CIIS Public Programs Podcast

 TRANSCRIPT

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Thomas Hübl is a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator who works within the complexity of systems and cultural change. In his most recent book, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma, Thomas examines how our world’s profoundly complex challenges demand a new level of human collaboration.

In this episode, Thomas is joined by CIIS faculty Drew Dellinger for an empowering conversation on healing our world through understanding our interconnectedness and healing our individual, ancestral, and cultural trauma.

This episode was recorded during a live online event on February 29th, 2024. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Drew Dellinger: Thomas, how's it going? Good to see you.

Thomas Hübl: Good to see you, Drew. I'm happy to be here with you, Drew.

Drew Dellinger: Absolutely. Absolutely. This is a thrill. So, you know, the topic today is healing and collective trauma and interdependence. And you know, I've had a great time reading your book here, Attuned, Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma and Our World. There's a lot of great ideas and wisdom in this book. And you know, one of the things I appreciated most about it is that it's ambitious and it's a work of synthesis and you're bringing a lot of streams together and a lot of, you know, your deep commitment and your study and your kind of commitment to self-cultivation and to thinking deeply about our world is, you know, apparent in every page of this book. And again, I say it's a work of synthesis. And one of the things I appreciate is how it integrates the mystical and the scientific. It integrates the personal and the collective, the cosmological and the humanitarian, the therapeutic and the visionary. And it does so in a way that's wise, that's compassionate, that's kind of commonsensical. I mean, I think it's very deep and erudite, but it's also, you know, kind of a commonsense kind of wisdom that we can feel in our bones. And I think it's ultimately very hopeful, but it's not the kind of cheap or easy hope that comes from  remaining in denial about our problems. It's the kind of deeper hope that we get when we confront the challenges head on and with courage and compassion for ourselves and others. And so I think it's hopeful in that earned sense. It's hopeful in that deepest sense of taking a real mature, clear-eyed look at the significant challenges and crises of our time. So I think it's a really important book. I've got just some quick questions kind of before we dive, delve really deeply into the content of the book, some kind of shorter warm-up questions. You can answer these briefly or you can go into as much depth as you like. But first, why did you feel moved to write the book?

Thomas Hübl: First of all, thank you for that concise and precise reflection on the book. That's very beautiful, you said. Lovely, lovely. Yeah, but after writing Healing Collective Trauma, I felt, first of all, I want to speak more about something that I practiced for a very long time, like three decades almost, like is that attunement process, like how in the healing work and the healing of trauma, it needs a lot of attunement. And actually, attunement is such a powerful aspect of any kind of trauma healing work. So I wanted to write that, and then I wanted to speak more about the whole spectrum of individual, ancestral, and collective trauma, and how the method that we developed over this period of time in different places around the world is actually like synthesizing the parts of us that need to heal in our individual self, but that there is ancestral and collective. It's not separate, but it's a kind of a spectrum. It's a kind of fluidity. And so I thought it would be great to combine this and write the next book. So that's what I did.

Drew Dellinger: Fantastic. And what's your intention or goal for the book? What impact or influence do you hope it'll have eventually? And it's been out for a little bit, so I imagine it's already having some significant impact. But what's your kind of intention and goal? What's your ultimate ideal for what would be the impact and the influence of the book?

Thomas Hübl: Yeah, one is that everybody who is a facilitator, therapist, coach, everybody who works with clients, we all have to walk our talk. All the intellectual concepts and understanding are great, but what really transforms is how we embody what we teach or the spaces we provide for other people to facilitate healing in this presence, in this mutual presence. And also that deep relational quality is really like a deep art. Attunement is a deep art, and I think it needs a lot of practice to be committed also to expand my own, let's say, conscious universe. And if I'm committed to that process, life will always show me new edges. And if I'm courageous to go there, as you said, it's not a cheap hope. That's beautiful. You said it's like an earned hope. And I'm very much with that individually, but also collectively, how as collectives we can do this work. And I am fascinated by that process.

