Thomas Hübl | Rewiring Fear and Anxiety from the Inside Out - Radical Responsibility Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 it didn't
have that on the other side, enough only partly in
our life as children, then often we walk through life

(00:20):
and we constantly want to be seen or need to
be seen. It's not only one to We need to
be seen 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

(00:42):
in who we really are in our intelligence.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. I'm doctor Fleet Mall
and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of
authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insight from
leading experts to a floor trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology,
and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This

(01:08):
is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change,
helping you find alignment with the person you are always
meant to be. Let's get started. What if transformation isn't
just about thinking differently, but feeling differently. Science shows us

(01:29):
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but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts.
This heart mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience,
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(01:51):
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(02:17):
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I invite you to join us. Clip the link to

(02:37):
learn more and start your journey today. My name is
doctor Fleet Mall, your co host for the session, and
I'm thrilled to be here today with a longtime friend
and colleague Thomas. You will welcome Thomas.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Hello Fleets, good to see her again.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
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 brain, so reshape
our neural architecture to both heal and work with the
fear and anxiety that are part of light. So I'm
wanting to begin with it. You might be able to
share a pivotal moment in your life when you were

(03:10):
experiencing a great deal of fear or anxiety, and how
you work with that, maybe how that in part influenced
the direction of your work altogether.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
That's an interesting question. Fear in my life, I think
one of the more recent or recent ones. I live
since some years in Tel Aviv, and we had multiple
waves of like worse 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 used

(03:41):
to worse situations. So when the first time we had
this like series two weeks of Missilo texts 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 in

(04:04):
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

(04:27):
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

(04:48):
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 or presence,
more relationship to the moment, and also that it helped
me us in my work to work with people that

(05:10):
experience worse situations or the threats of these kind of
situations in a different way. So maybe that's a good example.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
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. So it 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 ways increase your level

(05:40):
of tolerance or your ability to be with or your
actually so in some sense, we could fear 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.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
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 in know work
for thirty thirty five years, and I definitely would sign
what you just said that it's part of life. It's
like we often have those judgments on it at first,
but the more we learn to work with it, it

(06:22):
becomes a fuel and it actually changes and then we say, oh, emotions,
the ways 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.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
So our focus is the relationship between trauma and peer
and anxiety, and then how you know, experiencing peer anxiety
could then be the beginning point of doing the work
to identifying healer trauma and so forth, and so just
both the cusural relationship and then the healing relationship and
so as you will know, trauma often leaves an imprint

(07:00):
on our nervous system. It can be seen as patterns
kind of struck 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 what's
as functions both as individuals and later I think we
can talk about the collective part of this as well,

(07:20):
which is so much what your workers 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.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
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

(07:53):
an intelligent function. Secondly, the overwhelm and the part it
was too much in this moment and 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 a hard disk in our nervous system that
has a lot of data now inside. But that data

(08:13):
is numb. It's like an anesthesia. It's numb, and it's
pushed into 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

(08:34):
it's not palpable, So we can't feel the actual trauma.
We feel the symptoms. And we need to also take
an account that trauma didn't start with us. So there's
our childhood and our development and maybe potential trauma lata
in our life. There is our ancestry, and then there's
the cultural field that we have been born into. All

(08:55):
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

(09:15):
when we and I think that's important because when we
work with the fears or the symptoms that trauma creates
I think a tunement 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

(09:36):
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

(10:00):
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 an adequate way, learn to open ourselves

(10:24):
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

(10:45):
to integrate my fear and that my fear is not
the 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

(11:07):
scientific epigenetic data that shows how we can decrease anxiety
and fear through people. I mean people practice that work
more intensively over a period of time. That's happening. So
definitely there is a way to decrease our anxieties and
fear waves and live more I don't know, fulfilled and

(11:29):
joyful life. So we can do it, and I think
many other people that work in the similar field know
that too.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Wow, there's a lot, there's so much unpacked, So I'd
like to talk a little for a moment. A lot
of your work has focused on this inheritance of trauma
that we all receive culturally and epigenetically ancestrally, even going
way back. I mean, it's part of the human condition
and maybe to normalize us a little bit. I mean,
there's all kinds of traumas that happened that we wish
would never happen to anyone. Child abuse and war situations, force, migration,

