Thomas Hübl > Quotes

“By the turning of this wheel, karmic suffering repeats, and trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next—until it finds space and presence and clarity; until it is owned so that it may be healed.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness. Peter A. Levine In an Unspoken Voice”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“The medicine is already within the pain and suffering. You just have to look deeply and quietly. Then you realize it has been there the whole time. Saying from the Native American oral tradition”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“Collective numbness surfaces as epidemic substance misuse; food, sex, and entertainment addiction; media overuse; and many other forms. It reveals itself as a collective shutting down to crisis as much as to healing.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“To feel the problems of our world is to know its suffering, but this requires compassionate “response-ability.” If we fail to address the world’s collective trauma with clarity and compassion, we imperil the survival of our children and our children’s children—and countless other species.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“At least until those war refugees threaten to cross our own borders, and then generations of suppressed material is activated, erupting into racial hatred, mass outrage, and social volatility, manifestations of unresolved fear and pain.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“to become aware of the effects of trauma, which include dissociation, suppression, and disconnection. Otherwise, we overidentify with our dissociation, consciousness shrinks, and we remain stuck repeating the ancient stress responses of hyperarousal or numbness.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“The energy of intense suffering is pushed out of consciousness simply so that life can be allowed to go on. Denial permits us to survive the unsurvivable—for a while. Left too long, any unconscious defense mechanism becomes detrimental to life. When collective denial goes unaddressed, we see the proliferation of groups that deny that the Holocaust occurred, that a civil war was waged to defend the economic institution of race-based slavery in the United States, or that hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are subjected to state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing in the form of mass murder, sexual violence, and forced exile from the primarily Buddhist Myanmar.1”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“Suppressed energy doesn’t go away, and even dark or disowned energy cannot be destroyed. It needs to move, to become, to transmute; it must find an expression. In this way, unconscious material rises again and again to the surface, seeking to be met, detoxed, and clarified. Until trauma has been acknowledged, felt, and released, it will be experienced from without in the form of repetition compulsion and projection and from within as tension and contraction, reduction of life flow, illness or disease.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“This describes a deeply participatory practice I call relational mysticism. Instead of seeking realization in seclusion or by retreating from ordinary life, we create a living practice that remains constant even while we engage with the quotidian demands of work, family, community, and culture. It is a spiritual practice of embodiment across the personal and transpersonal domains. We awaken within the context of the world and the contemporary marketplace, not apart from them. It is, therefore, a deeply immersive, co-creative, procultural impulse in which we are led by our love of humanity and our belongingness to it to care for one another and for the world—both its beautiful and its difficult parts. As cultural mystics, we study the book of life.”
― Thomas Hübl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World

“The human soul expresses both stillness and movement; it is the nature of the soul to be and to become. These expressions of soul belong to what I refer to as the three innate and inalienable human rights: the right of being, the right of becoming (the unfolding of potential), and the right of belonging (the right to build healthy relational bonds and to experience oneself as part of a community).”
― Thomas Hübl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World

“If stillness is being, movement is becoming. Out of causal stillness, everything arises—and fundamentally, every “thing” in our cosmos is energy. Movement, therefore, is the flow of energy, information, and creativity. It is the motion of light, heat, electricity, magnetism, gravity, and all processes of life and matter. It is emotion, thought, belief, inspiration, innovation, and creativity. Energy is intelligence in action; life is movement.”
― Thomas Hübl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World

“Unresolved past is destiny; it repeats.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“Each time you become more aware of and receptive to a previously unconscious aspect of yourself, that fragmented piece of you is invited back into the fold, and you become more whole as a human being.”
― Thomas Hübl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World

“The story of the fearful or weak is to awaken into the nobility of one’s own true strength. These are fundamental journeys of the spirit, the narrative arc of souls. Of course, before we embark, we must respond to the call, a clarion invitation that is always sounding but can only be heard in the heart of great longing.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“When your nervous system is well-regulated and synchronized, you’re able to participate in life, to be passionate about your work, to relate deeply and skillfully with others, and even to grow and change after traumatizing experiences.”
― Thomas Hübl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World

“Our denied, unprocessed, unintegrated past. In a deeper sense, a great deal of human suffering exists because of the denial of the past and an inability to acknowledge and integrate it. But when the decision is made to finally look at and feel the past, everything shifts. For example, if I or my ancestors have been suppressing grief, and this deep sadness is allowed to come forward so that I begin to authentically feel it, it will be painful, yes, and yet the more I allow its honest expression, I will almost certainly also experience a release. And if I continue to make this process a conscious practice, I have begun the work of healing integration.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“It results in disembodiment, and when these conditions become fixed in the collective field, separation becomes the basic agreement of culture.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“The parent/child connection manifests as one link in a long chain of ancestral karma that stretches back through time. . . . In this modern scientific age, it is very difficult for people to accept the fact that they are responsible to their ancestors, that they are actually liable for the actions of their ancestors if the resulting karma has not yet been dissolved. Many find it absurd to think that the actions of an unknown ancestor could possibly have anything to do with what is happening to them today. But time and again, when investigating someone’s karma, I find problems that stretch back generations. Their spirit is not just an individual entity, it is also part of the family spirit that births and nurtures it.2”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“Three-sync process. The three-sync process occurs when, through a state of presence, we consciously bring the mind, body, and emotions into coherence.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“Often, the tension is telling us to release our habits for a moment and lean into the unknown, the new, the liminal edge where emergence arises.”
― Thomas Hübl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World

“Time does not heal our wounds but becomes a product of them, as it is the nature of unhealed psychological traumas to repeat. In every direction we can see the legacy of these repetitions recorded in the patterns of human history. Moments of great cultural suffering cannot simply be forgotten, no matter how distracted—by entertainment, consumerism, politics, and the rush of human affairs—that we allow ourselves to become. The ghosts of the past are eternally patient, always lingering in the wings of the collective unconscious. If we refuse to acknowledge their presence and their pain, they will possess greater influence over our affairs in the present day. That is why it is imperative that we create and commit to new—and in some respects, ancient—architectures for social healing.”
― Thomas Hübl

“But the vital life force that is suppressed and unused doesn’t disappear. It is converted into dark energy and redirected elsewhere. In our world, much of this buried potential is diverted toward mass consumerism and the conspicuous acquisition of material goods. The lords of retail are masters of propaganda, indoctrinating a culture in powerful beliefs (“I am not enough”) and filling people with perpetual desire (“To be worthy, I must acquire x, y, or z”). The outcome of this approach is mass accumulation, exponential waste, skyrocketing debt, and a pervasive feeling of scarcity.”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“The effect of transparent communication is the power to illuminate that field, infusing its byways and interstices with the light and lucidity of awareness, to bring healing and repair to the collective.”
― Thomas Hübl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World