Drew Dellinger: And I want to get into, there's lots of great ideas and juicy terms and terminology in the book. There's three terms in particular that I want to kind of delve into so that we can all be on the same page. And those terms are attunement, transparent communication, and collective trauma. There's also collective absenting, which I'm interested as well. But let's kind of take these one at a time. But before we do that, I'm intrigued by something, what you just said, and you touched on it, but I would like to probe a little bit deeper when you say that therapists, facilitators need to walk their talk. And you mentioned embodiment, and you mentioned kind of being open to seeing what emerges, but I'd love to kind of delve into that. What does it mean? What does it look like? What are some examples? What does it mean for a facilitator or a therapist to walk their talk?

Thomas Hübl: Yeah, first of all, I see healing as the process where the word, what we say, and what we live, and what we do becomes congruent, the same thing. Not two. Where we are hurt or traumatized, often what we say and what we do are two. But actually the healing process unifies a flow in the nervous system, a flow in the body, a flow between the individual, the ancestors, and the collective, or spirits, and all of the before. So that's one thing. The other thing is that as a facilitator, I need my nervous system to be fluid and open enough that I can tune in with different layers of my clients or my group's developmental levels. So that when somebody got hurt at age two, that it's not only that I can talk with my client about what happened at that time, but my nervous system is actually able to match that level of my client's nervous system and meet it directly on a biological level, the attunement level, the interception. And there it creates the safety that's needed to let the nervous system or the body or the emotions detox the content that we could never process. So in a way, I'm often saying like healing is that we become the right environment that our clients never had, or that a collective, a group becomes the environment that the collective never had in order to heal and to detox either the trauma or the transgressions of the past for us to grow as collectives. And I think the invocation with the native land just before is a very important aspect of what do we need to become as collectives for us to become a healing process or an integration process on a bigger scale. And so I think that that fluidity needs me every time there's a client interaction, every time there is a personal, any kind of difficulty or friction, it needs my own introspection so that I actually, I walk the transformation that I teach. And I think when we do that consistently, we continuously expand and grow and everybody we work with will benefit from our growth. That's a little, I mean, there's so much more to say to the, but it's a kind of a concentrated answer.

Drew Dellinger: Yeah, that's fantastic. We're going to circle around, you know, back to these ideas several times. So let's just jump right into the term attunement, but it's obviously important in this book as the book is called Attuned. So what do you mean by this term attunement? You've touched on it, but I'd love to hear a little bit more.

Thomas Hübl: Yeah. So I often say the basic building block of relating is I feel you and I feel how you feel me. When we are in that mutual or even one-sided as met attunement with my nervous system is synchronizing with your nervous system and that induces a better data flow. It's like a good internet connection makes this transmission fluid. If the internet connection is disturbed or cut, so we don't have any transmission now. So our conversation won't go out. Even if you have a great time, it doesn't transmit into the world. And so when we, whatever we carry inside, if it cannot be related to the world around us, people, environments, whatever, so the data connection is kind of shaky or broken. And so we pay a lot of attention how attunement can first be trained, can be professionalized and can actually become a powerful tool of the craft or the art of healing. And that when we feel felt, we know that neuroscientifically we feel safer. So in order to create a safe relationship to start with, with an individual in an organization as a leader, but also as in the collective in groups, we need that sensing or that I feel you feeling me and that attention, a nervous system's attention can be felt and we create a bigger space together. And often we see when we talk about wounds or trauma, the relationship cannot be, we can stay in that, usually in that kind of attuned process. So that indicates that something needs to be looked at instead of saying, oh, something is wrong. I should be all the time related. No, there's something we need to bring into our awareness and then we relate slowly as we detox past material. And I think providing the detuned space and then to go deeper into when we professionalize this with professionals, with therapists or so. So then we train that much deeper. So there's an application as I write in the book, the first part of the book is for all of us. And the second part of the book is more directed towards professionals so that we can refine that if you need to apply this every day in our work stream.

