EP 172: Healing Collective Trauma | Thomas Hübl

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out.

Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Moll. And in today's episode, I'm having a conversation with Thomas Hubel, who's renowned for his work on Heal Collective Trauma. He's a contemporary spiritual teacher who has done extensive work all over Europe and the Middle east looking at how to really heal the collective wounds and trauma that go back centuries, but are certainly very present even from the last century with two world wars and so forth, and how it keeps resurfacing. And he talks about the importance of doing this collective healing work. It is obviously very important to do our individual healing work, but if we only do it at the end of individual level, it can be limited because we can still be in this cycle of re traumatization because we're social beings and we live in collective structures. So this is a fascinating interview with one of the really important spiritual teachers and leading authorities on healing trauma in the world today, Thomas Hubel. Give it a listen.

Very happy to be here today with my friend and colleague, Thomas Hubel. How are you, Thomas?

I am good, Fleet. Thank you for having me again.

It's always great to have you here and just appreciate your work so much. And I've been looking forward to this conversation, especially in light of everything that's going on in the world right now. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio for those who may not be completely familiar with you, and then we'll jump right into the conversation.

Okay?

Thomas Hubel is a renowned teacher, author and international facilitator whose lifelong work integrates the core insights of the great wisdom, traditions and mysticism and the discoveries of science. 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, which came out two years ago. Opening dialogue around some of the most painful atrocities and collective traumas our world has experienced is at the heart of Hubelle's work. He began offering retreats in Austria and Germany in the early 2000s. Participants began to voice their deeply held intergenerational wounds stemming from Second World War. As these programs evolved, he will develop a methodology called the Collective Trauma Integration Process. He has led large scale events that have brought together thousands of Germans and Israelis to acknowledge face and heal the cultural shadow left by the Holocaust. In the last decade, his events have also focused on processing the collective traumas of racism, oppression, colonialism, genocides, and the complexities of those regions of groups which experience multiple historic current challenges. These events have been held in the U.S. israel, Germany, Spain, and Argentina. His nonprofit, the Pocket Project, works to support the healing of collective trauma throughout the world. Since 2019, Thomas has hosted an annual summit on Collective Trauma, which has brought together more than 100 speakers and 108,000 participants from more than 100 countries. Thomas has also been actively developing academic programs that explore new frontiers and research and discoveries and the interdisciplinary fields. He has coined inner science. And to this end, his educational organization, the Alchemy of Inner Science, founded in 2008, launched a master's and doctoral studies program in cooperation with universities in Europe and the U.S. in 2020, Thomas Huble received an honorary doctorate from Ubiquiti University in California for his pioneering work in the field of trauma. And he lives in Tel Aviv and Germany with his wife, the Israeli artist Yehudis.

Is that even close to pronouncing it right?

That's perfect.

Oh, that was good. Okay, thank you. I got lucky. Well, good.

All right. Well, again, welcome, Thomas. It's so great to have you here and your work is so compelling and just really appreciative of it. So let's jump into the conversation. So the overarching inquiry for this Global Resilience Summit is really how can we cultivate, deepen, sustain the individual, collective, and even systemic resilience? We need to, to really address the incredibly daunting challenges facing humanity today, from the climate crisis that we're already in and which really presents an existential threat to humanity within this or the next generation. And increasing instability, divisiveness, polarization around the world, Just so many daunting problems. The global pandemic, which maybe we're starting to emerge from, I think we all feel pretty hopeful right now, but it has been quite a journey for all of us. And so, you know, obviously, resilience, our ability to respond in healthy ways and take good care of ourselves and take care of each other and be in that responsive, relational mode rather than getting triggered back into purely fear and survival based reactivity, seems key to our ability to address these problems. And today, on day three of the summit, we're focused on cultivating and deepening community.

And societal resilience and really building a cultural resilience grounded in shared human values. And so I'm wondering what resilience means to you from your experience in your work and how we might begin to apply it collectively. Because that's really at the heart of your work, healing collective trauma. And then I would assume the. The positive side of that is building collective resilience.

Beautiful. Yes. So you said already many things yourself that I also want to come back to. So one thing is I think resilience is my capacity to stay related to challenges. And when I stay related to a challenge, I'm able to respond.

Where I'm traumatized. I can't stay related because I'm already trauma says it's. This is a disrelated place in myself or it's a disrelated place in our culture. And so when new challenges hit trauma, there's reactivity or there's numbness, there's distance, there's lack of care, there is non emergence. But if a challenge meets my open and resilient self, what does it mean resilient? Resilient means also integrated history.

