Thomas Hübl | Rewiring Fear and Anxiety from the Inside Out

So when the child develops a new function and it's being witnessed by the parents and felt by the parents, consciously, it makes it stronger. So the witnessing is an inherent function that brings us into existence. But if we didn't have that on the other side enough, only partly in our life as children, then often we walk through life and we constantly want to be seen or need to be seen. It's not only want to, we need to be seen to to confirm parts of us into existence. So that function, I think is an important aspect of healing. As you said, it's the therapeutic relationship is based on feeling felt and also being seen. But being seen is being seen in our specificity, not in a general sense in who we really are in our intelligence.

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My name is Dr. Fleet Mahler, Co host for the session and I'm thrilled to be here today with longtime friend and colleague Thomas Hubel. Welcome Thomas.

Hello Fleets. Good to see you again.

Always great to be with you Thomas, and looking forward to this conversation.

So Thomas I'm wondering since our theme.

Today is how we can rewire our brains or reshape our neural architecture to both heal and work with the fear and anxiety that are part of life. So I'm wondering to begin with, if you might be able to share a pivotal moment in your life when you were experiencing a great deal of fear or anxiety and how you worked with that, maybe how that in part influenced the direction of your work altogether.

Oh, that's an interesting question.

Fear in my life, I think one of the more recent, more recent ones. I live since some years in Tel Aviv and we had multiple waves of like war situations in the last years and now there is a longer term war. But also before and since I grew up in Vienna, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't used to war situations. So when the first time we had this like series, two weeks of missile attacks and sirens. So of course that brought up fear in me. But I felt that also what I'm teaching and also what I'm like my long term meditation practice really were very helpful. So not to get stuck in the fear, stuck, the fear gets stuck in my body, but actually to keep it fluid and to keep working on it and with it, to keep it as a movement and as an experience. And I felt that the more I really stay with the stress at the beginning of this experience and the fear, it helped me to stay with it. And I could feel how my nervous system actually de escalates the stress and de escalates the fear. And it became more and more clear that every time there was a wave like that and I could stay present with it and don't try to not have it and see it as a disturbance, it actually helped me to somehow digest the fears and integrate them. And that kind of decreased over time, those waves. And now it feels like very fluid in me so that those fears don't come up anymore. But I felt the work that I did really helped that process, that it created more stability, more presence, more relationship to the moment. And also that it helped me also in my work to work with people that experience worse situations, the threats of this kind of situations in a different way. So maybe that's a good example.

Yeah, I think so. And as you were describing it, it sounds like your ability, because of your practice and training to be with the fear and anxiety that was coming up to not repress it or try to get away from it, but to be with it, not try to change it, but being with it. And somehow through that process kind of actually Increased your capacity to be with fear and anxiety, in some words, increased your level of tolerance or your ability to be with or your actions. So in some sen, we could. Fear is certainly part of life, where it's part of our biology. And anxiety comes and goes, depending on. For a lot of different reasons. But in some ways, this could be. Rather than being a problem or an obstacle, it could almost be a fuel for growth in the way you were describing it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I see it completely that way. I experience it that way through all my practice. I'm practicing, I don't know, meditation now and inner work for 30, 35 years. And I definitely would assign what you just said that it's part of. It's like we often have those judgments on it at first, but the more we learn to work with it, it becomes a fuel, and it actually changes. And then we say, oh, emotions are waves. They come, and if they can run through, they can live again. And our capacity to be with is growing. And that's why the cup is bigger and the fear is smaller. That definitely is my life experience too.

So our focus is the relationship between trauma and fear and anxiety and then how, you know, experiencing fear and anxiety could then be the beginning point of doing the work to identify and heal our trauma and so forth. And so just both the causal relationship and then the healing relationship. And so, as you well know, trauma often leaves an imprint on our nervous system. It can be seen as patterns, kind of stuck, patterns of dysregulation, and then can be triggered by various associative things and so forth, or can just be very debilitating in an ongoing way. And course, this functions both as individuals and later. I think we can talk about the collective part of this as well, which.

Is so much what your work is about.

But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about trauma and how that maybe exacerbates the experience of fear and anxiety for people and then how.

That relates to our healing process.