(12:00):
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 in survival built
into our very biology. Our nervous system is set up

(12:20):
that way. Even at the cellular level, there's a predominant
survival instinct and they need to survive to not be
attacked or eaten. There's a need to consume to have nutrition,
and there's a drive to procreate, which is how species
perpetuate themselves. So this, all this energy is happening. And
you know, you mentioned as you've been practicing meditation for

(12:41):
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 omo
like this ground level what feels to them liking exact
could be, you know, because we've all been so numbed

(13:03):
out in many ways that it could be to the
back 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

(13:24):
of our work to really integrate, as you were saying,
So I wonder if you could talk about that, 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.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
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, it is still
like this. First of all, this all of this is
a disturbance, and many of the 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

(13:57):
of myself. I'm also not saying my liver is disturbing
me all the time. So, but my livery 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, the
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

(14:19):
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 from my grandmother in
the Second World War. So that we see, oh wow,
that instinctive get rid of is actually not helpful. So

(14:42):
we need to find a way and create First of all,
deep pathologize this and find a way to step by
stay 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 surprise,
rest stress, the suppressed trauma, the suppressed fear, or a

(15:04):
strong panic is being the anestheicized. So the ant just
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

(15:25):
stuff that they can process later and it feels very
overwhelming in life to be in touch with it. So
and then we try off then 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

(15:49):
stuff when it comes up. That deepens my meditation, and
my meditation gives me more presence mindfulness relatedness, so medic
awareness to be more with the stuff that 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

(16:10):
sometimes doesn't happen because it actually it 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

(16:32):
were not, but 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 they
don't be scared. There's nothing dangerous in the house. So
what did I do? I devalued the fear of my daughter,

(16:52):
don't be scared, and I give her an intellectual answer
when she has an emotional request. So that's not coregulative
really for her. That kind of creates the separation between us.
But if I am 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,

(17:12):
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.

(17:35):
And when my nervous system feels her fear in her stress,
her nervous system feels felt. There are two computer processors
and me. If she is young, very young, then my
coregulation teaches her nervous system to internalize regulation. So her
nervous system learns to do that more and more by itself,

(17:57):
and when she is old enough, her nervous system does
the regulation by itself. When she's too young, she cares,
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,
and I come to my parents, it's safe. So the

(18:18):
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 safe myself, do something in order to take care

(18:40):
of the situation. But 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 when I'm afraid, I can regulate, and it teaches

(19:04):
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
of fears or whatever. Often we see the fear is
actually the emotion, but the fear lives in the retraction

(19:27):
or is 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 see, oh, actually,
when I'm afraid, I feel alone. I wasn't even aware
of that, but now that I somebody points that out

(19:50):
to me, I feel, yeah, you are distant when I'm afraid,
and often we projectice then onto the world that the
world is not really caring for us, but that was
our chick that experience. Often and when we bring this
into awareness and we see that fear slowly can come
back into this usseness the we space and I experience again, wow,

(20:14):
you're really listening to me. You are aware that I
am afraid, You feel that I'm 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 when a
perture perspective growth, my body relaxes. So we see often

(20:37):
when that healing happens when energy stream goes down, there's
a relaxation at the escalation of stress and fear, the
person feels more embodied, and there's an upward stream of
energy that amaturation 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

(21:01):
that relational dimension is often not fully seen because people
try to do it within that context, not aware of
that relational context.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
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 and a trauma and
form very embodied way. But first I also want to
just mention you've kind of referenced us a little bit,

(21:33):
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 coregulations, this time distortion. I wonder if
you could talk about.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
That a little bit of NBC presence, Like we could
say presence is when I'm present and you're present, Like now,
when we're 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 and this experience and this moment, life

(22:10):
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

(22:33):
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,

(22:57):
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.

(23:17):
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 a shamed or scared and cannot

(23:40):
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,

(24:06):
into the central channel of our nervous system. So split
off parts come back into the wholeness and integrate themselves
into a macrona perspective, and my grona perspective becomes even
more stable, so I stay more mature, and if people
criticize me, I can inquire. I can't be with them,
I can still feel them. I don't feel like I'm retreating,

(24:27):
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

(24:49):
think that is when present then is not here not
now slowly comes back, we feel more embodied, We inhabit
our body more and again, I I've seen again thousands
of people that only through the process of healing became
aware of how much stuff they were not aware of

(25:10):
even when they wanted to start the healing journey. There
was an issue often but actually behind the curtain, 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.