Because I believe that history is not behind us. Integrated history speaks right now and listens or spoke through you before. And I listen. So all your ancestry and all my ancestry, that all the integrated parts of life, they are presence, that is presence, but unintegrated, split off, traumatized, whatever history, like the history that was too overwhelming to be processed and integrated, what does it mean? Integration means learning. When I can integrate my daily experience.

I feel I digest my day, I integrate my day. I learn from my daily experiences and they make me wiser. Integrated history makes us wiser. In the trauma of our culture, a lot of unintegrated information or experience is found. But underneath the ethical hurt, the transgression that hasn't been restored yet. When you look for example at the Holocaust, racism in the eyes of the collective, trauma is still the restoration waiting that gives us the ethical insight today to deal with artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, the climate change, we need that badly because we didn't get that learning yet, because it's somewhere frozen in the, in the cultural permafrost. And so when what builds resilience is the. Is the integration of trauma into wisdom. When we say one definition of wisdom will be how much world is the amount of world that I can include in the way I live, in the way I act, the way I speak? Like how much world am I intimate with and how much world is other? And the world that I need to other are also parts in myself. Individual, ancestral and collective parts of myself that are fragmented. So then I say this is hard for me, and I don't like this, and I don't like this. And this is other. These are the others. And so relationality, definitely. And the amount of world that I include is wisdom. So every trauma integration is actually a boost of wisdom. And that's why, yes, of course, the trauma of the past or the trauma of our own past was painful. Like what led up to the traumatic event was. Was really painful. But the residue of the trauma needs to be integrated in order for me to be able to meet the world of today with presence and with relationality, with insight, with the future, like innovation. All of that, I think, is in the world, resilience included. Wow.

I love this frame about integration.

And that where we are as humanity and on this planet and our history.

Is really the level of integration that we've accomplished. And that's really kind of where we are. And then to the extent that we feel all these cultural shadows going on, that's the unintegrated aspects of the trauma we've been through. And that this is a normal and in some ways healthy part of our evolution, because we all know we don't learn and grow without being challenged. And so we're not going to develop with them in a bubble either. Right.

So.

So I love what you talked about, wisdom. I mean, it makes me think of a colleague's mind. Big mind, big heart. Our mind gets bigger, vaster the space, the amount of the world which we hold, we embrace, our heart grows to do that. And that's only going to happen by being challenged, right? By being challenged and then integrating. So it just seems like your work, and so much of the important work in the world today is giving our fellow human beings skills, giving them this context, but also skills to integrate trauma skills to heal, unintegrated trauma, skills to integrate the trauma we're experiencing right now in the world. And so I wonder if you could talk just a little more about that. I mean, your book two years ago was all about this idea of.

Ancestral collective trauma and ancestral trauma. And I just. Could you talk a little bit more about ancestral trauma? Because obviously it probably goes back pretty far. And in some ways, ultimately you could just say it's the human condition. But then there are particular places in the world, particular cultures and societies that have very specific ancestral traumas. So could you talk a little bit more about how deep that runs?

First of all?

First of all, trauma that's not getting integrated resides, and the trauma, like when we. Look, I'll say something about society first, and then I go to the ancestral part.

When we look at society.

Then I think it seems like there's one process that we call cultural society. But actually what we see is emergent processes, relational. So emergent, relational, innovative, creative processes that are being born out of creativity and presence. But what we also see is non emergent, repetitive, disrelated processes that are just repeating themselves. And I believe those are living in the past. They are not being born out of presence. And both, when I look at society, I see both as one. But all the arguments in intimate relationships about the same things over and over again, all the processes that, like now, what happens right now in Europe is a repetition of an unresolved trauma of the Second World War and the Cold War. And so then what isn't been integrated, what hasn't been integrated needs to repeat itself in order. It's like the Freud's repetition compulsion. It repeats itself in order to surface itself again.

Because we need detoxification.

When we look at democracies today, I think we are seeing two things. We're seeing power over hierarchies in the world domination hierarchies, where it is a leader that is dominating the society. And then we see democracies unfolding. But in the democracy, it's a fragile process at the moment because we see that trauma detoxifies, tries to detoxify itself. And that creates all kinds of issues in democracies. But that's already an attempt of the system to heal itself. And then we reach a new level of coherence and say, ah, now it's great. And then a deeper layer of incoherence comes up. That's also true for the individual. That's also true for meditation practitioners. So you see, oh, wow, now I'm in a deep state of meditation. And then something happens in life. And then it looks like you never meditated. And it's, oh, I fell back. And instead of saying no, when you reach a new level of coherence, it means a new level of safety. You can detox a deeper aspect of life. And if I don't understand that, then I'm missing a lot of transformational work or processes. And when I take the deeper into your question, into the ancestral part, let's say in Second World War, like my grandparents or great grandparents, when they experienced the war and went through it, that trauma didn't disappear. That stayed in the lineage, that that has been also passed on to me or to you or anybody else. It's kind of a pandemic symptom because most of the people went through Some kind of trauma or their ancestors did. And so we are working with like in the summits. And so there's a professor in the university, Zabel Mansouri, and you can see in her, in her mice studies, that the sperm cells of traumatized mice pass on certain epigenetic changes. And five or six generations of mice have the same trauma symptoms without the trauma. So we still call these personal issues. I have this personal issue, that personal issue. But when we look a bit closer, it's not just. It's also personal, but it's much bigger than that. It's also ancestral and it's also part of a bigger trauma net in our society.