So let's put this. I need to expand a bit the window to bring in, like, the understanding of trauma. So one is, at least in my understanding, what I've learned over the years is that trauma is a frozen experience in our nervous system. So in the traumatic moment, the trauma response protects us. So, first of all, it's an intelligent function. Secondly, the overwhelm and the part that was too much in this moment, when it gets shut down, it gets frozen in time. I think that's important. So when the trauma happened, there is like a file being created on our hard disk, in our nervous system that has a lot of data now inside, but the data is numb. It's like an anesthesia. It's numb, and it's pushed into the unconscious. So from that unconscious, all kinds of symptoms come out. So when people say, I feel my trauma, I think that's not really the right articulation. What they feel is the symptom are the symptoms that their trauma creates, because the trauma is here, but something comes out of here all the time. But this is not visible and it's not palpable. So we can't feel the actual trauma. We feel the symptoms. And we need to also take into account that trauma didn't start with us. So there's our childhood and our development and maybe potential trauma later in our life. There is our ancestry, and then there's the cultural field that we have been born into. All of it can store and hold trauma. That's important. So sometimes when we feel anxiety, it comes more from the personal development. Sometimes anxiety comes already through our ancestors. They carried a lot of undigested fear. And we have been born into that epigenetically, psychologically, family wise, culturally. And so when we. And I think that's important, because when we work with the fears or the symptoms that trauma creates, I think attunement and the capacity to be really dialed in to the various files we are working with is very important. So trauma will definitely, you know, have undigested fear and through life circumstances that might be triggered, as you said, and that might be very disturbing, but it's an overlay. So there's my current reality, and then there is my past overshadowing my current reality. And that's often hard to discern. So saying all of that means that our system periodically, like in a loop, tries to detox originally suppressed material. So the repetition compulsion that Sigmund Freud was talking about is actually a mechanism to bring something back up into our awareness. But of course, that's often not happening because we used to keep it down. That's why I think we need to find ways, how to slowly, in a adequate way, learn to open ourselves up to these cycles and integrate those emotions. And that stress, as I. A little bit, as I described it before, and then we see that over time, we actually decrease those waves that are coming, they become smaller and smaller. And if my aim is not just how can I get rid of my fear versus how can I learn to integrate my fear and that my fear is not a weakness, but it's a human emotion, that is maybe very disturbing at first. That's why some people need professional help or help of community and friends and family, like some, that we don't do it alone. And we can maybe speak about the relational dimension in a moment. And I have seen thousands of people, and we even have scientific epigenetic data that shows how we can decrease anxiety and fear through people. When people practice that work more intensively over a period of time that that's happening. So definitely there is a way to decrease our anxieties and fear waves and live a more, I don't know, fulfilled and joyful life. So we can do it. And I think many other people that work in the similar field know that too.

Wow, There's a lot there and so much to unpack. So I'd like to talk a little for a moment.

A lot of your work is focused.

On this inheritance of trauma that we all receive culturally and epigenetically ancestral, even going way back.

I mean, it's part of the human condition.

And maybe to normalize this a little bit.

I mean, there's all kinds of traumas.

That happen that we wish would never happen to anyone. Child abuse and war situations, forced migrations, and all kinds of things related to various levels of injustice.

And at the same time, we all.

Inherit some level of collective trauma. And it seems that, you know, our biology is focused on survival. Obviously, job one for any species is survival. So there's some fear and survival built into our very biology. Our nervous system is set up that way. Even at the cellular level, there's a predominant survival instinct and the need to survive, to not be attacked or eaten. There's the need to consume, to have nutrition, and there's the drive to procreate, which is how species perpetuate themselves. So all this energy is happening. And, you know, you mentioned as you've been practicing meditation for a long time and how this helped you then be with fear and anxiety as it came up in the situation that you were referencing where you are in Tel Aviv. So in my experience, a lot of people, when they slow down through meditative practices, they sometimes touch into almost like this ground level, what feels to them like anxiety could be, you know, because.

We'Ve all been so numbed out in.

Many ways that it could be through the practice of meditation, you're kind of awakening again, but then you are in touch with something that's there, this kind of this ground level fear and anxiety that's part of our biology, maybe part of our inheritance. So I'm wondering if it's helpful to kind of normalize that, to realize this is kind of, that's good. We're getting in touch with the aliveness. And this can then become the beginning of our work to really integrate, as you were saying. So I wonder if you could talk about the. If we can kind of normalize this experience of fear and anxiety that's part of our human condition and it's part of what we can actually leverage for our growth.