(25:33):
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 they how come that?
Now this happened or this came up, or if you
have this. Yeah, because if twenty thirty years that stress
is active behind the scenes and we are not aware

(25:56):
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, 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.

(26:16):
The meditation practice is very important. There's 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 even to us staying young

(26:41):
for many years, like staying dynamic and creative and full
of purpose. I think it's really important.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
You're so beautifully describing this capacity we can develop to
increasingly be able to beild ourselves and to allow the
stock patterns to unfreeze and integrate and the table, and
also then to be with others, to be a coregulating
presence with others, whether our children or friends or others,
and or others were called to be with. I just

(27:09):
recently yesterday, returned from Peru, where I have a whole
history with I went there as a young man in
my twenties and ended up marrying a woman from there
and had a son and so forth. I had 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

(27:31):
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's 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 ten days

(27:51):
I've spent in a long time. I'm really grateful for
the practice and my teacher, my first Tivet and teacher
Trunk from SHAE, 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 the present, to not run away. And I'm
so grateful that this very challenging journey of the last

(28:14):
ten 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 though it
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

(28:35):
of things. And fortunately the 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 bodies,
so embodied work can be challenging, but some pathway into

(28:55):
embodied awareness, whether it's sitting practice or movement practice or
different things. But I found over time on if this
resonates with you, that by becoming more embody, erectly having
a physical felt presence of the body we know from
current neuroscience, that activates the task positive network, which then
allows the development network, the busy wandering mind on often

(29:16):
stress causing self sensing part of our brain to go
offline naturally with how to struggle with it, and the
more embody we are, the continuity of that felt presence
begins to create kind of an internal neurofile feedback loop
that where the body mind heart system is learning to
self regulate, learning to regulate itself into a tension stabilization

(29:36):
than in the deeper states of awareness. And then the
access states of flow, which in the Eastern traditions are
called somebody a sort of harmonic coherence and flow within
our nervous system and body and mind spirit such that
our nervous SYSM learns how to get there and can
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

(30:00):
were talking about. When we're able to access that those
flow states. However, we do it to some kind of
embodied practice. In those flow states, our social engagement system
is online. We're for ourselves and with others. So I
want you to talk about that ability to develop embodiment
and access to some kind of harmonic flower ease within

(30:21):
the body then supports that gradual unfreezing and metabolizing of
the trauma. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:26):
Yeah, So first I want to say I'm sorry, and
I hear that your time video from a wife and
those two what just shard about your son, so that
I heard that, I don't want to be I want
to honor what you just said with me and to
your question. So anyway, I think a load of the

(30:46):
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

(31:08):
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 the person says and what the person

(31:29):
transmits is the same. That makes sense. Sometimes we hear
things being said, but that 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 I
more wholeness can be created. So a nervous system that

(31:53):
is more whole can host more of the fragmentation without
polarizing or fragmenting itself. And that's important and that 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

(32:18):
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 then 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

(32:41):
how I process internal data and how I process data
that my senses bring from the external world from the outside,
my environment the rom 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,

(33:02):
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 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,

(33:23):
we can also do such a practice that I learn
to connect through my breath to my body, to my
physical body. And I know this just the areas that
feel safe and warm and open and where I really
rest in myself right now, even if at the beginning
is just my palms or my telvis or my legs

(33:44):
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 well when I pay attention, my whole

(34:05):
body is streaming. My whole body is full of energy,
it's flowing, so I feel the flow. And I would
even say I feel the flow of my soul, like
as if the movement of our soul is a river.
And when you are open and the river is not
just outside, the river flows through us. And like this

(34:25):
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

(34:48):
society between people. So everything becomes more synchronized. And because
of that, life feels much more as it ful like
a flow, as you said, and it'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,

(35:09):
where it stuck, I feel more destagnations. And I think
that's for everybody who works with people 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,

(35:33):
or many people that wrote about their experiences are saying
caves and then monasteries show 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 Condolini stream and

(35:54):
the chakras and the higher states of consciousness, all of
this makes a lot of sense we explore in a
healing work, and so yes, I think the practice is important.
I would just add, 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

(36:16):
I am completely disembodied. The parts of me that I'm
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,

(36:39):
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 the world, I think both together are very powerful.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
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 are describing, and I love the image
of the river for that flow, Doctor 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

(37:26):
the other when things become disregulated. But when we're in
this optimal flow. And also you were referencing earlier this
experience when you were 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.

