EP 134: Tranforming Collective Trauma for Global Healing | Thomas Hübl

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Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. And today I get to share with you a conversation I had with my friend and colleague Thomas Hubel, whose wife well known for his collective trauma summits and the work he does altogether around healing collective trauma and working to build a global healing community. So Thomas Hubel is a really innovative teacher. He's a meditation teacher, a spiritual teacher, a psychologist. He was someone who was on a path to becoming a doctor, actually, and was inspired to just step away from that and go into retreat. Spent four years in retreat and came out of that with a context that people began to recognize, inviting him to teach. And he really got pulled into looking at collective and historical trauma, especially in Europe. He's from Germany now, lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, who's Israeli. And he's really done a lot of work, large scale work, working with very large groups around all of the historical trauma that is still present from World War I and World War II and from the Holocaust and so forth. He has some really interesting ideas on how unprocessed, unhealed, unacknowledged trauma at the collective level becomes like this frozen tundra. But, you know, just like we're experiencing with climate change, there's times when that tundra unfreezes and it breaks through, and it breaks through again and again as further violence and war and refugee crises and everything we're facing today. So this is really important work that Thomas Hubel does, and I really encourage you to give this one a listen.

How are you, Thomas?

I'm great. I'm happy to be here with you, Fleet. Looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, me too. I've really been looking forward to this. I'm really happy you could be part of the summit. Thank you very much for being generous with your time. So I want to share a bit of your bio with our audience. Many of our audience probably know you well, especially from your collective trauma summits. But in case for those who don't, Thomas is a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator whose lifelong work integrates the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of Science. Since 2004, he has taught and facilitated programs with more than 100,000 people worldwide, including online courses, which he began offering in 2008. The origin of his work and more than two decades of study and practice on healing collective trauma is detailed in his book, Healing Collective A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. And I certainly want to touch in on that book today. So Thomas was originally a paramedic for many years and then a medical student. And at some point you stepped out of that stream and decided to go into retreat for four years, spent four years in a meditation retreat and came out of that. And I think you were just kind of organically discovered as a person with a lot to offer and you began teaching. And so your work has evolved. You, you've done a lot of work in bringing together people, large scale events of bringing together people around some really painful things like the, like the World War II atrocities of Holocaust and, and other places where, you know, helping people deal with intergenerational historical trauma in these ways by really bringing together, for example, bringing together Jewish victims of the Holocaust and Germans, for example, Israelis and Germans. And similar to the work we share that I've been doing at Auschwitz for many years with the Zen peacemakers. So really, it seems to be a very important part of your work and really want to explore today what you've discovered with that. Also just want to call out your organization, the Academy of Inner Science you founded in 2008, and that you're now offering masters and doctoral studies programs in the inner sciences accredited by various universities in Europe. And Thomas lives in Tel Aviv, Israel and Germany with his wife, the Israeli artist Yehudit, if I'm pronouncing that right. And. And your daughter. Great. Okay. All right. So, you know, this has been.

Quite a year or the past 12, 14 months or so that we've all over the world been through this incredible experience together of the pandemic, which is still ongoing in many parts of the world and in very severe ways. And.

It'S been an incredibly tumultuous time politically here in my own country with our reckoning with the vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow and racism and lots of different forms of economic inequalities and social inequalities. But these things are happening around the world as well, and seemingly increasing political instability around the world. And then in the background, or maybe even the foreground of that, we have the climate emergency and all the potential disruptions that could be coming our way with that. So it just seems like an incredibly daunting time. But in particular with all the lockdowns and everything over this past 12 to 14 months, I'm curious what this Time's been like for you and your family and your community.

Yeah, for.

There'S many layers. On the one hand, for me personally it meant like a very strong change like from, you know, I had a whole year planned of in person events and like of course online classes. But there were many in person retreats. And so we needed to change within a short time a lot of in person retreats into online versions. And we have a fantastic team. Like our team really was working day and night to create that change. And it worked really well. And we had a lot of as you said, since 2008 or 2000, something like that. We started, we did online classes and so we, we had the know how but.

It'S work to create a whole different environment for groups that were planned differently. So that was one thing. The other thing is that.

You know, we also supported people whose relatives or who by themselves got Covid. And so in the community there we saw lots of dynamics, like interesting dynamics where we could see.

Like the prior fragmentation and the trauma that got hit by new stress factor like Covid and how we see the fragmentations come up personally, like collectively and it. I thought it was fascinating, but it was also like a big.

Signpost. How important is the collective trauma work? And pretty soon after the pandemic started.

Many of our facilitators decided follow the call to create in a way a non profit because we are also running this nonprofit, the Pocket Project. My wife and I and Korsha Chaubert, the CEO. So we transformed.

Some of our online activities into groups and support systems for people that have been strongly affected by Covid by the isolation, by the lockdowns, economically health wise healthcare workers. And within a short time we managed to pull off like a really lovely, like many groups in different languages that supported people. So that was our nonprofit contribution.

And yeah, and for me it's an interesting time because I think it confirms very much what I wrote also in the book about how much we are impacted by collective trauma. Like it's thousands of years of accumulated trauma that.