And that's why in the integration work we developed this what I call IAC fluidity. It means individual, ancestral, collective liquefaction. So to melt the frozen part of life in myself, in my ancestry, in my portion of the collective as a citizen that grew up in Austria, in the us, in China and Argentina, wherever, and liquefy the portion that lives in my nervous system, in my body and, and create a responsibility, the ability to respond to my ancestors lives. Because where my grandfather had trauma and I carry like a transfer, a transmission of the trauma in myself, I'm not fully related to my grandfather. I'm related through the stagnation, not through a life responsive relation, resonance. And so there's responsibility towards the past, like the roots, the ancestors. There's responsibility in 2022, how I respond to the world that surrounds me. And there is responsibility to our future and to the future generations. And all together I think a part of resilience. And that's why for many people, when we do individual work, it's great. But we see often that individual work stagnates. Some parts we can work on, but some parts are a bit resistant to the integration or the healing. And that's where we need to expand the radius and include our parents lives, our grand or great parents lives. And not just do that intellectually. We all know that we have ancestors. That's not the point. But the point is that I can learn to feel that through my body and the ancestral part of my nervous system. Because the ancestors are encoded in my epigenetic genetics. They are encoded in my nervous system, in my cells, so that lives in me. And I think if we stop thinking that the body, a human body, is 30, 50, 70 years old. But if I say no, our body is hundreds of thousands of years old. The entire history that led up to us sitting here is also sitting here with us. It's encoded in us. And I think that makes human intelligence so amazing as a miracle because.

We carry a lot of stuff inside that when we pay attention. And I think you, yourself, with the work you do, and many others that have a contemplative practice, see what happens when we tap into those areas that are alive in us and we increase our perspective and like that. I think we are part of ancestral and collective resilience building.

Wow, that is so beautiful. And for me, it's such a positive view about humanity and our human condition or just life altogether.

On the one hand, it's daunting, the idea of taking responsibility or ownership for our whole ancestral history and realizing that, you know, it's our job to work with that now, to heal, to transform, to allow the new to emerge. And so it's very daunting to face that and take that on. But it's also such a positive view because it seems so often that, you know, we either want to be in denial of the past or there's a tendency to want to indict the past and blame. And, you know, either way, you got that There's a big political divide right now. Those who want to indict the past and those who want to ignore the past. Right. And be on denial of any kind of ownership. Either way is not really ownership. And then this idea that emergent. What wants to emerge, the next level of progress, evolution, spiritual consciousness evolving, developing, flourishing. It happens out of the present, right? It has to be unstuck. And these things have. So it's just this natural process that we can participate in. And it's often not easy. It can be scary, it can require a lot of work. But it is a really beautiful vision of humanity where, you know, we're all innocent. I mean, if you could say we're all guilty, but I think ultimately we're all innocent. We're just. This is the process and this is the work for us to do, right? To open our hearts, open our minds, and we develop wisdom by the more of this we're willing to embrace, right? The more the work we're willing to do. So it's such a beautiful vision. I'd like to bring it right into the present moment because.

And we are going to talk about the current situation in Europe in a moment. But I'd like to first talk a little bit about the global pandemic that we've all been in for the last over two years now, not quite two years since it was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. But as we know it started in late 2019, early 2020. And.

Humanity has not gone through a global experience like this since World War II. And even World War II probably didn't as universally impact everybody as this has. And there's been so much death and so much loss and so much fear. And, you know, for most of us are, to one degree or another, our threat systems have been on high alert for two years. We've been kind of living that way, you know, the experience. I remember the first time going into a supermarket and, you know, being reluctant to go down an aisle, actually seeing my fellow human beings rather than as neighbors I might say hi to. They're like the enemy or even walking down the sidewalk. You know, I've been able to relax that somewhat, but I can still feel it a little bit, getting comfortable again with my fellow human beings. Right. So what's your sense of the collective trauma impact of that we've gone through and the work to deal with that now so it doesn't get buried into being part of that unintegrated shadow. But regardless of what we do, how likely, you know, this is gonna. I would, I would, I would think the impact of this is gonna be around for a while, that our, our work of healing this and, and not turning it into shadow is gonna be around for a while.