Drew Dellinger: Fantastic. It reminds me of the guys who develop neuro-linguistic programming, and one of the ways that they kind of created this system was by watching master therapists, watching brilliant therapists, like Virginia Satir and kind of breaking down what they were doing and seeing how they matched, how they develop rapport with their clients and used the sensory channels. If the person was saying, I feel like this, they wouldn't say, I hear you or I see what you mean. They would use that kind of feeling language. You see what I'm saying? The language we use, how we hold our body, the rate at which we breathe, all of these are seen as ways of establishing rapport. But it seems like the attunement that you're talking about is deeper than that, is more spiritual in a certain sense or more, how would you speak to that distinction? Because I feel like you're talking about some of those things, some of those kind of basics of establishing rapport, but you're talking about something a little bit deeper as well. Is that right?

Thomas Hübl: Exactly. Beautifully said. Yes, I would completely agree. It's there are similar elements, of course. And there is, like for example, when you imagine you hold a baby on your arm and when you feel the baby, you can feel the space, the time, space, rhythm of your own nervous system changes. And when you speak, you modulate your voice. So there's time, space, rhythm, a different modulation, a different pulsation. And you don't lose your grownup perspective.You're still a grownup, a parent, but your nervous system knows exactly how to attune to the baby, except that age level in your own nervous system is hurt. Then it will be harder to attune. And then we are a bit more insecure. We don't fully know. We don't fully feel. And we over-mentalize parenting. But my nervous system for hundreds of thousands of years, our nervous system knows how to attune as a parent. And so we take that process and then we say, okay, how to apply that with our clients. And then we pay attention to very fine, subtle, as you said, it's a bit more spiritual, very fine, subtle information that's being transmitted moment to moment to moment. When we pay attention and when we by ourselves rest in an open, spacious, present state, then there's actually a lot everybody transmits when we speak or even when we don't speak. And that information is key, I believe, for healing. And then we look at, and that's why I put this also in the context of a traumatized world, collective trauma, which we might speak a bit later about, that I believe my body completely knows the language of your body. Not only mine, our bodies. They know body-ish. They know a language. And emotional language, my emotional system picks up on your emotions naturally. I can ask my client, oh, why, what are you feeling right now as an intervention to trigger like self-perception? But it's not because I don't know. If I don't know, then I have to look at it. How come that my emotional system doesn't pick up on what's happening? So that we need to ask each other what we feel, I believe, is already part of a collective symptom that we are so used to that some of the data doesn't transmit. And so we feel more separate. And transcending that separation into, that's why I called it interdependence, that we are actually much more connected, but sometimes we don't feel that connected. We feel more separate. But there's amazing data flow. And so attunement is to be able to tap into that data flow and to increase our capacity to perceive. And I think that's an amazing territory and can be refined. I think our whole life long.

Drew Dellinger: Yeah. It's just such a powerful experience to think about that kind of rapport, that kind of attunement. And I'm thinking you're talking about it in a therapeutic setting and an interpersonal communication setting. But my mind is also going to the energetic loop between a speaker and the audience, between a performer and the audience, between, I've been doing a lot of research on Martin Luther King in recent years. And in the Black church tradition, there's very much this energetic exchange between the preacher and the audience. And so the audience is energizing the preacher. The preacher is exacerbating the audience. And they're in this kind of dynamic exchange of energy, which is a fundamental concept in African worldview and spirituality and ritual is the call response and the energetic interconnectedness of all the participants. Let's talk a little bit about this term, transparent communication, and then we'll dig more into trauma and interdependence. But what does transparent communication mean?

