Awakening transformation through the presence of connection

Last Tuesday evening, I took time to reflect on the day’s events, allowing space for anything unprocessed to surface into the light of awareness. This has become an intentional daily practice since I began engaging with the work of Thomas Hübl—an Austrian spiritual teacher, author, and speaker known for his contributions to collective trauma healing, personal development, and the integration of mystical principles.

I felt a subtle stirring in the centre of my chest. Rather than searching for meaning, I remained present with the ambiguity of the unformed experience in my body. Around ten minutes passed before a gestalt of understanding began to take shape and a profound embodied insight crystalised. Through attuning to the depths of my personal experience it felt as though a portal into the transpersonal realm opened, granting access to an ocean of tears held in the field of our collective unconscious. I felt the visceral heaviness, ache and rawness of grief stream into my body as I touched into the immensity of what it means to be out of connection with ourselves and how this ripples through into our relationships with our fellow human beings and our perceived place in the natural world.

Alienation from ourselves

As humans, we are all born into a matrix of collective, intergenerational trauma. This unintegrated pain fragments our sense of self and disconnects us from the aliveness and vitality of our present-moment embodied experience. Here, the benevolence of Nature’s intelligence is at work, protecting our psyches from overwhelming bodily sensations. For most of us, these unprocessed parts of ourselves become trapped in time, untouched by the healing energy of loving awareness.

We see the reality of alienation from ourselves in our everyday lives. We push difficult emotions away by trying to control or manage these unwelcome ‘negative’ feelings. Social media provides an endless stream of distraction to escape from our inner world. We live in our heads, caught in an abstract world of perpetual thinking. Our left hemisphere’s conceptual processes of analysis, reasoning and rationality becomes our primary way of navigating life and we lose touch with the innate wisdom of our intuition. When unresolved wounds from our past are triggered in the present, we either reject parts of ourselves through self-criticism and shame or project them onto others in judgement and blame. The more we run from the burdens of our history, the more we feel compelled to keep busy in the present. We experience stress and burnout in our addiction to doing, seldom giving our nervous system the time, space and silence that is needed to digest experience. Disconnected from our own needs, we are quick to prioritise others over ourselves, saying yes when we really mean no. In our attempts to please others, we unknowingly reinforce the pattern of self-abandonment. 

Our hearts grieve, estranged from the sensitive depths of our embodied wholeness and we may feel the deeper longing for reunion in those tender groundless moments of existential meaninglessness.

Societal disconnection

Spawned in the West, hyper-individualism is a cultural manifestation of disconnection which has been exported around the world through globalization, modernization, and digital culture. It shapes not only how we structure our societies but how we understand who we are. We are marinating in the ideology of over-valuing autonomy, independence, self-reliance and personal responsibility.  This fosters a paradigm of striving, comparison and competition where success is attributed solely to personal effort and aptitude, rather than seen as the outcome of a complex web of interrelated factors, most of which lie beyond our control. The same applies to failure which is often viewed as a personal weakness as is the admission that we need help. Rather than risk being seen as fallible, vulnerable human beings doing the best we can, we hide behind the familiar social mask epitomised by the words ‘I’m fine’. Over time, this protective mechanism distances us further from our own humanity, erodes our sense of belonging and gives rise to feelings of isolation and loneliness. Tragically, this leads to too many taking their own lives in the quiet desperation of unbearable pain and hopelessness.

Consumerism feeds on hyper-individualism. Our self-worth, personal identity and the promise of well-being are frequently linked to what we own, what we buy, and what we can afford.  Advertising touches us where we are most vulnerable and we’re seduced into thinking ‘this product will fix me’. It lulls us into the delusion that we can buy our way out of our discomfort and pain, that healing lies outside of ourselves.  Consumption fuels the fear of scarcity – that there isn’t enough to go around – and we feel compelled to protect what we have and accumulate more. Fear narrows our perceptual field and we filter out the suffering of others. When confronted with the reality that we do have the resources – time, energy, skills, social capital, emotional resilience and financial means – to gift something that could significantly change the lives of our fellow human beings we reflexively turn away, concerned that this would somehow disrupt our sense of security, success, or the comfortable ways of life we’ve become attached to.

Healing – the way through

Our disconnection from ourselves is mirrored in the increasingly unstable and chaotic world unfolding around us. If we, as a species are to survive climate change with the inevitable surge in refugees, the growing divide of economic inequity, a financial downturn plunging millions more into hardship and poverty alongside soaring mental health challenges, social injustices and increasing societal fragmentation, we must access a different way of being. Urgently. We need to move from fear to love, from independence to interdependence, from disconnection to relationship. We must awaken transformation through the presence of connection.

Finding our way back to our whole selves is a lifelong journey of unfolding, discovery and transformation. It asks that we step beyond the familiar confines of our analytical minds and unlearn that which we know. In the safe relational space of skilled compassionate guidance, we’re able to courageously turn towards the fragments of ourselves that continue to unconsciously shape who we are becoming. Through coming into relationship with our wounded exiled parts, gently acknowledging, allowing and feeling their unprocessed pain, we gradually soften into the realization of the tenderness and beauty of being fully human.

Opening our hearts to ourselves naturally opens our hearts to others. We are more available to feeling each other’s pain and joy and this ripens into an honouring of our common humanity: just like me, you have fears and longings; just like me, you want to be happy and avoid suffering; just like me you have struggled and made mistakes; just like me, you want to feel safe, loved and valued; just like me you want to live your one precious life. We also begin to recognise the reality of non-linear causality in that a multitude of contextual factors have shaped who we have become. With compassionate forgiveness, we open into an increasingly felt understanding of the reality that, if we too were caught up in a lineage shaped by unimaginable violence, our closed hearts might be capable of taking precise aim at an innocent child playing in the street, dispassionately watching as the bullet pierces her chest, violently tearing through muscle and bone, leaking the red river of hopes and dreams from the limp vessel of her body.

As our healing deepens, our hearts become increasingly more inclusive and we can begin to hear the song of our inter-connectedness. We start to feel that we are not separate from nature – we are nature – and that in harming our blue planet, in all her miraculous diversity, we are harming ourselves. We become more capable of reconnecting with the wisdom of our indigenous communities and are naturally drawn to expressions of life-affirming values: relationship, a deep kinship with and reverence for all forms of life; responsibility, a collective duty to tend, nurture, and care for these relationships; reciprocity, honouring the natural balance of giving and receiving and redistribution, generously sharing our resources for the wellbeing of the whole (Lent, 2022).

In closing, I offer the final sentences of Hubl’s powerful book entitled ‘Attuned: practicing interdependence to heal our trauma – and our world’: “By upholding our sacred responsibility to integrate trauma, we, in effect, remove our shares from the collective trauma field, lessening the overall burden of suffering for others. This is not merely something some of us should do; it is the work that all of us who are conscious and capable must do. I beseech you to try” (pg. 197).

Thomas Hubl. 2023. Attuned: practicing interdependence to heal our trauma – and our world. Sounds True.

Jeremy Lent. 2022. The Web of Meaning – integrating science and traditional wisdom to find our place in the universe. Profile Books.