Becomes more visible when we have higher systemic stress. And I think that's also part of our conversation today. How to use the resilience that is already here and how to turn trauma into post traumatic learning or growth in order to induce even more resilience to meet future challenges. That's a bit, I mean I could go on for much longer, but that's basically.

A shortcut, you know, like short overview.

How about for you? I mean just you. Have you mostly been in one place for the last year or so in Israel. Have you traveled at all?

No. It's crazy because before I traveled every. Every month, two weeks. And I've been here ever since. Like last March, I came back on the first day that you needed to go to be quarantined. So I was 14 days in quarantine when I came back from New York. And then ever since, I didn't take a plane. So I was here now. I think it didn't happen 25 years that I was in the same place for such a long time.

I think we have a lot of commonality of experiences. I was a complete road warrior before this and I've been home now for over a year, haven't moved. And it's been kind of like a retreat of sorts and a time to really deepen my relationship with my wife and just something about being grounded. I like travel, but there's something about being in one place and being a feeling a bit more grounded that seems to have something to do with resilience as well.

Yeah, I loved it too. I love this time of just being in one place. It's great. It's like I love travel, but I love that too.

It's fantastic.

Yeah, well, it seems to be a lot of. Obviously the constructs of resilience and trauma are very related, very interrelated. And I want to talk very much about your work around collective trauma, just what you just referenced, about the resilience that can allow us to transform trauma into post traumatic growth and further resilience. I love the through line of that, the way you put that to begin with, though.

How would you define resilience? What is resilience for you, whether at an individual level, relational, collective, what does the term mean for you? I'm even curious, with your German background or other, sometimes when you look at terms like that in different languages, you get different nuances of meaning. I'm not even sure if there's a direct translation for resilience in. In German or. I don't know if you've learned much Hebrew. I assume your wife is Israeli. I think if there's a Hebrew word for resilience. Anyway, just explain what do we mean by resilience a little bit before we go further?

Yeah.

Let'S say I often define resilience like there are multiple levels, maybe, but one level of resilience is the capacity to stay related to challenges.

And the capacity to stay related to challenges is composed out of three factors in my understanding. One is.

What I would see the base of human Development and society's development is space. And I will say in a moment more about it. Then there is structure and then there is energy or data flow or life is movement. So there is.

Like energy is, is the movement of information or life. And so when we, when we look at.

In my mature self, in my all the parts of me that are synchronized with my age, I have a certain capacity to meet the challenges of my life. When my life meets me in a place that is not integrated or hurt or traumatized, I regress back into a prior function that at that age I'm not able to deal with that challenge. I believe we can see this also, for example, with combat soldiers. There are some combat soldiers that go into combat or they need to go there in a war situation. So depending on their inner state of integration, prior integration, the follow up traumatization either hits an prior unintegrated part and that makes the system fragment. And it looks like that person has a lower resilience than a person that has a much deeper base inside in the original development. When we look at collective trauma, we're always looking at the individual individuation and maturation of individuals within a collective environment of a certain collective maturation or integration. And I think it's always an interplay. I often say that trauma is in my understanding, a system that consists out of individual traumatization, ancestral traumatization very often, and cultural traumatization. So that's an interdependent whole. Not I have my individual trauma and my grandfather was also traumatized as if there were two. That's one system. And when we look at resilience, I think my current state of development.

And the parts of me that I feel, that I experience consciously, that I feel grounded in, that I feel related to and through my inner integration, I can relate to you. I can relate to a challenge, I can relate to a business challenge or to, I don't know, a life challenge that I have.

It induces a dynamic relation to a challenging situation.

And I believe that's not only my personal development as Thomas. That's also hundreds of thousands of years of humanity's evolution. And humanity's, like our ancestors, healing and integration and post traumatic growth sits in us, for example, a self healing mechanism. The fact that my body heals needed millions of years of healing to produce the healing that's happening in my body today. So it's an accumulation. It's not, oh, I did that. My nervous system has functions that accumulated themselves over hundreds of thousands of years. So resilience is the learning of all the prior ancestry until today, like all the prior lifetimes that have been lived until we have this conversation today. And of course my personal development within it.

And the pre. Traumatization induces like it's kind of a fragmenting force. And when we say there's a lower resilience, I think the, the fragmentation is stronger than the base that can keep a relation. And that's why the one more thing, that's why I think sometimes there's this saying, okay, what doesn't kill us makes us harder. Or that's like.

Yeah, right. And but.

When we are harder, we are not necessarily more resilient.

So when we are more protected at first it looks like as if I'm getting through life through harder challenges better. But I actually don't think that that's true. I think the more I'm related to challenges, I'm able to master them in a different way because I can stay more creative, more innovative and I'm more related to the situation that I can process better I think to discern what it means to be.

Harder and more tight versus stronger and more grounded to meet.

Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction because we could in relation to just kind of get defended and get tough, but that has a certain brittleness to it. And the idea that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger in a deeper way is that we become more resilient, I think. Right. And sometimes there's even people use the phrase like weatherproofing, like getting through some really tough tragedies in our life or tough situations in our life, if we go through them in a transformative way, can actually kind of weatherproof us for future challenges. I really like what the way you define that as a capacity to stay with or to be with the challenges of our life. And I think I often talk about in similar ways, I talk about being in responsive mode with the challenges of our life. And you know, because of our biological imperative for survival, it's very easy for us to get triggered into fear and survival based reactivity, fight, flight or freeze. And.

So what is it that makes us maybe less triggerable or able to handle more of life's challenges in what I often call a relational responsive mode rather than appearance survival mode. So you mentioned a base like I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about that base and can we talk about resilience as a state like that we can learn to access. Maybe I just take a deep breath and I'm in a state of or Is there a trait that we can actually train ourselves up to increase our default level of resilience so that it's going to take tougher challenges to throw us back into that unresourced place?

Exactly. It takes like the capacity, the amount of traumatizing energy that we can absorb and stay still. Related is higher when we upgrade resilience. And how we upgrade resilience is that in the entire evolution of our brain, basically between different parts and more ancient parts of our brain, we create through awareness based techniques. We create an entire.

Flow or coherence level that helps us in a way to infuse awareness even into the most.

Primal response or reaction patterns that are deeply wired in our nervous system. So if there are ancient functions in our nervous system that we practiced millions of years, and then there are some that we practiced hundreds of years, of course the ones that are millions of years old will be more stable and we default back to those. And that's very important because when we think about, for example, a climate crisis or a Covid crisis, but let's say the degree of crisis goes up, then certain higher functions like compassion, inclusivity, and that I can include you and feel you while I talk to you, those functions disintegrate easier in crisis situations and drop back into former functions. And that's important because from a certain level of incoherence in the collective field, and that's what I saw also in my work when I worked on the after effects of the Second World War and the Holocaust, from a certain level of collective fragmentation because of people are sitting in bunkers or basements are being bombed. So that incoherence is wired in every individual's experience of the same situation because it's destabilized. And then the higher functions disintegrate into more primal functions of consciousness like fight, flight, and I take, I want to survive and. But I think through awareness based techniques we can rewrite some of them. And it takes practice. It's not an easy fix, of course. It takes a lot of awareness and.

Willingness to feel deep levels of fear, deep levels of reactivity, and not try to get rid of them, but bring higher consciousness into those levels. So when we look at the development of the nervous system, a lot of practices, embodied spiritual practices, do actually exactly that, infuse.

More awareness and more presence into many developmental loops. We call it maybe our first attachment process, then our ancestral development, our cultural development, and, and that's a very deep aspect of creating individual and collective resilience is through practice, as you said. But I think it's also creating new pathways to rewrite part of our collective evolutionary history.

And I think that needs really committed practitioners.

Well, it's fascinating and I want to go to the collective level in just a moment, but I'd like to pursue this idea around personal practice for a moment. So I think we, I'm sure, share the experience with contemplative practices that when we can drop below all the noise and the mind really settles, we've made that shift from the noisy default mode network of the brain to the more attention stabilizing, task positive network. And then we really drop in and drop into deeper states of awareness. Below all the noise, there's a level at which, you know, our wholeness is unmistakable, the integral wholeness of our being is unmistakable. The fact that we're not broken, that we don't need fixing, that there's a ground there that could be called divine nature, Buddha nature, basic goodness, what have you. And that, that maybe is the deepest resource of resilience, that if we have, you know, some, if we're tapped into that in some way, the more access we have to that. And then also like some of the breath work techniques in Pranayama, some of the breath retention techniques that actually help us develop a higher CO2 tolerance. Because a lot of us don't realize that when we feel like we need a gasp for taking a breath, it's not necessarily that we're lacking oxygen, it's that we have very high levels of CO2. And so we get more and more comfortable with that, which is kind of building resilience almost back into that reptilian system that we can do contemplative practices. I think we can go back into some of those primal parts of our own nervous system and even build in a little bit of a buffer in there. So I'm curious about your thoughts about that.

That's beautiful. And I think in the awakening process, we have always the realization process and then we have a manifestation of any kind of higher realization, which means there's initiation and then there's manifestation, like can I walk my. So when I go into meditation and I touch these deeper grounds of being and this deeper, more universal or like divine presence aspects. And then how do I walk this in every. In everyday life, in every part of my life and bring it into every part of my life. So you said it beautifully that certain practices induce that, but also like what I call the combination of state awareness and process awareness, so that I'm willing to look at my daily experience and relational Experiences, internal experiences, and be able to, on the one hand, be willing to feel all this stuff that feels lovely, to feel the things that feel challenging. And what I talk a lot about recently is be aware of the tremendous amount of information that's absent.

Because trauma signature is in the absence.

So the part of information that is dark or like switched unconscious in our individual nervous systems and the absencing that we all contribute to in our culture, so that absence is actually not less resilient because it leads to side effects that we can't predict, that we can't feel, that we are not aware of. And that creates a lot of symptoms. And so the capacity to use the light of our spiritual or the conscious awareness, embodied light, potential light, to illuminate the absence of life together, the absence in one on one relations, the absence in my own, you know, when I sit in meditation. And so there is the part of presence and awareness that you spoke to and, and then.