Thomas Hübl: Yeah. First of all, just back to what you just said, I love what you just said. And I think exactly when we stand in front of an audience and our perception is open, then whatever we talk about has a very different data transmission than when we are a bit scared to speak and we disown our fear. So as long as I can stay vulnerable and open, so I can include my fear. But if I disown it and I kind of put a defense in place, then that becomes a barrier. And everything I say gets a spin through that barrier, and then it creates an effect in the audience. And that's a beautiful way to transcribe it. And that transparent communication is basically built on that. That communication means that I feel myself, obviously, that I have a good experience of my interior experience. So what's going on in me right now. And what's going on between us in the space between us. Is that an open space? Is that a bit more distant space? What happens in the space between us? There's not just air. There's a lot of data. And then that I'm attuned to what's happening for you and also how the communication lands. How your words land in me, how my words land in you, and how we create the loop, kind of an electricity circuit of flow of data. And the deeper that goes, the more inspiring, the deeper, the more intimate, all the levels our conversation will become. And the more distant that is, so it lowers in a way the capacity of innovation, intimacy, understanding. It brings out more conflicts up to, we know, we see it in the world, to all kinds of war situations. And the communication has such a gap that we don't hear each other. It's like there's a storm between us. And so transparent communication is a training where we say, you know, there are many people that sit in caves or monasteries, or some people at least, and that's their spiritual practice and that's amazing. But not most of the people that listen to us now are not sitting in a cave in the Tibetan, I don't know, Himalayan mountains. And so it means if I want to make relationship and relating and being in society and being societally impactful, then relationship can actually become an amazing medium for contemplation and meditation. So it's kind of a constant mindfulness practice. And like that, I think we simply improve the way we live with each other if we make that a practice. And it doesn't mean that it's always easy, and it's not supposed to be always easy. It doesn't mean it should be easy. It's a commitment to a practice, to a mindfulness practice. And transparent communication has lots of exercises and has a lot of practices how to turn our day into a contemplative practice, so to speak, and harvest the fruits over time that that gives us.

Drew Dellinger: Great. Let's delve into this subject that's so central to your work, the subject of trauma. And let me just read a couple of things here. The first sentence of the book is, “we live in stark times.” We live in stark times. And on the first page, you go through a litany of the social, personal, economic, political, ecological crises, one of which you list as mounting political authoritarianism, which is something I'm very concerned about here in the United States, particularly, but also in other places. And then you kind of summarize this litany of all these challenges we face, economic, political, ecological, social, personal, with the sentence, “traumatized persons haunt traumatized landscapes.” The word for that is stark, too. Like you said in the first sentence of the book, we live in stark times. But I think that's such a powerful and stark and poignant and compelling image of traumatized persons haunting traumatized landscapes. And there's one other thing I wanted to mention. So say a little bit about this idea of trauma and collective trauma. How would you frame that for our listeners here today?

