck. And that's why I think, exactly as you said, understanding those energy flows more intellectually, emotionally, physically, relationally, ancestrally, spiritually, is amazing.
We can't approach it just intellectually. One can write a PhD on attachment trauma but still suffer from the attachment wounds that the person carries because it needs a much deeper sensing. So just knowing who my ancestors are, or were, is not enough. I need to learn to tune in, to feel, to open my inner world to the data that lives in me today. But there, I have seen very powerful transformations in people's lives. It's very promising.
ELISE: No, it is, and it's very confronting, I mean, there's this other part, this is near the back of the book, and this feels relevant, I'm sure, to family systems and individuals, but also to our culture, right? And throughout the world, we see, as you were talking about these repetitive patterns, when you were talking about Ukraine, for example, I didn't know that about what had happened up until 1900, sort of the famine and genocide that occurred in that same part of the world. And here, you know, in America, I was just in Australia, they're going through many of the same things. Not attending to a history of slavery, but certainly attending to a history of genocide and colonialism and murdering first peoples and displacing them and everyone, we all get so calcified, right? So stuck. It's so hard to know, because I think it becomes an intellectual process for people of like, well, am I responsible for this? How am I responsible for this? Even though I've certainly benefited from it. And you write really beautifully about this where you write, "Importantly, we need not agree with or condone the harmful beliefs or behaviors of our ancestors to acknowledge their contributions to our lives. This is a point of considerable conflict for many, yet deep down we know the paradoxical truth. Our ancestors gave us life and that is sacred. As long as we refuse to acknowledge their past moral failures, those past moral failures repeat in the form of our own living struggles and social crises. It is only by choosing to witness and digest our ancestors crimes that we have power to stop them from being repeated." and you talk about how You know, this indigenous 14 generational belief system, how we can, in this moment, heal seven previous generations, seven generations to come by actually attending to what's present instead of pushing it down the field. So how do you hold people in that paradox of gratitude and anger, shame? I mean, there are so many present emotions, right? But we can't escape them. We can't run as much as we would like to sort of do that.
THOMAS: Yeah, it's beautiful. As you said it already, like we make spaces. We, in our work, we create spaces where we begin to be able to hold the paradoxical nature of that. And that we don't try to get to the solution. So I'm often saying trying to look at how it looks like when it's healed. is another form of avoiding what's actually here. Many people say, how long do I need to do this work? Or when will I be done with this? Or when will it be done? I don't know. And it's also not important because it's a way not to relate to what's the next step. And the next step is sometimes, I don't know how to deal with that. Maybe that's the next step. So let's bring That confusion, that not knowing, that overwhelm, that rage, that shame, that strong guilt, whatever it is, that fear, let's be with this together. Create collective spaces that are relational, that have certain precepts how we hold each other in those places. And we begin with what is actually here. When I think about the past of my ancestors, when I think about how colonialism hurt First Nation people, like what's happening now in Australia with the voice, there is a very important moment and we all have something come up, even if nothing comes up, that is what comes up, because it can't be that when such fundamental human rights questions are being asked, that nothing comes up, and if nothing comes up, then the numbness is the thing we need to see, the distance, the avoidance, that it's everything too much. Okay, let's honor that it's too much, but let's be with it. That's the entry gate to like a deeper process. And as you said, it's seven generations into the future. It's response ability is ability to respond. Can I begin to have a connection to the next generations and the reverberation forward in time and backward in time, like how the next generations affect us and we affect them with the way we live. So that's for some people is already a big stretch because it looks like time only flows in one direction. And I wrote a bit about this in the book, like the retro causality and how time moves not just into one direction, but actually the next generation is already affecting us. The future is affecting us here already. And the same is responsibility, responding to our ancestors lives. I have held many workshops where, especially in Germany, or between Germany and Jewish people where Nazi descendants were sitting with Holocaust survivors or their descendants in the same room and the tremendous amount of guilt, the tremendous amount of pain, the fear that it's very strong, but if you have holding spaces, amazing things can happen.
Amazing restorative processes can happen that restore life, and restore is not that we go back to something we know, it's that we become something together, we don't know what that is. We cannot predict who we gonna become. And I think that's why it's risky, because engaging in the after effect of colonialism, We don't know how our society is going to change. When we want more equality, our lives cannot continue the way they are now. But because often there is a lot of fear and guilt, and because we cannot predict that, so the process gets shut down, but we cannot continue like that. And that's why I think this collective work that we need spaces, we cannot just try to intellectualize that, that doesn't work. We need deeper spaces. We need, I believe, and that's why I'm often saying also in my talks, we need to speak to governments. We need an architecture in our society that helps us to integrate the legacy. The U. S. needs an architecture to integrate the legacy. Australia needs that, Europe needs that, the Middle East needs that, everywhere we need that, Asia, Latin America, you know, everywhere you look, you have massive drama.