My attention rarely goes to the parts that are missing in my awareness because I'm not aware that they are missing. And I'm also not aware of what I don't feel in you because that information simply doesn't arise in me. I see it only sometimes when we run into misunderstandings, into difficulties, into frictions, or we get into arguments and say how did we get here? So I miss the certain information, but on the other hand, I get to know you through resonance. So resonance is what I can feel, but there's no resonance in my absent parts. And that's why I think individual and collective absence is integrally or is deeply important.

And that the absent sing or the numbing is an intelligent process that we need to re own individually and collectively. So it's not a mistake. It's an intelligent function that is so often missed. I would like to bring that into the mix too. Because what is absent and what looks quiet might look pretty much the same in the introspection.

Well, I think that's really important what you're talking about. Another way to talk about that would be shadow work. In some ways you're talking about the individual shadow and collective shadow shadow in terms of depth psychology and you know, in the integral spirituality work, sometimes they use the framework wake up, grow up, clean up and show up. So but the grow up and cleanup both have to do with kind of integrating the shadow and illuminating those absent parts, those dark spots in our own nervous system. And I think we're right at that intersection here of individual work and collective work, because there's. We can only go so far with our individual work. And then we need that exchange with others and with the collective to further illuminate parts of ourselves that we're just simply blind to. And so I'd like to talk further about that, that integration work of both the unilluminated shadow as well as the trauma, which sometimes is known and invisible and sometimes is illuminated, not illuminated or part of the shadow. And also as well with that deep inner work, the personal work, especially if we do it in a very embodied way, we start to get in touch with, not only when we drop into those very deep states of being, which we can experience without necessarily having illuminated all our own shadow work, but we also touch into a kind of internal coherence of flow. You used around resilience. You talked about underlying structure, including space structure and data flow or energy. And Dan Siegel often describes mind or consciousness as a flow of the. Of information and energy. And there is a palpable flow that we can get more access to such that it's kind of there in the background and we can bring that into our work. And then the collective, as we begin to work with others, we could see it in terms of both of co creating healing, co illuminating shadow for ourselves and collectively, and then co creating that kind of flow, because that flow in itself seems to have the potential for both healing trauma and having us be more resilient, having a deeper base of resilience.

Yeah, when I look at this.

It'S beautiful. What you said is like that the flow states, these are the resource parts of myself, of our society. That's where we feel life and that's where we are making sense, which means cognition or thinking and sensing and feeling are one emergent process. So then it makes sense because I can feel it and I can think it. And so one side effect in our society of a fragmented world is that thinking and feeling or sensing are often separate or split or numb. So then I'm thinking about, and then I'm interpreting. But actually cognition and sensing are one emergent process in our integrated state. So then I think exactly what's needed that fits to the current moment. And when we, for example, look at trauma healing, then I believe one part of trauma healing is first to be informed, that there is something like that, then to go through some kind of healing process. And healing means integrating past information into now, which means post traumatic learning or post traumatic growth. And then. But then I think that there is another layer that I have seen also in the, in the collective trauma processes, is that after integrating a certain amount of trauma, we end up in the ethical restoration process of the cause that led to the traumatization in the first place. And, and the ethical restoration is what I would say, turning on the light in that room of our house.

You know, whatever led to a child's abuse, whatever led to kind of a violent or criminal act, whatever led to.

Racist behavior. We need to integrate the trauma, but we also need to get to the ethical restoration. And only then we illuminate life, we bring it back into its restored state. And the restored state is not too.

Because trauma creates two there's hyperactivation and there is numbness, and there's a fragmentation in between. Often sensational media plays on the hyperactivation or on the numbness and doesn't inform. It stays kind of in a superficial level. Trauma sensitive media is information that goes deeper into the body of the society that really informs us. And so the restoration of trauma and the restoration of the ethics that led to the traumatization create the unification of life. And that's what you said is then we experience that life is actually that beautiful flow of light and information in a field of high coherence. And whenever we feel that, we call it also sacred, because healing brings us back to a kind of a more unified states with life itself. So we don't feel separate anymore. And I think that's a great. That kind of energy circulation is also part of a field of unification or interconnectedness and interdependence.

Yeah, well, I think that's so important. The fourth stage that you talked about, you called it ethical regeneration.

Was it restoration?

Restoration? Ethical restoration. That's just so, you know, I think it's a part. We can some, we can, you know, really value healing and value transformation and spiritual evolution. But if we aren't, you know, embracing the ethical considerations around what caused those traumas in the first place. Right. And really, ultimately, our resilience, our societal resilience is really going to depend on embracing a new ethical context where we're really trying to prevent that kind of traumatization and rise above the shadow aspects and the constructs that creates that kind of traumatization. I just think that's so important to bring that forward. So I'd like maybe if you could share a little bit of your actual work that you've done.

With Germans and Israelis, for example, or the ongoing work you're doing through the Pocket project, It would seem that because you're dealing with individual trauma, you're dealing with intergenerational trauma, you're dealing with historical trauma. And in some ways I hadn't really thought about it this much in this way yet. But when we talk about resilience, we could talk about individual resilience, we could talk about intergenerational resilience, we could talk about historical resilience, we could talk about them much in the same way.