(37:47):
We want to be seen and knowledge, but also feeling felt.
And again doctor Siegel talks about that is the kind
of essence of the therapeutic relationship is giving someone else
the experience of feeling felt, actually giving their nervous system
feeling and healing. Belt. So you were describing this kind
of vertical poll that we can all do a lot
of work around our inner work of healing and greater

(38:08):
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
introceptive awareness and flow is also involved in our ability

(38:30):
to connect with others, to have our social engagement systems online,
and to be in 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
coregulation and collective healing work as an extension of our
practice and as extension of our work and some of

(38:51):
the opportunities to do that, you know, with others in
our relationships in partnership, but then also even in community settings,
in collective settings, which I know that a big part
of your work.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
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 field way,
to witness the child's new developments. When I say, oh wow,

(39:21):
I see you can do this in a way, I
confirm yoric 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

(39:42):
brings us into existence. But if it 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 one 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.

(40:05):
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,
and who we really are in our intelligence, and I
think that strengthens the voice of the child where it
becomes a grown up. And as a grown up I
have more orientation. I know my purpose. I know my creativity,

(40:30):
and I'm not unconsciously always asking for the confirmation of
my existence that I didn't get. But as a grown up,
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

(40:53):
each other is very helpful. And I see this often.
We are very large groups where we go through this
cold 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 and bigger groups in the whole group,

(41:16):
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 process emerge in
the group through us, and we can hold a space
for that that has such a healing power. And not

(41:36):
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 at
World War Two, or the Holocaust, or slavery and racism,
or the Native American channel side in the US. There's
so many very painful events and many others around the

(41:57):
world that there is 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

(42:20):
to do some work. My both grandparents were in Vienna,
I went through the Second World War. You know, they
had their trauma and their wounds from the Second World
War 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

(42:42):
collective dimension, so that my nervous system, my individual, my
ancestral and my collective nervous system can be more open
to walk through these 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

(43:04):
support when we as groups work together for the individual,
and the individual supports against other individuals, and if you
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,

(43:27):
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

(43:49):
those group spaces that are working all the time, I
think is way more powerful and it's 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

(44:10):
modern science and the one on one work that we
developed over many hundred years, I think this combination is
very powerful.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
Absolutely, It's certainly been the case. 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 Outschwitz again every year. Most of my
work is online, but I miss that in person work.
And I'm grateful to go at Ourswitz every year and
we do the circle work and the console work, both
small circles and big circles, and dietic work and triotic work.

(44:41):
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

(45:02):
agree that there's a 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're talking about feeling seen and being felt, I was
saying we could have a whole nother conversation about the
quantum level of this from a quantum perspective, as we
call each other into existence, as we confirm you know,

(45:24):
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. It's a manifestation
out of source. If we can kind of train ourselves
to be more attuned to source within and source in

(45:45):
the relational field, this can be a continual source of
energy and healing and inspiration and so forth, to kind
of tune 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 man
of the station of source at some level. And there's
why your thoughts about that. And then I would like
you to lead us in a practice.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
Right I think if our regular practice gives us more
and more energy, more and more access to that energy
to source energy or stick Schwortz mutual friend like calls
it self energy or there are different people describe it
in different ways, but there is a deeper, more trans
personal aspect to us that we can be dialed into.