First of all, I want to say that of course I think our relationship to fear and anxiety is key because there's still in the mainstream society, there's still like this. First of all, all of this is a disturbance and many times we also experience it that way. So I mean, the experience is true, but the fact is that's not the disturbance, that's part of myself. I'm also not saying my liver is disturbing me all the time, so but my liver is part of my life and my body. I cannot just get rid of it. Many people try to get rid of it and in the moment of getting rid of it, they're original. Trauma is being reproduced. That's a repetition of what happened already. So if I want to get rid of something, it shows that I got rid of it already earlier in my life. My fears as a child were too disturbing, so I numbed them out and I shut them down. When they come up in my life today, then I don't want them, but I'm reproducing the same that already happened in my childhood or maybe for my grandmother in the second World War. So that we see, oh wow, that instinctive get rid of is actually not helpful. So we need to find a way and create first of all, de pathologize this and find a way to step by step bring it in. And then you said something important many people experience when I start working on myself because I want to heal. Often the anesthesia of the suppressed stress, the suppressed trauma, the suppressed fear or strong panic is being deanestasized. So the anesthesia stops working because we become more aware, means we become more aware of something and that something starts to come back into our awareness. And suddenly it looks like, oh, wow, now I have much more fear. That's why we need a good practice guidance because some people really touch on stuff that they can process later. And it feels very overwhelming in life to be in touch with it. And then we try often with meditation to heal it. And meditation often doesn't heal this, but it gives us more awareness. So meditation is a great resource. If I Have the right techniques to integrate those emotions and have a trauma informed meditative practice that helps me to integrate stuff when it comes up, that deepens my meditation and my meditation gives me more presence, mindfulness, relatedness, somatic awareness to be more with the stuff that's coming up. So together they are a great pair. But alone, sometimes it's a bypass because I actually, through meditation I want to get out of those fears and feel good, which sometimes doesn't happen because it actually brings me more into the fear, which doesn't feel good. And then I call it. This wasn't a good meditation. But it has nothing to do with the meditation, something to do with the unconscious stuff that suddenly shows up in us. And the other part that I discovered in our work is very, for me very important, is that many of us were not or haven't felt supported when we were afraid. You know, we hear it. As a parent, I often bring this example. As a parent, I can say when my daughter comes and says, daddy, I'm scared and say, don't be scared. There's nothing dangerous in the house. So what did I do? I devalued the fear of my daughter. I said, don't be scared. And I give her an intellectual answer when she has an emotional request. So that's not co regulative really for her. That kind of creates a separation between us. But if I'm open, present, and I feel my daughter when she's scared, and I say, yeah, I feel that you're scared. Come to me, Come. When I say come, I invite the fear into relationship. My nervous system and her nervous systems create a unit together, a mutual space. So her fear is not just her fear, it becomes us. The usness of who we are when we are really related means emotions are not personal properties, but actually relational spaces. And when my nervous system feels her fear and her stress, her nervous system feels felt. There are two computer processors and meek. If she's young, very young, then my co regulation teaches her nervous system to internalize regulation. So her nervous system learns to do that more and more by itself. And when she's old enough, her nervous system does the regulation by itself. When she's too young, she can't. She needs the parent to feel safe. That's the evolution. So if she feels safe, and because she internalized that again and again, when I come to my parents, it's safe. When I come to my parents, it's safe. So the world becomes safe, unless it's not safe. And that's important because many people feel this anxiety, often it doesn't matter if it's really safe or not safe. And some people feel fear. When there is a real danger, then it's great because then it protects me. Then I can run away, save myself, do something in order to take care of a situation. And I think many of us that are listening now, when we look at it, we might often feel fear when there was no real danger and it turned out to be a regular situation and we were afraid. So that internalized regulation and fear regulation creates. Ah, when I'm afraid, I can regulate. And it teaches my daughter. When I am really afraid, there's always somebody that I can go to that feels like supportive. What does that do? That means when I sit with many clients and I see, they tell me about their life or fears or whatever, often we see the fear is actually the emotion, but the fear lives in the retraction or the shutdown of the social engagement system. So the fear is actually circling in a separate space. That's why it cannot release itself. And when we bring not only the fear, but also the relational quality to say, oh, actually when I'm afraid, I feel alone. I wasn't even aware of that. But now that I somebody points that out to me, I feel, yeah, you are distant when I am afraid. And often we project this then onto the world that the world is not really caring for us. But that was our childhood experience often. And when we bring this into awareness and we see that fear slowly can come back into this usness, the we space. And I experience again. Wow, you're really listening to me. You are aware that I am afraid. You feel that I am afraid. And I feel felt. The fear can release itself from that file that I spoke about before, continue its vertical development, and integrate itself into the wholeness of my mature perspective. So my mature perspective grows, my body relaxes. So we see often when that healing happens, one energy stream goes down, there's a relaxation, a de. Escalation of stress and fear. The person feels more embodied, and there's an upward stream of energy that a maturation of that younger fear that can grow up, and then it cannot be triggered anymore because there is no trigger anymore. And that's amazing. So I think that relational dimension is often not fully seen because people try to do it within that context, not aware of that relational context.

Wow, you've just given us, I think.

A masterclass in not only healthy parenting, but the whole relational dimension of healing is so powerful. And I want to circle back to that. And I also want to Talk more about embodied awareness and meditation, doing meditation in a trauma informed, very embodied way.

But first, I also wanted to just.

Mention you've kind of referenced this a little bit.

So.

But how trauma can distort time and then really kind of be an impediment to being present, to really being present in our lives for ourselves, with others, and have that capacity for co regulation that there's this time distortion.

I wonder if you could talk about.