Definitely. And.

I want to start with an analogy like a metaphor. Like I often say, when snow flakes fall into a river, they become water. And when snowflakes drop on an ice over river, they pile up and there's a big layer of snow on top of the ice. So what we saw in the pandemic, and I think that's such a wake up call for us, because climate change will make this 10 times stronger. Is.

That when. What does it mean? Snowflakes means experience that I meet with the open part of myself where I'm related, where I'm in my mature capacities, where I'm present, I can respond to that challenge. That's resilience. But when snowflakes, when experience meets us where we are traumatized, then it's just another layer that cannot be digested because the ground is, the soil is frozen. And so when we look at the pandemic, we see a massive fragmentation in the culture. We see a lot of new trauma that has been induced through the loss and the health care issue and what you said, the fear and the like, there are so many things that are new trauma, but it activated also a lot of pre existing collective trauma. And then we call it a crisis. But I don't think the pandemic is the crisis. The pandemic is the pandemic. There is a virus and that affects us. And so that's one thing, and that's maybe newly traumatizing, but the crisis is how we dealt with it. So it brought up to the surface a lot of fragmentation that pre existed the pandemic that was there before and it just got highlighted through a new stress factor because the biological system cannot tolerate another big stressor when it's anyway already up to the red zone. And, and I think that that's what we saw, but so what we also see. And that's why I'm such an advocate for collective trauma work, because I believe in the Constitution of the United States, in the Constitution of any state that takes that seriously. We have to have kind of a paragraph or a law that says we have to.

Restore the undigested legacy of our culture. And that needs to be part of our need as a human being, as a state, as a country, as a society. Why? Because that is collective health. If we don't have spaces that are being funded by the state in order to have collective spaces to digest collective experiences, we don't don't have the health mechanism. It's like when you, when you sleep or when you eat, when you have time to reflect on your personal experience, it helps you to reflect, digest and integrate. But we don't have that in a bigger scale in our society. We so hyper individualized. And then of course there are smaller groups that do that anyway. But I'm talking about millions and millions of people having a collective integration process integrated in the cultural process. And if we don't have that, especially now when there is a pandemic, we can be sure that a lot of the trauma will be buried and it will be passed on to the next generation. If we don't take care of it, we just pass it on and not only to our children, we pass it on to the next generation, even if people don't have kids. And that's why I think to take this as a wake up call the pandemic and see, wow, this showed us a global event that we can use to implement the right things in our culture, to become more trauma informed, to digest our personal and collective experience and to prepare the resilience. For example, also cod conflict as we see it right now in Europe, or the climate catastrophe that is going to come. And if that stress factor comes and biological or planetary stress reservoirs will be full, then more and more systems will start to collapse and disintegrate. And that's going to be a cascade of many, many fast processes that will be much faster than we expect. And I think if we do the collective trauma work, we can prevent some of it by integrating the trauma and making it a river, so melting the ice and letting the snowflakes fall into water. And that's, I think, the chance that we have now and the pandemic. Other global events show us at the moment that we need to heal as collectives. It's not anymore enough to just do individual work. We have to come together in bigger and bigger groups through technology, in person, doesn't matter what. And even like what you do now, your summit is a way to bring people together and to create a hub of exploration that's a contribution to that kind of collective work. And we need much, much more. And I think we have the technology with what we do now. We couldn't do without technology. And we can use the tool to create collective coherence, to let the collective nervous system detox digest and integrate trauma, because we cannot get rid of it. It's like it's in us. We can only integrate it. And I think that's a very, very big need that societies have. We need to create the policies and the structures for that.

Yeah, absolutely. And it is very much the purpose of this summit, and. And we're hopeful that this is a contribution to that. But I'd like to explore a little further what you were talking about, where we are and how we get, you know, how we even move forward. You know, we've had religious institutions, social institutions, civil society institutions in the past that have kind of helped stabilize things, have even maybe been in part ways of processing some of this trauma. And at the same time, you know, they like any institutions, they've had their shadow aspects and they've had their frozen aspects. And today, you know, kind of as part of just the current cultural wave of postmodernism we've been in for quite a while, A principal characteristic of which is deconstruction. You know, things have just been steadily deconstructed almost into, at least in this country, I feel, very nihilistic, materialistic landscape. And so people feel like they don't have anything they can trust or believe in. And, you know.