(46:30):
And that's a great resource. That's a great that's also
in its simplicity, super 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 get so trained,

(46:54):
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

(47:15):
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

(47:38):
not centered in a place, feel centered in 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 if you're in the river, you're in the wu
waste state in the in the dowd jing is when
we are exactly with the flow of life. But that

(47:59):
also feels the most center ring. So center is not
a 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 any more sourced by my past, but
it's actually like a knowing out of the present moment,

(48:20):
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 is a deeper place in us.
And then when we get scared, the cup is bigger

(48:40):
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.
But usually people say, is that they feel very young
and regressive when the fear comes up. That's where I
say the fear is so big because I am very small,
small meaning young. And then if I can open up
up first into my mature perspective and then even more

(49:02):
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 depths, 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,

(49:24):
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 and
accumulation of wisdom, is usually less disturbed by the current noise,
and it's more stable to speak from a deeper place.
There is more timeless and the timelessness is relevant at

(49:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
So much 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.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
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 a body. 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

(50:47):
echo the conversation and yourself and whatever inspired you, whatever
speaks to your experience or makes you more interested, just
to listen to the resonance. And also with your breath,
every time you exhale, mainly with every exhalations is down

(51:09):
and prolong your exhalation a little bit to drop a
bit deeper into your physical body and mainly parts of
your body feel open, safe, warm, necktat ground. That next
exhalation connects you deeper to those places or to that
place and your body. Maybe you also feel streaming, pulsing

(51:32):
flow sensations there through the body, sensations you feel through
your body sensations towards the ground. You just look how
close we're distant, appears or feels. Sometimes the ground's very
close in our experience, especially even our body is very

(51:53):
open and relaxed. Sometimes we feel a little bit distant
from the ground and there's some res in our body,
and it's equally fine. You want to just notice how
it is and not overrided. Still feel that's my current
relationship to the ground and soften into that experience. Then

(52:14):
if it's possible to open up, deep burn, let your
breath flow into the ground. Feel the ground, the soil
a little bit, the land that you're on as how
you're sitting and your existence is supported by the ground.
When the soil and retirement, we go through some challenges

(52:34):
and we integrate, digest and integrate the challenge. We add
a little bit of soil in the winter and the
odd fall and the winter, the leaves struck to the
ground through the winter had become a soil so that
the next inhalation, the next spring can sprout. Exhaling meants digesting,

(52:56):
integrating a daily life experience 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 and a sunny as screen. And
I think just one word are a few words to

(53:18):
I think that meditation because we're very often very good
in being active, experiencing also taking in data and information,
they also need a practice to digest the information, to
digest our day, our life, and to turn it into
soil so that the seasons of our life can stay

(53:38):
fresh and active and now 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 or the next moment. It's also good meditation

(53:59):
to do which night or in the evening before we
go to sleep. It helps us to improve our sleep.
That's just distress before we sleep, so we can sleep better,
recuperate better, we chart job better, eate better.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Well, 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 reference the Auschwitz.
I've been going there every year for a long time
with this bring witness work, and Bernie Glassman, the founder
of retreat, always said Auschwitz itself is a teacher when
we go there, and there's a wonderful German priest who

(54:35):
usually joins our retreat. Father Manford has been there I
think twenty five thirty maybe thirty years. He's been as
a German priest on loan to the Diocese of Krakau
and Poland, and his ministry is being at Outswitz administering
to the people that come there, and he always encourages
us to listen to the soil, to connect with the

(54:55):
soil and listen to the soil, and we do that
to our body and also literally in the place h RP.
But yeah, listening to the soil. So I love that
image of the soil and how we create more soil
with our integration work.

Speaker 1 (55:08):
Yeah. That's beautiful, wow, lovely powerful, especially that place.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Yeah, thank you so much, Thomas Subell, Thank you so
much for being part of our rewiring period anxiety summit,
and that's always just such a blessing to be able
to have these conversations with you.

Speaker 1 (55:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
Yeah, and where can people find out more about your work?

Speaker 1 (55:33):
We have multiple sources like Thomas Ubel. Thomas Hubl dot
com is my main website of course with the Academy
of in Science or our training programs and what we do.
And the pocket project of the work is one NGO
in Germany that does collective trauma work and Global Restoration Institute.

(55:55):
There's Global Restoration to the work is our US based
NGO where we do more on the government level and
diplomatic level trauma informed on collective trauma informed mediation, conflict
resolution work and advisory. So yeah, these are different resources
and our collective traumas on me every year.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
Two absolutely, yeah, and I really encourage people to check
all that out again, Thank you so much, Thomas.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
In care do well.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
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 and personal empowerment.
Stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to you. Take care,

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Thomas Hübl | Rewiring Fear and Anxiety from the Inside Out

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Thomas Hübl | Rewiring Fear and Anxiety from the Inside Out