5 Key Teachings: HEALING COLLECTIVE TRAUMA, by Thomas Hübl

TRANSCRIPT:

So my friend Kasey Crown, who is an incredible trauma therapist, sent me, maybe even two years ago, at the beginning of COVID. It’s the best articulation of collective trauma that I’ve ever read. Thomas Hübl describes it in a way that gives it a spiritual dimension as well as an emotional dimension. And there’s a lot of conversation about historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, how we pass these memories on through our blood lines, how they’re expressed in our DNA, like the work of Rachel Yehuda. He also talks in this book about the density of certain places where mass traumas occurred, and the way that humans still, to this day, still need to process, integrate, metabolize those experiences, even if they happened long before we lived. There’s a density that needs to be cleared and moved. He’s coming on the podcast, but please read this in advance, because it is a heady stuff and I feel like we’ll all get a lot more out of it. He writes: “At this time in human history, there is a new calling, a powerful invitation rising from a sense of deep collective longing. It calls us toward a shared quest—one that will entail both practical and spiritual action. At its core, it is a journey of collective healing. To succeed, we must begin to make whole the rift between the worlds of science and spirit, to create a sacred marriage between vital, yet formerly contradictory, domains.”

Update: You can hear our conversation on the podcast right here!

Processing Our Collective Past (Thomas Hübl)

5 KEY TEACHINGS:

1. We are more powerful as groups when we come together to process memories—and we need to do this collectively in order to unburden ourselves from history. This is called mass memory.

As Hübl writes: “In this way, each group that I taught throughout Germany was in fact instructing me. I began to witness a profoundly recursive pattern, emerging again and again in groups of all types and sizes. The central locus of the pattern was an often-powerful eruption of energetic material related to the Holocaust and the Second World War. After three or four days facilitating a group, this material surfaced as waves of emotion, physical sensation, and memory, including the phenomenon of mass memory, often experienced by large portions of the group during any given session. As this happened, scores of participants would begin to cry all at once, collectively experiencing images of the war as though they were personal memories. It would then take another one or two days for us to carefully process and integrate all that came up.”

2. What we don’t metabolize, we pathologize. Or I believe Carl Jung said something along those lines. Regardless, when we fail to integrate parts of ourselves that are trapped in shadow, they can metastasize.