And it creates a kind of an impoverished civil landscape. No commons, there's not a common. So we can trust. And so we see even with the situation of the pandemic, which might have pulled people together, you know, often when there's a disaster or sort of a perceived common enemy or something. But instead it's divided us further and everything's weaponized and everything's politicized. And so, you know, now maybe it's good that all these institutions of the past, you know, that idea of liquefaction, maybe it's good they're dissolving to allow something new to emerge. But on the other hand, sometimes it feels like the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater. Like the collective wisdom of humanity is being disregarded and ejected in this kind of very materialistic, nihilistic, postmodernist landscape. So I'm wondering, how do we get through this and reignite some desire to find some shared commons and place for dialogue and to do the kind of work you're talking about?

Yeah, when I talk about liquefication, I'm not talking about deconstructing those structures. I'm talking about liquefying the trauma agreements in our cultures. And that feels maybe at the beginning like something is melting. But you're right. If you take out more and more structures that cared for, like collective spaces in which we come together and they break away evolutionary wise or because they don't fit, or they had their own shadows. So that makes it even more important that we create new ones. Because it's only up on us. Nobody will create it for us. Like, we have to do it. You know, the people that feel called to do it need to do it. We need to put work into this. We need to develop new things that fit, like our current modern life. And we need to invest much more into a new level of community building.

And that we recognize that there's a need, that the culture has a need to digest its own process. And that's not only individuals talking about it. That's coming together and creating, using the principle of interdependence, that an individual is a specific experience, expression of the whole. They are not separate. That that's one interdependent unit. So I am life and you are life. You're not separate from life.

We.

We are individuated. That's why we can have this. And you have your intelligence, I have my intelligence. Everybody who listens has their intelligence. And we can digest that into. In different world spaces, interior world spaces, and resonate with each other, not resonate with each other, but we are not separate from life. But trauma creates that experience of separation in individuals, in cultural groups and ethnic groups, in different socioeconomic groups, between states. And I think that's where the distancing comes in. And the other thing is because in order to create resilience.

There is something important about.

The focus. And that's I think, important for everybody who facilitates any kind of processes in the world, or with clients or with organizations. Because the focus of my awareness usually goes either to where there is flow. Flow feels like yummy, it feels like lovely, it feels like healthy life. It feels like flow is its well being, it's joy, it's creative. So our energy goes into there. Why? Because it's attractive. It's a. It's attractivity and different levels of living. And then another part where my attention goes is hyperactivation. When something is exaggerated, then the energy goes there. But where my energy doesn't go by nature is the part that is absent. Absence is not attractive because by its definition, it evades our perception. It's the unconscious, it's the collective unconscious. So my attention doesn't go there. It doesn't even know where to go because I can't feel it. And in the culture we have huge patches of absence. And there is, in the hyperactivation, there is the pain that screams. But the deeper pain in the culture is the one that is mute, that doesn't speak, that doesn't scream, and it doesn't attract cameras. And I think for people that grow a certain level of awareness, the pain that is mute. And I might have mute parts in myself, I might have mute parts in my family, in my closer community and in culture. But the highest escalated pain is frozen. The people that are the most hurt are the ones that don't talk.

And so I believe for everybody who develops a higher awareness, a higher consciousness, to be able to be aware of these processes, we also have the responsibility to find through absence the pain that doesn't scream. And I think that holds most of the energy in our culture, in our cultural fabric, is found in the mute pain. And so when we. Because that's at the basis of a lot of social issues that we can solve, and then we try to fix them on the level of the symptoms that arise without going deep to the root that creates that fragmentation, that other ring, that right versus left, left at me versus them, and that all this has a deeper root. And I think so for building cultural resilience, we have to develop the capacity to respond to the pain that has no voice. They cannot ask for help, because when it's frozen, when you see people that are really shocked, they are quiet.

So I worked while I studied, I worked as a paramedic, as a volunteer for the Red Cross for nine Years. And I trained paramedics.

And for us was very clear that as a paramedic, when you come to a place where there are a lot of injured people, you always go first to the ones that don't.

Make any sounds or they don't scream. But in a way that's interesting as a paramedic because of injuries. But that's also true on a more psychological level because the highest escalated stress or trauma, pain is cut off, it's silent.