Thomas Hübl: Yeah, to keep it short and succinct. So we could say trauma as the response to overwhelming situations that we cannot process in the moment that they happen, lead to like an internal fragmentation. So the nervous system knows how to, when there's extreme overload or stress, how to shut down a part of that stress to survive better. So in that moment, we create two. There's a lot of stress. There's some numbing or absenting going on. There's a fragmentation. From that moment, what I will call the question and the answer gets split. So we become a walking question. There's a topic in our life that we can't resolve easily. And it's, should I do this? Should I do that? Is that right? Is that right? How, like there is a question and it's, of course it's an unconscious question, but there's a question in our life. And so, and the second way to speak about trauma that's very important is in the traumatic moment, life says, here in space and time, it's not good for me. I think that's very important. Here in space and time, it's not good for me. A child that gets abused, somebody that experienced violence or racism or like here, it's very difficult. So not being here and not being now is actually intelligent. And there's a lot of quest for presence, also in many spiritual traditions. But I think without understanding that trauma says intelligently so, here it's not good for me. So splitting space-time, space and time is intelligent. And to learn how to work with that intelligence and not to see that as an enemy is key. I believe every defense mechanism of every human being is an intelligent function that was better than without it. And once I understand that, I see, well, everything that happens in our internal process is not either a strength or a weakness. Everything is intelligence. We just need to learn to listen to it and make that intelligence our friend. And when we go deeper, we could say, okay, that's individually so, but there is our ancestors and our intergenerational transmission of trauma has an effect on us. It's not just the past. It's something that lives in me. It lives in my cells, in my epigenetics. It lives in the way how I experience my emotions, how I experience my body, how I'm thinking about life. And in the collective, it's the same that we all have been born into a world that was already traumatized to a certain extent when we came in. Every one of us came into a world that was partly integrated and partly hurt. And so we grew up in trauma symptoms as life. This is life. So we normalized part of those symptoms as, oh, that's how it is. Politicians talk like this. Parents talk like this. Teachers talk like this or live like this or behave like that. And so detoxing our own experience and say, wow, when somebody is hurt and walks around with a big wound, we need to say, listen, you can walk around with that big wound. That's your free choice. But all the life-threatening inflammations, we need to say, listen, this is a wound. And then you can get treatment. So when the normalized aspect of trauma that is so normal to us because it conditioned me or conditioned us, once we say, oh, no, that part of our society, this is a result, these are repetitive patterns that are non-emergent, they are disrelated, they keep repeating, we are doing the same thing over and over again. We are having the same conversations over and over again. Instead of having it another time, let's stop for a moment and say, we heard that already 20 times and nothing changed. So why do we try again? So let's make some space and say, what's actually happening here? So there are other parts of life that keep updating themselves. And we all know this in ourselves. There are parts of us that are growing all the time. It feels fresh, new. I have new ideas. I'm innovative. I'm creative. I'm related. It's warm. It's open. And seeing that collective trauma is a societal design factor. It designs part of our societies. It designs part of our organizations. It designs part of the way we live together in states, in communities, globally. And as long as we don't see that design factor more and more and more, because we are collectively aligned to it in certain ways, and that's not good or bad. That's just, I think, what it means to be born in this life. And Segi Jung spoke about the collective unconscious. We are not aware of certain aspects. That's why we keep repeating them. And so I think if we first, before we say, okay, what should I do with that? We kill the question with an attempt to answer it before we even gave birth to the question fully. And so we need the question, we need to sit with that question so that it can come more into our vision. And then we will find ways how to deal with it. And of course, we have already some of it, but we need more collective awareness building. And I think the systemic level of trauma creates so many normalized symptoms in our societies that we really need a different approach to change certain pain points that we have. I think including climate change and many other big issues, recurrent wars, as we can see right now.

Drew Dellinger: Yeah. That's just so powerful and important, and I want to keep going a little bit more on this concept of collective trauma. You've done events around the world, and in the last decade, you've been focused on, quote, processing the mass traumatization brought about by racism, oppression, colonialism, genocide, gender violence, the climate crisis, and other historic and contemporary challenges. I'm fascinated by this because some of my interests have been looking at oppression, looking at social movements, looking at liberation movements, looking at issues of white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, human centeredness. And so I'm totally intrigued and curious about what this work looks like, what this process looks like, what some of these events look like. How are you dealing with mass traumatization, processing this mass traumatization brought about by racism, oppression, colonialism, et cetera?