That a little bit.

Yeah. When we see presence, like we could say presence is when I'm present and you are present. Like now, when we are sitting here, we feel each other. We are in the moment, we are together. What happens in the traumatic moment? In the traumatic moment, life says here and now, in this body, in this experience, in this moment, life is absolutely not good for me when a child's being abused here and now, it's not good. So to shut down a part of my body awareness, a part of my pain, my emotional pain, my physical pain, to get out of my body and fragment space and time is intelligent in that moment. So in order to maybe save myself or be able to do so, or just to not feel what's happening to me, that's very important. So not here, not now is also an intelligence that often we see just as a disturbance. So many people pathologize themselves for not being able to be present. But that means I don't understand that movement. But so what happens is in that moment, presence is being split in the past, which is all the fear or the pain or the anger or the shame I suppressed becomes a package of past. And then later, many years later, when people talk to me in public and say something about me or criticize me, that package of shame might come up. That package of fear might come up. So I'm not able to respond to the criticism because I feel actually scared by it. But the fear is not from today. The fear is the fear of that moment back in my childhood. And so the past will overshadow the present moment, which. So in that moment I'm not responding anymore. As a grown up person with all my intelligence, with all my skills, with all my experience, I might come across like a boy that feels either ashamed or scared and cannot really respond to the criticism. And then I will become reactive or I will withdraw. So that distortion in time means that a part of me is frozen in time. And every time that gets triggered, my intelligence regresses back into that moment. That's why the trauma healing is to release those frozen time packages, integrate that into The Kundalini stream into the central channel of our nervous system. So split off parts come back into that wholeness and integrate themselves into my grown up perspective. And my grown up perspective becomes even more stable. So I stay more mature. And if people criticize me, I can inquire, I can be with them, I can still feel them. I don't feel like I'm retreating. And I start to become defensive. But if not, then my past I really feel defensive because I feel so threatened. But the fear is living in another time zone. And so the more we do our healing work, we feel also we become more stable, like we can be in more challenging moments in a more related way. And I think that is when presence, when this, not here, not now, slowly comes back. We feel more embodied, we inhabit our body more. And again, I have seen again thousands of people that only through the process of healing became aware of how much stuff they were not aware of. Even when they wanted to start the healing journey. There was an issue often, but actually behind the curtain, and there's much more that we don't even feel. So that also means that when we say, oh, we are stressed. Yeah, we are stressed. That's the stress I feel consciously. But the stress behind the curtain, behind this wall, I don't see. But there might be much more stress that actually affects my physical body all the time, but without my awareness. And then we say, oh, if health issues come up in our life, we wonder, oh, how come that now this happened or this came up, or I have this. Yeah, because if 20, 30 years that stress is active behind the scenes and we are not aware of it, doesn't mean that it's not affecting our body. It still affects my physical body, but I don't feel it. That's why sometimes we are surprised. Oh, wow, how could that happen? But had we known what's behind the curtain of our unconscious? Anesthesia. So that's why it's so important that we have a practice that combines both of what you said. The meditation practice is very important or some kind of mindfulness practice. For some people, sitting meditation might activate their early childhood trauma. So maybe we start differently. But some mindfulness practice plus the integration work really to, I think contributes to our health and to even to us staying young for many years, like staying dynamic and creative and full of purpose. I think it's really important.

You're so beautifully describing this capacity we can develop to increasingly be able to be with ourselves and to allow these stuck patterns to unfreeze and integrate and metabolize and also then to be with others, to be a co regulating presence with others, whether our children or friends or others and or others were called to be with. I just recently yesterday returned from Peru where I have a whole history with. I went there as a young man in my 20s and ended up marrying a woman from there and had a son and so forth. So I have this long history there and tragically lost my son there four years ago during the pandemic he passed and related to some injuries he'd had and then his mother now was dying of cancer. So I was just down there to be with her and I'm very happy I was able to be with her for the last five days of her life. There was also a lot of complex family trauma and things going on there and conflict and able to visit my son's grave for the first time because I couldn't go there during the pandemic and all this going on. It was really one of the most challenging 10 days I've spent in a long time. I'm really grateful for the practice and my teacher, my first Tibetan teacher, Trung Pharmace, talked about holding your seat, learning to hold your seat in the midst of life and how the deepening of our practice gives us this capacity to stay, to be, to present, to not run away. And I'm so grateful that this very challenging journey of the last 10 days, somehow I was able to just hang in there and keep putting one foot in front of the other and stay open and stay relational even. There was a lot of fear and anxiety and family conflicts and potential things going on. And one that could, you know, I could feel my inclination to withdraw or to polarize or to get, you know, feeling, you know, different sides of things. And fortunately the practice, practice just kept taking over. And there's something like that with practice. Our practice wins out over some of our other possible intentions. And so I wanted to talk about this embodied approach to practice. And of course, you know, our trauma lives in our body. So embodied work can be challenging, but some pathway into embodied awareness, whether it's.