And I think we noticed at a certain time that hospitals are good for people that urgently need care. So we implemented that. And I think now something new is needed. We need collective healing spaces because that's a tremendous impact on health care costs. That's a tremendous impact on criminal rates. That's a tremendous impact on reducing racism. It's a tremendous impact on education, on the way political polarization works, we have to create the architecture that doesn't exist yet in a functional form, like mainstream form that helps us to ground those legacies skillfully. Like, facilitated spaces that, where we can literally look at this together and integrate the legacy because we understand how important it is not to repeat it. We are bound to repeat the unconscious patterns. And I think, and then. One part of our intellect says, no, but it's not true. But if most of us look at our lives, we will find some repetitive patterns that are persistent, that are still there, that are still working. And many of us did already 20 years of therapy. And people say, still, I still have that pattern. So it's not that they just disappear magically. They need attention. And I think As you said, the war in Ukraine is a sign that we didn't do the work in the last four decades or five decades in Europe that needed to be done in order to prevent this war. I believe it's possible to prevent it, but for that we need to open up the legacies of the famine that was there, of the Second World War, the First World War, big scars that are residing in our unconscious.
ELISE: And it's, you know, as you said, I think so many of us see this as An intellectual need or a policy need, et cetera, something that we can solve on the mental. And so, of course, all of this is true to some extent, we need equity in our systems and to attend to all of that. But it's really limited, I think. And I what I see happening too, is that And I have this tendency as well. I mean, I wrote a whole book about the cultural conditioning of goodness and how it lands in the bodies of women, causing us to repress and suppress and project, everything that we perceive or has been told is bad. And so we end up sort of clinging to this raft of goodness, which we then try to use as a shield against all of this bad feeling, right? And I see this showing up in circular firing squads, particularly in more liberal environments, and this sort of like, are you perfect in your allyship, and then the way that we tear each other down when we're not, but we are using it as a protection, a ballast against attending to what's really present. Men, in my experience, are just like, I'm out, like, there's, no one's really holding anyone accountable, so like, later, we'll let you guys fight about this, you can be the punching bags for these conversations.
Not all men, but that what we need is like a 360 reckoning, because the way to that our patriarchal culture is set up where power and money and whatever it is that's at the top of this pyramid scheme, whiteness, the things that we adulate culturally that I think many of us can recognize and say like, well, that's a fallacy, you might get that it doesn't deliver you much or anything or it doesn't save you from all this feeling and you look at the cultural chaos that's created typically, often, the really destructive is happening in the hands of a lot of white men, right? Deaths of despair, school shootings, suicidality, loneliness, like, nobody gets out alive and nobody is emotionally salvaged from this work.
If anything, I don't know if I'm doing a job of explaining this, but this is like a 360 healing. This isn't just about Holding people accountable who have been perpetrating more harm. It's about also understanding that there is a lot of harm in being the person who's harming. Does that make sense to you? That there's like intense healing needed, it is not the people who are sort of been the oppressive forces in our culture, traditionally, in some ways need the most. healing. Maybe that's backwards, but it seems like that's also what's playing out. Also because they have the most power to perpetrate or keep these cycles going, can you help me explain what I'm trying to say?
THOMAS: Yeah, first of all, I love that you go into these deep topics and also so eloquently and that you feel when you speak that you really deeply work this in yourself also and in your work. So that's really beautiful. And I agree also with many things that it's not an either or holding one is holding somebody accountable or healing. It's both. But sometimes Because it's so hard to go a bit deeper, to really feel in our bodies and emotions like what these kind of things mean and which layers it has in us, it's much easier to bail out somehow and try to get out of it through some kind of mechanism. Also the goodness in some, like there is a projected goodness that create and behind it, there is a kind of a vacuum because we don't actually want to go deep.
And we can see that, that when integrated presence is vulnerable, is willing to learn, is willing to receive, is willing to bow, is willing to stay connected when it's difficult. I understood that privilege means, I can turn away and that knowing that I learned to use my privilege to turn to words and to be willing to stay in the fire of learning together, especially when it's about cultural wounds, but also when it's about individual trauma work, that all those qualities, I think, we feel the integratedness or the willingness to hold the unintegratedness of our physical, emotional, mental, relational, spiritual, ancestral roots, that all those layers are important. And it's not that The one or the other because they're all one. So if I exclude some of it, there are solutions, where we are going together, will also be only partial, and those fragmentations will surface anyway again. We can't get out of it. And you said that beautifully, the only way is skillfully in. The only way is skillfully in. And that's a process that we cannot predict, because whenever we go deeper, we're never there. The one who goes deeper, whoever that is, changes. We don't stay the same person when we heal, we open up, we integrate something fundamentally, we don't stay the same culture. So we're gonna change in ways that are unpredictable and that's often scary and that risk, I think if we use our privilege to take that risk again and again, and If we do that, as like, as I often say, then we become a living prayer.