Thomas Hübl: Yeah. There are multiple layers. There's our way of living, obviously, like how we as individuals are aware of these topics, how we as individuals raise our awareness by ourself through our self motivation. I want to learn about this. I want to explain. Once I get to see, wow, yes, that's happening, so what can I learn, of course? And how can I not only learn it also intellectually, but also as a human being in my embodied way of living? And so there's a self exploration and there's also like a social impact process of the individual. But then when we do this, what I call in my first book, the CTIP, the collective trauma integration process, when we come together, and often we have very large groups, as you just said, we come together and we create like a safe space with each other, like a resource relational safe space. Usually we have big therapist teams with us. And then when we come together and we relate with each other, we actually creating a vessel, like a cup. We are creating a vessel. When that vessel is safe enough and strong enough, the nervous systems in the room start to detox material by themselves. Because our body wants to heal, our body knows that holding the trauma inside has a high cost. It's an intelligent process to protect myself, but if it stays chronic and if I walk around decades with the trauma, I spend a lot of my energy on keeping it that way. And it creates some symptoms in my life. So in the moment it feels safe enough, we detox trauma together. And so what I've seen is when we have this relational field, it's almost like a magic pond where information starts to surface that is part of this collective field. It doesn't matter if we do it in Germany, if we do it in Argentina, if we do it in the US, in China, everywhere, there's a different collective information. And so a mix between personal and collective information starts to arise. And so as that starts to happen, we facilitate the process so that we can step by step integrate what comes up. And what we integrate creates more soil, creates a bigger cup. And we have a safer cup, more information comes up. And we integrate that. So as we go through waves of that process, until we feel, okay, that's what we can do in this collective field in the given time and in the given competencies in the room, but there is some kind of clearing mechanism happening for the individual. And we surface material from that collective field. And that creates a lot of learning for everybody in the room and a lot of recognition. That is not just it, that is also intellectual, but it is much deeper, that is embodied, that is an embodied learning process, which includes our ancestors, obviously, because many of our ancestors are part of the issues that we are working on today. And the other part is we are also working on developing, okay, how can a deeper systemic trauma understanding influence policies? How can it influence how we operate as governments in different countries and try to influence certain recurrent pain points in a different way through understanding systemic trauma? So there are different dimensions of how that understanding can influence our societies. And I think we need to make use of all of them, including also what we do if organizations either had trauma as the organization or created trauma in the environment, so that we work with that. And the environment is not just, as you said before, beautifully human-centric, it's ecosystemic, which means it includes nature, it includes the whole ecosystem, because that's also part of the trauma landscape. And so also for, I think, if many of the bigger organizations that had some traumatic impact, either on the biosphere or biosphere in the human environment, the social environment, there's a lot of pioneering work to be done to restore that and grow together into a new level of development, because every trauma that gets integrated becomes post-traumatic learning and development, and also ethical upgrades. Because at the end of the day, it's about the trauma that is stored, but it's about the ethical transgression that was there to start with to create the trauma. And that ethical transgression needs to be integrated for us to upgrade our ethical understanding, to deal with the new innovations, AI or nanotechnology or any kind of other science breakthroughs. We need that ethical growth, but some of it is frozen in the permafrost of our cultures. And so as long as we don't harvest that learning, that's why I often say innovation is not just coming from the future. Innovation is the learning that we've never had. And that's frozen in the ice of the past. So that's why we need both streams of innovation.