Sitting practice or movement practice or different things.

But I found over time, I wonder.

If this resonates with you, that that by becoming more embodied racially, having a physical felt presence of the body, we know from current neuroscience that activates the task positive network which then allows the default mode network, the busy wandering mind and often stress causing self sensing part of our brain to go offline naturally without having to struggle with it. And the more embodied we are, the continuity of that Felt presence begins to create kind of an internal neuro biofeedback loop that where the body, mind, heart system is learning to self regulate, learning to regulate itself into attention, stabilization, then into deeper states of awareness and then access states of flow, which in Eastern traditions are called samadhi, sort of harmonic.

Coherence and flow within our nervous system.

And body and mind, spirit, such that our nervous system learns how to get there and has more access to that. And when we're in these states of flow, I think that's where a lot of this unfreezing and integrating and metabolizing can happen that you were talking about. When we're able to access those flow states, however, we do it through some kind of embodied practice in those flow states, our social engagement system is online for ourselves and with others. So I wonder if you could talk about that ability to develop embodiment and access to some kind of harmonic flow or ease within the body, then supports that gradual unfreezing and metabolizing of the trauma.

Yeah, yeah. So first I want to say I'm sorry. And I hear that your time with your former wife and also to what you shared about your son. So that I heard that I don't want to be. I want to honor what you just shared with me. And to your question. So anyway, I think a lot of the integration work, trauma integration work, and the spiritual work or contemplative work are designed from different kind of angles to create that flow that you said that when trauma disorganizes the data flow, healing trauma organizes the data flow and the data flow inside and outside and through our whole nervous system, which I think we could equal to sense making. So suddenly things make sense, which means cognition, emotional experience, feeling, our body becomes one flow, one message. So then things make sense. What a person says and what a person transmits is the same. That makes sense. Sometimes we hear things being said, but the body transmits something else. So that doesn't fully make sense. Even if I can understand the intellectual side, I don't fully feel it. So I feel a gap. And if I don't immediately interpret the gap and I host the gap, so then more wholeness can be created. So a nervous system that is more whole can host more of the fragmentation without polarizing or fragmenting itself. That's important. That's, I think, the basis of every therapeutic interaction is that more wholeness is able to host more fragmentation. And so that flow state that you spoke about, like the coherence or the organization, the higher organizing principle forming us or me or you or we are being informed by the world. Means we can hold a coherent form of life in us. So inside and outside become more coherent. And when they're more coherent, we call that intimate. So we don't feel separate from the world, but we feel the interdependence. And wherever trauma happens, the bridge from inside to outside. Like how I process internal data and how I process data that my senses bring from the external world, from the outside, my environment, the room, you. So when you arise in me more coherently and my inner space is open and relaxed, as you said, the world feels intimate and not separate. And where trauma resides, it's disorganized. It feels more separate, distant, fragmented, polarized. And we see a lot of this right now in the world and also in the collective body. And I think. Think I would definitely underline what you just said. Is that if I have a practice that helps me to first reconnect. And maybe at the end of our.

Conversation, we can also do such a.

Practice that I learn to connect through my breath to my body, to my physical body. And I notice just the areas that feel safe and warm and open. And where I really rest in myself right now. Even if at the beginning, these are just my palms or my pelvis or my legs or whatever it is. It doesn't. Often it's not immediately the whole body. But from there we can slowly expand. And create a more coherent experience of our inner body flow. And I think the more I practice, this definitely adds to the coherence or flow state that you said. Because I can feel wow. When I pay attention, my whole body is streaming. My whole body is full of energy. It's flowing.

It's.

So I feel the flow. And I would even say I feel the flow of my soul. Like as if this, the movement of our soul, is a river. And when you are open, then the river is not just outside. The river flows through us. And like this, we are more intuitive. We are more connected to other people. We have more access to instant knowing. We suddenly know things either in conversations. We have a kind of a sense that goes beyond the learned knowledge that my brain holds. And we are more tapped into the collective space. We are more synchronized with the synchronicities that happen in the society between people. So everything becomes more synchronized. And because of that, life feels much more as a flow. Like a flow, as you said. And that's beautiful. So there is this higher organizing principle that the more I feel, that I feel like how life is flowing through me and through us. And I Also feel more where it doesn't, where it's stuck. I feel more the stagnations. And I think that's for everybody who works with people or groups. Amazing. Because our body tells us a lot about other people's bodies. We can feel a lot more than we've learned in school about each other because our nervous systems are so sensitive. I think many of the people that practiced long time meditation, or many people that wrote about their experiences as in caves and in monasteries, showed that their nervous systems can do stuff that is potentially in all of us. But we often don't turn on those functions because we don't have the manual how to use the nervous system functions correctly. And so all the work on the Kundalini stream and the chakras and the, you know, higher states of consciousness, all of this makes a lot of sense when we explore in a healing work. And so yes, I think the practice is important. I would just add it. I can practice and open up the parts of me and I can refine the parts of me that are where I already have access, where I am completely disembodied, the parts of me that I am not aware of, I need some kind of. Either they pop up in meditation, they pop open, or I am willing to see myself more clearly through community because other people will reflect back to me the parts that I can see in myself. That's why communal healing is so powerful. Powerful because even if not every mirror is fully clear, but somehow through other people, I can see the parts that I can see myself. And so I would say the contemplative practice is one pillar. And I think the communal and relational part is another pillar. If I want to awaken my inner world, I think both together are very powerful.