I'm wondering if you could talk about what you're learning about that in terms of working with people across these victim perpetrator lines and different things like that. Especially because I do a lot of similar work. And you're kind of at that edge of.

What some people might point to as a risk of re traumatization, but in service of transformation, to be able to take, to come together and go into that deeper place together and then come, you know, begin to be there long enough for something new to emerge from that emergent quality of higher order integration. So that is not easy work.

Definitely, definitely. And there are strong forces in the collective unconscious. I love one thing you said, individual resilience, ancestral resilience, cultural resilience, because like, there's a beautiful way to look at ancestors. It looks like ancestors are in the past, but in my understanding, ancestors are when integrated structures of consciousness that channel energy in us, when ancestral transmission of life happens or is either healed or happened without traumatization. So light is flowing from one generation to the next. The information of life is flowing from one generation to the next. And that induces in our bodies a feeling of integrated ancestral architecture. So these are pipe systems that channel energy in my body. If my ancestral lineage has a lot of breaks, traumatizations and intentions, so I will feel those in my body too. And I think epigenetics brings us closer to that kind of understanding how trauma lives, continues living in us. And so I love this. Ancestral resilience is the integration of ancestors into our life. And ancestral traumatization creates.

A distance in space and time. And so because space time, I think is an important component of trauma, because past split of past trauma creates a split of past. And so when there's trauma between me and my parents, or me and my parents and my grandparents, I feel them as distant. I don't feel intimate with my parents. And whenever we heal something, we feel more close, we feel more intimate, we feel more vulnerable, more open, more related. And relation is a data connection. And I think we will see more and more how like we will understand also scientifically more and more how ancestral health or ancestral traumatization really affect our health or our, you know, health issues. And so that's a beautiful answer. Like when the ancestors come closer in time and space and they are less distant, I feel more present in my own life and more grounded. And the same is for the cultural fragmentation. And I have seen because you asked us about, about the work that we did, because it's, it's exactly how you said. We have to volunteer as groups of people to at least do our cleaning up of the collective living room. Like a trauma, like the Holocaust left a lot of unintegrated information in the culture. If I turn away from it, I become an unconscious perpetuation of that catastrophe. If I turn appropriately towards it, every one of us does his or her portion. Nobody needs to do, can do everything, but everybody does something. So if everybody picks up a part of the.

Energy that we left that we didn't clean up, we are cleaning up the collective living room together. And I believe the amount of pollution that we see at the moment in the physical, on the, in the physical world, on the planet is a kind of a physical reminder that the same is true in, in our unseen collective past. There's a lot of information that's not being integrated. So what we are doing is. We are. And that, that kind of togetherness, like together we are addressing the collective shadow. And I'm sure you experience this as well, needs a lot of relational preparation, like in smaller groups. In the bigger group, we did this with thousand people. It needs a lot of coherence. And we had also many facilitators present. So it needs a lot of relational support systems to create a safe space. It needs safety, it needs relation, and it needs group coherence. And then from a certain level, we were able to touch the collective denial. And then a kind of a collective digestion of past material. And then.

The amazing experience is that.

From a certain level of the depth, there's a tremendous presence that arises. And when people speak within that space, it's not anymore that you. The way we speak in daily life, or we blame each other, it goes to a different level of nakedness and, and that voicing that we. Every person that voices something, voices an aspect of the, of the process, but within a very strong collective presence. And I believe we are at the edge. And I'm. I would love to hear your take of your experience. Like we're at the edge to transition into a new phase of collective healing, maybe also induced to the technology, through the technology that we are using right now, that we are able to create new fields of resonance or coherence amongst many people. And kind of an intimacy.

Physical, offline and online that allows us more collective healing spaces where the individual and the collective become one healing system. And that's what I'm very interested in, this individual collective healing system.

Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating. Well, in terms of kind of what we're doing during the pandemic, all the work we're doing online and maybe the hybrid kind of things are going to come out of this could be a whole nother discussion. I just want to go back a moment to what you were describing because it felt, it resonated so much with me in the work we do with the Zen peacemaker bearing witness retreats at Auschwitz every year, last year, more than 20 years now. And we've done retreats in Rwanda with Tutsi and Hutu genocide survivors and perpetrators. And in those retreats we do a lot to create. Same thing you were discussing. We have small groups and really well trained facilitators. And we do a lot of things to create a container and create a certain level of safety. And then especially when we go into large group processes, sometimes very, very large group processes, at a certain point in the retreat, a certain level of fragmentation and dysregulation will almost always arise. And at first some people are really unhappy about that because they felt like they were all like in this coherence, right? And then suddenly there's this. And I know Bernie Glassman, who founded that retreat as then teacher Bernie Glassman, social activist, was always happy when he saw that arise. Okay, now we're going to do the work, right? And it reminds me also of Scott Peck's model. I don't know if to you're going familiar with his community building process where you go from something he called pseudo community into allowing chaos and conflict to arise. And of course you have to have a safe container for that. And then there's an emptying process which he says the third stage. And then finally genuine community can emerge. Something like what you were just describing, that, that thing, that emergent quality of presence and co created, integrative kind of presence can arise. And I just find the possibilities of that work so powerful. But it does seem like we have to really do the work to create safe spaces to work at that depth. Because at the service and so much of what's happening societally and in the media and on social media and with the strong influences we're all dealing with is all happening at a level way above that where you don't have the safety or the coherence and you just get all this Fragmentation constantly.

