Your inner experience matters: Collective trauma & the invasion of Ukraine
“It’s not mainstream knowledge how deep collective trauma sits in our societies.”
This was one of the many quotes I wrote down from Thomas Hubl’s live event on the Ukraine crisis this past Saturday. Over 6,000 people from across the world gathered to hear him speak. It’s a gift to have a teacher who can articulate the need for collective healing and integration processes so clearly.
His talk was on how the invasion of Ukraine is painfully resurfacing unintegrated wounds from past conflicts in Europe for many people. Whatever our experiences are and relationship is to this war, he points to our internal experiences – feelings of overwhelm, fear, shutdown, outrage, horror – as touching upon collective trauma we’ve inherited from our ancestors, family lines and cultures.
Before I go any further, I want to gently check in with you -
How are you feeling reading this article so far? What do you notice arise or not arise for you as you enter into reflection about the war? What do you notice in your body and emotional landscape?
As I check in with myself, I notice a tense dullness in my forehead that shows up as a headache. It’s like a wired exhaustion from holding something so big. Feelings of alarmed aloneness bring a ‘waah-waah’ feeling into my arms and chest. It’s like an immobilizing siren sound that I can’t hear but can feel radiating throughout the top half of my being. Like I’m being stunned.
As I notice this, I warmly invite my attention down to my feet. Firmly press my big toes to the Earth. My energy gently travels down and fills the lower parts of my body. I reground. *Exhale* My breath returns.
Our internal experience reveals so much to us, but we often disregard it because we don’t understand its value, don’t have the proper support or tools to go into it, or are too ashamed, overwhelmed or bewildered to know what to do.
In times of crisis this is especially so. When human suffering abounds, we are often called to act. And within this impulse, our inner worlds can feel like something that we need to shut down and suppress in order to do so.
But as Thomas Hubl so beautifully puts it, “The inner experience that we are going through is not an obstacle in the way, it is part of the way.” Our emotions and bodily sensations reveal us to ourselves. They tell us how we’re impacted by the world and what’s important to us. They shine a light on the historical memories we unconsciously hold. Feelings that range from hyper activation to complete numbness all make sense within the context of collective trauma, and all offer entry points to work with.
Our inner worlds are part of the way towards solving the issues we face as a world because they’re part of the collective trauma field that has fed and will continue to feed the wars, societal responses, policies, politics and business practices that no longer serve us. Caring for the piece of that collective trauma field that we uniquely carry offers us an opportunity to transform that unresolved material and harvest the “pearls of ethical learning” (another gem from Hubl’s talk) that have been frozen in the icy throes of time. By healing and working with our internal experiences, we have an opportunity for post-traumatic growth and learning that can help us problem solve, respond and show up to the world in a way that’s wise, mature, adaptable and effective.
What’s even cooler about all of this is that the field of neuroscience gives us clear-cut tools backed by hard science for how best to do healing work. These ideas about healing aren’t pie-in-the-sky, wishy-washy things. We have powerful research and emerging practices that serve as beacons of light for us as we innovate and feel our way in the dark for how best to do collective healing work in practice.
Which just makes my soul sing. Because what I’m called to do here at We Heal For All is to be part of that innovation process. To take what we know about individual healing, and adapt and apply it to our collective needs.
My invitation to you is this: Join me in this work. In Circle. In fundraising. In networking. In brainstorming. Let’s collaborate to bring more healing-centered tools to the world, and find ways to take the complex reality of our times and use it to facilitate the collective healing movements we need for the betterment of our world.
Grateful for teachers like Thomas Hubl who are leading the way.
Send me a note with your visions, ideas, and feels: connect@wehealforall.com. Would love to hear from you and collaborate.
📸: Christian Palmer www.unsplash.com
Hi, I’m Liz Moyer Benferhat. Writer, facilitator, coach, and development practitioner dedicated to the subtle interplay between how inner transformation feeds the outer transformation we need in the world. Welcome 🌿