Absolutely. And I want to explore this relational and collective dimension of healing with you more and then allow time for you to lead us in a practice for sure. So as you were describing, and I.

Love the image of the river for that flow.

Dr. Dan Siegel often talks about the optimal kind of organization of our nervous system and brain is like a river that flows between these shores of chaos on one side and rigidity on the other. When things become dysregulated, but when we're in this optimal flow. And I also, you were referencing earlier this experience when you're talking about parenting a child or being with your child, your own daughter, if she's expressing, she's feeling fear, that experience of feeling felt, giving that to another, receiving that for another. Often we talk about the need to be seen and that's a valid thing. We want to be seen and acknowledged, but also feeling felt. And again, Dr. Siegel talks about that as the kind of essence of the therapeutic relationship is giving someone else the experience of feeling felt, actually giving their nervous system the feeling of feeling felt. So you were describing this kind of vertical pole that we can all do a lot of work around, our inner work of healing and greater access to flow. And then of course there's the lateral dimension and they're integrated. And a lot of our healing work can happen within that lateral dimension as well, because there's a flow that goes that way as well. And we know from current neuroscience that the neural architecture that's involved in developing greater access to flow within ourselves, greater interoceptive awareness and flow is also involved in our ability to connect with others, to have our social engagement systems online and to be in that, that energy matrix that can then provide further landscape for healing and regulation and so forth. So I wonder if you could talk about sort of co regulation and collective healing work as an extension of our practice and as an extension of our work and some of the opportunities to do that, you know, with others in our relationships and partnership, but then also even in community settings and collective settings, which I know is a big part of your work.

I wanted to say one thing about the feeling seen and I think that connects to feeling felt because I think one of the parental pillars, like the function of a parent, is to witness and like in a felt way, to witness the child's new developments. When I say, oh wow, I see you can do this, in a way I confirm your or the child's existence. More so when the child develops a new function and it's being witnessed by the parents and felt by the parents, consciously it makes it stronger. So the witnessing is an inherent function that brings us into existence. But if we didn't have that on the other side enough only partly in our life as children, then often we walk through life and we constantly want to be seen or need to be seen. It's not only want to, we need to be seen to confirm parts of us into existence like that they exist. So that function, I think is an important aspect of healing. As you said, it's the therapeutic relationship is based on feeling felt and also being seen. But being seen is being seen in our specificity, not in a general sense in who we really are, in our intelligence. And I think that strengthens the voice of the child that becomes a grown up. And as a grownup I have more orientation. I know my Purpose. I know my creativity and I'm not unconsc always asking for the confirmation of my existence that I didn't get. But as a grownup, even when I didn't get it, I still need it. And so exposing oneself to a group context or a collective context that is safe and relatively safe and it has the capacity, you know, to really. That we witness each other is very helpful. And I see this often. We are very large groups where we go through this collective healing work. We do individual, ancestral and collective healing work in these groups. And the feeling felt when we induce more and more feeling felt in small groups, like in triads, in bigger groups, in the whole group. It's amazing because it unleashes such a tremendous healing power. If hundreds of nervous systems witness a person speaking, or we witness a group process, a collective, collective process emerge in the group through us, and we can hold the space for that that has such a healing power. And not to forget, I mean, if you look into, like, if you look at many countries and into the unconscious of many cultural spaces, you talked about Latin America, Europe with World War II, or the Holocaust, or slavery and racism, or the Native American genocide in the US there's so many very painful events and many others around the world world that there's a lot of energy stored in kind of a lake, an invisible lake underneath our cultural awareness that has a lot of design capacity, that designs our culture, but without us knowing. And so to say, yes, individual healing work is important. But for example, I needed to do some work. My both grandparents were in Vienna, went through the Second World War. You know, they had their trauma and their wounds from the Second World War or from their parents from the First World War. So there's a whole archeology of trauma that also resonated in my body. And I needed to do a lot of work also on the ancestral dimension and then on the collective dimension. So that that my nervous system, my individual, my ancestral and my collective nervous system can be more open to walk through this trauma fields with groups and provide a holding space. That's something we need to work on because that's not just given usually, but there's a tremendous support when we as groups work together for the individual and the individual supports again other individuals. And if we develop that space, well, I think this is the healing. And I'm sure you had similar experiences with your own groups. I know you went often to Auschwitz and did other retreats and groups that when we come together as groups, even very difficult trauma fields are places where we can learn a lot, integrate a lot, grow a lot and be together. And that togetherness unfolds a lot of healing power. So I think in the west we are often too stuck on one on one context, which I think is important, no doubt. But I think one on one work within those group spaces that are working all the time, I think is way more powerful and is way faster because the collective supports the individual work. So I'm a big fan of combining what also the wisdom traditions teach us over thousands of years, that we come together in communities, we come together in rituals, and I think with the modern science and the one on one work that we developed over many hundred years. I think this combination is very powerful.