Exactly. So beautifully said. And really, I think I want to underline what you said. Now, we have to create these safe spaces because that's the only way that we can really, that our nervous systems will want to detox the past or information that's stored or the fragmentation. And that's very important. And also, as you said, that if through sensational media, we constantly trigger that hyperactivated nervous system in the collective, in many of us, so we just strengthen fear, which are strengths and stress, and we don't lead to a deeper information.

And that information needs a mix between being informed but also being safe to absorb that information and learn something and care or be part of as a citizen, you know, I want to be part of, but if I'm constantly in a state of stress and fear, I'm not going to be part of really. And so learning like that, we learn together collectively, how to create those safer spaces and what's needed and how important is the function. I feel you feeling me. I feel how you feel me. When we talk to each other, when we talk to our children, when we talk to people, that we feel how other people feel us is part of that relational resonance field. And I think so there is individual mindfulness practice, but then there is relational mindfulness practice. And I think the more of us can practice, at least in more and more moments of our relational lives. I feel you feeling me. That neuroception creates, like, when I feel you it. When you feel me, we feel safer with each other and we can relax deeper because we feel felt, you know, and many of us know, maybe through our development, how it feels when we don't feel felt and when. When in unfelt moments, trauma happens. And so I feel you feeling me is a great practice, as often as I can remember it, that I'm not just in the same room with you, but I feel you when I talk to you, and I feel how you feel me. And then that becomes the data connection of the information that we exchange. And I think that's a great relational mindfulness practice that has a lot of impact in our lives.

Yeah, absolutely. And how we can create more spaces for that to happen. I want to come back to just a point to reference something you said I thought was very powerful as well at the ancestral level of how we can integrate and bring those connections into the moment. And I'm thinking of ancestor worship in the Shinto tradition, which in modern times probably has been commodified in some ways, but traditionally, I think was a way to really retain that Connectivity or even I know when I travel in Europe, in fact, I'm usually over there in November in Poland and on All Souls Day, all the families go out to their ancestral villages and visit the graves and place flowers on the graves and mass. Like the whole country stops to do that and these kind of ways of recognizing those connections. And then in contrast to that, what we're going through here in my own country, where, you know, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and mass incarceration is so present right now and creates so much disconnection. And it seems like.

We don't have the spaces or even the language yet. I think for white Americans to embrace that history, whether they, you know, whether they have ancestors that were there at the time of slavery or not, but just to embrace our history being and, or even the spaces as well for, for African Americans to embrace that whole process of integration hasn't happened in any way. And I think that's why there's so much dysregulation right now. The Zen peacemakers, we've been wanting for some time to do a bearing witness retreat around the legacy of slavery and mass incarceration. And we finally did one online. I think it'll be so much more powerful when we can do it in person. We want to go to the south and visit some of the places like the New Museum.

In Mississippi and so forth, where there are some real artifacts of that time. But we did do a three day retreat online, which was very powerful, bearing witness to this. And somehow we have to. I don't think we can escape doing this healing work and doing this reintegration work. And there's so much of our shared, I mean, there's so much of our shared history that's still unintegrated, even just from the two world wars of the 20th century. And, and I don't think we've had a collective context for doing this work until in the last few decades, really.

That's right. That's right. And I think you're absolutely right. I think it's a real, it's the responsibility of citizenship that we more and more realize that everyone is responsible for the collective past that we have been born into. It's not, we can't, we can't say anymore that what happened happened. And I don't want to look at it because we know too much about the unconscious perpetuation of the destiny, because unconscious energy is destiny and it's bound to repeat itself. And we see it again and again. And I think for us as white people we have to go to a deep, like a voluntary deep exploration process. Because when we are sitting in places of power, it's so easy to turn away. I mean, it gets harder and harder to turn away, but still a lot of the trauma has been perpetuated by turning away. And I think for enough.

Awareness in the wide population to want to do the trauma work, that is hard, and then the relational.

Restoration work, that is hard. It's a process that we need to sign up to and stay with.

And I think it needs a lot of courage to do that work. But we have to do it in order to.

First of all, just see how much trauma happened through, of course, slavery, but also colonialism around the world. We did some work on the colonial, colonial trauma that happened. And we are in the pocket project dealing also with different parts of colonial trauma, colonialism, trauma around the world, and also immigration. Immigration is often not seen as a traumatic event, but often immigration has been induced through trauma, was traumatizing and again induce trauma. So there's a lot of trauma energy. I think also in the founding of the United States, for example, if you take this now as an example, and that has never been dealt with. So there's immigration, there's slavery, there's racism, there's a Native American genocide. And we know more and more, if you don't look at will run through us and repeat itself. And so I think that we, you know, the responsibilities of what it means to be a responsible citizen is not just paying our taxes and taking care of our houses and our cities. It's also taking care of the legacy and the unseen legacy that we were born into. And because we were born, every one of us was born somewhere. And we have to take this as part of our work. And maybe one more thing, because in the, you know, spiritual and self development work, many people mistake.