And that needs skill. And I think we need to create that skill and we need the collective community building, like building healing communities with positive relational capacity building. And because positive relational skills are the create positive relational experiences is exactly what's the remedy for trauma. And of course, higher level of skill for complex trauma. And so individual and collective competence building is I think, what we have to support. And I think the states need to support that. We like, not the United States, every state in the world, our states need to support that because we recognize how much that would influence our health care system. It would reduce a lot of costs that we have now that are based on untaken care trauma.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I love your point that it's really up to us because, you know, we have had religious, cultural, civic institutions that have held us for many generations, and you know, they've had their shadow sides and all that develops, but still have really had a huge benefit. Maybe we grew a bit dependent on that. And now as these things, for various reasons are deconstructing or dissolving, and it really is up to us. Those were all created by somebody a long time ago, right? Those were created by individuals who stepped up and created them. So now it's our turn and we have to do that individually and collectively. And to the extent that we need to get our governments involved, it's going to be up to us to get their attention and, and get to buy in to do that.

I think that's just such an important call to action and it's really at the heart of what this summit is all about. I would like to take some time today to explore what's going on in Europe right now. I think it's on all of our minds and hearts. I think a lot of us feel for the Ukrainian people, it at least appears in the immediate circumstances that this was an unprovoked aggression by Vladimir Putin and his armed forces, and it is an invasion. And at the same time, not to in any way justify anything, but all this has deep historical roots and roots in ancestral trauma going back through World War II and World War I. And you know, one of the insights, you know, In World War I, your company, where your country, I believe you're a native of Germany, was left in shambles after World War I, which really gave rise to the Nazi movement and so forth. And so after World War II, with the Marshall Plan, the West really rebuilt Germany and turned it into a stable democracy that really is a positive force in the world today. And it wasn't really done for Russia after World War II. And it was kind of. There was just suddenly this wall went up, right? It was east and west and you know, so, you know, there's a lot there. And I'm curious if you could talk about this present situation in Ukraine, how we can better understand it in terms of this idea of historical, ancestral and cultural trauma. And other than just deciding I want to root for the good guys or something, is there a deeper way that we can support this? So maybe this is one of those, you know.

Emerging kind of things that, you know, the unhealed stuff has exploded to the surface. So is it a matter, Are we just going to push it back down or could this leverage us to.

Some further transformation?

Right. Yeah, definitely. It's very important. Like.

First of all, I think that it shows that.

Untaken care trauma is bound to repeat itself. And we saw this throughout human history. We see this over and over and over again.

Even if it takes decades. But there is this kind of repetition compulsion. And that shows us, like the pandemic we discussed before, how important it is to have spaces, especially when there are such large scale traumatization like the second World World War and the millions and millions of people that died in Russia, in Germany, everywhere in Europe and the Holocaust as a genocide. These are deep, deep wounds. And of course Germany did on the one hand a great job to open that up and really make it a topic and keep it out in the open so that the wound is open and that there is a conversation being supported. And at the same time, that conversation only could go so far. So we need to take that deeper into the deep emotional and physical ingrained dimension and ancestral dimension of trauma. Because now many next generation folks are the population of the countries that went through World War II or living here in Israel. And.

So the.

So that's one thing. So it shows us the importance of doing that work. Now, of course, when there is such a hot trauma happening right now, like a war, we need to work in parallel. We need to take care of the physical needs, we need to take care of Refugees, we need to do whatever we can do in order to support life, to be saved or to be supported in that existential need. But at the same time, it's often easier either or at the same time, we need to keep on what I often call take out the shares that every one of us has and holds of the collective unconscious. Which means that when that crisis scares me, the fear that comes up in me is part of the invasion. And that's what I think many people don't see that way, that, oh, I am scared when I see this. Yeah. But the trauma layer that gets triggered in millions of people in, for example, Europe now is inherently connected to what created over many years like a situation of fragmentation, numbing, othering political dynamics. These are all processes that are part of the trauma dynamic. And so there is a way how to immediately support or take care of the situation. But this doesn't mean that we give up in this moment to do the inner work as much as we can and with as much precision as we can. So that's one thing. The other thing is that we are working a lot on applying the collective trauma knowledge to, for example, the east west separation. Since we worked a lot on the east west separation in Germany. But it's the the same for Europe, but in Germany it's very strong because it's in one country. So when the Berlin Wall came down.

It was like the east has somehow been integrated in the west into the West. But that's not an integration, because what happened is it was a kind of a suddenly there was West. And I believe that that's a mistake. Of course that it happened was good, but the way the integration has been facilitated was missing out on something. And I had, in one of my groups, there was once a situation where there was a deep process with somebody that lived in the former East.