Then I'm committed to life and I'm committed to being here and to work with skillfully, not just I throw myself into overwhelm and then I'm just overwhelmed. That doesn't have any meaning because nothing happened, nothing happens, then I just feel pain and I'm stuck. But that we do it skillfully and that we create those spaces where we can do that together. And then accountability, restorative actions, social justice, and everything that's needed to repair the social fabric in action needs to be done as much as the internal fabric needs to be repaired, relationships need to be repaired, our ancestors need to make peace. And They cannot just make peace.
We need to be the ones that own the repercussions of our ancestors lives and invest the energy that's needed to create the form of peace that we cannot control. And I think only then, when we are willing to, in a way, Acknowledge the history that happened so deeply that we begin to rewrite history, not because we want to change history, is it okay, now that we rewrite the history books because we don't want to have anything to do with the past. That's toxic, but we authentically and relationally go deep and we embrace the truth of what happens, and we are willing to stand in that truth. Then we also become like a healing force backwards in time. So literally, it has an effect on our ancestors lives, I believe, that through our presence, we literally impact the living system through our own embodiment.
And I think that changes society now. That stops some of the repetitive patterns, the retraumatizing patterns. And then It's not because If it's about what do I have to do in order to repair something that happened in the past, I'm not there yet. I mean, maybe something needs to be done anyway because it's vital to, you know, create more equality in our society. But if I have to... When we heal, I often say in the collective drama work, we often say, imagine there is a book and the book is partly frozen. Like it's in the ice. You see a part of the book, but the part of the book is in ice. And the book contains the remedy that we need, but we can't read the book because it's frozen in ice. So that's why I often say trauma, or collective trauma work, is the prerequisite. And the more the ice melts, the ethical restoration is a human need. I think deep inside our core, we know that we want, but we have to, but we want to restore the wounds of the past because we see how Ecosystemic health cannot happen. And I think there is a fundamental impact on, of what I'm saying on our healthcare understanding. Public health and individual health cannot happen in an ecosystem that is not healthy.
ELISE: Yeah.
THOMAS: It affects us literally in our, like health wise, the unrestored collective wounds affect individuals of that ecosystem health wise. And the reverse is also true. I think, coming to a place where I want that reparation, I want the repair to happen, I want the restoration to happen, I want that collective growth. Then also something happens, because then... It touches the place in me that knows how to respect human rights in each other, and how to create a society that is truly respectful of the essence of who we are. That's not, oh, I have to behave in a certain way. The law, the Tao says, when we, the Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell's translation says this beautifully, it says, when humans, when we live according to the Tao, the law will be written in our hearts. It says, like, the law is inherent to the action in our life. It's not an external reminder of how I should live. Once it's externalized, it means that I'm dissociated inside. I can't feel life fully. And so that's what you said, I think is very important. How can we create the spaces that we come to a place where that need gets reawakened, and then we will do anything that's needed because we see its importance.
ELISE: Yeah. It's so beautiful, both that this is encoded in ice, and may we all stay in the fire and help thaw it so we can integrate it. Well, thank you. I could talk to you for many more hours and the book's amazing.
THOMAS: Thank you.
ELISE: Now we had to go, let's go get on that IG live.
THOMAS: That's lovely. Let's do that. Let's do that.
ELISE: Wow, I love Thomas. I think what he is doing is so important and he is such a gifted facilitator, that I hope everyone comes to know him. He writes, “Continuing to deny historical truths further annihilates survivor groups; it is a terrible retraumatization. But denial is also an unconscious agreement to cease or regress one’s owngrowth and development. By accepting responsibility, perpetrators of collective trauma or their descendants break away from the conditioned narrative and ultimately disidentify with their former group self-concept. They find a renewed sense of group esteem as they retell their communal narratives with ownership, accountability, truth, and a sense of deeper understanding and inclusion. New meaning and purpose, along with new stories, are created from a position of responsibility to the traumatized, to the culture at large, and to one’s own future descendants.”
I love what he said about this book being frozen in ice, and then this idea of staying in the fire. Which, to me, means recognizing that we are each containers or vessels, in some way, for processing all of this material in our own lives and in the collective. And that as we continue to do the work, to stay in the fire, we turn ourselves into larger and larger containers able to process more. And that it’s on each of us to do our part, whatever that may be, for some of us who’ve had a lot of personal trauma, that may be our work, that may be what needs to happen and that is enough. And for others who haven’t had that, who have lived life’s privilege and relative ease, our work is then to attend to this larger, cultural responsibility. And it is so deeply uncomfortable, it is so appealing to turn our backs and walk away and to leave it for someone else to attend to. But we can’t do that anymore. We can’t continue to kick this down the field and so, we have to stay in the fire. Even when it feels like it might consume us, we have the capacity to do what we can. Alright, I’ll talk to you next week.