In a way mistaken that like purpose is my, is my career or is how I express myself in the world and how I live what I really like to live and how. And of course that's true. But purpose is equally integrating the issues that I carry in myself, that my culture that I was born into carries. That's part of our purpose. So purpose is the expression plus the integration. That's why I often say that the three pillars of a healthy spiritual practice is practice is integration work and is ethical living. Like how can I upgrade my ethics? And I need to practice all three like practice to deepen our state awareness and to deepen our embodiment integration, where I need integration to go deeper and ethical alignment and the upgrades of our values because they also grow with our spiritual evolution.

And so I think that's very powerful what you said. And it's even, I believe, as the citizen's responsibility to deal with that legacy.

Well, I think that's a real clarion call that you've offered there. I think we are, I mean, it's clear now that we're in this together. I hope it's getting clearer and clearer to more of us with the pandemic. But so I mean climate change and global warming, it's going to make it clear as we go forward that we're all in this together and that we are called to a higher level of citizenship and engagement. I started offering a training last year called.

In person, which I hope to re engage beyond the pandemic called engaged citizenship. Because in some ways, in the same way that we've optimized complex systems for efficiency and profit and thus created fragile systems, we've been optimizing our social structures around individualism and non engagement to where the breakdown of extended families, the breakdown of the nuclear family, it's just a relation. Me and my job, me and the economy, me and the government. And we defer sense making to others, we defer responsibility to the experts, to the authorities. And we have a very low level of even mindset around what I'm responsible for. And somehow that's really got to shift in such a major way because it seemed like things have been going the opposite direction for a long time to come back to embracing this level of collective engagement when we're not in a small hunter gatherer band or a small tribal setting where it's kind of obvious when we're in this large scale societal, digital world going into the machine age, how we can all kind of wake up to this need to re embrace a much higher level of individual and collective responsibility for the good of the whole.

That's right. That responsibility means my capacity to respond and my ability to respond. And that's great because recently somebody asked me in a course on collective trauma, asked me, am I responsible for the crimes of my grandfather? And I said, no, you're not responsible for the crimes of your grandfather because that's what your grandfather did. But if you use the word responsible, are you able to respond to the after effects of the crimes of your grandfather? Because if you turn away, because if you say no, I don't want to look there, it's too painful and you turn away, the after effects will run through you unconsciously and you will perpetuate them. So being able to turn around and look and infuse awareness is, in a way, the future infusing awareness into processes that happened already. And like this, we insert new possibilities, and that opens the gate for, like, a change, for new things to happen. So we induce the future into stuff that happened in order to have a new future. Otherwise, we will just repeat the past. And I think that's beautiful. Then another part that came up in me while you were speaking is that I think we also need to change another myth, which is that this body and this nervous system is Thomas. No, this body and this nervous system is millions of years old. They are millions of years old. And Thomas is a wiring within a nervous system that is much bigger than my personality. So every one of us has a personal dimension in the nervous system, but the nervous system is much more capable. It has been developed over hundreds of thousands of years and longer. And I think when I think myself in this body and this nervous system, in this personal box, I do not use the much more collective parts of my nervous system. And I am embedded in a much wider resilience. Because if I feel that I'm part of the planet and I'm not on the planet, like a cup, I'm not on the planet. My body is the planet. And so when I'm. Because the substance of my body is the substance of the planet. And now when I'm. When I experience the deeper openness, I'm also connected to the wisdom and the resilience of all life that led up to me today. And I think, given we are talking about resilience, to open up my awareness that the collective is not out there. The collective is as much out there like many, many people and billions of people, as it's also in me. There's a representation of that in my nervous system. And that's how I can feel the collective is, through the collective, part of my nervous system. And I think that's often not how we think about the amazing biocomputer, that there are so many functions. Some wisdom traditions talk about that there's much more information available in us than we sometimes use. And I think hyper individualism and the Western lifestyle brought a lot of scientific and technological breakthroughs, which is fantastic. But it also overshadowed some of the indigenous and other wisdom traditions, gems that have been buried a bit under this kind of light of science and technology. And I think it's a time for a reintegration or a synthesis of all those pearls as one human intelligence.

Absolutely. Absolutely. One of our Summit presenters Gabriel Cram his work focuses on connecting current neuroscientific information with ancestral wisdom. That's really what the meeting point of his work. But there's so much in there in what you said. And fortunately we know neuroscientifically that the work we do to become more embodied, to increase our level of interoceptive awareness, to tap into that internal coherence, all that involves the same neural pathways that increase our capacity for connectedness with others, for creating connection and intimacy with others, for creating co creating safety and connection with others. The work is mutually reinforcing, that we can do individually in community.