And then I said to her, because I need to learn from you about the life in the east and you need to learn from me about somebody that grew up in Vienna and lived in the West. I don't have your experience and you don't have mine. It's not that one of us has a better experience. We both have an experience. And if we are humble enough to learn from each other, energy can flow between us and we start to build a Germany or a Europe that is an integration version of the two former. But you cannot integrate the former east into the former West. That I think it doesn't work. And it will leave societal symptoms, fractures. And you see the fractures in Spain, Barcelona, Madrid and You see it in many places where that integration work didn't happen properly. So that the integrated Germany or Europe is one that we don't know yet, that we both need to be humble and not know what that is in order to let it emerge through us. And I think that worked. We are also working now in a proposal to do this on the larger scale for entire Europe. The former Eastern countries and the former Western countries are becoming integrated. And one participant in one of my groups said a sentence that I found very interesting. She said, us living in the former east, we were always fascinated by the West. We were always looking at the west, and the west was always looking at itself.

And I thought that was a very strong sentence. And I think that because otherwise we keep a fracture in the society that will come up through external pressures, like, for example, the pandemic. It will lead to a societal fragmentation.

And I think we need to do this more in the world. How we create spaces where.

Real interest, real curiosity, listening spaces will facilitate spaces, will help us to learn from each other. All around the world, we have those former conflict areas, former areas of division, vision, that haven't been yet fully knitted together as a new potential space. And I think that's what we need in Europe very strongly in order. And then also, you know, that we also understand the deep trauma that happened also just through Germany and Russia in the World War, like deep, deep trauma that is still sitting deeply in Europe. It's heartbreaking when we feel into this, and the new trauma that is being created now is deeply heartbreaking. So I think that.

There'S a lot to do, and I think we are just.

Starting to do that kind of work on a larger scale in order to create new potential spaces that we don't have to repeat the past.

Well, that's really a fascinating perspective and brings up a number of things for me. I mean, and clearly, even though there are not so many folks around from World War II now, or even that many Holocaust survivors, I have a good friend whose mother was as a young girl in the camps at Auschwitz. So there are a few, but there's not a lot. But still, this conflict and this war in Ukraine is clearly opening up wounds in the collective unconscious or even consciousness. And.

You know, there are two threads I'm thinking here. One is, as you know, I've been going to Auschwitz with the Zen peacemakers for over 20 years. We did the first Bearing Witness retreat there in 1996. So some 50 years after the end of the liberation and after the Holocaust.

We started A Bearing Witness retreat in Rwanda in 2009, I believe was the first one. Again, quite a while after the genocide of 1994, I believe. And so I'm wondering and not say that we were the only ones doing this kind of work, but maybe we need to come in more quickly now. I do have colleagues that brought a Bearing Witness retreat to Bosnia closer to the end of that conflict. And so it's maybe the technologies that we have around Bearing Witness and other ways of healing need to be immediately there. So that's one piece. I have a question about that. And the other though, what you do brought up about that east, west divide and you know, it's so easy for us to fall, especially as Americans to get into the winners and losers and you know, begin to think about. We're conditioned to think of everything in terms of a football game or something. Right. And you know, we'll see Russia as the enemy and you know, be cheering for the Ukrainians. They seem to be fighting for liberty. And it seems like that east, west divide has often been defined and you know, it was capitalism versus socialism, it was collectivism versus individualism. And those things can get polarized so quickly. But maybe there is on a human level, I mean, even around the time of the, you know, where the Soviet Union began to fall apart, there was a citizen diplomacy going on from the US and other countries of, you know, connecting citizen to citizen and sharing culture and breaking bread. And you know, when I think about the east, if the west would turn and look towards the east. The east has really strong traditions of mysticism. For example, I don't just mean in India, but I mean within the Orthodox Christianity and even Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia and parts of the Soviet Union, there's a mysticism in the east that has been not as present in the West. And so maybe it's a cultural interest that has to. Rather than saying we're going to battle it out and argue where's the balance between individual and collectivism or it seems like capitalism is kind of dominant both sides at this point, totalitarian on the one side, so called democracy on the other side. So maybe it's a more human to human level of what you're talking about. We have to connect as human beings and share culture instead of just getting into these hot flash, paradigmatic kind of issues.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly like how we. Of course there are things that need to be solved on governmental levels, but I think every one of us has agency and it can be small things. I don't need to think of what's the big thing that I can do. And then I'm so paralyzed because I don't know how to do it. And then I don't do anything. Whatever is the possible next step. And some of us have developed capacities and networks that we can do more. And some of us do smaller things, but we all engage. And I think like that we create a collective immune response to such a situation. Because we are the collective immune response system. The whole world needs to get up in a moment like that. Everybody needs to get up and say we are the immune system that is around this conflict. And we don't let ourselves be polarized, but we see how we can bring value and added value to the situation. And I think that's challenging because first of all, it will bring up stuff in me. And when I am getting scared, I am becoming reactive. And so I need to take care of my own reactivity first. And then see what's my agency, my real response to the situation. What can I do to create collective coherence? What can we do together? And then, just a friend of mine, I heard today they said they created. They have a platform in Berlin, and they created 50,000 homes they already have together for refugees to. To give a shelter to 50,000 people. And they pulled off that project in two days. And so, like, it doesn't matter if it's big or small. Everybody can do something to be part of the immune response. And I'm very hopeful that the more collective trauma we liberate, we will be less frozen and more responsive more and more and more. And I think if we allow. If I take into consideration that how I feel is not an obstacle. When I get really scared and I pay attention to my fear and I allow myself to digest my own process or whatever comes up in me, it makes me more open to respond. And it's part of the unconscious trauma perpetuation. So there's inner work to do and there's outer participation. And I think if we combine this, we are really. We also bring our awareness practice, our spiritual practice and our inner healing work that we do. We bring it back into. Into the world, into the society. And then it becomes a very positive resource to build together the world that we all want to live in. I often say it's humanity that builds the house for humanity. If you live in a house that is not a good house for everybody, we build that. We are the architects of that house for humanity. And we see in the world that many people have way too little privilege have way too little space in that house and, and it's not a good house for them. And if you're building these houses that then conflicts erupt like this. So that's our responsibility.