Absolutely.

And it's certainly been the case. I, I, before the pandemic, I was just involved in that kind of work all the time around the world. And I kind of miss that.

I still, since we kind of got.

Out of the panic, been going to Auschwitz again every year. Most of my work is online, but I miss that in person work and I'm grateful to go at Auschwitz every year. And we do the circle work and the council work, both small circles and big circles and dyadic work and triadic work. It's so powerful. One last question and then I would like to ask you to lead us in a practice, you know, as individuals dealing with whatever we're dealing with. And I hopefully we would have be able to benefit from ideal settings and be able to do retreats and have good therapeutic relationships and do our healing work and so forth. But in the world, in terms of what we can actually work on ourselves, I wonder if you agree that there's, in terms of the attunement work, we do our own healing work individually, we're tuning into that deeper level of ourselves and really ultimately we can be kind of tuning into source, if you will. When you were talking about feeling seen and being felt, I was thinking we could have a whole nother another conversation about the quantum level of this from a quantum perspective, as we call each other into existence, as we confirm, you know, the feeling. That could be very interesting conversation. But there is a level of source that we can tune into that is profoundly healing. But also in the collective world, even with all the problems in the world, there's still within all that field, there's source, there's, it's a manifestation out of source. If we can kind of train ourselves to be more attuned to source within and source forth in the relational field, this can be a continual source of energy and healing and inspiration and so forth to kind of attune ourselves to being able to experience Source even in the midst of chaos or even in the midst of all these situations. It's all somehow still a manifestation of source at some level. And I'm curious about your thoughts about that. And then I would like you to lead us in a practice.

Right. I think if our regular practice gives us more and more energy, more and more access to that energy, to source energy or a stick words, mutual friend like calls it the self energy or. There are different people describe it in different ways, but there is a deeper, more transpersonal aspect to us that we can be dialed into. And that's a great resource. That's a great. That's also in its simplicity, supra intelligent because it looks like in that more quiet connected state there is nothing. But in that nothing there is a lot of intelligence. Like there's supreme intelligence. So it. And I think we got so trained especially in the west to be focused on forms that we forgot in which all these forms arise in. It's like you read a book and you forget that you're always looking at paper because you're hypnotized by the letters and the words and the meaning. And so I think what you are referring to is very important. That's why I think the combination of integration work or healing work and, and contemplative work is so important. And especially now when we see the world's. The world's more volatile. To feel more grounded first in our bodies but then also grounded in the deeper sourcing energy from deeper within I think is very, very important. And it also that energy feels more like anchored because when we say centered, we are not centered in a place. We are centered in trouble flow. Be centered means we are immersed in the river. We don't feel the pressure of pushing the river or slowing it down. So you're. If you're in the river, you're in a. The Wu Wei state in the. In the Dao De Ching is when we are exactly with the flow of life. But that also feels the most centering. So centered is not the place, but it's actually an immersion in the movement. It feels deeply peaceful. And that's. I think now there's a navigation system. There's a kind of a deeper knowing that is not anymore sourced by my past, but it's actually like a knowing out of the present moment and that is that inner GPS I think is something that can. Is really helpful in times like this when it seems like There's a lot of volatility and there's a lot of chaotic movement in the world or even threatening movement. That there's a deeper place in us. And then when we get scared, the cup is bigger. That can host the fear. Because when the cup is small, the fear is big. So when somebody says it's so big and overwhelming, it means that the cup is small. What usually people say is that they feel very young and regressive when the fear comes up. That's why I say the fear is so big, because I am very small. Small, meaning young. And then if I can open up first into my mature perspective and then even more so into that transpersonal space, I think that's deeply resourcing. And that's also where wisdom comes from. Because where do we turn to in crisis times? We are looking for wisdom. We are looking for the depth. We are looking for elders. We are looking for. And what is elderhood? Elderhood is that we see that certain people didn't just get older, they really took on the challenges in their life and also became wiser. And, you know, we can also be young and wise. But that elderhood, whatever. Is elderhood, an accumulation, Wisdom is usually less disturbed by the current noise and is most able to speak from a deeper place that is more timeless. And that timelessness is relevant in. At every time in human history. I think that's also why we read wise books or sources of wisdom over thousands of years, because they're not just speaking to the current situation, they speak out of that which creates the current situation. And that's really amazing. And so when we can be tapped into where that wisdom comes from, that's very powerful.