Drew Dellinger: I love that. And that's a good segue into the last topic. I mean, there's several other questions that I would love to ask and we may get a chance to, but there's one more topic that I definitely want to make sure we hit. And that topic is interdependence. Interdependence is right here in the subtitle of the book, Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma and Our World. This has been a particular interest of mine, so I just want to share a couple of quotes. And one of the last things you said where you're talking about innovation is the learnings from the past that we haven't learned yet or that we haven't integrated yet. And that's been some of my scholarly project has been looking at the ways that people in the past were talking about interconnectedness. It's not just us or James Lovelock in 1965 coming up with the Gaia hypothesis. People have been talking, interconnectedness, interrelatedness, interdependence, mutuality, participation. These are core themes and most cultures, most mystical and spiritual traditions. And so let me just read a couple of examples. Bell Hooks writes, “spiritual life is first and foremost about commitment to a way of thinking and behaving that honors principles of interbeing and interconnectedness.” So that's Bell Hooks in 2001. Martin Luther King in 1954, “the universe is indeed a unity, a oneness.” Mohandas Gandhi, “I believe in the essential unity of man and for that matter of all that lives.” Gandhi writes, “underlying ahimsa or nonviolence is the unity of all life.” A couple more examples. “Existence in relation sums up the African conception of life and reality. Existence in relation sums up the African conception of life and reality.” Patricia Hill Collins writes, “the words and actions of black women intellectuals from different historical times and addressing markedly different audiences resonate with a strikingly similar theme of the oneness of all human life.” Here's a black woman intellectual like Patricia Hill Collins is referencing, but here's a woman from the 19th century, Anna Julia Cooper, who writes, “we take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism. Whether of sex, race, country or condition.” Just a couple more and then I'll wrap up. Here's a radical feminist from 1974, Jane Alpert writes, “feminism concerns more than political power, essential as that is. It is closely tied to theories of awakening consciousness, of creation and rebirth, and of the essential oneness of the universe.” That's 1974. Here's the scholar and theologian, Catherine Keller in 1986 writes, “feminist sensibility affirms the quest for connection. The intuitive trust in interrelatedness seems to function as the first principle of much feminist reflection.” So I just think, I mean, we could go on and on and there's been a certain scholarly influence in this idea of interconnectedness. So we see terms like the oneness hypothesis, radical relationality, relational ontology, relational epistemology, the kinship worldview, animism, new animism, pantheism, panentheism, process thought, deep ecology, new ecology, the ecological self, ontologies of entanglement, planetary entanglement, the biotic community, the beloved community, Gaia, the newest sphere, existential togetherness. So the point I'm trying to make is that in all of these, in so many different traditions and so many different time periods, we have intellectuals, freedom fighters, liberation activists, spiritual people, preachers, mystics, emphasizing over and over and over again, these themes of interrelatedness, interconnectedness, whether it's Hildegard of being in, talking about everything is interpenetrated and interrelated, or it's today's scholars talking about ontologies of entanglement. We see this theme of interdependence again and again, and it's a core theme in this book. So tell us about your approach to interdependence and why you think it's important and why is it relevant in our personal and collective lives?

Thomas Hübl: Yeah, so first of all, it's so beautiful to listen to these quotes. They're amazing. And at least what I have learned over, I don't know, 20 some years of seeing thousands and thousands of people going through these processes in small or large events, I think the especially Western notion that is so hyper-individualized at times is putting the individual into a box, which is a confusion of individuation and separation. I think the separation dimension, individuation is great. The separation dimension is an effect of systemic trauma. And so there's a mix and some schools of thought kind of perpetuated that kind of split or that mix. And so when we look at, we even say things like, because I think trauma is deeply encoded in language. And so there's what I call the language of separation and that has a certain grammar. That's how we speak. And then there is a language of transformation. A language of transformation is deeply interested in the representation of the actual process that's happening. And it's kind of intimate with the process. It doesn't matter if the process is pleasant or not pleasant, if it works or if it doesn't work, because if something doesn't work, something works that it doesn't work. So we are always interested to stay in touch like a surfer on a wave. And I think good process work individually or in groups is to get the wave, the wave what's happening. I often see in my groups, if I find myself thinking about what's next in a group process, I know I missed something. Because when you are in it, you are not thinking it's a flow. It's an emergent process. Even if the process is stagnant and we are present with the stagnation, that's what it is. It's the process. And so when we come back to the interdependence, so as individuals, we are not part of the ecosystem, I believe. We are the ecosystem. When you go through the forest and I ask you, okay, where is nature? Well, nature is not just around me because this is also nature. So nature is through us, not around us. And society is also not all the other people. I'm surrounded by society. I'm also society. So society is through us. So the biosphere or the ecosystem is all of us. It's through us, but that's often not how we experience life. And I would argue that's not because we are individuated. That's because we feel separate and we carry elements, layers of trauma, individual, ancestral and collective trauma encoded in our experience. And so when we, and that's what I think is the limitation also sometimes of the psychotherapeutic process. It doesn't, the landscape is not big enough. And sometimes we get confused if the landscape is too big, but sometimes we cannot resolve certain things when we're too much hypnotized by the individual, when the individual is too close and separate. And so that I am individual, yes, and I am the ecosystem, yes. And that's the principle of interdependence. That's I'm plugged into a data flow, a data network that we call the biosphere. And that even when we listen to the dualism between the human sphere, the human experience and nature, there is often a kind of a dualism because the trauma hurts the data flow. Then you see, wow, my ancestors are actually roots into the planet. My body is the planet. It's not on the planet. My body is the planet. And so the more we are in a regulated way, dropping deeper through different layers of trauma, it actually opens up more and more into a fluidity that is like a data flow. And so nature is not any more other, but we are nature and we are plugged into the intelligent network of nature. And so, and end up to very profound spiritual dimensions, let's say. And that gives us a much more intimate experience of life and a much more present and the tuned experience of life. And let's imagine distancing because many people, when they say they are triggered, what they mean is, okay, they get a rush of stress. They get maybe angry or scared. And so it's a stressful part of the trigger. But the other side of being triggered is becoming a bit more distant, becoming more indifferent, coming checked out. And so there's a lot of checked outness in how we approach collective topics at the moment. There's a lot of hyperactivation, which is different. So climate urgency, there is something urgent, but trauma stress is not climate urgency. These are two different things. And then we see a lot of indifference. That indifference is trauma in the other form. So absence and indifference are trauma symptoms. So when we see how many people carry distancing, either I feel distant to certain parts of my body, certain emotions, certain people in society. So there is a lot of distancing going on. So it means we are lacking collective intimacy. And I think that collective intimacy is something we really need in order to solve globally and come to a different level of global collaboration. And so that's why I believe interdependence is such an important, deeper embodied understanding of life that we need to accelerate the way we collectively heal and we collectively collaborate. So I think same as the quotes that you read, I think that they're super important for, especially also for social impact work, for political work, for climate activism, for social or racial justice. We need that interdependence.