And I think it's important to keep in mind that there, there's going to be many traumatized Russian soldiers as a result of this conflict and we have to be equally concerned for them. You know, I shared with you earlier that I, I was participating in an all day meditation retreat yesterday online and that we had I think six or seven Ukrainians in the retreat and they had to leave partway through to go to a shelter, which was kind of a shock way went through the retreat, but we also had five or six Russian participants who were there. And so, you know, that's part of, we have the ability to create these online global communities now and to do that around shared values and practices and to share this knowledge and, and I know you are also a meditation teacher and a spiritual teacher and I'm wondering if you might, you know, just to finish off our time today. It's been incredibly rich. There's just so many insights. I want to go back and listen to this and really, really get, wrap my mind around some of these things because I think they're really paradigm shifting in terms of how we think about these problems before. You know, we've all heard that Einstein quote that you can't solve problems with the same mind that created them. And I heard a lot of threads of a different kind of mindset there that might actually help us. So I really want to continue to explore that. So thank you very much. But I wonder if you could lead us in a brief practice of some kind. And you know, you mentioned that the individual work is important, but the collective work is really important. So. But sometimes we need, you know, practices to help us have the resilience to go out and do the collective work together. So I'm wondering if you might lead.

Us in something like just take.

A.

Moment to let the conversation that you just listen to just drop in.

Maybe. So following your breath and.

Especially your exhalations.

That help you to relax into your body.

And also to see how the entire conversation about trauma, collective trauma, collective resilience.

Just resonates within you.

What's your physical response.

Emotional response.

Your cognitive mental response?

What are the aspects of our conversation that resonate a bit deeper within you? Like you felt, oh, wow, yeah, that's something to deepen.

That'S something to contemplate on, explore more, reflect more, write more about the Reflective writing.

To how you can.

Become a focal point of awareness within.

A relational emergence. Creative processes of your culture.

But also the non emergent, repetitive, disrelated processes of your culture.

Notice yourself. What are the aspects of your. The culture that surrounds you.

That you feel connected to, that are easy, flowing.

And also the parts of your culture that are more at a distance.

Other.

Harder, more difficult.

And that's our work.

Those are. Those need more attention.

Contemplation.

And maybe integration work.

And the same is also true for your.

Relation to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

What's your.

Relation to the conflict? To the situation.

And your response ability. Your ability to respond.

And then to take a couple of deeper breaths and.

Fill your body well.

Maybe.

Come back gently and come back to the questions later.

Carefully. Thank you so much. I'm very grateful for our conversation. It was very deep. I would love to continue it very, very much synchronized in the conversation. So thank you for having me here.

Yeah, thank you, Thomas. I always feel like I'm a. I'm a different person on the other side of our conversations. And that feels really good. And I would love to find some way to kind of maybe keep our dialogue going on offline and find some other ways to have our work intersect. So let's find a way to.

Me too. Thank you so much.

All right. You be well. Thank you.

You.

Thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye.

And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people.

Customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu. Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us.

Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com.

Savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.

Hello, it is Ryan. And we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino. Chumba Casino has all your favorite social casino style games that you can play for free, anytime, time anywhere, with daily bonuses. So sign up now@chumbacasino.com. that's chumbacasino.com no purchase necessary vgw group.

Void where prohibited by law. 21 plus terms and conditions apply.