Thomas, if you would. I would love to just keep this conversation going forever. It's so wonderful. We are kind of near the end of our time, so if you would lead us in a practice of some kind of attunement practice, whatever you're inspired to do. Really? Yes.

Yeah, let's do like a grounding practice. Of all the content. We listen now to a lot of.

Content, maybe we can just let it settle into our bodies and connect a.

Bit more to our bodies. And so for everybody who's listening now, we can just. Okay, after you listen to many things, maybe some are close to your experience.

Maybe others not, and you just feel the echo of the conversation in yourself. And whatever inspired you, whatever speaks to your experience or makes you more interested just to listen to that resonance and also with your breath, every time you exhale, mainly with every exhalation, to slow down and prolong your exhalation a little bit, to drop a bit deeper into your physical body and mainly see parts of your body feel open, safe, warm, connected, grounded. Next, exhalation connects you deeper to those places or to that place in your body. Maybe you also feel streaming, pulsing flow sensations there and through the body, sensations you feel through your body, sensations towards the ground. And you just look how close or distant the ground appears or feels. Sometimes the ground's very close in our experience, especially when our body is very open and relaxed. Sometimes we feel a little bit distant from the ground. When there is some stress in our body and the tigray, you want to just notice how it is and not override it. Still feel that's my current relationship to the ground. I soften into that experience.

Then if it's possible to open up deeper and let your breath flow into the ground, feel the ground, the soil, keep it the land that you're on, that's for how you're sitting. And your existence is supported by the ground, by the soil. Every time when we go through some challenges and we integrate, digest and integrate a challenge, we add a little bit of soil in the winter and the old fall and the winter, the leaves drop to the ground through the winter, it becomes soil so that the next inhalation, the next spring can sprout. Exhaling mints digest, integrating with daily life experience to be fresh for the next moment, to arrive, to sprout and then with a couple of deeper breaths, maybe to come back to your heart and slowly through your heart on your screen.

And I think just one word or a few words to I think that.

Meditation, because we're very often very good at and being active, experiencing also taking in data and information, you also need a practice to digest that information, to digest our day, our life, and to turn it into soil so that seasons of our life can stay fresh and active and our nervous system stays refreshed. So that's a great meditation when you feel disturbed or stressed, to come back to the body, to the soil, let the experience resonate and integrate itself so that you can be fresh for the next moment.

It's also a good meditation to do.

It night or in the evening before we go to sleep. It helps us to improve our sleep, digest the stress before we sleep so we can sleep better, recuperate better, recharge our battery better.

Wow, thank you so much, Thomas. And I love the image of the soil and the connection between body and soil and the earth. You know, you referenced Auschwitz. I've been going there every year for a long time with this Bearing witness work. And Bernie Glassman, the founder of retreat, always said Auschwitz itself is the teacher when we go there. There's a wonderful German priest who usually joins a retreat. Father Manfred has been there, I think 25, 30, maybe 30 years he's been as a German priest on loan to the Diocese of Krakow in Poland. And his ministry is being auspic and ministering to the people that come there. And he always encourages us to listen to the soil, to connect with the soil and listen to the soil. And we do that through our body and also literally in the place through our people, you know, listening to the soil. So I love that image of the soil and how we create more soil with our integration work.

Yeah. That's beautiful. Wow. Lovely. Powerful. Especially that place.

Yeah.

Thank you so much. Thomas Huble, thank you so much for being part of our Rewiring Fear and anxiety summit. And it's always just such a blessing to be able to have these conversations with you.

Yeah. Thank you, Fleet. I always enjoy our conversations. We always create such a lovely space together. So thank you very much for having me.

Yeah.

And where can people find out more about your work?

We have multiple sources like Thomas Hubelthomash. UEBL.com is my main website, of course, with also the Academy of Inner Science.

All our training programs and what we do.

And the pocketproject.org is one NGO in Germany that does collective trauma work. And Global Restoration Institute is global restoration.org is our US based NGO where we do more on the government level and.

Diplomatic level, Trauma informed and Collective Trauma informed mediation, conflict resolution work and advisory.

So yeah, these are different resources and our collective trauma Summit every year too.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I really encourage people to check all that out. Again, thank you so much, Thomas.

Thank you.

Be well.

Thank you for joining me on the radical responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing, healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you.

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