A Ball of String

On the non-linearity of healing, and Whatsapp as medicine.

Frosty morning in my local park.

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“Contemporary individual suffering is rooted in the ancestral legacy and continues into the present. Traditionally, one cannot be separated from the influences of ancestral suffering. Time is nonlinear, circular, and simultaneous.”

— Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart et al.¹

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Resonant World #13

A psychiatrist once told me: “Recovery does not happen in a straight line.”

He was talking about the path back from depression.

But he could’ve been speaking about any form of healing.

Since engaging in earnest with collective trauma work through the Timeless Wisdom Training I’m undergoing with Thomas Hübl, I’ve been thinking about how to put the experience into words.

I can see an image that I want to describe, but it’s almost impossible to convey: As subtle as an ink drop diffusing in water, as complex as a spider’s web covered in frost.

The closest I’ve come to making it relatable is a ball of string.

As if, since I began the training in February, I’ve been pulling on a football-sized ball of rough twine. Every now and again, as the unwinding deepens, I hit a knot — the residue of a trauma, suddenly rising to awareness. This could be something from my own life; it could be something handed down by my ancestors, or it could be from the collective. Sometimes my body knows it’s time to let it go before I can find the story to explain its origins. Sometimes I never know the story at all. Often, there are tears.

And on lucky days, a silver coin drops out of its hiding place in the tangle — a newly-minted insight I can slip into my pocket for later use.

If I was to share some of these coins, I’d offer the following:

• Grief, not fully felt, is passed down the generations, flowing like water following the path of least resistance through a landscape. I learned this in March, when I connected with the family grief I’d inherited for the loss of my Great Uncle Lionel, a remote figure growing up, who had been captured and shot in Italy during World War Two.

• Anger, too, flows onward like molten lava, as if tracing the channels and striations of a geological sediment. During an online retreat this summer, I recognised that I’d been carrying the anger of my grand-father Charles, brooding in the garden shed, unable to express what he’d brought back with him from the trenches, the Great Depression, the Blitz. It was an anger that — when it erupts in my own home — leaves me feeling deeply ashamed.

I now recognise that it was the nudges of these ancestors that prompted me to return to Britain and spend years engaging with the psychological burden carried by soldiers, their families, and by extension all of us in the energy field of these isles.

And, though I often question my path, and where it’s leading, I feel them urging me on more tangibly now — their rough hands brushing mine as we fumble with this ball of string, trying to trace the next knot, liberate the next coin.

Making these connections has been a revelation to me.

Had it not been my own body that yielded these stories, I would have thought of them as figments of my imagination — fictions to explain away my flaws.

But as I write these words, I feel a conviction that makes me want to offer these coins — because in the sharing of healing stories, the healing multiplies.

Trauma, as Thomas Hübl observes, always contains an element of “not enough.”

Not enough time. Not enough safety. Not enough love.

When we come together to relate in intentional ways, we can remedy these deficits.

Healing is abundant in that way — the more we give, the more we receive.

Somehow we forgot this. But we are remembering, and this remembering is what will change both the future and the past.

The Knight of Swords

In Healing Collective Trauma: A process for integrating our intergenerational and cultural wounds, Hübl writes about the possibility of “detecting subtle tendencies before they manifest”:

“These subtle tendencies first arrive as whispers. We learn to hear them by creating mindfulness, stillness and presence so that our higher guidance has a place to land,” Hübl writes. “On that still quiet lake, in the silence of the heart, it may be possible to hear the name of the Divine.”

Before I pick a Tarot card (Thoth deck), I visualise a lake — then imagine myself wading into the calm waters — a ritual to connect to my unconscious. It’s a moment to become still, to establish internal coherence, then see whatever card lands.

Last weekend, it was the Knight of Swords.

A few days later I met a man who embodied the qualities of this archetype: Sharp-witted, a thrusting entrepreneur, galloping in hot pursuit of his goal.

In Tarot: Mirror of The Soul, therapist Gerd Ziegler describes the Knight of Swords like this:

“His strong intellectual determination is unified with a deep emotional perceptiveness,” Ziegler writes. “Only goals which are emotionally charged can kindle such passion. Body, intellect and spirit (the three swallows) are in harmony and fly alongside him.”

I felt great excitement at meeting this living embodiement of the Knight of Swords. I was so keen not be late for our coffee in a City church that I arrived more than half an hour early. I studied him closely, curious about how the energy between us felt. I recognised myself reflexively trying to impress him; and a desire to embody more of his energy in myself.

Days later, I read a new layer of meaning into the card.

I’m a member of two Whatsapp groups that grew out of men’s work (some of which I wrote about in Resonant World #12). It’s been astonishing to me how these groups (one big, with several dozen men; the other small, with half a dozen active members) have been able to capture and concentrate the essence of deep internal work began in group settings — in-person, or online.

If the meetings had been mountain tarns, the Whatsapp groups feel like tributaries, carrying the purity of the energy we concentrated out into the world.

Make no mistake: “Stuff” can come up in a Whatsapp group, just as it can in person or during 90 minutes on Zoom.

And the Knight of Swords knows what it is to have “stuff”: In his shadow aspect, he suffers the burden of living too much on the mental plane — losing touch with his emotions (Cups) and the earth (Disks).

But a Knight is mature, and this one knows how to wield the sword with skill — cutting away what’s not needed; piercing to the heart of the matter. I’ve observed such a level of precision and transparent communication in these groups that what might have been powerful triggers (including for me, personally) have melted into a deepening of softness, mutuality and trust. The process has been beautiful to behold.

As Ziegler says of the Knight of Swords:

“Both swords, the long one in his right hand, and the other short one in his left, will be employed equally. The represent two potential energies, yang (male, analytical) and yin (feminine, intuitive) which will be needed in the proper balance in order for him to advance.”

This is the integration we can find when we support each other to heal.

Technology can be a vector of trauma. But I see these Whatsapp chats as capillaries in the larger organism of the self-organising global healing movement, and I’d love to hear about other people’s experiences of leveraging social media and other platforms to build connective tissue between sessions of deeper, more focused work.

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What I’m reading

For anyone with an interest in group healing processes, I cannot recommend this newly published article in the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change by Thomas and my friend Lori Shridhare highly enough. It maps out with exquisite precision how collective trauma integration works, and has some useful tables and charts to boot.

The ‘Tender Narrator’ Who Sees Beyond Time: A Framework for Trauma Integration and Healing, by Thomas Hübl and Lori Shridhare.

“In this article, we present a framework for the integration of individual and collective trauma that is focused on creating safe, interactive group spaces for dialogue, group coherence building, reflection, and transformative practices.”

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A big thank you to everyone who has supported Resonant World. It’s a huge source of motivation for me to know that this newsletter is creating some value. Thank you.

1. Brave Heart, M. Y. H., Chase, J., Myers, O., Elkins, J., Skipper, B., Schmitt, C., Mootz, J., & Waldorf, V. A. (2020). Iwankapiya American Indian pilot clinical trial: Historical trauma and group interpersonal psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, 57(2), 184–196. Cited in Hübl, T., & Shridhare, L. (2022). The ‘Tender Narrator’ Who Sees Beyond Time: A Framework for Trauma Integration and Healing. Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, 2(2), 9–27. https://doi.org/10.47061/jasc.v2i2.4937