I find that very exciting. An image that also came up while you were speaking. And then I'd like to invite you to lead just a brief guided practice, if you would, for us. But one image that came up that I've always found helpful for me personally is that of Indra's Net. That idea of the cosmology as a vast net with these, all the nodes on the net, you know, that idea of Bohm's holographic universe, that all the nodes contain all the wisdom of the net. And a lot of times I think my job as a human being is to be a good node on that net. So I got to take good care of myself and do my own work and then participate in the net where I'm hopefully adding more value than I'm receiving and. But that my consciousness is not just my node consciousness. I also need a net consciousness. Right. And.

The work is in the balance.

Of those two beautiful. And it also means that the individual, the ancestral and the collective are one system. And so like this I know I need to do individual work. I can expand this into my ancestry and into the collective and beyond, into the more universal aspects of life.

And I.

Maybe one more thing that we touched upon a little bit earlier is. And then we can go into the practice is also I think.

We need to explore.

Global distance and global intimacy like that. Is the world really as big and as far as as it appears in our perception or as part of the distance, the absence of information that is not visible, that creates a sense of separation and distance. So that the absencing is the architecture of separation. And so.

I often say, look, life, as you said before, pushed us to use zoom. In the COVID time we all started to use zoom or any kind of video technology. And we needed to make that jump much faster than maybe we would have chosen otherwise. And now I'm saying, okay, what actually happens between us if we take Zoom Out.

Because it seems like through the video conferencing, we can feel each other. We are close to each other. But still, if I use my rational mind, you're sitting thousands of miles away. So how can I feel you so close when I. You know, I feel you very close, but you're sitting far away. But if we took Zoom out, would we still be that close? So what's the function of consciousness, of intimacy?

Is information omnipresent or everywhere? Or is information really far away? And I think that's an interest. Thinking about collective trauma, like the trauma traumatic or the trauma content, the suppressed trauma content creates a fog in consciousness that gives the subjective experience of distance. And then I can say, oh, the school shooting that happened there, or the racism event that happened, it's happening there.

And I wonder about that, if it's really there, or if our indifference and numbness creates a sense of distance. And we would feel many things much more intimately or intimate within ourselves, not just out there. That things matter much more than at the moment in our anestheticized culture, we feel. And I think that's an interesting exploration. Global distance and global intimacy.

It is very interesting. And I know we're both well aware of the stories of many great yogis and saints in Avatar and shamanic people who've had these visionary experiences that crossed time and space in that way. Some really incredible experiences, or even ordinary people. I remember Elizabeth Kubler Ross, in her book on death and dying, wrote about a woman who was just in a. Who was dying and was in a state of such anger that she drove everybody away from her. And nobody wanted to go anywhere near a hospital room. And she was in such pain and somehow catapulted her into this visionary experience where she suddenly had this experience of being a woman giving birth somewhere in Africa, and then a woman being violated somewhere and then a woman somewhere. And she went this visionary experience of going back through time across many cultures, of literally being in the body of all these women across time and across the planet. And she came out of it in a state of kind of just shining radiance. And suddenly she was a magnet for everyone in the hospital. And she just very fortunately got catapulted into that experience by her pain. But it was that somehow, energetically, human beings have demonstrated that ability to cross global time and global space.

Yeah, Beautiful, beautiful fleet. I think, like, we had a rich conversation, and maybe we can just let the information of the conversation, like, with a few cycles of breathing.

Drop into our bodies and.

Like, maybe a slow down exhalation.

It helps me to.

Kind of down regulate my nervous system into relaxation.

And then connect more and more to.

The life parts of my body.

Present parts of my body.

I feel streaming and pulsing and.

Flowing sensations.

As I connect to the.

Flow and body presence and aliveness.

I am connecting to the movement of life.

And the liveness of life.

That wants to live in me.

And that wanted to live for very long time.

It goes beyond my conception.

My parents life and my parents conception.

My grandparents life and their conception.

Beyond.

Into all.

The.

Lives where life wanted to live.

My aliveness is inherently connected.

To a whole web.

Of aliveness.

Roots that go very deep.

Into the core of our world.

To the core of all our ancestors.

And the wisdom of all the learning.

All the hurt and the healing of that hurt and those wounds.

And the restoration.

And all of that is available in every one of us as.

Global resilience.

Global wisdom. Embodied wisdom.

Through introspection and attunement and listening.

I and everybody have access to.

The pulsing wisdom.

And resilience.

And he gives us the strength and the base together with our.

Innovation capacity.

The power of our soul.

Potentiality.

To meet the current challenges.

The challenges to come.

By staying related to one another.

And the challenges we face.

Personal lives.

Communities, countries.

Global experience.

Sa.

Then.

Take a couple of deeper breaths.

Slowly come back.

Yeah.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Thomas, thank you so much. Thank you so much. This has been really incredibly rich, and I'm just thrilled that we can invite everyone here on the summit into this conversation, which there are so many different threads that could be followed here into the depths of the work that we're called to do. Thank you so much. You've been incredibly generous with your time and thank you for the work you do and thank you for being part of our summit.

Thank you so much, Fleet. I'm very much enjoying our conversation and the resonance between us. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Me too.

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