Drew Dellinger: Yeah. Powerfully stated. One of the ways, one of the reasons why I became interested in interdependence was because I was trying to articulate, I mean, this is 25 years ago, but I was interested in racial justice, social justice. I was interested in environmental issues, the ecological crisis. And it's obvious to a lot of people now, it was a little less obvious 25 years ago, but there were certainly people at that time and people long before who were saying, these are not separate issues. These are not separate crises ultimately. And we need to recognize and address them as parts of a multivalent crisis. And so I was looking for ways to articulate the connections between ecology and social justice and cosmology. And so I began, and to me it was just very clear that there were deep, deep connections and that these were fundamentally interconnected, but it's harder to articulate what that is. So I began thinking about how do you break this down into simple language and what are some of the deep principles that flow underneath in between connect ecology, social justice and cosmology or worldview. And some of the principles that I eventually came to were personhood in terms of deep reverence and respect for every individual being, not just the human person, but every articulated individual being in the cosmos, that kind of regard for the cosmic personhood of every being, every ecosystem, every raindrop, every atom, every entity, every individual. So personhood is a deep principle that connects ecology and social justice. Also think of community as a deep principle that connects ecology and social justice and interconnectedness, which in some ways is another way of saying community. But I think of interconnectedness as a deep principle that connects ecology, social justice and cosmology. I remember saying the connection is connection. What's the connection between ecology and social justice? The connection is connection or the connection is interconnection. It is interconnectedness. So I just think it's really interesting and inspiring to see how you're working with this idea in terms of both our collective political global crises and our individual communion with ourselves and with others. And so I thank you for your words. I thank you for the heart and the intelligence and the presence that you're bringing to this work and to our world. And on behalf of CI— I also want to thank CIIS Public Programs. Thank all of you for being here. And with that, I'll thank you, Thomas, one more time and sign off and say thanks so much to everybody. And it was a real pleasure to be with all of you today. Thank you.

Thomas Hübl: Thank you.

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

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